How Can We Think Most Effectively?

The "good stuff," I tell my writing students, comes not from conscious calculation but from the unconscious, the dream place in our brains. The ego, the self-proclaimed executive, can help a lot with editing, but not with first-order creativity. The ego, I warn, spews out clichés, wants to control everything, and thinks that it is everything.

Psychiatrist/philosopher Iain McGilchrist, in his book The Master and His Emissary, offers a physiological explanation for my (courtesy of Freud) ego and unconscious metaphors. We have known for a long time that the two hemispheres of the human brain control opposite sides of the body, and have different shapes and abilities. Misunderstandings, though, used to abound. McGilchrist’s research has parted the clouds substantially.

The expression “I’m of two minds” turns out to be anatomically true. The two brains know many of the same things; yet, their styles of thought differ considerably.

The Left Brain and the Right Brain

The left brain excels at finding and grasping things, including prey. It is characterized by either/or thinking, extreme optimism, and a very high opinion of itself. The left brain, McGilchrist states, is adept at manipulating inanimate things and treats animate things as if they were inanimate. It focuses narrowly, breaking wholes down into parts that it can analyze and reconstruct as abstractions. It loves formal logic and tends to rely on what it already knows. Life, viewed by the left brain on its own, can seem flat and mechanistic. Over time, it can seem boring and dead.

The right brain treats inanimate things as if they’re alive. It shows greater flexibility than the left brain and concerns itself with the surprising and new. It sees the “big picture” and excels at spotting danger and not becoming prey. It out-scores the left brain in imagination and intelligence, though its thought may arrive as intuition. The right brain has a better sense of humor than the left, but can be overly cautious, its thinking tinged with melancholy.

The left hemisphere houses the centers of language production and comprehension. Yet, the right hemisphere understands language, too, and contributes greatly to what the left hemisphere can say.

Like many writers, I tend to sense emotionally charged, right-brain images first, then search for words to convey them. I began this essay with the sense of an ending that glowed in front of me, and intuitions about how I might get there. I’m on that path now, using the left-brain style of reason to bring (I hope) readers along with me.

This explanation is, of course, oversimplified. Any attempt by the brain to describe its own workings must be so. The left and right hemispheres, linked by the corpus callosum, work together in highly complex and often mysterious ways. There may be disagreement, even battles; but, overall, two brains seem to be better than one. My left brain, with its analytic skills, can be an able helper when I write, offering not just words but also sound editorial advice. For me to write my best, though, my right brain must lead.

Today's Left-Brain World

The same principle, McGilchrist claims, applies in life. The right brain should be the master, ably aided by the left. The modern world, however, is increasingly left-brain ruled. Education is aimed almost exclusively at the left brain. The brain-as-computer model—questionable at best—is seen as accurate and a good thing. When every issue can be codified into an algorithm, and decisions made by impersonal mathematics, heaven-on-earth (the left brain thinks) will have arrived.

To any reader not in thrall to the left brain, the flaws in such thinking are clear. Everyone knows people whose thought is rigid and who see only one side of any issue: their own. Such people, dominated by their left brain, are handicapped intellectually, whatever their IQ.

The law aspires to be unbiased and logical. This requires that judge and jury ignore their intuitions and work solely with their left brains. They must—here comes a right-brain image—hobble down the road to justice on crutches, one leg tied behind their backs.

Anyone who has tried to make a complex decision by sticking strictly to a “rubric” knows what a fool’s errand that can be. It may offer the illusion of fairness to grade a piece of writing, say, or assess a job candidate by assigning numerical scores to predetermined qualities. In truth, it’s likely to be “Garbage in, garbage out.”

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I once voted to allow a man I intuitively disliked to manage a rock band that I led. Everyone else in the band believed this man would make us stars. My left brain declared my dislike unkind and unfair. Not wanting to be either, I gave in.

You can guess how things turned out.

Putting the Right Brain in Charge

Can anything be done to get our world, as well as our individual psyches, back on the “right” track?

A strong program of K–12 arts education would be a good start. Exposure to the arts, both as creator and appreciator, helps children to know and understand the power of the right brain.

It would help, too, if people were taught to recognize right- and left-brain thinking—in others and in themselves. This would aid self-knowledge and decision-making.

Intuition should be given more respect. It’s not infallible, and can be hard to defend in court, but the right brain is capable of much more incisive, subtle, and creative thinking than is the left brain. Einstein is said to have envisioned his theory of general relativity well before he had the math to back it up.

The left brain’s analytic ability has helped humankind to move out of caves and, metaphorically speaking, into Bel Air, with a good chance of living long enough to enjoy the view. The left brain is most effective, though, in a subordinate role. The right–left team must re-learn how to work optimally together, or risk destroying not only the quality of human life but also life itself.