The Split
I have been looking for the words to explain this feeling of restlessness I experienced most of my professional life. Having been a part of it, and still felt that uncomfortable unease of going against my instincts.
I acted it out like the lead character in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (Spielberg, 1977) where a man (Richard Dreyfuss) frustrated his family trying to visualize the place where an alien ship was going to summit and encounter the human race.
He starts with drawings, shaping his mashed potatoes at dinner, and finally building a giant piece of art taking up his whole living room. If I could show you my home office, you’d shake you head and smile. Never the less I recommend a nostalgic viewing of this film.
Credit: Columbia Pictures, Photofest, Pete Turner
So what liberated me?
Iain McGilchrist! A psychiatrist who spent decades studying the brain's two hemispheres, makes the conclusion I could never phrase: the analytical, controlling (left) half of the mind was never meant to run the show. It was built to serve a richer, more embodied way of experiencing the world by the right hemisphere. Present, sensing, holistic. The emissary was meant to serve the master!
Somewhere along the way, as he so gallantly puts it - the emissary took over!
That takeover gave us extraordinary reasoning, extraordinary systems, extraordinary control. It may have also buried the biggest paradox in modern life.
The part of our brain built to serve the other more capable, sensing, powerful part, has taken over and it doesn't know it's done so!
We have numbed our capability to use our holistic intelligence and it plays out on just about every level of our lives. We suffer sitting in the midst of a sea of possibilities.
I call it The Split, and once you see it, it's hard to unsee: probably the single shift that has shaped Western development more than any other.
I offer 11 minutes to decide for yourself by listening to Iain McGilchrist himself illustrated by a fantastic animation by RSA Animate.
https://lnkd.in/dWGJ8dnP
Screendump of the Iain McGilchrist on Youtube, by RSA Animate
