“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.” But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. “Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.
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