Ways of Seeing II: Left Eye, Right Hemisphere

In Part One, I said that there were two ways of seeing (receptively and perceptively), but I was wrong to suggest that these were the only ways of seeing. There are, of course, many ways of seeing. In Homer alone, Bruno Snell notes nine different words to denote sight. The two that I mention are more like broad categories in which other forms fall.

However, I would like to add two more broad categories based on a book I’ve just read by Iain McGilchrist called The Master and the Emissary.

I’ve always subscribed to the idea that there are fundamental differences between left-eye and right-eye dominance, and this has been confirmed for me by McGilchrist’s thesis:

My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co- operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture

According to McGilchrist, the left hemisphere, which is associated with the right eye, ‘yields narrow, focussed attention’, whereas the right hemisphere, which is associated with the left eye, ‘yields a broad, vigilant attention’. Another way of thinking about this is that the left isolates information, while the right deals with information as a whole:

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