poetry around him (for the mind has an amazing capacity for ignoring things it considers unimportant), and that his soul had become shrivelled and dehydrated as a result.
In fact closing the senses to these finer shades of meaning can be extremely dangerous: it results in a sense of futility and boredom, the feeling of Ecclesiastes that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun. To avoid this problem we merely have to understand that we have
two
instruments for grasping the world around us, not — as we naturally tend to assume — just one. One part of the mind has the power to encounter reality as simply and directly as drinking a glass of water. The other part can only come to terms with reality by strapping it into a kind of rigid iron framework and measuring it with rulers and clocks.
Now in fact science has recently come to recognize the physical existence of these two ways of grasping reality, and that they are located in the left and right halves of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres. The science of split-brain physiology has uncovered the fact that we have two people living inside our heads: the person you call ‘you’, and a total stranger who lives in the other half of the brain.
Our brains are divided into two, like a walnut. The left hemisphere deals with language and logic, the right with intuition and ‘recognition’ — you could say that the left side is a scientist and the right an artist. The two halves are joined by a mass of nerve fibre called the commissure or
corpus callosum
. If this is severed — as it is occasionally to cure epilepsy — the patient begins to act like two separate people. One split-brain patient tried to zip up his flies with one hand and unzip them with the other. Another tried to hit his wife with the left hand while the right held it back. (For some odd reason the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, so it was the intuitive side that was trying to hit her and the rational side that was holding it back.) When a female patient was shown an indecent picture the right half of her brain caused her to blush with embarrassment: when asked why she was blushing she replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The ‘I’ that spoke was, of course, her left-brain self.
What this clearly demonstrates is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left cerebral hemisphere — the ‘logical’ half — while the ‘stranger’ lives in the ‘intuitive’ half. At first it seems difficult to account for anything so odd, until we recollect that man has been forced to develop his ‘logical’ aspect in order to build civilization. And this — as we observed in the case of Peter Hurkos — involves
suppressing
faculties that are not essential for survival. In fact brain physiologists call the left hemisphere — the ‘you’ — the dominant hemisphere and refer to the right as the non-dominant hemisphere. They could be compared to two partners in a marriage, where the husband is highly dominant and the wife unobtrusive and shy.
It is a pity that Bergson did not live long enough to see his philosophy scientifically justified — for that is what split-brain physiology has accomplished. The right brain is concerned with pattern-recognition — which means that a patient with right-brain damage might have difficulty recognizing his own mother, except by
telling
himself that she has grey hair and brown eyes. An undamaged right brain recognizes faces in a flash, without the need to analyze. And the same faculty responds to poetry and music and pretty girls and mountain scenery. And our response to these things is a valid
recognition
, not just a ‘feeling’. If science insists on confining itself to those things that can be grasped by the left side of the brain, then it is ignoring a half of reality.
But it would be a mistake to blame the left brain for being too dominant. It is not really a male chauvinist bully. The problem is that in
In fact closing the senses to these finer shades of meaning can be extremely dangerous: it results in a sense of futility and boredom, the feeling of Ecclesiastes that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun. To avoid this problem we merely have to understand that we have
two
instruments for grasping the world around us, not — as we naturally tend to assume — just one. One part of the mind has the power to encounter reality as simply and directly as drinking a glass of water. The other part can only come to terms with reality by strapping it into a kind of rigid iron framework and measuring it with rulers and clocks.
Now in fact science has recently come to recognize the physical existence of these two ways of grasping reality, and that they are located in the left and right halves of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres. The science of split-brain physiology has uncovered the fact that we have two people living inside our heads: the person you call ‘you’, and a total stranger who lives in the other half of the brain.
Our brains are divided into two, like a walnut. The left hemisphere deals with language and logic, the right with intuition and ‘recognition’ — you could say that the left side is a scientist and the right an artist. The two halves are joined by a mass of nerve fibre called the commissure or
corpus callosum
. If this is severed — as it is occasionally to cure epilepsy — the patient begins to act like two separate people. One split-brain patient tried to zip up his flies with one hand and unzip them with the other. Another tried to hit his wife with the left hand while the right held it back. (For some odd reason the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, so it was the intuitive side that was trying to hit her and the rational side that was holding it back.) When a female patient was shown an indecent picture the right half of her brain caused her to blush with embarrassment: when asked why she was blushing she replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The ‘I’ that spoke was, of course, her left-brain self.
What this clearly demonstrates is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left cerebral hemisphere — the ‘logical’ half — while the ‘stranger’ lives in the ‘intuitive’ half. At first it seems difficult to account for anything so odd, until we recollect that man has been forced to develop his ‘logical’ aspect in order to build civilization. And this — as we observed in the case of Peter Hurkos — involves
suppressing
faculties that are not essential for survival. In fact brain physiologists call the left hemisphere — the ‘you’ — the dominant hemisphere and refer to the right as the non-dominant hemisphere. They could be compared to two partners in a marriage, where the husband is highly dominant and the wife unobtrusive and shy.
It is a pity that Bergson did not live long enough to see his philosophy scientifically justified — for that is what split-brain physiology has accomplished. The right brain is concerned with pattern-recognition — which means that a patient with right-brain damage might have difficulty recognizing his own mother, except by
telling
himself that she has grey hair and brown eyes. An undamaged right brain recognizes faces in a flash, without the need to analyze. And the same faculty responds to poetry and music and pretty girls and mountain scenery. And our response to these things is a valid
recognition
, not just a ‘feeling’. If science insists on confining itself to those things that can be grasped by the left side of the brain, then it is ignoring a half of reality.
But it would be a mistake to blame the left brain for being too dominant. It is not really a male chauvinist bully. The problem is that in
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