NOTICINGS: Parallel polis
Enhancing political activism with an understanding of the brain’s two hemispheres.
A couple of months ago, I happened upon a YouTube video of a lecture given by Dr. Iain McGilchrist. His subject is the brain. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. His books are based on 100 years of research. He’s broken new ground and has come to understand how the two brain hemispheres function.
In the history of humankind this is a new theory, a new understanding of ourselves. Each hemisphere, the left and the right, has its one mode of attention. McGilchrist’s view is that the hemispheric balance has gone unbalanced as a result of left-brain dominated thinking. Without the benefit of the right brain a left brain imbalance in understanding the world happens. The left brain is always convinced it knows best. Always.
My response to his ideas was like the tumblers of a lock falling into place. Click. I recognized what he had identified, and suddenly everything, especially the huge mess we’re all in, made sense.
So I began reading McGilchrist. (An extraordinary pleasure from the feel of the paper to his voice on the page. He’s got wit. He’s got capaciousness. Heart and mind thrum here.) In over a thousand four hundred pages, he includes sources. No expert in hard science or the so-called soft humanities— psychiatry, medicine, physics, botany, literature, or physiology has said he’s got it wrong. I watch a ton of videos.
All living creatures and not just human brains, have two lobes. They are asymmetrical. Each has a different and utterly specific way of understanding the world.
Because McGilchrist’s rich ideas are impossible to summarize, here’s a kind of graphic haiku.
The left brain.
'Landscape in the Mist' (Τοπίο στην ομίχλη), directed by Theo Angelopoulos (Greece, 1988)The left hemisphere of the brain is characterized by its focus on manipulation, control, and explicit meaning. The left hemisphere's perspective is rigid and overly focused on details, potentially leading to a neglect of context and relationships.
The right brain.
Language is a Skin, Roland Barthes, 1977
The right hemisphere is primarily responsible for understanding the implicit, the interconnectedness of things, and the broader context of experience. It focuses on the whole picture rather than isolated details, and is crucial for intuition, empathy, and understanding metaphor and humor.
“The right hemisphere sees a coherent, sustained vision,” says McGilchrist. “It is vigilant for whatever, including what it does not see. The left hemisphere sees only what it's already focused on finding and has seen before. It's likely to be blind to other things. This is why they need one another.”
I see the hemispheres in action as I watch a Black-Capped Chickadee take a bath in my garden. Bird flies to the edge. Waits. The water. Bird plans to go into the water. Waits. Bird plunges in. That’s the left brain in action. Bingo. Bird got what Bird was after.
At the same time, as Bird stands on the edge, Bird looks about. What’s happening beyond and around the water? Then … Bird sees Bird is safe. Once in the water, Bird displays pleasure. Yes, this feels good! Bird is rhapsodic. That is the right brain. Left and right brain in harmony. Both kinds of attention deliver a fulsome, wholesome time in the bath. Happiness.
Another way of describing this behavior is attention. Attention drives presence and action. For humans, attention is a moral action. Put like that, what’s your preference about your attention, aka action? Do you prefer to use only or mainly the left brain, which gets what it wants and what it has already seen?
McGilchrist cites an example in our distant past when the left hemisphere took over. “During the Reformation,” McGilchrist says. “There are extraordinary accounts of the destruction of priceless works of art by a few people with a few sledgehammers. Self-righteousness is a problem. Having a quick fix that involves destruction is never a good idea or advisable. Today, we have to think about what would be advisable… I do worry about the left hemisphere because it always thinks it’s absolutely got it right. It can be quite damaging to society.”
My burning question is, how does this apply to political activism? I wasn’t looking for a prescription or a To Do list. McGilchrist doesn’t do that. Still. Given the cold-blooded callousness gripping the reins of power in your life and mine, and for generations to come, how does McGilchrist apply his knowledge to political activism?
I found out. In a recent conversation between Anthea Lawson, author of The Entangled Activist, and McGilchrist about the implications of his thinking about our attempts to change the world, which is predominantly shaped by left-hemisphere perceptions. They discuss how we can understand the right hemisphere’s take on reality to help us approach the political problems we face with more effectiveness.
As I notice callous, cruel, and unspeakable actions reported every single hour, exemplified by …
SCOTUS rulings, June 27, 2025
ICE actions
Pushback by the majority of American citizens, including artists
Vincent Valdez, Hello America, 2024Because I want our human universe to shift into one of care and justice for all, I am taking two parallel actions: private and public.
My private life. To encourage more right-brain activity for more balance, I am attempting to shift from multi-tasking to doing one thing at a time. When walking, just walk. Without AirPods. Stop and smell the roses. Detour into music. Draw a leaf.
My public life as an activist. I am learning how to apply the fact that a multitude of ways of are, in fact, our entire world: flora, fauna, humans. Nothing is black or white. Nothing exists independently. Everything is in relationship. So, to change the world—to save our democracy, it is essential to relate to folks whose perspectives are way different than mine.
Because every living being lives in relationship to knowns and unknowns.
Democracy. The actual living, breathing, reality of democracy, is being in relationship with one another, and needs all our brains.
Every grain of sand, every cloud, every handshake, and every encounter of the minds is the whole world.
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NOTES
The Sophia Lectures with Dr Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Division and Union
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qvJlvoRQCEREx8NWVHSFtUGGTR194wCFnFFoMFw-pnQ/edit?tab=t.0
Activism and the Divided Brain - A conversation between Anthea Lawson, author of The Entangled Activist and Dr Iain McGilchrist, about the implications of his thinking for our attempts to change the world.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/left-brain-vs-right-brain.html
Human Nature and the Divided Brain | Iain McGilchrist
“This structure goes back 700 million years, as far as we know, to a sea creature called Nematostella vectensis, the oldest creature extant. It is the ancestor of the mammalian brain.”
https://neurosciencenews.com/neuroscience-nerve-cell-centralization-1669/
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and the Emissary, Yale University Press, 2012
Stephen Ellcock, with much gratitude! IG: @stephenellcock FB: /stephen.ellcock