Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and writer whose books suggest that the two halves of the brain attend to the world in two very different ways, and that Western culture has come to trust only one of them. The right hemisphere takes in the living whole, whilst the left narrows in on parts it can grasp and use. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches something very close: that hunter-gatherers lived with both in balance, that the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer tipped us towards the left, and that the right hemisphere’s way of seeing is the shamanic, animist way.
Who is Iain McGilchrist? #
A psychiatrist who was earlier a fellow in English literature at Oxford, and who has written two very large books about the brain and culture.1 The first, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, came out in 2009. The second, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, in two volumes, followed in 2021.2 Both books bring together brain science, philosophy and the history of Western culture.
What does he say about the two halves of the brain? #
That they are two ways of being in the world, not two sets of jobs. The popular idea is that the left brain does logic and the right brain does art. McGilchrist rejects this. He writes: “The difference, I shall argue, is not in the ‘what’, but in the ‘how'”.3 Both halves are involved in nearly everything we do. What differs is the kind of attention each pays. The right hemisphere’s attention is broad, open and alert to the whole, to what is living, unique and in relationship. The left hemisphere’s attention is narrow and focused, picking out parts it can name, grasp and use.
This matters because, as he puts it, “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.”4 How we attend shapes the world we live in. Attend only in the left hemisphere’s way, and the world starts to look like a heap of separate things and resources.
What are the master and the emissary? #
The title of his first book comes from a story. A wise ruler sends out a trusted emissary to do his work. In time, “the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.”5 In McGilchrist’s reading, the right hemisphere should be the master, and the left its servant. The left hemisphere “is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact.”6
He argues that Western culture has let the emissary take over. He contrasts it with East Asian cultures, which, he writes, “use strategies of both hemispheres more evenly, while Western strategies are steeply skewed towards the left hemisphere.”7
What has this to do with the Fall? #
A great deal, though Therapeutic Shamanism tells the story further back. McGilchrist traces the imbalance mostly through the history of the West, from ancient Greece onwards. Therapeutic Shamanism places its roots in domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, from around 11,000 BC, and the Fall, from around 4,000 BC. “The brains of hunter-gatherers seem to have been much more in balance”. They would have experienced themselves “as an individual, whilst at the same time experiencing that they were, in reality, a part of a larger whole.”8 Then “the Fall was characterised by the left hemisphere of the brain and the ego seizing control, and suppressing the emotional and sensitive right side of the brain.”9 When the first city-state cultures began to emerge, the left hemisphere of our brains became dominant.
Like McGilchrist, Therapeutic Shamanism sees this as a matter of attention, not of half the brain switching off: “The Fall was not the process of the right-brain shutting down, but the process of us shifting our attention and focus towards the left-brain, and of valuing the left-brain’s perceptions more than those of the right.”10 See What is the Fall?
And what has it to do with animism? #
The right hemisphere’s way of seeing is, in Therapeutic Shamanism’s terms, the animist way: alive to relationship and to the more-than-human world. “Remember that the right hemisphere of the brain is the bit that is hardwired to shamanism, and to empathy and the sense of interconnectedness.” Because that part of us is “heavily suppressed in modern humans”, much of shamanic practice today “needs to be devoted to waking up the right hemisphere and restoring the balance in the brain.”11
McGilchrist touches on animism in The Matter with Things. He quotes the anthropologist Tim Ingold, for whom animism is not “a way of believing about the world but … a condition of being in it”. And he asks a question many animists would recognise. So many peoples, he says, “all thought, or think, that there is something speaking to us in nature. If we alone suddenly can’t hear it, in the West in the twenty-first century, how do we know it’s we who are right?”12 See What is animism?
Is the left brain the enemy, then? #
No. Both halves have their place: “the two hemispheres of the brain both have their essential role and function”, and the left helps us “make rational and practical decisions”.13 The trouble is imbalance, not the left hemisphere itself. “Central to shamanic practice is bringing both hemispheres of the brain into balance, so that neither has dominance.”14 See What is intuition, and can we trust it?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism part company with McGilchrist? #
Therapeutic Shamanism has a great deal of time for McGilchrist’s ideas. One of his talks has “so much animist-like stuff in it, and it really highlights the limits of the left brain”. But McGilchrist is “Not quite animist in that he still gets lost at times in hierarchical perspectives.”
Two points stand out. The first is the master and the emissary itself. McGilchrist’s framing of the relationship between the hemispheres as ‘master and emissary’ has some issues, generally, and specifically from an animist perspective. Animism looks for right relationship between equals, not a ruler and a servant, which is why Therapeutic Shamanism’s aim is that neither hemisphere should dominate. The second is the opposite imbalance. An over-dominant right brain is as much of a problem as an over-dominant left one, “just in different ways”, and it is arguably not something McGilchrist addresses enough. See What is intuition, and can we trust it?
Isn’t “left brain, right brain” a myth? #
The popular version largely is, and both McGilchrist and Therapeutic Shamanism say so. McGilchrist stresses that “Both hemispheres are involved in almost all mental processes.”15 The idea of some people being ‘left-brained’ and others ‘right-brained’ has largely been discredited, and the terms are used here “as shorthand to refer to two different modes of thinking and being.”16 What remains is that the two halves “do indeed function differently”, and that “there is dominance in the sense of which hemisphere’s responses we pay attention to.”17
Some critics feel McGilchrist leans too hard on the contrast. The writer Jeremy Lent, who is largely sympathetic, notes that his thesis “has been criticised for being overly focused on the right-versus left-hemisphere contrast at the expense of other complexities of human cognition.”18 Even so, the picture of two ways of attending, and a culture that has forgotten one of them, has spoken to a great many people.
