The title of this post is taken from Iain McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and his Emissary”. A book I’ve slowly started working my way through. Here are a couple passages that stuck out to me that shine interesting lights on a two way approach:
In marmosets, individual animals with more strongly lateralised brains are better able, because of hemisphere (brain) specialization, to forage and remain aware of predators. There are shorter reaction times in cats that have a lateralized paw preference. Lateralized chimps are more efficient at fishing for termites than unlateralised chimps. Even individual human brains that are, for one reason or another, less ‘lateralized’ than the norm appear to show global deficits. In a word, lateralisation brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks. p26
In Hockey attention is split between tasks of managing actions on the ice and actions in the game.
Iain goes on to mention two types of attention that operate: focused and open. Focused attention operates on the minutiae while open attention observes the situation or wholeness. He also writes about allegiances outside of the self which are lost foraging only for what is desired by one’s self.
Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and inso doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience— the live, complex embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. p31
Lastly, a diagram of what neuroscientists call Yakovlevian torque— the idea that the brain is not oriented symmetrically but is slightly rotated on its central axis.