Category: Mind

  • The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

    Iain McGilchrist

    As is the case most of the time these days, I discovered The Master and His Emissary thanks to a podcast. Iain McGilchrist’s concepts seemed extremely intriguing, and now I have to admit (as he mentions early in the book) maybe intuitively consistent with my lived experience, and I had to read the book soon. Turns out that it goes directly to my all-time favourites, and was in my Bibliofiles 2023 list.

    As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into two parts – the divided brain, and the making of the Western World, each with half a dozen chapters. The first part deals with the brain itself – the asymmetry of the right and left hemispheres, their collective and individual roles, how their functioning actually leads to different perspectives, how this affected the evolution of music and then language (which can be seen as a key component in the progression of the species), the primacy of the right hemisphere, and how its emissary – the left hemisphere – has now usurped control.

    The heuristic ways of looking at the hemispheres, e.g. left analytical, right creative etc, is replaced by a nuanced view. The differences between them are less about what they do and more about how they approach something. The left’s utilitarian ability to ‘grasp’ (look at how the metaphor applies to thoughts), its ability to provide simple answers and articulate them well, have all enabled it to grab control at an accelerated pace since the Industrial Revolution, and create a world where it prizes precisely these capabilities in individuals, institutions, and culture at large.

    This is in many ways opposed to the right, which takes more holistic views, understands ideas and metaphors, perceives emotions better, specialises in non-verbal communication, and is humble about what it knows. The right deals with whatever is implicit, the left is tied to more explicit and more conscious processing. The right is present and pays attention to the world outside, the left re-presents. We need both hemispheres, and the right knows it, but the left thinks it knows everything. The left creates a world, and when it stops communications with the right, will not even accept reality if it counters the ‘truth’ of the world it has created. Its role was to provide a map of reality, it now thinks the map is reality, and if not, it will remake reality to fit the map.

    The second part then digs into how this has manifested in the world around. It begins with the concept of mimesis (my favourite part) and how it was the crux of our leap into what we now call culture. The meta-skill that enables all other skills – imitation – possibly explains the rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids. Through the next five chapters, Iain takes us through history – from the early Greeks to the post-modern world, and how, though history has seen a see-saw in terms of the dominance of the hemispheres – Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Revolution – the impact of the last one was such that we are now in a world where a swing towards the right seems near impossible. Much like an addict, who is not even conscious that his next dose is not just another dose. ‘There is a vicious cycle between feelings of boredom, emptiness and restlessness, on the one hand, and gross stimulation and sensationalism on the other’.

    The research is deep, in both sections, as evidenced by over a hundred pages of notes and bibliography. I especially appreciated the decision of not having same-page notes – it really does help the flow of reading. Iain has painstakingly tried to make a large number of diverse topics as accessible as possible. The first half is based on conclusions from scientific research and experiments across history, and various domains. The second half is itself an accordion of topics across centuries – arts, music, politics, language, and everything we call culture.

    I think my bias for this book and its argument is based on my own experience. As a person and a professional who has to balance both hemispheres, I have been pulled to the left for the longest while. And in many workshops, the recommendation to me has been to let my right side ‘play’. It is only very recently that I have been able to start doing that, and I have to say that I am much happier. The Master and His Emissaryis a book I hugely recommend. It is not the easiest of reads, and I deliberately slowed down my reading speed so as to not gloss over it (though I still did in some of the arts discussions!) but it will open up how you think – the narrative you have made about yourself, and the world around you.

    Quotes and ideas from The Master and His Emissary
    There are four main pathways to truth – science, reason, intuition, and imagination
    “The question is not what you look at, but what you see” ~ Henry Thoreau
    Attention changes what kind of thing comes into being for us : in that way it changes the world. Whether they are humans (say, employer vs friend) or things – a mountain is landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to the prospector, and a dwelling place of gods for another. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.
    Manipulospatial abilities may have provided the basis for primitive language. Function gestures become manipulative, syntax developed to form language, expression of our will. (p 111) Even in left handers, grasping actions controlled by left hemisphere, thus right hand.
    Language’s origin in music. Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion, that is communicated by one individual ‘inhabiting’ the emotional world of the other. A process that could have been derived from music. Grooming – music – language, all picked up by imitation. (p 123)
    Adam Zeman’s three principal meanings of consciousness – as a waking state, as experience, as mind (p 187)
    The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water – or does not say ‘no’ to the water, whatever that it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into benign the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not to say ‘no’.
    The idea that the ‘separation’ of the two hemispheres took place in Homeric Greece. (voices of gods) (p260 -275)
    Gnothi seauton – know thyself
    In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
    It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
    But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
    What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
    I am to learn.
    ~ Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
    The difference between reason and rationality. The former depends on seeing in things in context – right hemisphere. Latter is left, context-independent.
    Kant described marriage as an agreement between two people as to the ‘reciprocal use of each others’ sexual organs’
    ‘Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment’ ~ Sam Johnson
    Modern consumers everywhere are in a ‘permanent state of unfulfilled desire’
    Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of a fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.

    The Master and His Emissary

  • Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind

    Judson Brewer

    The book descriptor is what drew me in – ‘train your brain to heal your mind’. in “Unwinding Anxiety”, Dr. Judson Brewer attempts to do this with a three act structure – set up, confrontation, resolution. In this context, identifying the triggers, understanding the why behind the cycles and updating the brain’s reward networks, and then tapping into the brain’s learning centres to break the cycles.

    The book begins on point with the dictionary definition of anxiety – ‘a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome’, born when our brain doesn’t have enough information to predict the future. Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety. An early example of the author’s mother-in-law manifesting anxiety in the form of snapping (irritability) was something I could relate to (in my own behaviour!)

    In the first part, the book also covers why the typical weapons against habits don’t work- willpower, immediate substitution, environment priming, and mindfulness. In the second part, I found the idea of changing behaviour by addressing ‘the felt experience of the rewards’ useful. This is different from thinking our way out of a behaviour, something that has failed for me in the past. Another reinforcement was about how reliving the past doesn’t really fix it, what we have is the present. In this section, the twenty one day habit-building timeframe is also debunked. The third section has useful frameworks like RAIN (Recognise, Allow/Accept, Investigate, Note) and a little part on meta worry – worrying about the next time you’ll worry. A final useful bit was not focusing on the ‘why’ of the anxiety, but instead on resolving it.

    While the title says anxiety, I felt that a lot of the book was about addiction and bad habits (smoking, overeating, alcoholism etc) and the habit changing methods that you would find in other books like The Power of Habit, or Atomic Habits. If it’s specifically anti-anxiety tips that you’re reading this for, I am not sure how useful it would be. It is arguable that anxiety is a habit, and what works for changing other habits can work for this as well. Somehow, I think that might be a superficial cure, and we don’t really know how to fix the real problem yet.

    Unwinding Anxiety

  • Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Under-Rated Organ

    Giulia Enders

    When you think of it, it’s quite amazing how emotions we might attribute to the mind find metaphors related to another part of the body – ‘gut feel’, ‘butterflies in the stomach’, ‘sh*t your pants’, ‘pit in your stomach’ and so on. The metaphors are based on actual physical sensations, and so on hindsight, it is quite obvious that the gut and the brain have quite a connection.

    If we consider our development as an embryo, it goes along three ‘tubes’ – cardio-vascular, nervous, and the gut systems. But unlike the heroes of the first two – the heart and the brain, who have attention and literature, we rarely even think about the gut unless we have an ailment. But it is amazingly complex, with links to even something like mental health, and that’s what makes “the inside story of our body’s most underrated organ” a really interesting read.

    Giulia Enders does an excellent job of breaking down the complexities, much like some of her favourite bacteria that find a mention in the book! The book is not just accessible but entertaining too, with fun illustrations popping up on a regular basis. However, despite not sounding like a boring thesis, the book is full of not just information, but insight. This goes all the from the scenes of the behind like how does pooing work, and the kinds of poo, to behind-the-scenes walkthroughs of important and not-so-known processes like the gut structure and how organs transport food, to practical advice on everything from allergies, things like reflux and constipation, and diets, to cleanliness, and the MCU equivalent of the microbes in our gut.

    As someone who has been at the mercy of clueless gastro-intestinal practitioners, I’d say that her stated aim of making information available to a broad audience is in itself worthy of an applause. An absolutely fascinating read, even if you’re only vaguely interested in this inner piece of ours!

    Things I learned
    – The gut accounts for two-thirds of our immune system
    – There are inner and outer sphincters, representing our unconscious inner world and our consciousness respectively. Their understanding of the respective spaces, and their ‘conversations’ and relationship determine when you fart, or when you have to just go!
    – Squatting is indeed the best way to defecate, as it leads to a nice, straight intestinal tract. This is scientifically proven in the book
    – Saliva is basically filtered blood! It also contains a painkiller stronger than morphine, called opiorphin. Because the mouth is super sensitive thanks to more nerve endings than any other part of the body
    – The stomach is shaped like ‘Quasimodo’ so that water and food can be treated separately
    – Lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it’s a deficiency – the body not having the enzyme to break the two sugar molecules. In 75% of the population, the gene for digesting lactose begins to switch off as we grow older because we are no longer reliant on mother’s milk
    – Rumbling tummy is the ‘migrating motor complex’ at work. And it’s more from the small intestine. Housekeeping when that and the stomach are empty. If something enters, the process stops. In this context, regular snacking isn’t a good idea, and needs separation of at least 5 hours
    – Solve constipation with dietary fibres, fluids, pro and prebiotics
    – The extraordinary story of the sea squirt, which navigates the oceans, finds a good place to settle down, and then proceeds to eat its own brain!
    – Irritable bowel syndrome could be caused by micro inflammations, bad gut flora or undetected food intolerances (but as you might have experienced, doctors pooh pooh patients as hypochondriacs or malingerers!)
    – The brain can receive information from the gut at the insular cortex. Bud Craig’s theory is that human self awareness originates in the insular cortex. It consists of three hypothesis – this part gets info from all over the body and organises it to form an image – a representation of our feelings. The second part of the hypothesis is that the purpose of the brain is to create movement – for the best life possible. The third part of the hypothesis is that to make the best possible movement, the images are important and the brain and the gut are both qualifiers for the central role in giving this information
    – Gut bacteria vary by geography too – climate, food etc all play a part
    – “Genes are possibilities. Genes are information. Genes can be dominant, forcing features on you or they can just offer their abilities for us to use or not. But most of all, genes are plans.” Lovely!
    – Our collective gut bacteria have 150 more times genes than a human. Who are we really made of!
    – Gut bacteria are of 3 types- bactericides, prevotella, ruminococcus.
    – Haem is needed for many things, like production of blood. Its lack is a genetic defect that has been seen in Romania – results in symptoms that include garlic intolerance, sensitivity to sunlight, and red urine. Vlad!
    – Yoghurt is nothing but milk pre-digested by bacteria. Buy ones that use bacteria that produce dextrorotatory lactic acids rather than levorotatory.
    – Lactobacillus Reuteri can significantly lower cholesterol and lipid levels, and increase HDL
    – A toxoplasmata infection causes our immune system to activate an enzyme IDO which breaks down the substance the invaders like to eat and forces them to enter a dormant state. But this eatable is also an ingredient needed to produce serotonin. This potentially causes suicidal behaviour.
    -Eat prebiotic dishes

    Gut : The Inside Story of Our Bodys Most Under-Rated Organ

  • The Molecule of More

    Daniel Z. Lieberman, Michael E. Long

    The ‘molecule of more’ whose machinations make you desire what you don’t have, and drives you to seek new things. That which offers rewards when you obey it, and punishes you when you don’t. Dopamine, whose fingerprint is visible in most of the thoughts and actions we do on a daily basis, is the subject of the book. Discovered in 1957 by Kathleen Montagu, and first thought of as a pleasure molecule, only .0005% of brain cells produce it, but it has a disproportionate influence on us.

    (more…)

  • The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

    Olivia Laing

    The Lonely City was a book that had been on my list for a while now, thanks to quotes from it reaching me from various sources. I now realise why a lot of people hold it in high regard. It’s not just the deep and poignant insights about loneliness, and its connection to art, but also how this relates to our humanity. 
    Olivia Laing uses the loneliness she developed when she moved to New York in her mid-thirties to explore the city and the feeling through art. In eight chapters, she fixes her gaze on the life and work of artists, some well-known and some unknown (to me) who have used their art in different ways to cope with their feeling of loneliness. 

    The connection between all of them is the liminality in which they operated – the edges of society’s discourse. I found two of them especially poignant. Henry Darger, born in the slums of Chicago in 1892, and who at the age of eight was sent first to a Catholic boys’ home and then to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, and later spent almost six decades rolling bandages and sweeping floors in the city’s Catholic hospitals. It was only posthumously that he was recognised and attained fame. A lonely person who lived on the sidelines of society but whose art radiated unique perspectives. 

    The other is Valerie Solanas, who appears in the narrative of Andy Warhol (she attempted to murder him in 1968). Except for a few years, her life never really looked up. Hers was a vicious cycle of loneliness, her own mistrust and withdrawal fed by the society which shunned her. Her life just kept spiralling downwards until her death, alone in a welfare hotel, with her body being discovered after three days. 
    But towards the end of The Lonely City, Laing also shows how art is not only a medium of expression, but also a way in which the individual is trying to connect with those around him/her. An excellent read if only for the many perspectives of loneliness. 

    As she writes in her dedication, “If you’re lonely, this one’s for you”

    Some of my favourite sections in The Lonely City: 

    Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.

    What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. 

    People who hoard are often socially withdrawn. Sometimes the hoarding causes isolation, and sometimes it is a palliative to loneliness, a way of comforting oneself. Not everyone is susceptible to the companionship of objects; to the desire to keep and sort them; to employ them as barricades or to play back and forth between expulsion and retention. On an autism website, I’d come across a discussion on the subject, in which someone had encapsulated the desire beautifully, writing: ‘Yes, very much a problem for me and while I’m not sure if I personify objects I do tend to develop some weird sort of loyalty to them and it’s difficult to dispose of them. 

    Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it. 

    Like Harris, Warhol could see that technology was going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve fame; intimacy’s surrogate, its addictive supplanter.

    The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. Only the homeless and the dispossessed seemed exempt, though that’s not counting the street kids who spent every day hanging out in the Apple store on Broadway, keeping up on Facebook even – especially, maybe – if they didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows what it looks like. I can’t count how many pieces I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. Despite an advert then prevalent on the subway that declared ‘Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again’, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected, misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up. 

    That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computer can participate, can become a minor deity of Tumblr or YouTube, commanding thousands with their make-up advice or ability to decorate a dining table, to bake the perfect cupcake. A prepubescent in a sweater with a knack for throwing shade can grip 1,379,750 subscribers, declaring it’s hard to explain myself so those are what my videos are for!! And then you run the hashtag lonely through Twitter, can’t vibe with anybody lately #lonely, seven favourites; I love seeing people that I asked to do things with not reply to me and then do things without me. #lonely, one favourite; I’m having one of those nights. Too much thinking time #lonely I sound like a fucking sook with lots of cats. I wish I had a cat, no favourites.

    The Lonely City