One day, around 1990, someone asked John Cutting to give a seminar at the Maudsley Hospital in London. cutting era a renowned psychiatristwith extensive clinical experience and who gave dozens of talks each year; but I didn’t really know what to talk about. So gathered some notes on the right hemisphere and its relationship with psychiatric disorders. The relevant thing, he said, It was not ‘what’ each hemisphere does, but ‘how’ each one sees the world. No one could imagine it, but for a young resident he had begun the task of his life. Although the story begins a little earlier When Roger Sperry arrived in Pasadena in 1954 was a little frustrated. He was 40 years old and had a wonderful future that was slipping through his fingers. In less than two years he had been a professor at the University of Chicago, head of Neurological Diseases and Blindness at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, and a key player in the marine science laboratory at the University of Miami. But between delays, budget cuts and power struggles, no one had offered him anything stable. It’s true that Caltech had offered him a position with potential, but how many times had the same thing happened and, in the end, it had come to nothing? Everything changed when he met WJ WJ was a patient at White Memorial Hospital. There, in the early 1960s, a CalTech student, Joseph Bogenhad begun to perform commissurotomies to treat especially complicated epilepsies. The curious thing about this intervention that surgically ‘separated’ the two hemispheres was not that it worked (and improved the clinical symptoms of patients with the disease) but that on a day-to-day basis, the cognitive and functional weaknesses of patients with split brain are not easily distinguishable of those of a normal person. The divided brain Maxim Berg The patients’ deficits only became evident under specialized neuropsychological testing, and investigating the reason for this was a long and complex task that cost Sperry the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine. A decade later, John Cutting was giving a talk on the psychiatric implications of all this. In the auditorium, Iain McGilchrist I was stunned. In ’75, this young British man had won the “lottery”: one of the scholarships at All Soul College in Oxford and, a little later, a teaching position in the Oxford Department of Literature; seven years later, McGilchrist left the academy disappointed with the “gritty” approach to literary criticism. And he started studying medicine. First the degree at Southampton and, later, the specialty in psychiatry at Maudsley in London. It was there, it was then, when’The master and his emissary” (that Captain Swing now publishes in Spanish) took shape. It only took 20 more years to carry it out.. A book about the brain… In that colossal essay, McGilchrist explains that the pop view of the cerebral hemispheres (the idea that one is in charge of one thing and another of another) is a reckless simplification. The hemispheres hide something else: two complete and coherent ways of experiencing the world. Two forms that, here is the key, are incompatible with each other. The right hemisphere (on the one hand) has a predilection for the open, the contextual, the embodied: it prioritizes the living, the implicit, irony, ambiguity and the relationships between things. The left hemisphere (for its own) cuts, abstracts and fixes: it is excellent for procedures, for mechanisms; to break down problems, explain them and control them. The interesting (and important) thing is that McGilchrist insists that, actually. Both hemispheres participate in almost everything: what changes is how they relate to reality. They are two people (two styles of attention) whose Conversation gives meaning to civilization as we know it. …but a book about many more things. Because throughout the 1000 pages of ‘The Master and His Emissary’, McGilchrist takes us to an amazing journey through two millennia of art, science and politics as if they were the story of that conversation. There are times in which both ways of thinking coexist in harmony (such as the Renaissance); while there are other periods in which one or another of the styles prevails over the rest. It is a voracious, wild book. A book that wants to capture everything, that wants to account for everything, that wants to capture the ‘zeitgeist’ of each of the eras of humanity. Today, according to the British psychiatrist, we live an era dominated by the left hemisphere. Can a brain theory explain today’s world? The bet is risky, ambitious and very controversial. Since the first version of the book was published in 2009, criticism they haven’t stopped coming. From unwarranted extrapolations of available neuropsychological evidence to some cherry-picking in art, philosophy and politics to make the narrative fit perfectly. However, I think that all these criticisms (despite being accurate), miss the mark. The strength of ‘The Master and His Emissary’ is not in the evidence that supports it, it is in the power of its metaphors. And a metaphor is, we know well, little more than a flashlight. Something that, no matter how many shadow areas it leaves, we still need to see in the dark. And, in this case, its metaphor is more necessary than ever. It’s just what we need to understand something that, as a good literary expert, McGilchrist also knows. That we may be encased in a nutshell and consider ourselves kings of infinite space. Who was going to tell us that when Hamlet said this he was talking about our own brain? Image | notorious v1ruS In Xataka | When Darwin’s children fell victim to their father’s own laws of natural selection
