NOTES - The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - Iain McGilchrist

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - Iain McGilchrist (2009)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY

1. Hellige, 1993, p. 168.

2. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 279, n. 4.

3. Crow, 2006, p. 793.

4. Many others in the field are similarly convinced that the issue is important. John Cutting, author of the most comprehensive study ever made of the right hemisphere and its functions in relation to psychiatric illness (Cutting, 1990), writes that ‘the single greatest advance in neuropsychology in the last 50 years has been the discovery of hemisphere differences in every aspect of human life’ (Cutting, 2009). Marcel Kinsbourne, despite his justified aversion to ‘dichotomania’, has for decades done more than most neuroscientists to pursue the differences between the hemispheres. Claude Braun, another distinguished neuroscientist with an interest in hemisphere differences, writes that ‘the vast database of animal research [and] human neuropsychiatric research … both clearly establish numerous important and spectacular specialisations of the right hemisphere’ (Braun, 2007, p. 398). Elkhonon Goldberg has consistently championed the view that there are important differences in hemisphere function (see p. 482, n. 16 below). Robert Ornstein, having written a book about hemisphere differences, The Psychology of Consciousness, in the 1970s, became so frustrated with the vulgarisations that for 20 years he concentrated his research on other matters and gave hemisphere research up as a bad job. He has now returned to it, and admits that he was ‘bowled over’ on returning to the literature in the 1990s to find how much evidence had come forward that ‘the division of the mind is profound’ (Ornstein, 1997, pp. 3-4).

5. ‘In the intact brain, it is rarely the case that one hemisphere can perform a task normally whereas the other hemisphere is completely unable to perform the task at all. Instead, both hemispheres often have considerable ability to perform a task, even though they may go about it in different ways [emphasis added] … In this sense, having two cerebral hemispheres is akin to having two reasonably complete “brains” whose differences, compared with their many similarities, are likely to start out being subtle. Although many hemispheric asymmetries are very subtle, the range of tasks showing hemispheric asymmetry is quite broad and spans such diverse domains as motor performance, language, spatial processing and emotion. Thus far, it has not been possible to identify any single information-processing dichotomy that could account for anything close to this entire range of hemispheric asymmetries … Whatever links there might be between the various hemispheric asymmetries, they would seem to be determined in some other way or according to some other principle’ (Hellige, 1993, pp. 335-6).

6. I adopt a position closer to Schopenhauer's belief that the world exists ‘between’ something independent of the mind and the mind that apprehends it than to the (in some ways similar, but relatively adynamic) relationship suggested by Kant's view that, as Tanner puts it, ‘our experiences are the result of a collaboration between us and a basic reality of which we can know nothing, except that it must exist’ (Tanner, 1999, p. 6).

7. To some extent this aspiration has been realised: see Schore, 1997.

8. C. Jung, 1953-79, vol. 10, p. 12.

9. Our brains are ‘organs of unique and curious historiography, for whereas in our bodies earlier somatic structures have been superseded by later ones, our brains have retained, without replacing, certain modified forms of the stages of our own evolution’ (Fraser, 1989, p. 3).

10. Sherrington, 1906.

11. Kinsbourne, 1988. I agree with Sperry that ‘the left-right dichotomy in cognitive mode is an idea with which it is very easy to run wild’. As he says, ‘qualitative shifts in mental control may involve up-down, front-back, or various other organisational changes as well as left-right differences’ (Sperry 1982, p. 1225), thus confirming that in his view opponent pairs are involved in shifts of mental control. But the ‘left-right’ dichotomy is different in kind from the ‘up-down’ and ‘front-back’ dichotomies in several important respects, which neither Kinsbourne nor Sperry mention. The cortex and subcortical regions are functionally distinct and incomparable, and run in series rather than in parallel. The cortex arises out of and exists to modulate the ‘input’ from the more ancient regions that lie below: the relationship between the frontal and posterior regions of the cerebral cortex has a similar structure, in that the frontal lobes developed from, and exist to modulate the action of, the posterior cortex. By contrast, the hemispheres are evolutionary twins: they display a remarkable degree of apparent overlap or redundancy of function, and run in parallel rather than in series. Each on its own can sustain something remarkably like a normalhuman mind, which certainly cannot be said of any of the other paired entities on its own. I believe the ‘front-back’ and ‘up-down’ shifts may be particularly important in understanding both normal functioning and psychopathology at the individual level; only the hemispheres, however, are capable singly of underwriting nothing less than a version of reality, and displaying the rivalry that in this book forms my focus of attention. And as I hope to show, the left-right opposition is itself already inextricably involved, in a far from straightforward way, with the other two dimensions.

12. Ornstein, 1997, p. 16.

13. Sergent, 1982.

14. Laeng, Chabris & Kosslyn, 2003, p. 313.

15. Descartes, 1984-91a, p. 118.

16. The complexities of handedness have been dealt with superlatively well by Chris McManus (in McManus, 2002, to which the interested reader is referred).

17. Language is lateralised to the left in about 96% of right-handed subjects (Rasmussen & Milner, 1977). Although this study was based on a sample of subjects with epilepsy, the finding has been confirmed in normal subjects: see Pujol, Deus, Losilla et al., 1999.

18. Pujol, Deus, Losilla et al., 1999.

19. Valéry, 1957, ‘Au sujet d’Eurêka’, vol. 1, pp. 857-8. In fact he is speaking of Edgar Allan Poe: ‘Dans la système de Poe … l'univers est construit sur un plan dont la symétrie profonde est, en quelque sorte, présente dans l'intime structure de notre esprit.’ Poe had himself written in Eureka: ‘the sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended on with an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the Universe.’

20. Pasteur, 1874 (1 juin; in Pasteur, 1922, p. 361): ‘L'univers est un ensemble dissymétrique et je suis persuadé que la vie, telle qu'elle se manifeste à nous, est fonction de la dissymétrie de l'univers ou des conséquences qu'elle entraîne.’ Pasteur's belief that asymmetry distinguishes whatever is living has been confirmed in our time: see, for example, Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985.

21. Very roughly indeed, and I cannot now remember where.

22. For a discussion of Hegel's treatment of ‘master’ and ‘slave’, and its relevance to the neuropsychology of the cerebral hemispheres, see pp. 204-5 below.

PART 1: THE DIVIDED BRAIN

The Master and his Emissary

CHAPTER 1: ASYMMETRY AND THE BRAIN

1. The source for this is one Avianus Vindicianus, a friend of St. Augustine who was proconsul of Africa in around AD 360-70 (Green, 2003). His tract De Semine, preserved in MS no.1342-50 of the Royal Library at Brussels (folio 48r-52v), probably represents the views of Greek physicians of the third century BC. These ideas are often mistakenly attributed to Diocles of Carystus, a famous Athenian physician from the fourth century BC, on the basis of the earlier work of the Dutch scholar, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, who published three papers in the 1980s to this effect (Lokhorst, 1982a, 1982b, 1985). However, he later revised his views (see Lokhorst 1996); and from this it would seem that Avianus's sources cannot be earlier than the third century BC. After Avianus there is little until modern times to suggest any view other than the naïve one that the hemispheres are symmetrical, apart from an annotated drawing of the brain from the early fifteenth century preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS. 0.2.40, fol. 57v), which suggests that the right hemisphere is warmer than the left: ‘the rygth syde hoot ande dry, the leyft syde cold and drey’ (Clarke & Dewhurst, 1972, p. 21). I have no idea where that came from, but it has a sort of metaphorical aptness.

2. Wigan, 1844, p. 271. Wigan sees the hemispheres as like the two eyes: despite their duality, they normally deliver only one object of vision, not two; and, though each eye is sufficient on its own, there are some things that two do better than one. But, as with eyes, the two hemispheres must be identical. He does not therefore distinguish between the two hemispheres, although he says that ‘in the healthy brain one of the two hemispheres is almost always superior in power, and exercises control over the volitions of its fellow’. He sees all psychiatric disorders in terms of a moral conflict of wills, the will of the healthy hemisphere, whichever it might be, striving to compensate for the depraved will of the diseased one.

3. Jäncke & Steinmetz, 2003, p. 204; Banich, 2003, p. 262.

4. Conti & Manzoni, 1994; Saron, Foxe, Simpson et al., 2002.

5. Meyer, Röricht, Gräfin von Einsiedel et al., 1995; Röricht, Irlbacher, Petrow et al., 1997; Höppner, Kunesch, Buchmann et al., 1999.

6. Cook, 1984; Hoptman & Davidson, 1994; Chiarello & Maxfield, 1996.

7. Saron, Foxe, Schroeder et al., 2003; Allison, Meador, Loring et al., 2000; Tootell, Mendola, Hadjikhani et al., 1998.

8. Meyer, Röricht, Gräfin von Einsiedel et al., 1995; Bloom & Hynd, 2005.

9. Jäncke & Steinmetz, 2003, pp. 210-11.

10. Hopkins & Marino, 2000; Aboitiz, Scheibel & Zaidel, 1992.

11. Friedman & Polson, 1981.

12. Mind and brain are aspects of the same entity, but completely distinct types of phenomena. The difference is similar to what I take Sartre to mean by his distinction between our inward experience of the body (pour soi), and the fact of the body as a ‘thing’ (en soi).

13. Cf. Roger Scruton on time: Scruton, 1997, p. 367.

14. Descartes, 1984-91b, ‘Meditation VI’, p. 56 (trans. adapted): ‘… me non tantum adesse meo corpori ut nauta adest navigio, sed illi arctissime esse conjunctum et quasi permixtum, adeo ut unum quid cum illo componam.

15. I said that the fundamental problem in explaining the experience of consciousness is that there is nothing else remotely like it to compare it with, since it is itself the ground of all experience. If it were not for this, a helpful analogy for the relationship I believe I see between mind and brain might be the relationship of a wave to water. The wave exists in the water: that's what we mean by a wave. Does the water cause the wave? No. Is it the movement of the water, then, that causes the wave? No, not that either: the movement of the water just is the wave. Similarly the relationship of mind and brain. Does the brain cause the mind? No. Is it the changing states of the brain that cause the mind? No: the changing brain states are the mind - once the brain experiences them. And that is where the analogy ends, because there is no inwardness to a wave. All the same, the analogy continues to have its uses: the forces of wind and gravitation that end up instantiated as a wave in water do not depend on water for their being, only for their expression at that moment as a wave. They exist apart from - in a sense, above and behind - the water in which they are instantiated, and would carry on existing if the water were not there, though then they would be deprived of their form of expression as that particular wave. Similarly, I believe, it may be that consciousness does not depend on a brain for its existence: just, in the absence of a brain, it is deprived of its expression as that particular mind. Another metaphor, far from original, but none the less useful, is that of the TV set. The TV set is proximally causative of the phenomena that appear on the screen: damage the electronic circuitry, and the picture's gone, or at any rate distorted - true enough. But the TV set is only mediative; it does not itself gives rise to the programme you watch. And you couldn't tell which it does - originate the programme or transmit it - by inspecting the workings: the TV set would look much the same whichever. It is true that we might be able to say from looking at the type of constituent parts in it whether there was anything there that we recognised could in itself generate programmes from scratch, or whether, on the contrary, there is something there which, from what we know of electronic components, appears to pick up electromagnetic waves and turn them into pictures. But that is only possible because we make all the parts of any machine, and set up the system. So we know by definition what sort of a thing a cathode ray tube or plasma screen is, and what it is for, what it does. But there is no such state of affairs with a neurone. We didn't make them and we don't know what sort of things they are, or what they are capable of doing. In trying to understand them we have, fatally, already to decide what sort of things they might be in order to know what to compare them with, which kind of model to apply. Apply the machine model and that begs the question entirely.

16. Semendeferi, Lu, Schenker et al., 2002; Schoenemann, Sheehan & Glotzer, 2005.

17. Allen, Damasio, Grabowski et al., 2003.

18. Cf. Pascal: ‘When we're too young, our judgment isn't sound, and it's the same when we're too old. If we don't think enough about something - or if we think too much - we're inflexible and get stuck. If we take a look at our work as soon as we've done it, we're not able to be objective; but if we wait too long, we can't get into it any more. It's like looking at pictures from too near or too far away. There is only one place that's exactly right: the others are either too far, too near, too high or too low. In the art of painting it's perspective that determines where that point should be. But who's to say where it is when it comes to truth and morality?’: 1976, §381 (Lafuma §21); trans. I. McG. (‘Si on est trop jeune on ne juge pas bien, trop vieil de même. Si on n'y songe pas assez, si on y songe trop, on s'entête et on s'en coiffe. Si on considère son ouvrage incontinent après l'avoir fait on en est encore tout prévenu, si trop longtemps après on n'y entre plus. Ainsi les tableaux vus de trop loin et de trop près. Et il n'y a qu'un point indivisible qui soit le véritable lieu. Les autres sont trop près, trop loin, trop haut ou trop bas. La perspective l'assigne dans l'art de la peinture, mais dans la vérité et dans la morale qui l'assignera?’) Similar ideas, foreign to the invariance of Cartesianism, are expressed in (1976) §71(Lafuma §38) and §69 (Lafuma §723). In this and all subsequent quotations from Pascal, the notation of the Pensées is that of Léon Brunschvicg, though in each case I have also given the notation proposed by Louis Lafuma for ease of reference to other editions.

19. Marc Dax died in 1837. His series of observations, originally made in 1836, were published by his son Gustave in 1863, following Broca's publication of similar findings in the case of ‘Tan’ in 1861 and prior to Broca's classic paper of 1865: G. Dax, 1863; M. Dax, 1865; Broca, 1861a, 1861b, 1861c, 1865.

20. Wernicke, 1874.

21. Heschl, 1878; Eberstaller, 1884.

22. Geschwind & Levitsky, 1968. Subsequent studies have suggested that the difference may be due to the fact that the posterior angulation of the right Sylvian fissure takes off more steeply and anteriorly than the left, shortening the planum (Loftus, Tramo, Thomas et al., 1993). The issue of how to define the planum remains unresolved (Honeycutt, Musick, Barta et al., 2000), but a recent study which compared three different definitions of the planum found a leftward asymmetry according to each (Zetzsche, Meisenzahl, Preuss et al., 2001).

23. LeMay & Kido, 1978; LeMay, 1984, 1977; Chiu & Damasio, 1980.

24. Yakovlev & RakiThe Master and his Emissary, 1966; Weinberger, Luchins, Morihisa et al., 1982; Bilder, Wu, Bogerts et al., 1999; Barrick, Mackay, Prima et al., 2005; Good, Johnsrude, Ashburner et al., 2001.

25. D'A. W. Thompson, 1917.

26. Kertesz, Polk, Black et al., 1992. As did Witelson & Kigar (1988), they found that brain asymmetries of structure were generally related to function, although, as the authors point out, phylogenetic correlations between the structure and function of an organ overall should not lead to the expectation that such correlations will be demonstrated in every individual case. For a review of the relationship between anatomical and functional asymmetry in the human brain, see Toga & Thompson, 2003.

27. Jäncke & Steinmetz, 2003, p. 201; Maguire, Gadian, Johnsrude et al., 2000.

28. Amunts, Jäncke, Mohlberg et al., 2000; Amunts, Schlaug, Schleicher et al., 1996; Melsbach, Wohlschläger, Spiess et al., 1996; Snyder, Bilder, Wu et al., 1995.

29. Maguire, Gadian, Johnsrude et al., 2000.

30. Nottebohm, 1970.

31. Jäncke & Steinmetz, 2003, p. 216. See also LeMay & Culebras, 1972, and Hopkins & Marino, 2000.

32. Rogers & Andrew, 2002.

33. Glick, Meibach, Cox et al., 1979; Sandhu, Cook & Diamond, 1986.

34. Rogers, 2000.

35. Hoffman, Robakiewicz, Tuttle et al., 2006.

36. Rogers & Kaplan, 2006; Rogers, 2000.

37. Rogers, Zucca & Vallortigara, 2004.

38. Dharmaretnam & Rogers, 2005.

39. Bugnyar, Stöwe & Heinrich, 2004.

40. Evans, Evans & Marler, 1993; Rogers, 2000; Lippolis, Bisazza, Rogers et al., 2002; Lippolis, Westman, McAllan et al., 2005.

41. Rogers, 2006.

42. Fabre-Thorpe, Fagot, Lorincz et al., 1993.

43. McGrew & Marchant, 1999.

44. Crow, Crow, Done et al., 1998.

45. Rogers, Zucca & Vallortigara, 2004.

46. Güntürkün, Diekamp, Manns et al., 2000.

47. Csermely, 2004.

48. Robins & Rogers, 2006.

49. Vallortigara, Rogers, Bisazza et al., 1998.

50. Bisazza, Cantalupo, Capocchiano et al., 2000; Rogers & Workman, 1989; Halpern, Güntürkün, Hopkins et al., 2005.

51. See, e.g., Fernández-Carriba, Loeches, Morcillo et al., 2002a; Ventolini, Ferrero, Sponza et al., 2005.

52. Rogers, 2000; Vallortigara, 1992.

53. Dharmaretnam & Andrew, 1994.

54. Hoffman, Robakiewicz, Tuttle et al., 2006.

55. Ventolini, Ferrero, Sponza et al., 2005.

56. Denenberg, Garbanati, Sherman et al., 1978.

57. Andrew & Rogers, 2002.

58. Johnsgard, 1981.

59. Corballis, 2003. See also R.H. Bauer, 1993; Nottebohm, 1977; Ehret, 1987; Fitch, Brown, O'Connor et al., 1993; Holman & Hutchison, 1994; and Hook-Costigan & Rogers, 1998, all cited by Corballis.

60. Hunt, 2000; Hunt, Corballis & Gray, 2001; Hunt & Gray, 2004; Rutledge & Hunt, 2004.

61. Rogers, 2000.

62. Kahn & Bingman, 2004.

63. Rogers, 2002.

64. Yamazaki, Aust, Huber et al., 2007; Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003; Lux, Marshall, Ritzl et al., 2004. Also see: Halpern, Güntürkün, Hopkins et al., 2005.

CHAPTER 2: WHAT DO THE TWO HEMISPHERES ‘DO'?

1. As if to make the point, a recent article on the lateralisation of memory explicitly states, having reviewed the literature, that what makes the difference is the hemisphere, not the site within it: ‘lesion site within the hemisphere does not seem to explain much of the laterality findings, if any at all’ (Braun, Delisle, Guimond et al., 2009, p. 127). However such a strong claim is unusual, and in most cases the point is clearly relative, not absolute.

2. This was first noted in the mid-nineteenth century (Thurman, 1866). Since then, the finding has been repeatedly confirmed, by amongst others, Crichton-Browne, 1880; Bonin, 1962; Hadziselimovic & Cus, 1966; Galaburda, LeMay, Kemper et al., 1978; Weis, Haug, Holoubek et al., 1989; LeMay, 1982; Schwartz, Creasey, Grady et al., 1985; Kertesz, Polk, Black et al., 1992; Zilles, Dabringhaus, Geyer et al., 1996; and H. Damasio, 2005, p. 82.

3. Kolb, Sutherland, Nonneman et al., 1982; Diamond, Johnson & Ingham, 1975.

4. At least in both Caucasians and East Asians: Wang, He, Tong et al., 1999.

5. Giedd, Snell, Lange et al., 1996.

6. Chi, Dooling & Gilles, 1977b; Witelson & Pallie, 1973.

7. Galaburda, 1995.

8. Galaburda, Aboitiz, Rosen et al., 1986.

9. Hayes & Lewis, 1993.

10. Scheibel, Paul, Fried et al., 1985.

11. Seldon, 1982.

12. Allen, Damasio, Grabowski et al., 2003; Gur, Turetsky, Matsui et al., 1999; Gur, Packer, Hungerbühler et al., 1980; Galaburda, 1995. While the findings of Pujol and colleagues are at variance (Pujol, López-Sala, Deus et al., 2002), it should be pointed out that in that paper they make a number of findings that are not in keeping with the research consensus.

13. Lewis & Diamond, 1995.

14. Glick, Carlson, Drew et al., 1987.

15. Glick, Ross & Hough, 1982; Tucker & Williamson, 1984; Wagner, Burns, Dannals et al., 1983. Alteration of the prenatal environment can result in changes in the hemisphere asymmetry of neuroendocrine control: see, e.g., Fride & Weinstock, 1988.

16. For an overview see Davidson & Hugdahl, 1995, and their subsequent volume, Davidson & Hugdahl, 2003.

17. I use the words ‘do’ and ‘function’ for the moment because they are part of the language commonly used in talking about the brain. I place them in inverted commas because I believe they are misleading, since they already presuppose a model, and therefore prejudge the nature of the brain they are trying to help us understand.

18. This is better than looking at brains which have abnormal structure from birth, because such brains will have had the opportunity to reorganise themselves during the first decade of life, the period of maximum plasticity, with the result that their organisation will be atypical and can give us only limited information about the brain in general. With time, it is true, there may be adaptations even in the adult brain following an insult, but they are necessarily far more limited. But brain lesions do have consequences for the non-lesioned areas. The brain is a dynamic system: particularly at the time the lesion is occurring, inferences are unreliable. This caveat applies to neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taylor's fascinating account of her own left-hemisphere stroke (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html, accessed 28 April 2009).

19. See, e.g., Devinsky & D'Esposito, 2004.

20. ‘Trying to surmise the brain activation pattern of a cognitive task based on functional neuroimaging data may be like Noah trying to surmise the landscape of Mesopotamia after the Great Flood by staring at the peak of Mount Ararat protruding above the water’ (Goldberg, 2001, p. 55).

21. Cacioppo, Berntson, Lorig et al., 2003. Areas that show activity may be doing so in response to activity somewhere else in the brain which is not showing up, but is the primary link with the activity in which we are interested. Metabolic activity may be great in one part of the system, e.g. in the basal ganglia, because this is a regulatory constituent of a system whose other parts (neocortex) are where the activity we are interested in measuring is really going on. One proponent of positron emission tomography (PET), a type of functional metabolic imaging, writes of the pitfalls: ‘The assumption is that areas with increased or decreased metabolic activity are in some ways dysfunctional (areas with normal metabolic rates might also be dysfunctional) … It is known that changes in experimental conditions … can lead to large changes in the patterns of regional metabolic activity. (With this in mind I must note that special and unusual conditions are unavoidable concomitants of all PET studies) … These uncertainties can be illustrated by analogy with the fuel consumption and electrical activity in an automobile. In a car a variety of functional changes can result in similar levels of fuel consumption. A total lack of fuel use is consistent with mechanical failure, but could also result from a sick or vacationing driver who never starts the car. Increased fuel consumption could be found in a high-performance sports car, a poorly tuned old clunker, or an ordinary car moving at normal speed with an emergency brake on. A change in electrical patterns could be due to the use of windshield wipers or defrosters, the activation by loss of oil of an indicator light, or use of the audio system’ (Wexler, 1988, pp. 68-71).

22. Parks, Loewenstein, Dodrill et al., 1988; Haier, Siegel, Nuechterlein et al., 1988; Carly, Golding & Hall, 1995.

23. Yoshii, Barker, Chang et al., 1988; Hatazawa, Brooks, di Chiro et al., 1987; Haier, Chueh, Touchette et al., 1995.

24. McDaniel, 2005.

25. Seidenwurm & Devinsky, 2006.

26. ibid.

27. Cacioppo, Berntson, Lorig et al., 2003.

28. Stanislas Dehaene, leading neuroimaging researcher and Professor of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, quoted in Holt, 2008, pp. 44-5.

29. Griffin, Friedman, Ween et al., 2006.

30. As one prominent neurologist puts it, ‘the same alterations of behaviour can emerge from lesions at different sites in the brain and … lesions at apparently the same sites in different individuals may lead to different behavioural manifestations’ (Trimble, 2007, p. 62).

31. van Zomeren & Brouwer, 1994.

32. The first is from the service of Compline (taken from 1 Peter 5:8): ‘Brethren, be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist, steadfast in the faith'; the second from Nietzsche's poem of the same title (lit. ‘Man, beware!’), memorably set to music by Mahler in his Third Symphony.

33. For evidence relating to right hemisphere lesions in general, see Jerison, 1977; Dimond, 1979a; and Rueckert & Grafman, 1996. For right frontal lesions, see, e.g., Wilkins, Shallice & McCarthy, 1987.

34. Korda & Douglas, 1997.

35. de Renzi & Faglioni, 1965; Benson & Barton, 1970; Howes & Boller, 1975; Nakamura & Taniguchi, 1977; Tartaglione, Bino, Manzino et al., 1986; Sturm & Büssing, 1986. Almost all studies have suggested that patients with right hemisphere lesions are slower than those with left hemisphere injury, although in one study slowing has been associated with lesions of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Godefroy, Lhullier & Rousseaux, 1996). For the association of perceptuomotor slowing with lapses of attention, see Rousseaux, Fimm & Cantagallo, 2002.

36. Studies in healthy subjects include: Heilman & van den Abell, 1979; Sturm, Reul & Willmes, 1989; and R. Whitehead, 1991. For evidence from split-brain patients, see, e.g., Dimond, 1979b.

37. Lewin, Friedman, Wu et al., 1996; Pardo, Fox & Raichle, 1991; Sturm, de Simone, Krause et al., 1999. Patients with Alzheimer's disease exhibiting right parietal hypometabolism have problems of vigilance: see Parasuraman, Greenwood, Haxby et al., 1992.

38. Benton & Joynt, 1959; Dee & van Allen, 1973; Sturm & Büssing, 1986.

39. Salmaso & Denes, 1982.

40. For evidence of left caudate involvement, see Godefroy & Rousseaux, 1996 and Godefroy, Lhullier & Rousseaux, 1996; for evidence of left anterior cingulate involvement, see Rousseaux, Godefroy, Cabaret et al., 1996.

41. Bisiach, Mini, Sterzi et al., 1982; Jansen, Sturm & Willmes, 1992.

42. Corbetta, Miezin, Dobmeyer et al., 1991.

43. Godefroy & Rousseaux, 1996; Godefroy, Lhullier & Rousseaux, 1996; d'Esposito, Detre, Alsop et al., 1995.

44. Vohn, Fimm, Weber et al., 2007; Nestor, Parasuraman, Haxby et al., 1991; Corbetta, Miezin, Dobmeyer et al., 1991.

45. Bultitude & Aimola Davies, 2006.

46. Çiçek, Gitelman, Hurley et al., 2007.

47. ‘Several studies have suggested that consequences of lesions of the right and left cerebral hemispheres are not equivalent - some of the attention components such as tonic arousal or vigilance being more specifically impaired by right-hemispheric (and most often anterior) lesions; others such as focussed or divided attention (non-spatial) being more severely altered following left injuries’ (Rousseaux, Fimm & Cantagallo, 2002, pp. 289-90); and see Sturm, Fimm, Cantagallo et al., 2002, p. 370. Both Jerison and Dimond have suggested that the two hemispheres have different types of attention systems, along similar lines (Jerison, 1977; Dimond, 1979a). Posner suggests that the system subserving sustained attention is closely linked to the spatial attention system in the posterior part of the right hemisphere, and sees this as going some way to explain right hemisphere dominance in sustained attention (Posner, 1995; Posner & Petersen, 1990).

48. Ivry & Robertson, 1998; Kitterle, Christman & Hellige, 1990; Kitterle & Selig, 1991; Sergent, 1982; Robertson, Lamb & Knight, 1988; Robertson & Lamb, 1991; van Kleeck, 1989.

49. Mesulam, 2000; Deouell, Ivry & Knight, 2003.

50. Delis, Robertson & Efron, 1986; Delis, Kiefner & Fridlund, 1988; Siéroff, 1990, 1994; Halligan & Marshall, 1994.

51. Leclercq, 2002, p. 16.

52. See Schutz, 2005 for an overview; also Posner & Raichle, 1994.

53. Edelman & Tononi, 2000; Goldberg, 2001; Mesulam, 2000.

54. Tang, 2003.

55. Goldberg & Costa, 1981; Goldberg, Podell & Lovell, 1994; Rogers, 2000; Regard & Landis, 1988; Feinstein, Goldin, Stein et al., 2002; Goldberg, 1990, 2001; Treyer, Buck & Schnider, 2003; Kimura, 1963; Gordon & Carmon, 1976; Cotton, Tzeng & Hardyck, 1980; Persinger & Lalonde, 2000; Martin, Wiggs & Weisberg, 1997; Henson, Shallice & Dolan, 2000; Gold, Berman, Randolph et al., 1996; Shadmehr & Holcomb, 1997; Haier, Siegel, MacLachlan et al., 1992; Berns, Cohen & Mintun, 1997; Raichle, Fiez, Videen et al., 1994; Tulving, Markowitsch, Craik et al., 1996; Cutting, 1997, p. 67.

56. Gardner, 1974; Sperry, 1985.

57. Mills, Coffey-Corina & Neville, 1993; Thal, Marchman, Stiles et al., 1991.

58. Goldberg, 2001.

59. Bever & Chiarello, 1974.

60. Podell, Lovell, Zimmerman et al., 1995; Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992.

61. Brownell, Potter, Bihrle et al., 1986; Molloy, Brownell & Gardner, 1990.

62. Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995.

63. Federmeier & Kutas, 1999.

64. Larose, Richard-Yris, Hausberger et al., 2006.

65. Coulson, 2001; Rausch, 1977; Cacioppo, Petty & Quintanar, 1982. Neuroimaging tends to show the same right frontal role in set-shifting: see, e.g., Aron, Fletcher, Bullmore et al., 2003; Nagahama, Okada, Katsumi et al., 2001; Rubia, Smith, Brammer et al., 2003.

66. Heilman, 2005, p. 151; Razani, Boone, Miller et al., 2001; Jones-Gotman & Milner, 1977; Ruff, Allen, Farrow et al., 1994.

67. Vanderhasselt, De Raedt, Baeken et al., 2006.

68. Konishi, Nakajima, Uchida et al., 1999.

69. Richards & Chiarello, 1997.

70. Brownell, Simpson, Bihrle et al., 1990; Tucker & Williamson, 1984.

71. Ramachandran, 1994.

72. Yochim, Kender, Abeare et al., 2005, p. 132. See also Chiarello, 1988; Beeman, Friedman, Grafman et al., 1994; Coney & Evans, 2000.

73. Chiarello, 1991, 1998; Chiarello, Burgess, Richards et al., 1990.

74. Burgess & Lund, 1998.

75. Seger, Desmond, Glover et al., 2000; Yamaguchi, Yamagata & Kobayashi, 2000.

76. Posner, 1995; Diggs & Basili, 1987.

77. Jung-Beeman, Bowden, Haberman et al., 2004.

78. Mashal, Faust, Hendler et al., 2007.

79. Chiarello, Senehi & Nuding, 1987; Nakagawa, 1991.

80. Beeman, Friedman, Grafman et al., 1994.

81. Mednick, 1962.

82. Contreras & Llinas, 2001.

83. Heilman, 2005, pp. 117-18; E. A. Easterbrook, 1959; Eysenck, 1995.

84. Alajouanine, 1948, p. 235.

85. Harnad, 1972. One of the problems in measuring creativity is that creative individuals may have abnormal lateralisation, so that what we are measuring in terms of right and left hemisphere function may not correspond with the normal situation. There is a ‘strong’ association between better left ear (right hemisphere) localisation and creativity (Weinstein & Graves, 2002); and there is further evidence of the association between schizotypy, the right hemisphere and creativity (Poreh, Whitman & Ross, 1993-94; Zanes, Ross, Hatfield et al., 1998). But schizotypy is mainly notable for abnormal lateralisation and over-reliance on the left hemisphere (Platek & Gallup, 2002; Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000; Nunn & Peters, 2001). This is an area complicated, not least, by widely differing meaning of terms. But it has to be said that virtually all the qualities listed by Walter Cannon as the hallmarks of the creative mind are features of right hemisphere function (Cannon, 1965: and see Heilman, 2005, pp. 174-5).

86. Bowden & Beeman, 1998.

87. Bremer 1958; Bogen & Bogen, 1988; Bogen & Bogen, 1999.

88. Scheibel, Paul, Fried et al., 1985; Gur, Packer, Hungerbühler et al., 1980.

89. Gur, Packer, Hungerbühler et al., 1980.

90. Tucker, Roth & Bair, 1986. Its enormous power to integrate information over wide areas is due not only to more and longer-ranging white matter connections, but, at least according to Schutz, to a larger posterior association cortex (whose function is to integrate different kinds of experience), denser association fibres (whose function is to form connections between areas), greater interconnection of temporal lobe neuronal columns and larger integrative structures in the parietal lobe and the area round the Sylvian fissure, than the left hemisphere (see Schutz, 2005: I have not succeeded in verifying all of these findings from the literature).

91. Liotti & Tucker, 1994.

92. Semmes, Weinstein, Ghent et al., 1960; Teuber, Battersby & Bender, 1960; Milner, 1975.

93. Chapanis, 1977; Goldberg & Costa, 1981; Semmes, 1968; Tucker, 1992.

94. Semmes, 1968, pp. 23-4.

95. Levy-Agresti & Sperry, 1968, p. 1151.

96. Tucker & Williamson, 1984.

97. Kirsner, 1980.

98. Kirsner & Brown, 1981; Kirsner, 1980; Marsolek, Schacter & Nicholas, 1996; Marsolek, Squire, Kosslyn et al., 1994; Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995.

99. Navon, 1977; Nebes, 1978; Christman, 1997; Beeman, Bowden & Gernsbacher, 2000; Broadbent, 1977; Hellige, 1995; Young & Ratliff, 1983; E. Zaidel, 1985.

100. Mangun, Luck, Plager et al., 1994.

101. Navon, 1977.

102. For schizotypy, see Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000. For schizophrenia, see Bemporad, 1967; Place & Gilmore, 1980; Reich & Cutting, 1982.

103. Kinchla, Solis-Macias & Hoffman, 1983.

104. Leclercq, 2002, p. 16.

105. Delis, Robertson & Efron, 1986; Fink, Halligan, Marshall et al., 1996; van Kleeck, 1989.

106. Gitelman, Alpert, Kosslyn et al., 1996; Desmedt, 1977; Goebel, Linden, Sireteanu et al., 1997.

107. Fimm, Willmes & Spijkers, 2006; Heber, Valvoda & Kuhlen, 2008.

108. LaBerge, 1983; Humphreys, Riddoch & Quinlan, 1985.

109. There is a vast literature on this phenomenon, but see, e.g., Ratcliff, 1982.

110. Berlucchi, Mangun & Gazzaniga, 1997.

111. It has been suggested by Siéroff (1994, p. 145) that it is the preference for local rather than global processing by the left hemisphere that underlies the phenomenon of left hemispatial neglect in right hemisphere lesions (see Leclercq, 2002, pp. 16-17).

112. Oliveri, Rossini, Traversa et al., 1999.

113. Ellis, Jordan & Sullivan, 2006.

114. Rastelli, Funes, Lupiáñez et al., 2008; Siéroff, Decaix, Chokron et al., 2007.

115. de Renzi, Gentilini, Faglioni et al., 1989; Kinsbourne, 1993b.

116. Marshall & Halligan, 1989. For a contrary view, see Bartolomeo & Chokron, 1999.

117. Loetscher & Brugger, 2007.

118. Bartolomeo, Chokron & Siéroff, 1999.

119. de Renzi, 1988.

120. Vallortigara, 2000; Tommasi & Vallortigara, 2001; Vallortigara, Regolin, Bortolomiol et al., 1996.

121. Güntürkün & Böhringer, 1987; Güntürkün, Hellmann, Melsbach et al., 1998. See also Hellige, 1993, p. 175: ‘The notion of two hemispheres that are in a mutually inhibitory relationship to each other is also consistent with the hypothesis that in rats and chicks the less emotional left hemisphere normally inhibits the more emotional right hemisphere.’

122. See, for example, Yoshida, Yoshino, Takahashi et al., 2007; Evert & Kmen, 2003; Fink, Marshall, Halligan et al., 1999a; van Kleeck, 1989. For findings in brain-damaged patients, see: Ferman, Primeau, Delis et al., 1999; Schatz, Ballantyne & Trauner, 2000. For neuroimaging, see: Heinze, Hinrichs, Scholz et al., 1998; Iidaka, Yamashita, Kashikura et al., 2004; Lux, Marshall, Ritzl et al., 2004. This area, like many others in neuropsychology, is made more complicated by the fact that key terms are used in different ways by different researchers. A case in point is a recent paper which, contrary to a vast body of research pointing to the opposite conclusion, claims to demonstrate that there is a dominance for global attention in the left hemisphere. However, the experimental conditions do not include any stimulus that forms a whole that is in any way distinguishable from a meaningless assemblage of parts; attention is specifically directed to the local level by the nature of the task; and the stimuli are all simple, stereotypic geometric shapes, of the kind that are automatically preferred by the left hemisphere (Wang, Zhou, Zhuo et al., 2007).

123. See, e.g., Bradshaw & Nettleton, 1981, 1983; Stillings, Feinstein, Garfield et al., 1987; Anderson, 1990; TenHouten, 1991. The idea is taken further by John Cutting (1997 passim, especially pp. 157-63) who provides an illuminating analysis of delusions and abnormal experiences in organic syndromes.

124. E. Zaidel, 1985; Walsh & Darby, 1999.

125. Nebes 1971a, 1971b, 1972, 1973, 1974; Milner & Taylor, 1972; Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978.

126. ‘… d'autres éprouvent de considérables difficultés à assembler correctement les divers éléments, donnant au cours de leurs nombreux essais des positions extraordinaires aux membres (bras attachés au cou ou à la partie inférieure du tronc …) … Dans le dessin sur ordre d'un éléphant, ne dessine qu'une queue, une trompe et une oreille … le puzzle (modèle éléphant) aboutit à un échec total et est exécuté avec lenteur. Bien qu'il reconnaisse les éléments essentiels (verbalisation à mesure), il est incapable de les disposer à leur place même approximative et les uns par rapport aux autres’ (trans. I. McG.) Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, pp. 237, 229 & 231 respectively.

127. McFie, Piercy & Zangwill, 1950; Ettlinger, Warrington & Zangwill, 1957; McFie & Zangwill, 1960; Warrington, James & Kinsbourne, 1966.

128. Nikolaenko, 2001; see also Nikolaenko, 2004.

129. Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, p. 224.

130. Benowitz, Moya & Levine, 1990.

131. See, e.g., Kinsbourne, 1982; Kinsbourne, 1988, p. 145; Federmeier & Kutas, 1999.

132. Alexander, Benson & Stuss, 1989.

133. Blakeslee, 1980; Deglin, 1976.

134. Heilman, Scholes & Watson, 1975.

135. See, e.g., Foldi, 1987; Bottini, Corcoran, Sterzi et al., 1994. There is some confusion over what is meant by metaphor. Obviously there is metaphoric content to almost everything we say - language is essentially metaphoric in nature, at the simplest level. If the chosen ‘metaphor’ for an experiment designed to distinguish between the hemispheres is so bland, obvious or banal that it requires no imagination, presents no novel thought, and does not bring together disparate meanings, little is likely to be discovered. We know that unfamiliar phrases activate the right hemisphere, while familiar ones activate the left hemisphere (Bottini, Corcoran, Sterzi et al., 1994; Eviatar & Just, 2006; Mashal, Faust & Hendler, 2005; Mashal, Faust, Hendler et al., 2007). So when it comes to metaphor, it is in keeping with this that poetic phrases, such as ‘rain clouds are pregnant ghosts’, are understood by the right hemisphere, while clichés, such as ‘babies are angels’, are processed by the left hemisphere (Schmidt, DeBuse & Seger, 2007). Specifically, it is not just the novelty inherent in metaphor, but the combination of novelty with the bringing together of disparate ideas that involves the right hemisphere (Mashal & Faust, 2008). Although two recent studies, bravely aiming to repudiate a consensus built on thirty years of research, have purported to demonstrate that it is the left hemisphere that is principally involved in the appreciation of metaphor, they have only demonstrated what we already know, that the left hemisphere has a predilection for cliché. As long as a phrase is comfortably familiar, the phrase will activate the left hemisphere only. The metaphors used in one of these studies (Rapp, Leube, Erb et al., 2004) were ‘very simple statements’, such as ‘the alarm clock is a torturer’. Reference to ‘torture’ is a used, and overused, way of expressing displeasure - ‘it was torture having to drag myself out of bed this morning’. This phrase is not essentially different from ‘babies are angels’. Bottini and colleagues, who found a right hemisphere pre-eminence, used phrases that still required the bringing together of two distinct ideas, e.g. ‘the policeman who didn't give straight answers was jumping ditches’. Rapp and colleagues justified using such simple phrases by referring to the fact that the right hemisphere is known to be involved in understanding more complex sentences. Maybe, but there is nothing whatever complex about the sentences, as sentences, in the Bottini examples - the only thing that is ‘complex’ about them is that they require seeing the connection between two disparate ideas. That is the essence of metaphor, and it turns out to be beyond the capacity of the left hemisphere. The other study (Stringaris, Medford, Giampietro et al., 2007) was similarly unlikely to test true metaphorical understanding: indeed the paradigm ‘metaphor’ they report using - ‘some surgeons are butchers’ - is hardly a metaphor at all; probably, if anything, less so than ‘babies are angels’. But when the metaphor is of the kind encountered in poetry, rather than cliché, it is clearly the right hemisphere that is involved (Faust & Mashal, 2007).

136. Foldi, Cicone & Gardner, 1983; Kaplan, Brownell, Jacobs et al., 1990.

137. Deglin & Kinsbourne, 1996.

138. See Cutting, 1997, pp. 185; Kosslyn, 1987; Goldberg, 1990; Hécaen & Albert, 1978.

139. ‘… comme poussé par une force bizarre à placer sur le modèle que nous lui proposions les pièces de bois, et non à côté … un trouble de la faculté de réaliser une copie abstraite à partir d'un modèle concret’ (trans. I. McG.): Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, p. 224.

140. Jackson, 1915, p. 97; in Jackson, 1932, vol. 2, pp. 140-41.

141. Marsolek, 1995.

142. Warrington & Taylor, 1973; Deglin, 1976.

143. Shibahara & Lucero-Wagoner, 2002. For reviews of right hemisphere language, see Beeman & Chiarello, 1998; Joanette, Goulet & Hannequin, 1990.

144. Querné, Eustache & Faure, 2000; Hutner & Liederman, 1991; Querné & Faure, 1996; Landis & Regard, 1998.

145. Gloning, Gloning & Hoff, 1968; Goldberg, 1990.

146. Pobric, Mashal, Faust et al., 2008; Sotillo, Carretié, Hinojosa et al., 2005.

147. Mashal, Faust, Hendler et al., 2008. See the philosopher Jean Paul (Richter) quoted on p. 117: ‘metaphor … was the first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour could it become a literal sign’.

148. Marsolek, 1995.

149. See Brown & Kosslyn, 1993; Kosslyn, 1987; Grossman, 1988; also Cutting, 1997, pp. 64 & 185-6 for further discussion; and pp. 154-9, where Cutting gives examples from the analysis of delusions and anomalous experiences of organic patients.

150. For this whole area, see Cutting, 1997, esp. pp. 154-60 & 188. Also Warrington & McCarthy, 1987; Gardner, 1974; Pallis, 1955; Bornstein, Sroka & Munitz, 1969; Bornstein & Kidron, 1959; Landis, Cummings, Benson et al., 1986.

151. Bourgeois, Christman & Horowitz, 1998; Pallis, 1955.

152. Marsolek, Schacter & Nicholas, 1996; Brown & Kosslyn, 1993; Farah, 2003.

153. Blakeslee, 1980; Deglin, 1976; Marsolek, 1995.

154. Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003; Bornstein, 1963; Gloning, Gloning, Hoff et al., 1966; Lhermitte, Chain, Escourolle et al., 1972; see Cutting, 1997, p. 153 for fuller discussion.

155. Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003; Grossman, 1981.

156. Umiltà, Bagnara & Simion, 1978. See also Blakeslee, 1980; Deglin, 1976.

157. Pallis, 1955; Bornstein, Sroka & Munitz, 1969; McCarthy & Warrington, 1990; Sergent, Ohta & MacDonald, 1992; Lhermitte, Chain, Escourolle et al., 1972.

158. Laeng, Chabris & Kosslyn, 2003; Laeng, Shah & Kosslyn, 1999; Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003; Seger, Poldrack, Prabhakaran et al., 2000; Koivisto & Laine, 1999.

159. Burgund & Marsolek, 2000; Marsolek, 1999; Yamazaki, Aust, Huber et al., 2007.

160. Vuilleumier, Henson, Driver et al., 2002. See also Zaidel & Kosta, 2001; Kosslyn, Koenig, Barrett et al., 1989; Laeng, Chabris & Kosslyn, 2003.

161. See, for example, Fernandez & Friedman, 1999.

162. Maudsley, 1867 (cited in Radden, 2000, p. 27).

163. Capgras & Reboul-Lachaux, 1923.

164. Cutting, 2009. See Förstl, Almeida, Owen et al., 1991; Silva, Leong, Wine et al., 1992; Silva, Leong & Wine, 1993; Ellis, 1994.

165. Courbon & Fail, 1927.

166. Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992; Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995.

167. Thompson, Silk & Hover, 1980.

168. Luria, 1973; van Lancker, 1991; Wallace & Canter, 1985.

169. This is how I would interpret the group of experiences that Cutting himself characterises by the phrase ‘self-as-doer’ (Cutting, 1997, p. 158). I believe my interpretation is closer to the phenomenon illustrated here.

170. See Tulving, Kapur, Craik et al., 1994; Cimino, Verfaellie, Bowers et al., 1991; Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992; Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Neufeld et al., 1999; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Haupts et al., 1993; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Fink et al., 1997; Markowitsch, 1995. Although the concept of ‘self memory’ is complex and covers a range of brain activities not confined to one region or one hemisphere alone, true recall of personal experience is consistently more associated with the right hemisphere. ‘The general findings regarding the right prefrontal cortex are impressively consistent. A review by Nyberg et al. (1996) summarizes results of those comparisons in which the PET image corresponding to a semantic reference task was subtracted from an episodic target task. In 25 of the 26 relevant subtractions, the right prefrontal cortex was preferentially involved in the episodic task … The right frontal blood flow, uncovered by PET, is most closely associated with task instructions, more specifically the requirement to think back to some specific, previous personal episode … We interpret the blood flow in the right prefrontal cortex as signifying neural correlates of the intent to become autonoetically aware of a previous experience’ (Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997, pp. 340-41). Objective data about the self, or imagined (fabricated) autobiographical memories are less strongly lateralised to the right hemisphere, though the relative reliance on verbal constructs (left-hemisphere-dependent) versus imagery, entailed in the task, may also exert an influence here (Conway, Pleydell-Pearce, Whitecross et al., 2003). The distinction that matters seems to be whether or not the episode is re-experienced in the process of recall; clearly recall of some autobiographical information can become little more than objective recall of facts (Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997). There is thus a distinction between episodic and autobiographical memory (see Gilboa, 2004 for an overview of this complex area). Imaging, as Gilboa demonstrates (op. cit.), is associated with its own set of problems, but so are all artificial laboratory based tests of memory, where, unlike most naturalistic situations, an effort of deliberate registering is involved, usually of information that has no part to play, as yet, in the sense of the continuing self over time. This may explain the distinction that underlies the HERA (Hemispheric Encoding/Retrieval Asymmetry) model (see Tulving, Kapur, Craik et al., 1994), which posits that encoding of memory causes left frontal, and recall of episodic information causes right frontal, activation: the committal to memory, by a conscious effort of will, of information of little personal relevance in the laboratory setting is a wholly different sort of process from the recognition of something that may now form part of one's recognisable experience.

171. Schiffer, Zaidel, Bogen et al., 1998.

172. Lhermitte, Chedru & Chain, 1973.

173. Gainotti, 2002; also Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider et al., 1996; Perani, Cappa, Bettinardi et al., 1995; Perani, Schnur, Tettamanti et al., 1999; Perani, Cappa, Bettinardi et al., 1995; Mummery, Patterson, Hodges et al., 1998; Damasio, Grabowski, Tranel et al., 1996 (erratum appears in Nature, 1996, 381(6595), p. 810), and comment by Caramazza, 1996.

174. See also Perani, Cappa, Bettinardi et al., 1995; Mummery, Patterson, Hodges et al., 1998; Mummery, Patterson, Hodges et al., 1996.

175. ‘Living things (irrespective of task) increased activation in the right middle frontal and right fusiform gyri. Non-living things (irrespective of task) increased activation in the same left posterior middle temporal area seen for tools and inanimate objects by Martin et al. (1996), Damasio et al. (1996), Mummery et al. (1996) and Mummery et al. (1998)’ (Price & Friston, 2002, p. 437, commenting on the findings of Cappa, Perani, Schnur et al., 1998).

176. Perani, Schnur, Tettamanti et al., 1999, p. 293.

177. See also Gainotti, 2000; Gainotti & Silveri, 1996.

178. ‘ «À la place de la moitié gauche de la poitrine, du ventre et de l'estomac on lui a mis une planche.» Elle descend jusqu'à l'anus, et est divisée en compartiments par des planches transversales … les aliments ne suivent pas le trajet normal de l'estomac et de l'intestin, « ils sont aspirés dans les compartiments de cet échafaudage et ils tombent par le trou sur le bas de l'échafaudage ». Tout cela n'existe que du côté gauche. À droite les organes sont parfaitement en place’ (trans. I. McG.). Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, pp. 73-4, referring to Ehrenwald, 1931.

179. Gainotti, 2002; Perani, Cappa, Bettinardi et al., 1995; Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider et al., 1996; linked by Gainotti (2002, p. 419) to the generation of action words and the observation of actions, concluding that ‘the categories of man-made objects may be chiefly subserved by the fronto-parietal regions of the left hemisphere, because knowledge of these categories is at least in part based on the handling, manual use or, in any case, physical contact and concrete utilization of objects’ (quoting Gainotti, Silveri, Daniele et al., 1995). Gainotti (2002) makes the point that the dorsal system of visual processing of the left hemisphere, being involved in action planning, ‘could have critically contributed (through processes of concrete utilisation and of physical contact) to building the semantic representation of non-living things’ (p. 413), while the ventral system, relying on the interomesial and inferior parts of the temporal lobes, contributes to our sense of living things. ‘These data are consistent with an exclusive involvement of the ventral stream of visual processing in tasks concerning living categories and a greater involvement of the dorsal stream in those concerning man-made objects’ (p. 416). According to Price & Friston, 2002, ‘manipulable relative to natural word generation enhanced activation in the left posterior middle temporal cortex’ (p. 436). See also Mummery, Patterson, Hodges et al., 1996; Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider et al., 1996; Damasio, Grabowski, Tranel et al., 1996. The topic is discussed in Cutting, 1997, pp. 153-4.

180. Hartmann, Goldenberg, Daumüller et al., 2005; Schwartz, Buxbaum, Montgomery et al., 1999.

181. Corballis, 1998, p. 1085.

182. Meyers, 2008. And see pp. 327-8 below.

183. Gainotti, Barbier & Marra, 2003; Giovanello, Alexander & Verfaellie, 2003; Rakison & Poulin-Dubois, 2001; Borgo & Shallice, 2001; Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Mendez & Perryman, 2002.

184. Mendez & Lim, 2004.

185. Cutting, 1997, pp. 186-8; D. W. Zaidel, 1985, 1987; Vitkovitch & Underwood, 1991; Wapner, Judd & Gardner, 1978; Drews, 1987; Foldi, 1987; Wapner, Hamby & Gardner, 1981; Brownell, Potter, Michelow et al., 1984; Gardner, Brownell, Wapner et al., 1983; Joanette, Goulet & Hannequin, 1990.

186. Nicholls & Cooper, 1991.

187. Joseph, 1988b.

188. Laeng, Shah & Kosslyn, 1999; Zaidel & Kasher, 1989.

189. See Cutting's analysis of delusions and anomalous experiences in organic patients (Cutting, 1997, pp. 162-3). I would say that this series also gives evidence of the generally minatory tone of left hemisphere experience, of something happening that is strange, threatening and hard to pin down, which is the essence of paranoia and of the so-called ‘delusional mood’ of schizophrenia. See also Yin, 1970; Warrington & Taylor, 1973; R. Jung, 1974; D. W. Zaidel, 1987; van Kleeck & Kosslyn, 1989. There is a left hemisphere advantage, not just for nonsense images but for attending to nonsense syllables, which increases as depression and schizophrenia are treated. The left hemisphere advantage for real words decreases as depression and schizophrenia are treated (Wexler, 1986).

190. Some such confounders are the right hemisphere advantage for whatever is new, and whatever is visually complex. A good case in point is the study by Vogt & Magnussen (2005). This shows that while all images are, in naïve subjects, better processed in the right hemisphere, this is more strongly the case for realistic images, less strongly for abstract ones, which is in keeping with what one might expect. However, in trained painters, the realistic images were better processed in the left hemisphere (perhaps comparable with the findings of different lateralisation in professional and amateur musicians, see below), while processing of the abstract paintings was lateralised more strongly to the right than in the naïve subjects. This might have to do with the fact that such complex abstract paintings may be seen as a concept - another ‘abstract’ - by naïve viewers, whereas to the more engaged attention of the professional they remain ‘new’, because they never become reduced to a concept (and thus over-familiar) - they are viewed differently on every approach. But the results are also skewed by the fact that the realistic paintings were, unfortunately, in black and white, which tends to favour the left hemisphere (Barnett, 2008), while the abstract ones were in colour, which tends to favour the right hemisphere (Njemanze, Gomez & Horenstein, 1992; Mendola, Rizzo, Cosgrove et al., 1999; Pallis, 1955).

191. Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger et al., 2003; Rankin, Gorno-Tempini, Allison et al., 2006; Spinella, 2002.

192. Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff et al., 2006.

193. Morrison, Lloyd, di Pellegrino et al., 2004; Hutchison, Davis, Lozano et al., 1999.

194. Decety & Chaminade, 2003, p. 591.

195. Ruby & Decety, 2001; Wraga, Souheil, Shephard et al., 2001; Decety, Chaminade, Grezes et al., 2002; Chaminade & Decety, 2002; Ruby & Decety, 2003.

196. Drake & Bingham, 1985; Drake, 1991.

197. Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger et al., 2005; Ohnishi, Moriguchi, Matsuda et al., 2004.

198. Baron-Cohen, Ring, Moriarty et al., 1994; Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg & Cohen, 2000.

199. Legerstee, 1991; Meltzoff, 1995.

200. Perani, Fazio, Borghese et al., 2001.

201. Prinz, 2005a, 2005b, 2002.

202. For evidence from brain-damaged patients that ‘theory of mind’ depends on the right hemisphere, see: Happé, Brownell & Winner, 1999; Siegal, Carrington & Radel, 1996; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger et al., 2005; Molloy, Brownell & Gardner, 1990; Stone, Baron-Cohen, Calder et al., 2003 (right hemisphere damage was the predominant factor); Stone, Baron-Cohen & Knight, 1998; Shammi & Stuss, 1999; Stuss, Gallup & Alexander, 2001 (again right hemisphere lesions were of predominant significance); Griffin, Friedman, Ween et al., 2006; Griffin & Baron-Cohen, 2002; and Winner, Brownell, Happé et al., 1998. For functional imaging evidence that the right hemisphere plays a preponderant role in ‘theory of mind’, see Baron-Cohen, Ring, Moriarty et al., 1994; Brunet, Sarfati, Hardy-Baylé et al., 2000; Shallice, 2001; Blakemore & Decety, 2001; McCabe, Houser, Ryan et al., 2001; and Vogeley, Bussfeld, Newen et al., 2001. The last two also demonstrate the closeness of association between ‘theory of mind’ and the sense of the self. A study by Gallagher and colleagues (2000) suggests both hemispheres contribute, though there is a special role for the right middle frontal gyrus. While most of the above evidence implicates the right frontal region, Saxe and Wexler (2005) demonstrate a role for the right posterior cortex. See also p. 477, n. 380, p. 510, n. 14 & p. 512, n. 76 below; subjects with autism spectrum disorders have problems with ‘theory of mind’ that replicate right hemisphere deficits (Gunter, Ghaziuddin & Ellis, 2002; Ellis & Gunter, 1999).

203. Gallup, 1982; de Waal, 1996, 1998; Povinelli, Nelson & Boysen, 1990, 1992; Povinelli, Parks & Novak, 1991.

204. Gopnik & Meltzoff, 2006; Ritblatt, 2000.

205. Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985.

206. Voeller, 1986. There is a vast literature on this topic. For reviews of cerebral asymmetry and emotion, see, e.g., Davidson, 1984; Silberman & Weingartner, 1986; Tucker, 1981; Davidson, 1988; Borod, 1992. See also Cutting, 1997, pp. 65-6, 186-8 & 438-42; Sperry, Zaidel & Zaidel, 1979; Deglin, 1976.

207. Mychack, Kramer, Boone et al., 2001.

208. Schutz, 2005.

209. Miller, Chang, Mena et al., 1993; Edwards-Lee, Miller, Benson et al., 1997; Perry, Rosen, Kramer et al., 2001.

210. Rizzolatti, Fogassi, Gallese et al., 2001.

211. Wohlschläger & Bekkering, 2002.

212. Corballis, 2002a.

213. Aziz-Zadeh, Koski, Zaidel et al., 2006; Molnar-Szakacs, Iacoboni, Koski et al., 2005.

214. Biermann-Ruben, Kessler, Jonas et al., 2008.

215. Iacoboni, Molnar-Szakacs, Gallese et al., 2005.

216. Dapretto, Davies, Pfeifer et al., 2006.

217. Roberts, Beer, Werner et al., 2004.

218. Barbas, Saha, Rempel-Clower et al., 2003.

219. Joseph, 1982; Tucker, 1981; Tucker, 1992; Bear 1983; Pribram, 1981.

220. Sullivan & Gratton, 2002.

221. Craig, 2002.

222. Heilman, Schwartz & Watson, 1978; Levy, Heller, Banich et al., 1983; Heilman & van den Abell, 1979; Lane, Novelly, Cornell et al., 1988; Wittling & Pflüger, 1990.

223. Kinsbourne & Bemporad, 1984.

224. Borod, 1992; Borod, Bloom, Brickman et al., 2002; Heilman, Scholes & Watson, 1975; Borod, Koff & Caron, 1983; Borod & Caron, 1980; Heilman & Bowers, 1990; Snow, 2000; Alpers, 2008.

225. Suberi & McKeever, 1977; Landis, Assal & Perret, 1979; Ley & Bryden, 1979; Etcoff, 1984a; Borod, Welkowitz, Alpert et al., 1990; Habib, 1986; Strauss & Moscovitch, 1981.

226. Narumoto, Okada, Sadato et al., 2001.

227. Blonder, Bowers & Heilman, 1991.

228. Bryden, 1982; Etcoff, 1986.

229. Blonder, Bowers & Heilman, 1991; Borod, 1993; Breitenstein, Daum & Ackermann, 1998; Ross, Thompson & Yenkosky, 1977.

230. Prodan, Orbelo, Testa et al., 2001; Gazzaniga & Smylie, 1990.

231. Cicero, Borod, Santschi et al., 1999; Borod, Andelman, Obler et al., 1992; Ely, Graves & Potter, 1989; Joanette & Goulet, 1988; Shapiro & Danly, 1985; Tompkins & Mateer, 1985; Sim & Martinez, 2005.

232. The Victorian neurologist Sir William Gowers recounted the case of a patient who could not even utter the word ‘no’ until, in distressed exasperation, one day he blurted out: ‘I can't say “no” ‘. See review by ‘A. M.’ (Adolf Meyer) of Liepmann's ‘Das Krankheitsbild der Apraxie (‘motorischen Asymbolie’) auf Grund eines Falles von einseitiger Apraxie’ (Meyer, 1904b, p. 282).

233. Tucker, Watson & Heilman, 1977; Wechsler, 1973.

234. Nagae & Moscovitch, 2002.

235. Bryden, Ley & Sugarman, 1982; Erhan, Borod, Tenke et al., 1998; Hatta & Ayetani, 1985; Safer & Leventhal, 1977; Stirling, Cavill & Wilkinson, 2000; Strauss & Moscovitch, 1981; Graves, Landis & Goodglass, 1981.

236. Etcoff, 1984b; Bowers, Blonder, Feinberg et al., 1991. The right posterior cortex is particularly involved in facial processing as such (Lezak, 1976).

237. Saxby & Bryden, 1985; de Schonen, Gil de Diaz & Mathivet, 1986; Nelson, 1987. For a fuller discussion, see Schore, 1994.

238. Ross, 1983.

239. Suberi & McKeever, 1977.

240. See Cutting, 1997, p. 153; Sergent, Ohta & MacDonald, 1992; de Renzi & Spinnler, 1966; Warrington & James, 1967; Milner, 1968/2003; Levy, Trevarthen & Sperry, 1972; Bruyer, 1986; Ellis, 1983; Ellis, Jeeves, Newcombe et al., 1986; Landis, Cummings, Christen et al., 1986.

241. Sergent & Villemure, 1989; de Renzi, Perani, Carlesimo et al., 1994; Uttner, Bliem & Danek, 2002.

242. Joubert, Felician, Barbeau et al., 2003; Behrmann, Avidan, Marotta et al., 2005; Nunn, Postma & Pearson, 2001; Levine & Calvanio, 1989; Sergent & Signoret, 1992; Barton, Press, Keenan et al., 2002.

243. Farah, Wilson, Drain et al., 1995; Yin, 1969; de Gelder & Rouw, 2000.

244. Schiltz, Sorger, Caldara et al., 2006.

245. Rossion, Caldara, Seghier et al., 2003.

246. de Renzi, Bonacini & Faglioni, 1989.

247. Burt & Perrett, 1997; Luh, Rueckert & Levy, 1991; Butler, Gilchrist, Burt et al., 2005; Butler & Harvey, 2005; Parente & Tommasi, 2008; Deglin, 1976.

248. Wigan, 1844, pp. 128-9.

249. Bodamer, 1947, p. 18; as translated in Ellis & Florence, 1990, p. 88.

250. Sergent & Villemure, 1989, p. 975.

251. Caldara, Schyns, Mayer et al., 2005; Bukach, Bub, Gauthier et al., 2006.

252. Broad, Mimmack & Kendrick, 2000.

253. Sackeim, Greenberg, Weiman et al., 1982; Lee, Loring, Dahl et al., 1993.

254. Borod, Welkowitz, Alpert et al., 1990; Bloom, Borod, Obler et al., 1990; Heilman, Bowers, Speedie et al., 1984; Heilman, Blonder, Bowers et al., 2000.

255. Kolb & Milner, 1981.

256. Indersmitten & Gur, 2003.

257. Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1998; Harmon-Jones, 2004, 2007.

258. Couppis & Kennedy, 2008.

259. Simmons & Baltaxe, 1975.

260. Ross & Mesulam, 1979; Ross, 1993; Borod, Koff & Buck, 1986; Dopson, Beckwith, Tucker et al., 1984.

261. Sackeim, Greenberg, Weiman et al., 1982; Davidson & Fox, 1989; Lee, Loring, Meador et al., 1990; Luciano, Devinsky & Perrine, 1993.

262. Borod, Haywood & Koff, 1997; Hugdahl, Iversen & Johnsen, 1993; Moreno, Borod, Welkowitz et al., 1990.

263. Borod, Kent, Koff et al., 1988; Borod, Koff, Yecker et al., 1998.

264. KeleThe Master and his Emissary, Diyarbakirli, Tan et al., 1997; Dane, Gümüstekin, Polat et al., 2002; Dane, Ersöz, Gümüstekin et al., 2004.

265. Indersmitten & Gur, 2003.

266. Fernández-Carriba, Loeches, Morcillo et al., 2002b; Hauser, 1993.

267. Vauclair & Donnot, 2005. 80% of right- and left-handed mothers cradle babies with their head to the left. Males have no preference, but when they become fathers, 80% cradle to the left (Sieratzki & Woll, 1996). The preference is specific to babies, as opposed to inanimate objects, and is therefore not simply a matter of convenience: Almerigi, Carbary & Harris, 2002. See also Saling & Tyson, 1981; Dagenbach, Harris & Fitzgerald, 1988; Manning & Denman, 1994; Turnbull & Lucas, 2000. It was suggested by Salk (1973) that the preference related to proximity of the baby's head to the maternal heart, but overall evidence would suggest that it is because of right hemisphere attention (Harris, Almerigi, Carbary et al., 2001). A study of deaf subjects shows that it is not related to auditory prosody (Turnbull, Rhys-Jones & Jackson, 2001).

268. Grüsser, 1983; 99 out of 103 mother and child sculptures dating from the period between 1900 BC and 0 BC showed the leftward cradling bias (Grüsser, Selke & Zynda, 1988).

269. See, e.g., Salk, 1973. Dagenbach and colleagues (Dagenbach, Harris & Fitzgerald, 1988) give an overview of the literature, suggesting that cradling bias is not related to handedness.

270. See, e.g., Manning & Chamberlain, 1991.

271. R. M. Bauer, 1982; Borod, Koff, Lorch et al., 1985; Cicone, Wapner & Gardner, 1980.

272. Stuss & Benson, 1983; Stuss, Gow & Hetherington, 1992.

273. Liotti & Tucker, 1994; Ross, Homan & Buck, 1994.

274. Gazzaniga & Smylie, 1990; Zaidel, Chen & German, 1995.

275. Morris, Ohman & Dolan, 1998.

276. Cutting, 1997, p. 186; Ross, Homan & Buck, 1994.

277. Coney & Bruce, 2004.

278. Grijalva, 1982.

279. Paul, Lautzenhiser, Brown et al., 2006; Richter, Möller, Spitzer et al., 2006; Spalletta, Ripa, Bria et al., 2006; Hoppe & Bogen, 1977.

280. Gainotti, 1972; Gasparrini, Satz, Heilman et al., 1978; de Bonis, Dellatolas & Rondot, 1985; Terzian & Cecotto, 1959; Perria, Rosadini & Rossi, 1961; Gainotti, 1969.

281. Asthana & Mandal, 2001; Robinson & Price, 1982; Schiffer, Zaidel, Bogen et al., 1998.

282. Adolphs, Jansari & Tranel, 2001.

283. Tucker, 1988.

284. Persinger, Richards & Koren, 1994.

285. Silberman & Weingartner, 1986; Killgore, 2002; Babinski, 1922; Denny-Brown, Meyer & Horenstein, 1952; Hécaen, de Ajuriaguerra & Massonet, 1951. Affective facial stimuli are judged more positively by the left hemisphere than the right (Davidson, Mednick, Moss et al., 1987). The association of positive emotion with the left hemisphere is especially true in women (van Strien & van Beek, 2000). And depressed subjects appear to have increased reliance on the right hemisphere (Emerson, Harrison, Everhart et al., 2001: and see pp. 63-4 below).

286. Brosch, Sander & Scherer, 2007.

287. For example, the right hemisphere is biased towards recognition of the female face, which is less likely to be the focus of competition, and more that of social bonding, than the male face (Parente & Tommasi, 2008). This is supported by evidence that while both males and females attend to angry faces with the left hemisphere (Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1998; Harmon-Jones, 2004; d'Alfonso, van Honk, Hermans et al., 2000), females will attend to principally male angry faces when the right hemisphere is suppressed, but female angry faces when the left hemisphere is suppressed (Brüne, Bahramali, Hennessy et al., 2006).

288. Chao & Martin, 1999; Corbetta, Miezin, Dobmeyer et al., 1991. It is hard to see how any deductions about lateralisation could be made from the study of Lueck and colleagues (Lueck, Zeki, Friston et al., 1989), since it was based on three subjects, two of whom were actually left-handed, and the hemisphere differences were very small.

289. Howard, ffytche, Barnes et al., 1998; Kosslyn, Thompson, Costantini-Ferrando et al., 2000.

290. Njemanze, Gomez & Horenstein, 1992; Mendola, Rizzo, Cosgrove et al., 1999; Clapp, Kirk, Hausmann, 2007; Levy & Trevarthen, 1981; Barnett, 2008; Pirot, Pulton & Sutker, 1977; Davidoff 1976; Hannay, 1979; Scotti & Spinnler, 1970; Pennal, 1977; Pallis, 1955.

291. Pettigrew, 2001; Hart, Partridge & Cuthill, 2000. ‘There are hints from many sources that the left hemisphere may innately prefer red over green, just as it may prefer horizontal over vertical. I have already discussed the language-horizontal connection. The connection between the left hemisphere and red is also indirect, but is supported by a remarkable convergence of observations from comparative neurology, which has shown appropriate asymmetries between both the hemispheres and even between the eyes (cone photoreceptor differences between the eyes of birds are consistent with a greater sensitivity to movement and to red on the part of the right eye (Hart, 2000)) and from introspective studies over the millennia in three great religions that have all converged in the same direction on an association between action, heat, red, horizontal, far etc and the right side of the body (i.e. the left cerebral hemisphere, given the decussation between cerebral hemisphere and output) compared with inaction, cold, green, vertical, near etc and the left side/right hemisphere respectively’ (Pettigrew, 2001, p. 94). Pettigrew refers to an engaging Tibetan painting illustrating his point (Parfionovitch, Meyer & Dorje, 1992).

292. Viola, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene iv, lines 111-16.

293. Starkstein & Robinson, 1988, p. 28.

294. Robinson & Benson, 1981; Robinson & Szetela, 1981; Robinson, Kubos, Starr et al., 1984; Lipsey, Robinson, Pearlson et al., 1983; Starkstein & Robinson, 1988.

295. Robinson, Kubos, Starr et al., 1984; Finset, 1988.

296. Evidence of the connection between the right frontal lobe and depression can come from the most surprising sources. There is a fascinating monograph in the British Library (BM X.529/66791) which was privately printed in 1984 by Gordon H. Wright, an anatomist with a family history of schizophrenia, who noted a connection between depression and infection of the left paranasal sinuses. Apparently in 1/80 brains there is a so-called foramen of Powiesnik which allows communication between these sinuses and the uncus (entorhinal cortex), specifically in the area of the amygdala.

297. Deldin, Keller, Gergen et al., 2001; Keller, Nitschke, Bhargava et al., 2000; Banich, Stolar, Heller et al., 1992; Liotti & Tucker, 1992.

298. Nitschke, Heller & Miller, 2000.

299. ‘A review of reported cases reveals that most focal lesions associated with secondary mania involve the diencephalic region and that the majority of lateralized lesions are on the right side’ (Cummings & Mendez, 1984). This has been borne out by many subsequent studies: Robinson, Boston, Starkstein et al., 1988; Cutting, 1990; Kulisevsky, Berthier & Pujol, 1993; Cummings, 1997; Vuilleumier, Ghika-Schmid, Bogousslavsky et al., 1998; Braun, Larocque, Daigneault et al., 1999; Blumberg, Stern, Martinez et al., 2000; Carran, Kohler, O'Connor et al., 2003; Dodson, 2004. In one case a patient was scanned before and after a right hemisphere infarct: ‘comparison of pre- and poststroke SPECT scans demonstrated a unique pattern of left orbitofrontal hyperperfusion, with extensive right frontal hypoperfusion only after the stroke, during the manic episode’ (Mimura, Nakagome, Hirashima et al., 2005, p. 263). Not all researchers are in agreement, however: see, e.g., Bearden, Hoffman & Cannon, 2001; Caligiuri, Brown, Meloy et al., 2004. A patient scanned during an episode of mania induced by deep brain stimulation showed clear activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior temporal cortex, as well as of the left anterior cingulate cortex, and deactivation of the left insula (Ulla, Thobois, Lemaire et al., 2006); and similar findings have been made in similar experimental conditions, with activations in the left thalamus, but also in the right middle and inferior temporal gyrus, right inferior parietal gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus, and deactivation in the left posterior middle temporal and occipital gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, bilateral cuneus and right medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate gyrus (Mallet, Schüpbach, N'Diaye et al., 2007). See also Chapter 6, n. 60.

300. Robinson, 1979.

301. See, e.g., Finset, 1988; Starkstein & Robinson, 1989; Lauterbach, Jackson, Wilson et al., 1997; Robinson, Starr, Lipsey et al., 1985.

302. Henriques & Davidson, 1991; Bench, Friston, Brown et al., 1992; Greenwald, Kramer-Ginsberg, Krishnan et al., 1998; Lee, Loring, Meador et al., 1988.

303. Davidson, 1992; Davidson, 1993; Heller, 1990; Schwartz, Davidson & Maer, 1975.

304. Schaffer, Davidson & Saron, 1983; Jacobs & Snyder, 1996.

305. Debener, Beauducel, Nessler et al., 2000.

306. Davidson, 1988, pp. 17-18.

307. See Kinsbourne, 1988.

308. Navarro, Gastó, Lomeña et al., 2004.

309. Iosifescu, Renshaw, Lyoo et al., 2006.

310. Kinsbourne & Bemporad, 1984; Finset, 1988.

311. Heller, Nitschke, Etienne et al., 1997; Nitschke, Heller, Palmieri et al., 1999.

312. Panksepp, 1998, p. 310; where he cites George, Ketter, Kimbrell et al., 1996. A further reason for caution is that different intensities of experience might have opposite brain correlates: thus, while ‘mild to moderate negative experiences (such as an experimentally induced negative affect or even a more clinical anxious state) might result in right hemisphere processing activation (and an attentional bias to the left ear) … an intense experience (such as … pure major depression) might interfere with right hemisphere processing, with eventual damage if some critical point is reached’: Gadea, Gomez, Gonzalez-Bono et al., 2005, p. 136. See also Rotenberg, 2004, for an interesting thesis on the relationship between overactivity and hypofunction of the right hemisphere.

313. See Poincaré: ‘… [creative] mathematical work is not simply mechanical … it could not be done by a machine, however perfect. It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones or rather to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules which must guide this choice are extremely fine and delicate. It is almost impossible to state them precisely; they are felt rather than formulated … the subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self?’ (Poincaré, 1908 (trans. F. Maitland), quoted in Ghiselin, 1992, p. 28).

314. Parsons & Osherson, 2001.

315. Bowden & Jung-Beeman, 2003; Kounios, Fleck, Green et al., 2008; Sandkühler & Bhattacharya, 2008.

316. Lane & Schooler, 2004; Dodson, Johnson & Schooler, 1997; Wilson & Schooler, 1991; Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990.

317. Ashcraft, Yamashita & Aram, 1992.

318. Jackson & Warrington, 1986.

319. Aram & Ekelman, 1988.

320. Langdon & Warrington, 1997.

321. Dehaene, Piazza, Pinel et al., 2003.

322. Cohen, Dehaene, Chochon et al., 2000; Dehaene & Cohen, 1997.

323. Pesenti, Zago, Crivello et al., 2001.

324. Knauff, Fangmeier, Ruff et al., 2003.

325. See Cavanna & Trimble, 2006 for an excellent review of the functions of the precuneus.

326. Parsons & Osherson, 2001; Houde, Zago, Crivello et al., 2001. However it should be pointed out that this evidence is from scanning data only.

327. Dehaene, 1997; Funnell, Colvin & Gazzaniga, 2007.

328. Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001.

329. Joseph, 1988b; Boll, 1974.

330. Schilder, 1999.

331. See p. 405 below.

332. See Cutting, 1997, pp. 277-83, for a full discussion of the distinction between the left hemisphere's ‘body’ and the right hemisphere's ‘body’.

333. Marcel, 1949.

334. This observation is attributed to Aristarchus, and is cited in Apollodorus, Lexicon Homericum, §254.

335. Cutting, 1990, p. 190.

336. Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, pp. 72-3. Compare Roth, 1949, describing a patient who complained bitterly that there was another man's arm in bed with him; another patient kept searching for her hand - ‘it feels as if someone has stolen it’ (p. 91: note that the arm is ‘stolen’, not just ‘missing’).

337. Bisiach, Rusconi & Vallar, 1991.

338. Feinberg, Haber & Leeds, 1990; Feinberg, 2000; Breen, Caine & Coltheart, 2001.

339. See p. 89 below.

340. Meador, Loring, Feinberg et al., 2000.

341. ‘Il semblait que toute la moitié gauche de son corps eût disparu de sa conscience et de sa vie psychique … ce malade déclare qu'une main étrangère vient se poser de temps en temps sur sa poitrine, ce qui le gêne et l'agace: « cette main, dit-il, m'appuie sur le ventre et m'étouffe ». « Cette main m'agace, dit-il encore, elle n'est pas à moi et j'ai peur qu'elle ne me donne un coup de poing.»’ (trans. I. McG.): Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, p. 72.

342. Nightingale, 1982.

343. Goble, Lewis & Brown, 2006.

344. Yokoyama, Jennings, Ackles et al., 1987; McFarland & Kennison, 1989; Spence, Shapiro & Zaidel, 1996; Angrilli, Mauri, Palomba et al., 1996; Yoon, Morillo, Cechetto et al., 1997; Wittling & Pflüger, 1990; Wittling, 1995; Meadows & Kaplan, 1994; Heilman, Schwartz & Watson, 1978.

345. Spence, Shapiro & Zaidel, 1996.

346. Sieratzki & Woll, 2005.

347. Coslett & Heilman, 1986; see commentary in Kimura, Murata, Shimoda et al., 2001.

348. In relation to sex, see Braun, Daigneault, Gaudelet et al., 2008. In relation to food, see Regard & Landis, 1997. The evidence appears to be that right hemisphere lesions cause a grossly excessive increase in a variety of activities, whereas a left hemisphere lesion causes either no significant change, or a mild decrease in the activity: Braun, 2007.

349. Wittling, Block, Schweiger et al., 1998; Wittling, Block, Genzel et al., 1998; Dütsch, Burger, Dörfler et al., 2007; Previc, 1996. Wada testing of epileptic subjects confirms this pattern (Yoon, Morillo, Cechetto et al., 1997; Zamrini, Meador, Loring et al., 1990). A paper by van Honk and colleagues found that the left hemisphere governs sympathetic drive, but unfortunately the experiment involved only exposure to angry faces, and the one emotion that is definitely left-hemisphere-mediated is that of anger (van Honk, Hermans, d'Alfonso et al., 2002). Braun reviews the human and animal literature and agrees that this effect does occur, but suggests that the preponderant effect, which evolves some time later, and which he accepts might represent a later compensatory effect, is in the opposite direction (Braun, 2007).

350. Wittling, Block, Schweiger et al., 1998.

351. Hugdahl, Law, Kyllingsbaek et al., 2000.

352. Bellugi, Poizner & Klima, 1983.

353. Bellugi, Poizner & Klima, 1989.

354. Yamadori, Mori, Tabuchi et al., 1986; Frey & Hambert, 1972; Arseni & D?an?ail?a, 1977; Braun, Dumont, Duval et al., 2004.

355. The right hemisphere processes language, though less efficiently than the left: see, e.g., Ellis, Young & Anderson, 1988; and Skarratt & Lavidor, 2006.

356. Cutting, 1997, p. 67; Chernigovskaya & Deglin, 1986; Drews, 1987.

357. Diggs & Basili, 1987.

358. Nichelli, Grafman, Pietrini et al., 1995.

359. Coulson & Wu, 2005.

360. Haggard & Parkinson, 1971; Carmon & Nachshon, 1973; Wymer, Lindman & Booksh, 2002; Blakeslee, 1980; and see Cutting, 1997, pp. 184-7.

361. Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer & Aharon-Peretz, 2005.

362. Kaplan, Brownell, Jacobs et al., 1990.

363. Winner & Gardner, 1977; Anaki, Faust & Kravetz, 1998a, 1998b; Brownell, Simpson, Bihrle et al., 1990.

364. Shammi & Stuss, 1999; Gardner, Ling, Flamm et al., 1975; Wapner, Hamby & Gardner, 1981; Brownell, Michel, Powelson et al., 1983; Bihrle, Brownell, Powelson et al., 1986; Dagge & Hartje, 1985.

365. Beeman, 1993.

366. Virtue, Haberman, Clancy et al., 2006.

367. Aram, Ekelman, Rose et al., 1985.

368. See p. 118 below.

369. Benowitz, Bear, Rosenthal et al., 1983.

370. Happaney, Zelazo & Stuss, 2004.

371. Hoshiyama, Kakigi, Watanabe et al., 2003.

372. Dimberg, Thunberg & Elmehed, 2000.

373. Pelphrey, Morris, Michelich et al., 2005.

374. Prodan, Orbelo, Testa et al., 2001.

375. Fabbro, Gran & Bava, 1993; Stuss, Gallup & Alexander, 2001. This capacity has led Julian Keenan and colleagues to see the right hemisphere as the basis of Machiavellian scheming, what they call the ‘dark side of consciousness’ (Keenan, Rubio, Racioppi et al., 2005). However this is not borne out by the evidence they cite. One paper they refer to suggests that lie-detection, not lying, is better in left-handers (Porter, Campbell, Stapleton et al., 2002), and another has nothing to say about lying at all (Stuss, Gallup & Alexander, 2001). The imaging paper by Spence and colleagues shows that lying activated regions bilaterally, if anything more in the left hemisphere - there is no suggestion of rightward inclination at any point (Spence, Farrow, Herford et al., 2001). One paper reports a case of pathological lying, but this is associated with loss of right thalamic function (Modell, Mountz & Ford, 1992). Another reports that an individual who tended to have seizures when he lied was found to have a meningioma impinging on the right medial temporal lobe, in proximity to the right anterior cingulate (Sellal, Chevalier & Collard, 1993). It is hard to know what conclusions can reliably be drawn from this (especially as he did not lie when he had seizures, but had seizures when he lied); but if any are to be drawn, it is surely relevant that this region is known to be activated in emotional conflict. We know from previous research that the anterior cingulate is involved in conflicting response tendencies (Carter, Macdonald, Botvinick et al., 2000); that the degree of right anterior cingulate activation is in fact proportional to the degree of response conflict, and inversely related to left dorsolateral prefrontal activation (MacDonald, Cohen, Stenger et al., 2000); and that in general conflicting emotions are dealt with by the right hemisphere (Davidson, Ekman, Saron et al., 1990). This is precisely what the paper by Langleben and colleagues, which they also cite, demonstrates: that the conflict involved in lying - both the emotional conflict (manifest in guilt and anxiety) and the cognitive conflict (having to inhibit the ‘prepotent’ or natural response) - induces activity in the right anterior cingulate (Langleben, Schroeder, Maldjian et al., 2002). None of this to me suggests that the right hemisphere is involved in the ‘dark’ side of consciousness. Finally, the paper by Ganis and colleagues reveals only that the right hemisphere is involved in the episodic memory retrieval tasks required by the task paradigm, lying about events in one's life (Ganis, Kosslyn, Stose et al., 2003). What, however, was significant, in my view, was that, as Ganis and colleagues report, ‘specifically, we did not predict modulation of activation in the primary motor cortex (close to the hand and mouth representations)’ (p. 835). In other words, for no apparent reason, lying activated the ‘grasp’ regions of the left hemisphere.

376. Winner, Brownell, Happé et al., 1998; Barnacz, Johnson, Constantino et al., 2004; Etcoff, Ekman, Magee et al., 2005. One further intriguing connection with the right hemisphere is that, when engaged in deceit, a subject's true emotional state is often disclosed through the upper, rather than lower, part of the face - which we know the left hemisphere cannot read (Prodan, Orbelo, Testa et al., 2001). See p. 59 above.

377. Napier, 1980, p. 166.

378. Rotenberg. & Arshavsky, 1987, p. 371.

379. Ween, Alexander, d'Esposito et al., 1996; Schutz, 2005.

380. For evidence linking the right hemisphere and ‘theory of mind’, see n. 202 above. For the link between autism, right hemisphere deficits and ‘theory of mind’, see Brownell, Griffin, Winner et al., 2000; Ozonoff & Miller, 1996; Sabbagh, 1999; and Stone, Baron-Cohen & Knight, 1998.

381. Sloboda & Juslin, 2001.

382. Sloboda, 1991, 1998; Panksepp, 1995; Panksepp & Bernatsky, 2002; Krumhansl, 1997; Goldstein, 1980.

383. I owe this perception to Professor Alwyn Lishman.

384. Suzuki, Okamura, Kawachi et al., 2008.

385. Gorgias, Encomium, §9.

386. Langer, 1942, p. 222.

387. Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay dated 5 October 1842 (Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, 1864, pp. 269-70).

388. Nietzsche, 1968, §810, p. 428.

389. Jeffries, Fritz & Braun, 2003.

390. Russell & Golfinos, 2003; Nicholson, Baum, Kilgour et al., 2003.

391. Fujii, Fukatsu, Watabe et al., 1990.

392. Marin & Perry, 1999.

393. ibid.

394. Luria, Tsvetkova & Futer, 1965.

395. Signoret, van Eeckhout, Poncet et al., 1987.

396. Judd, Gardner & Geschwind, 1983.

397. Alcock, Wade, Anslow et al., 2000; Peretz, 1990; Lechevalier, 1997; McKinnon & Schellenberg, 1997; Matteis, Silvestrini, Troisi et al., 1997; Platel, Price, Baron et al., 1997; O'Boyle & Sanford, 1988; Perry, Zatorre & Evans, 1996; Perry, Zatorre, Petrides et al., 1999a, 1999b.

398. Roland, Skinhøj & Lassen, 1981.

399. Lechevalier, 1997; Platel, Price, Baron et al., 1997.

400. Popescu, Otsuka & Ioannides, 2004; Sakai, Hikosaka, Miyauchi et al., 1999; Peretz, 1990; Roland, Skinhøj & Lassen, 1981.

401. Evers, Dannert, Rodding et al., 1999; Preisler, Gallasch & Schulter, 1989; Passynkova, Neubauer & Scheich, 2007.

402. Tramo & Bharucha, 1991; Preisler, Gallasch & Schulter, 1989.

403. Tramo & Bharucha, 1991.

404. J. Levy, 1988.

405. See Patston, Hogg & Tippett, 2007 for discussion; also Patston, Kirk, Rolfe et al., 2007.

406. Goldberg & Costa, 1981.

407. Vollmer-Haase, Finke, Harje et al., 1998.

408. Harrington, Haaland & Knight, 1998.

409. Buchtel, Rizzolatti, Anzola et al., 1978; Bertoloni, Anzola, Buchtel et al., 1978; Mohl & Pfurtscheller, 1992.

410. Jones, Rosenkranz, Rothwell et al., 2004.

411. Maquet, Lejeune, Pouthas et al., 1996; Bueti, Bahrami & Walsh, 2008; Koch, Oliveri, Carlesimo et al., 2002; Koch, Oliveri, Torriero et al., 2003; Pastor, Day, Macaluso et al., 2004; Danckert, Ferber, Pun et al., 2007; Funnell, Corballis & Gazzaniga, 2003; Stagno & Gates, 1991; Alexander, Cowey & Walsh, 2005; Lacruz, Artieda, Pastor et al., 1991; Battelli, Cavanagh, Martini et al., 2003; Rao, Mayer & Harrington, 2001. But see also Cutting, 1997, pp. 198-220, esp. p. 216 ff., for an extensive survey of the literature to that date, as well as Cutting, 1999, pp. 217-18.

412. Becchio & Bertone, 2006.

413. Husain, Shapiro, Martin et al., 1997; Battelli, Cavanagh, Intriligator et al., 2001; Battelli, Pascual-Leone & Cavanagh, 2007.

414. Mills & Rollman, 1980; Swisher & Hirsh, 1972; Carmon & Nachshon, 1971; Nicholls, 1994; Brown & Nicholls, 1997.

415. Hough, 1990; Schneiderman, Murasugi & Saddy, 1992.

416. Cummings, 1997; Ritsema & Murphy, 2007; Bender, Feldman & Sobin, 1968 (in 11 out of 12 cases the abnormal features were in the left visual field, and in 11 out of 12 cases there was pathology demonstrated in the right posterior region); Michel & Troost, 1980 (in two out of three cases there was a right posterior mass); Müller, Büttner, Kuhn et al., 1995 (3 cases of palinopsia, all with lesions in the posterior right hemisphere).

417. Schwartz, Assal, Valenza et al., 2005.

418. Okubo & Nicholls, 2008; Nicholls, Schier, Stough et al., 1999; Elias, Bulman-Fleming & McManus, 1999.

419. Corballis, 1996; Corballis, Boyd, Schulze et al., 1998.

420. Steiner, 1989, p. 27.

421. See Schopenhauer: ‘It is just this universality that belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness, that gives it that high value … Accordingly, music, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language that is related to the universality of concepts much as these are related to the particular things. Yet its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but is of quite a different kind; it is united with thorough and unmistakable distinctness’ (Schopenhauer, 1969, vol. 1, p. 262). ‘Gerade diese ihr ausschließlich eigene Allgemeinheit, bei genauester Bestimmtheit, giebt ihr den hohen Werth … Die Musik ist demnach, wenn als Ausdruck der Welt angesehn, eine im höchsten Grad allgemeine Sprache, die sich sogar zur Allgemeinheit der Begriffe ungefähr verhält wie diese zu den einzelnen Dingen. Ihre Allgemeinheit ist aber keineswegs jene leere Allgemeinheit der Abstraktion, sondern ganz anderer Art und ist verbunden mit durchgängiger deutlicher Bestimmtheit’ (Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, iii, §52, 1960, vol. 1, p. 365).

422. Nettl, 1983.

423. Durnford & Kimura, 1971; Nikolaenko & Egorov, 1998 (trans. N. N. Nikolaenko).

424. Banich & Federmeier, 1999; Hellige & Michimata, 1989; Kosslyn, Koenig, Barrett et al., 1989; Laeng, 1994; Rybash & Hoyer, 1992.

425. Kosslyn, 1987; Kinsbourne, 1993b.

426. Drago, Foster, Webster et al., 2007; Roth, Lora & Heilman, 2002.

427. Grossman, 1988; Menshutkin & Nikolaenko, 1987 (trans. N. N. Nikolaenko).

428. Laeng & Caviness, 2001.

429. Bodamer, 1947 (see p. 60 above).

430. The treatment of this subject is bedevilled by some of the same problems alluded to previously in discussing bizarre and abstract images. Lesion studies are likely to be most informative, but unfortunately few lesion patients are asked about their ability to appreciate beauty, and the few that may report spontaneously on the matter are likely to be overlooked, since failure to appreciate beauty may be treated as an aspect of depression. The only lesion study I am aware of to make that distinction is that of Habib, which suggests loss of the sense of visual beauty following a right temporal lesion (Habib, 1986). One is therefore mainly reliant here on imaging data, with all its attendant problems, particularly in such a spectacularly complex area. A few of the undoubted difficulties in knowing what it is that one is measuring here are outlined in a paper by Nadal and colleagues (Nadal, Munar, Capó et al., 2008). Additionally the tendency to use abstract patterns, or modernist paintings, in such studies alone skews the data, since, as discussed, the right hemisphere has a tendency to prefer images that have meaning in the real world, and the left hemisphere those that do not. One way round this is to compare an image in its original proportions with the same image subtly changed in proportion. This strategy demonstrates that the right insula and amygdala are the principle areas involved in judgments of beauty, according to such universally held criteria as the golden ratio: see Di Dio, Macaluso & Rizzolatti, 2007. Alternatively, using abstract or modernist paintings, the image can be compositionally interfered with or noise-filtered: where altered versions are compared with the more beautiful originals (much as in Di Dio et al., 2007), the originals are preferred to altered or filtered versions, in each case activating the right hemisphere (lingual and fusiform gyri): see Vartanian & Goel, 2004. Incidentally it is beauty which drives the unconscious creative processes of mathematics, associated with the right hemisphere, as most mathematicians from Pythagoras to Hofstadter will attest. Poincaré wrote that ‘… It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked à propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility … The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile at it.’ Poincaré, 1908 (trans. F. Maitland), quoted in Ghiselin, 1992, p. 29.

431. Nikolaenko, Egorov & Freiman, 1997.

432. ibid.; Nikolaenko 2003; Egorov & Nikolaenko, 1992.

433. Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978.

434. See Cutting, 1999, p. 236; Cutting, 1997, p. 187; Rausch, 1985; Brownell, Potter, Bihrle et al., 1986; Deglin, 1976; Henson, Rugg, Shallice et al., 2000. Evidence from right hemisphere lesions and from split-brain subjects confirms that the left hemisphere is over-confident and the right hemisphere correspondingly tentative: Kimura, 1963; Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992.

435. Cutting, 1997, pp. 65 & 68.

436. Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978, pp. 148-9.

437. Schnider, Gutbrod, Hess et al., 1996; Nebes, 1974; and, more generally, Drake & Bingham, 1985.

438. Schacter, Curran, Galluccio et al., 1996; Curran, Schacter, Norman et al., 1997.

439. Panksepp, 2003, p. 10.

440. Gazzaniga, 1998.

441. Gardner, Brownell, Wapner et al., 1983.

442. Wolford, Miller & Gazzaniga, 2000.

443. Unturbe & Corominas, 2007.

444. Yellott, 1969.

445. Goel, Tierney, Sheesley et al., 2007.

446. The Necker cube is attributed to a Swiss crystallographer, Louis Albert Necker, who in 1832 described the way in which the structure of crystals appeared to reverse spontaneously. Although the duck-rabbit was made famous by Wittgenstein, it was first discussed by the American psychologist, Joseph Jastrow (‘The mind's eye’, Popular Science Monthly, 1899, 54, pp. 299-312), who in turn derived it from a German popular magazine called Fliegende Blätter (1892). See http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/JastrowDuck.htm (accessed 28 April 2009).

447. Lumer, Friston & Rees, 1998.

448. Cowin & Hellige, 1994.

449. Hellige, 1976; Hellige & Webster, 1979; Hellige, 1980; Bradshaw, Hicks & Rose, 1979; Sergent & Bindra, 1981.

450. Sergent, 1982, p. 254.

451. Ballard, 2002.

452. Stuss, 1991b; Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997; Stuss, Picton & Alexander, 2001. Evidence that the right hemisphere is better at telling truth from falsehood, at least in others, has been presented above, as has evidence that it is better at jettisoning premises that are totally at variance with experience. There may, of course, be situations in which it is positively advantageous to entertain hypotheses that run completely counter to experience, and I believe this is one of the distinctive contributions that the left hemisphere makes to, particularly scientific, creativity.

453. Ramachandran, 1995; Gordon, Drenth, Jarvis et al., 1978; Rausch, 1985.

454. Schutz, 2005, p. 16, citing Rourke, 1989, and Johnson & Myklebust, 1967.

455. Stuss 1991a, Stuss 1991b.

456. See, for example, Schacter, Glisky, and McGlynn, 1990. As Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving put it: ‘The whole picture is one of a dissociation between knowledge and the realization of personal relevance of that knowledge’ (1997, p. 348).

457. Persinger & Makarec, 1991; Lazure & Persinger, 1992; Ahern, Herring, Tackenberg et al., 1994; Bear & Fedio, 1977. It was observed as long ago as the late nineteenth century that there was a difference in the emotional timbre of auditory hallucinations, depending on the side from which they appeared to arise. For example, Magnan reported that four patients with a chronic psychotic illness involving auditory hallucinations experienced unpleasant, critical and hostile remarks in their left ear, and soothing, even flattering remarks in their right (Magnan, 1883).

458. See pp. 63-4 above.

459. See, e.g., David, 2004, esp. pp. 365 & 370.

460. Alloy & Abramson, 1988; Iqbal, Birchwood, Chadwick et al., 2000; Ghaemi & Rosenquist, 2004, esp. pp. 110-11; Haaga & Beck, 1995.

461. See Adair, Schwartz & Barrett, 2003; Bisiach, Vallar, Perani et al., 1986; Feinberg, Roane, Kwan et al., 1994; Starkstein, Fedoroff, Price et al., 1992; Meador, Loring, Feinberg et al., 2000. First described in a classic paper by the French neurologist Babinski (1914), this phenomenon is as striking as it is common: Cutting estimates that it occurs in the majority of cases of right hemisphere stroke involving left hemiplegia, that is to say, paralysis of the left side of the body (Cutting, 1978). Insight into illness is lost (anosognosia) when the right hemisphere, especially the right parietal lobe, is damaged and insight increases pari passu with performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is thought to be a test of principally right frontal functioning (Morgan & David, 2004) and with tests of specifically right parietal lobe function (McEvoy, Hartman, Gottlieb et al., 1996; Flashman & Roth, 2004). It has been hypothesised that unawareness of (bodily) illness results from an interaction between frontal lobe impairment which compromises the ability to self-monitor, self-correct and draw proper inferences, and parietal lobe dysfunction which affects the complex integration of sensory input (Benson & Stuss, 1990; Ellis & Small, 1993). Bilateral superior and middle frontal gyri volumes are smaller where there is poor insight in psychosis (Flashman & Roth, 2004). There are specifically right-sided deficits in the frontal and parietal lobes of Alzheimer's patients who lack awareness of illness (Reed, Jagust & Coulter et al., 1993; Starkstein, Vazquez, Migliorelli et al., 1995; Derouesne, Thibault, Lagha-Pierucci et al., 1999). For overviews, see Prigatano, 1991, 1994; Heilman, 1991.

462. Bisiach, Rusconi & Vallar, 1991. Ramachandran & Rogers-Ramachandran (1996) provide further experimental evidence for the findings of Bisiach and colleagues. In their patient, stimulation of the right hemisphere also caused an increase in REM sleep, corroborating other evidence that REM sleep may be a right-hemisphere phenomenon (see p. 188 below).

463. Meador, Loring, Feinberg et al., 2000.

464. ‘À l'examen, quand on lui montre sa main gauche dans le champ visuel droit, elle détourne le regard et déclare: « Je ne la vois pas ». Spontanément elle cache sa main gauche sous la couverture ou la place derrière son dos. Elle ne regarde jamais à gauche, même lorsqu'on l'appelle par ce côté’ (trans. I. McG.): Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, p. 80, referring to Hoff & Pötzl, 1935.

465. ‘… elle la saisit pour l'abandonner aussitôt avec des signes de dégoût’ (trans. I. McG.): ibid., p. 80.

466. ‘… troubles de l'humeur rappelant la moria des frontaux: euphorie, jovialité, tendance aux calembours faciles. Une de nos malades hémiasomatognosique totale par tumeur pariétale, bien que se plaignant d'une céphalée extrêmement vive, manifeste ainsi une jovialité surprenante’ (trans. I. McG.): ibid., p. 63.

467. Drake & Bingham, 1985; see also Cutting, 1997, p. 184; Ahern, Herring, Tackenberg et al., 1994; Bear & Fedio, 1977.

468. Schutz, 2005, p. 11.

469. Zalla, Koechlin, Pietrini et al., 2000.

470. See, e.g., Rothbart, Ahadi & Hershey, 1994. Children and adolescents with psychopathic tendencies have difficulty recognising sad faces (Blair, Colledge, Murray et al., 2001; Blair & Coles, 2000) and sad vocal tones (Stevens, Charman & Blair, 2001). Reparative behaviour and sadness are highly correlated in childhood (Cole, Barrett & Zahn-Waxler, 1992).

471. Zahn-Waxler & Robinson, 1995.

472. Narayan, Narr, Kumari et al., 2007.

473. Yarnell, 2001, p. 454.

474. Lebrecht, 1985, p. 118. I am reminded of Wittgenstein's reported verdict on life: ‘I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.’

475. King Lear, Act III, Scene vi, lines 34-5.

476. See p. 159 below.

477. See p. 207 below.

478. Greene, Nystrom, Engell et al., 2004; Haidt, 2001.

479. Tranel, Bechara & Denburg, 2002; Tranel, 1994; A. R. Damasio, 1994a, 1994b; Damasio, Tranel & Damasio, 1990; Barrash, Tranel & Anderson, 2000; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio et al., 1994; Bechara, Tranel & Damasio, 2000; Eslinger, 1998.

480. Moll, de Oliveira-Souza & Eslinger, 2003; Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Bramati et al., 2002; Greene, Nystrom, Engell et al., 2004. For more detailed analysis, see Mendez, 2006.

481. Knoch, Pascual-Leone, Meyer et al., 2006.

482. Knoch & Fehr, 2007; Alonso-Alonso & Pascual-Leone, 2007.

483. See pp. 46, 231-2 & 390.

484. Regard, Knoch, Gütling et al., 2003; Clark, Manes, Antoun et al., 2003.

485. Camprodon, Martínez-Raga, Alonso-Alonso et al., 2007.

486. Lethmate & Dücker, 1973; Gallup, Wallnau & Suarez, 1980; Povinelli, Rulf, Landau et al., 1993; Kitchen, Denton & Brent, 1996; Lin, Bard & Anderson, 1992.

487. Keenan, McCutcheon, Freund et al., 1999.

488. Sugiura, Kawashima, Nakamura et al., 2000.

489. Imbens-Bailey & Pan, 1998.

490. Keenan, Wheeler, Platek et al., 2003; Preilowski, 1977.

491. Uddin, Rayman & Zaidel, 2005.

492. Vanderhaeghen, 1986.

493. Craik, Moroz, Moscovitch et al., 1999.

494. Schiffer, Zaidel, Bogen et al., 1998.

495. Decety & Chaminade, 2003.

496. Falk, Hildebolt, Cheverud et al., 1990.

497. Schore, 1994, p. 125. Schore notes incidentally that the right orbitofrontal cortex is larger in infant rats, though other areas of frontal cortex are larger on the left (van Eden, Uylings & van Pelt, 1984).

498. Trevarthen, 1996; Thatcher, Walker & Giudice, 1987; Schenkenberg, Dustman & Beck, 1971; D. C. Taylor, 1969; Chi, Dooling & Gilles, 1977a; Crowell, Jones, Kapuniai et al., 1973; Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987; Giannitrapani, 1967; Hellige, 1993; Tucker, 1986. As far as structure goes, Trevarthen notes (1996, p. 582): ‘The right hemisphere is more advanced than the left in surface features from about the 25th [gestational] week and this advance persists until the left hemisphere shows a post-natal growth spurt starting in the second year.’ On structure, see also Rosen & Galaburda, 1985.

499. Bretherton & Bates, 1984.

500. McCabe, Houser, Ryan et al., 2001; Vogeley, Bussfeld, Newen et al., 2001.

501. Devinsky, 2000.

502. Miller, Seeley, Mychack et al., 2001, p. 821.

503. Watt, 1998.

504. Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997.

505. Stuss & Alexander, 2000; Stuss, Gallup & Alexander, 2001; Stuss, 1991b; Stuss, Picton & Alexander, 2001.

506. Sperry, Zaidel & Zaidel, 1979.

507. Théoret, Kobayashi, Merabet et al., 2004, p. 57.

508. Decety & Sommerville, 2003. See also Uddin, Molnar-Szakacs, Zaidel et al., 2006; Uddin, Kaplan, Molnar-Szakacs et al., 2005; and Feinberg & Keenan, 2005.

509. Lou, Luber, Crupain et al., 2004.

510. Sugiura, Watanabe, Maeda et al., 2005.

511. Feinberg, Haber & Leeds, 1990; and Meador, Loring, Feinberg et al., 2000.

512. Paysant, Beis, Le Chapelain et al., 2004.

513. Feinberg, Haber & Leeds, 1990; Feinberg, 2000; Breen, Caine & Coltheart, 2001.

514. Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997.

515. Vogeley, Bussfeld, Newen et al., 2001.

516. Wittgenstein, 1971, p. 83.

517. Keenan, Nelson, O'Connor et al., 2001.

518. Turk, Heatherton, Kelley et al., 2002.

519. See, e.g., Keenan, McCutcheon & Pascual-Leone, 2001; Sugiura, Kawashima, Nakamura et al., 2000; Platek, Keenan, Gallup et al., 2004; Kelley, Macrae, Wyland et al., 2002.

520. Nakamura, Kawashima, Sugiura et al., 2001.

521. Decety & Sommerville, 2003.

522. Feinberg & Keenan, 2005, p. 675.

523. Blakemore, Rees & Frith, 1998; Farrer, Franck, Georgieff et al., 2003; den Ouden, Frith, Frith et al., 2005; Ogawa, Inui & Sugio, 2006.

524. Hamilton & Grafton, 2008.

525. For discussion, see Cutting, 1997, pp. 372-3. See also Dandy, 1930 and Serafetinides, Hoare & Driver, 1965.

526. Chaminade & Decety, 2002; Coslett & Heilman, 1989. Yet according to other evidence, for the right hemisphere to initiate an action it must be ‘overlearned, habitual actions like actual object-use’ (Cutting, 1999, p. 234; Rapcsak, Ochipa, Beeson et al., 1993).

527. Heilman, 2002; Heilman & van den Abell, 1979; Coslett & Heilman, 1989; Coslett, Bowers & Heilman, 1987.

528. Lhermitte, 1983.

529. Lhermitte, Pillon & Serdaru, 1986; Lhermitte, 1986.

530. Hashimoto, Yoshida & Tanaka, 1995.

531. Friston, 2003, p. 183.

532. See d'Aquili & Newberg, 1993; d'Aquili & Newberg, 1999; and Newberg, d'Aquili & Rause, 2001.

533. Trimble, 2007. This is also in keeping with Fenwick (1996), who associates religious experience principally with the right temporal lobe.

534. Gorynia & Müller, 2006.

535. O'Boyle & Benbow, 1990.

CHAPTER 3: LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND MUSIC

1. Goldberg & Costa, 1981; see also Pribram, 1981; and Regard & Landis, 1988.

2. Note that ‘facts’, like data, imply something that is finished, completed, given that factum and datum are both past participles.

3. Watt & Ash, 1998.

4. Davies, 2001.

5. McGilchrist, 1982.

6. Aristotle, Poetics, 1450B, 1459A.

7. C. Jung, 1953-79, vol. 10, p. 287.

8. Nietzsche, 2003, §34 [244], p. 14 (translation adapted; emphasis in original): ‘ “Erkennen” ist der Weg, um es uns zum Gefühl zu bringen, daß wir bereits etwas wissen: also die Bekämpfung eines Gefühls von etwas Neuem und Verwandlung des anscheinend Neuen in etwas Altes.’ In German, erkennen also carries the implication of knowing something ‘inside out’.

9. Bateson, 1979.

10. See, for example, Ratliff, 1965.

11. When one describes man as a wolf any ‘human traits that can without undue strain be talked about in “wolf-language” will be rendered prominent, and any that cannot will be pushed into the background. The wolf-metaphor suppresses some details, emphasises others - in short, organises our view of man. Suppose I look at the night sky through a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear. Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I do see will be seen as organised by the screen's structure. We can think of a metaphor as such a screen and the system of “associated commonplaces” of the focal word as the network of lines upon the screen …’ If I describe a battle as a game of chess, ‘the chess vocabulary filters and transforms: it not only selects, it brings forward aspects of the battle that might not be seen at all through another medium’ (Black, 1962, pp. 41-2).

12. See, e.g., Kinsbourne, 1993a, pp. 43-50.

13. E. Zaidel, 1995; see also Kaplan & Zaidel, 2001, p. 158: ‘Each hemisphere can function as an independent cognitive unit, complete with its own perceptual, motoric and linguistic abilities’.

14. Freud, 1960b, p. 212.

15. One research group has suggested that there may be no necessary connection between language dominance and brain torque in individual subjects who have abnormalities of brain lateralisation (Kennedy, O'Craven, Ticho et al., 1999). However, other research suggests that torque is indeed linked specifically to size of the planum temporale, which is known to be intimately involved with language function (Barrick, Mackay, Prima et al., 2005). Whichever position one adopts, the relationship between brain structure and function in unusual individual cases would not form a reliable basis for generalisation about the species, given the remarkable extent of brain plasticity in development. For example, individuals with hugely attenuated cerebral cortices secondary to hydrocephalus sometimes function virtually normally; this does nothing to invalidate the relationship between brain structure and function in general.

16. I am not the first to have questioned whether language is the core difference between the hemispheres. For example, the prominent neurologist and neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, whose research has been an important influence for me as for others, writes: ‘The basic facts linking language to the left hemisphere are not in dispute. The question arises, however, whether the close association with language is the central attribute of the left hemisphere or a special case, a consequence of a more fundamental principle of brain organisation’ (Goldberg, 2001, p. 41). He goes on to draw attention to the research suggesting that animals who do not have language may show hemisphere specialisation, and concludes that ‘the fundamental principle of brain organisation’ between the two hemispheres is that the right hemisphere deals with novel information, and the left with familiar information.

17. See, e.g., Wynn, 1998.

18. Homo erectus endocasts demonstrate the same left parietal and right frontal petalia typical of humans: Wynn, 2002.

19. The linguistic capacities of even extensively trained apes are best regarded as non-existent. See, e.g., Bodamer & Gardner, 2002; Premack, 1986; Terrace, Petitto, Sanders et al., 1979.

20. Cantalupo & Hopkins, 2001; Pilcher, Hammock & Hopkins, 2001; Cain & Wada, 1979.

21. LeMay & Geschwind, 1975.

22. Gannon, Holloway, Broadfield et al., 1998.

23. LeMay, 1976. Endocast analysis (of siamang gibbon brains) supports previous work on anthropoids where a left occipital petalia was most commonly observed, followed by a right frontal petalia (Falk, Redmond, Guyer et al., 2000).

24. Whether or not there is conclusive evidence for right-handedness in chimpanzees is not critical to my argument, though evidence suggests it exists (Hopkins, Cantalupo, Freeman et al., 2005; Hopkins & Fernández-Carriba, 2000; Byrne & Byrne, 1991, 1993; R. W. Byrne, 1995; McGrew & Marchant, 1992; McGrew, Marchant, Wrangham et al., 1999; Marchant & McGrew, 1996). Chimpanzees appear to have a handedness distribution midway between that for the expected (‘unbiased’) norm and that for humans, which is right-shifted (see Annett, 2006: esp. figure 2, p. 105). See also Hopkins, 1995; Hopkins & Cantalupo, 2003; Hopkins, Fernández-Carriba, Wesley et al., 2001; Hopkins, Wesley, Izard et al., 2004. In fact there does appear to be a ‘rightwards drift’ for interacting with the environment in a wide range of species (see McManus, 2002, p. 215). Although individual members of other species may show a paw preference, this is usually random, and therefore tends to be equally distributed between left and right in any one species, roughly half of whom will have a preference for the right paw, and half for the left. It is first with primates that this begins not to be true: primates begin to show the typical human pattern of a general preference for the right hand. However, primates do not have language. Of course they are able to communicate socially, but they do this without using words, without language as we understand it. What is more, even sustained human attempts to teach primates to communicate using a symbolic language of any kind have resulted in at best very limited success, as with Washoe, a chimpanzee who after years of training eventually mastered around 130 symbols, without any recognisable syntax, compared with the complex syntax of human language and its average vocabulary of about 75,000 words (Oldfield, 1966, p. 341).

25. Christopher Walsh, Bullard Professor of Neurology at Harvard, discussing the research (C. Walsh, 2005).

26. Thus Toga and Thompson conclude, with some discretion, ‘clearly, brain asymmetry, language laterality and handedness are interrelated, but in a complex way’ (Toga & Thompson, 2003, p. 38).

27. Kay, Cartmill & Balow, 1998; MacLarnon & Hewitt, 1999; Johanson & Edgar, 1996.

28. See Tattersall, 2004, p. 25: ‘It is this leap to symbolic manipulation in the mind that most truly marks us off from other forms of life on Earth; and the ability to do this is evidently something that arose rather abruptly, as a by-product of something else, rather than through a process of gradual fine-tuning over the generations.’ The earliest known symbolic object, an ochre plaque bearing geometrical engravings, is almost 80,000 years old, and comes from the Blombos cave in Southern Africa (Henshilwood, d'Errico, Yates et al., 2002). The earliest pierced shells, suggesting symbolic body ornamentation, arose at around the same time in the same region, along with evidence of trade in valued materials and the mining of flints (McBrearty & Brooks, 2003). See also Mithen, 1998a, 1998b; Noble & Davidson, 1996; Milo & Quiatt, 1993.

29. Overall the correlation between brain size and intelligence remains robust across species and within human populations. See the most comprehensive meta-analysis of investigations of the relation of brain size to IQ to date: McDaniel, 2005.

30. See, e.g., Suthers & Zollinger, 2004.

31. These long, long musical ‘sentences’ of Wagner's are, however, paralleled in language by the extraordinarily long sentences of his admirer, Thomas Mann, in which one has to keep subjects and subordinate clauses in mind for minutes at a time, while one waits for the verb, or for the principal clause to conclude.

32. Koelsch, Kasper, Sammler et al., 2004.

33. See S. Brown, 2000b.

34. Sansavini, Bertoncini & Giovanelli, 1997.

35. Cooper & Aslin, 1990.

36. Mehler, Bertoncini, Barrière et al., 1978; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; Alegria & Noirot, 1978. What is more, they are sensitive to the musical aspects of speech even before they are born: if a mother repeats a short story twice a day for the last six and half weeks of her pregnancy, her newborn child will prefer hearing it to one she did not (DeCasper & Spence, 1986). ‘The womb is an acoustic filter that preserves the intonations of a mother's speech’: I am indebted to Vaneechoutte & Skoyles (1998) here, and in the discussion of ‘the linguistic wars’, for an interesting and thought-provoking survey of this area.

37. Mehler, Jusczyk, Lambertz et al., 1988.

38. Bogen, 1985; van Lancker & Canter, 1982.

39. Henschen, 1926.

40. Panksepp & Bernatsky, 2002, p. 136.

41. Dunbar, 2004, p. 132. See also Mithen, 2005; and Livingstone, 1973.

42. Gould & Lewontin, 1979.

43. ‘Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third … I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake’ (‘The Meaning of Life’, in Pinker, 1997, pp. 525-32).

44. Mithen, 2005.

45. See Rousseau, 1966; von Humboldt, 1988; and Jespersen, 1922.

46. I notice the obverse of this as a Western psychiatrist asking people every day about their interests and hobbies. Whenever people mention music, I ask them whether they sing or play an instrument, and long ago learnt to expect that hardly any will mean other than that they like to listen to recorded music.

47. Sacks, 2006 (emphasis added).

48. This was first suggested by Vico in his Scienza Nuova in 1725, and later by Herder, Rousseau, Humboldt and many other theorists, and is confirmed in the case of Greek literature by, for example, Dover and colleagues (Dover, Bowie, Griffin et al., 1997, p. 10). It has also been specifically claimed in relation to Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Old Icelandic, English, Spanish and German: e.g. Mazari (2006, p. 62). Benedetto Croce not only endorsed the view, but went so far as to say that ‘language is always poetry, and … prose (science) is a distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical form’ (Croce, 1922, p. 329).

49. Ford, 1989, 1991.

50. Everett, 2005.

51. See Dunbar, 2004.

52. Henri Poincaré, ‘Mathematical Creation’, in Ghiselin, 1985, pp. 25-6; Albert Einstein, ‘A letter to Jacques Hadamard’, in Ghiselin, 1985, p. 32.

53. Arnheim, 1977, p. 134.

54. Aust, Apfalter & Huber, 2005; Kuhl & Miller, 1978; Kluender, Diehl & Killeen, 1987.

55. Categorisation is species-specific, ‘but the ability to categorise and to learn categories is remarkably general across taxa’: Finkel, 1988, p. 63.

56. Hernstein, Loveland & Cable, 1976.

57. Cerella, 1980; Matsukawa, Inoue & Jitsumori, 2004; Watanabe, Sakamoto & Wakita, 1995.

58. Porter & Neuringer, 1984.

59. Chase, 2001.

60. Greenfield, 1991; Griffin, 1992; Herman, Richards & Wolz, 1984; Matsuzawa, 1991.

61. Raby, Alexis, Dickinson et al., 2007. For Alex, see Pepperberg, 2005.

62. Varley & Siegal, 2000.

63. Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Tomasello, Call & Hare, 2003; Byrne & Whiten, 1992; Call & Tomasello, 2008.

64. Schore, 1994, pp. 87-8; Izard, 1991.

65. Lordat, J., Analyse de la parole pour servir à la théorie de divers cas d'alalie et de paralalie (de mutisme et d'imperfection du parler) que les nosologistes ont mal connus (‘Analysis of speech as a contribution to a theoretical understanding of different cases of alalia and paralalia (mutism and imperfection of speech) poorly recognised by nosologists’): emphasis added. This essay is discussed in Hécaen & Dubois, 1969, pp. 140-41, and cited by Prins & Bastiaanse, 2006.

66. Varley, Klessinger, Romanowski et al., 2005; Bloom & Keil, 2001; Brannon, 2005; Rossor, Warrington & Cipolotti, 1995; Cappelletti, Butterworth & Kopelman, 2001.

67. Varley, Klessinger, Romanowski et al., 2005.

68. Remond-Besuchet, Noël, Seron et al., 1999.

69. Pica, Lemer, Izard et al., 2004. See also Gordon, 2004; Dixon, 1980. Warlpiri-speaking Australian children, who also lack number words, can match a series of tones to a series of sticks as well as their English-speaking coevals, the significance of which finding is that it eliminates visual memory as a possible explanation (Butterworth, Reeve, Reynolds et al., 2008).

70. Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002.

71. Saxe & Moylan, 1982.

72. Hartnett & Gelman, 1998.

73. von Wattenwyl & Zollinger, 1978. The degree to which the German word rosa might be considered foreign is, of course, open to debate, but the point is made by Heinrich Zollinger: ‘The English term orange but not the term pink has a German counterpart. Many Germans, even those who speak English, do not know what pink means …’ (1988, p. 159).

74. Roberson & Davidoff, 2000; and see Lupyan, 2005.

75. Nunn, 2005, p. 202, n. 2. Also see Hespos & Spelke, 2004. The concept of tightness of fit is present in Korean, but not in English: as a result, Korean children learn to see this as a joint at which to ‘carve’ the natural world, where English children lose the distinction.

76. As Bloom & Keil conclude, in a concise review, to which the reader is recommended, of the strengths and weaknesses of the various positions adopted by language experts: ‘It is a tool for the expression and storage of ideas. It is not a mechanism that gives rise to the capacity to generate and appreciate these ideas in the first place’ (Bloom & Keil, p. 364). An interesting sidelight on the fixative properties of language is that if one names explicitly the aspects of a visual scene, one is less likely to be blind to subtle or slow visual changes in it: words fix the features of an evolving process (Simons, 1996).

77. Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996; Rimé, Schiaratura, Hupet et al., 1984.

78. Detailed phantom limbs occur in subjects with congenital limb deficiency: Melzack, Israel, Lacroix et al., 1997; Saadah & Melzack, 1994.

79. Ramachandran, 1993.

80. Here again I am indebted to Vaneechoutte & Skoyles (1998) for a recent discussion of this and related issues. The structure of language may emerge from, and may even be viewed as a special case of, the structure of action (Studdert-Kennedy, 1983, p. 5), adapting the neural substrate of the left hemisphere evolved in primates for right-handed manipulation and bimanual coordination to vocalisation (Moscovitch, 1983). See also Lieberman, 1984, 1991; and Calvin, 1989.

81. Kinsbourne, 1978, p. 553.

82. ibid., pp. 553 & 558.

83. ibid., p. 559.

84. Sarles, 1985, p. 200.

85. Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978; LeDoux, Wilson & Gazzaniga, 1977.

86. See, e.g., Hewes, 1973; Corballis, 1992; Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox, 1994; Stokoe, 2000; Feyereisen & de Lannoy, 1991.

87. E. Bruner, 2003, p. 38. See also Bradshaw, 1988, 1997.

88. Corballis, 1992; see also further thoughts in Corballis, 2002b, 2003.

89. Wohlschläger & Bekkering, 2002.

90. Révész, 1958, pp. 15-19.

91. Frey, Funnell, Gerry et al., 2005.

92. Gonzalez, Ganel & Goodale, 2006.

93. Stoeckel, Weder & Binkofski, 2004.

94. ‘… ces sujets tendaient à saisir avec cette main [la droite] tout ce qui était à leur portée ou même l'agitaient dans l'espace vide comme à la recherche de quelque chose. À la différence de ce qui se passe chez les sujets présentant un grasping-reflex, ils étaient capables de relâcher immédiatement l'étreinte dès l'ordre donné’ (trans. I. McG.): Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952, p. 64.

95. ‘… le malade, prié d'imiter les gestes des mains de l'observateur, tente de mettre ses propres mains contre celles de celui-ci … Lorsque les mains entrent en action, il semble qu'elles cherchent à ne pas rester isolées, à « trouver une compagnie dans quelque chose qui remplit l'espace»’ (trans. I. McG.): ibid., p. 224.

96. Herder, 1966: ‘So little did nature create us as severed blocks of rock, as egotistic monads! … the plucked chord performs its natural duty: it sounds! It calls for an echo from one that feels alike, even if none is there, even if it does not hope or expect that such another might answer … I cannot conceal my amazement that philosophers - people, that is, that look for clear concepts - ever conceived of the idea that the origin of human language might be explained from these outcries of the emotions … Children, like animals, utter sounds of sensation. But is not the language they learn from other humans a totally different language?’ (pp. 128, 87 & 99 respectively).

97. Geschwind, 1985, pp. 272-3. A similar point has also been made more recently by Jerison, 1985; and Burling emphasises that we would understand the origins of language better by observing the way primates think than the way they communicate (Burling, 1993).

98. Vygotsky, 1962; Clark & Karmiloff-Smith, 1993; Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland et al., 1986.

99. ‘Some inkling of the power of planning ahead seems to be possessed by chimpanzees, whose tool-modifying activities suggest that they occupy the grey area within the spectrum of tool-using and tool-making - a stage of dawning comprehension’: Napier, 1980, p. 113. For an overview, see Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990.

100. See p. 49 above.

101. Quoted in Biese, 1893, p. 12.

102. Black, 1962, p. 44.

103. Snell, 1960, pp. 200-1 (emphasis added).

104. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 123 & 129.

105. Locke, 1849, III, x, §34: ‘… all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats …’ (p. 370).

106. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999. It is perhaps significant that the functions the conscious left hemisphere associates with itself - optimism, control, consciousness, rationality - are all expressed by means of the spatial metaphor ‘up’, since it is also keen on winning (not just in individual experience, but in the battle of the hemispheres, as I shall try to suggest); and being in the ‘up’ position means being physically on top of your opponent - in a word, winning. Examples are (optimism) being upbeat, lifting one's spirits; (control) having control over, ranking above; (consciousness) waking up, but falling asleep; (rationality) rising above one's feelings, but breaking down in tears.

107. Janata & Grafton, 2003.

108. ‘I know of more than one instance where an individual … could not but associate, by a direct and rapid impulse, this particular sound with that particular colour, this particular phenomenon with that particular dark and quite different feeling, where a comparison through slow reason could detect no relationship whatever.’ Herder, 1966, pp. 139-40.

109. Herder, 1966, pp. 140-43.

110. B. Berlin, 1992, 2005; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001.

111. Vowles, 1970.

112. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 4.

113. Chomsky, 1957, 1988.

114. See, e.g., Botha, 1989; Harris, 1993; Tomasello, 1995; Allott, 1995; Bates & Goodman, 1997.

115. Reviewed by Aitchison, 1996.

116. Chuang Tzu, 1964, ch. 3, ‘The Secret of Caring for Life’, pp. 46-9.

117. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 30.

118. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part I, §19, p. 8.

119. Nagel, 1979b.

120. Chartrand & Bargh, 1999.

121. Laban, 1960, p. 86.

122. ibid., p. 97. I am sure Laban is right; but I suspect the ultimate difference is that we attend in a much more intense way because of being present at the birth of something, with all the uncertain expectancy of such an event, rather than, as in listening to recorded music, attending its memorial service.

123. Vaneechoutte & Skoyles, 1998.

124. S. Brown, 2000a.

125. S. Brown, 2000b. See also Scherer, 1991. For a general discussion of these issues, see Morley, 2003.

126. Dunbar, 2004, p. 131.

127. For ‘the cheerless gloom of chance’, see Kant, 1891, p. 15. For the sheer exuberance of human nature, and its refusal to be limited by what is necessary, see William James (1979): ‘Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities … Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary’ (p. 104).

128. Dunbar, 2004, p. 128.

129. Panksepp, 1998, p. 334.

130. Falk, Redmond, Guyer et al., 2000; Holloway & de LaCoste-Lareymondie, 1982; E. Bruner, 2003; Broadfield, Holloway, Mowbray et al., 2001.

131. Ornstein, 1997, p. 149.

132. Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985; Chi, Dooling & Gilles, 1977b.

133. Simonds & Scheibel, 1989; Thatcher, Walker & Giudice, 1987.

134. Macaques exhibit a right frontal petalia, involving both the orbital and dorsolateral areas of the frontal lobe, with a possible associated left occipital development (Cheverud, Falk, Hildebolt et al., 1990; Cheverud, Falk, Vannier et al., 1990; Falk, Hildebolt, Cheverud et al., 1990). Great apes show both right frontal and left occipital petalia (Pilcher, Hammock & Hopkins, 2001), though according to Bruner they ‘present specific patterns, more marked in Gorilla with a [left occipital] dominance’ (E. Bruner, 2003, p. 33).

135. ‘The most statistically significant difference [in the entire brain] was located in the right frontal pole and a number of other significant peaks were located in the right superior and middle frontal gyri, particularly in mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex, confirming previous findings that this lobe extends further anteriorly and laterally in the right hemisphere than in the left’ (Watkins, Paus, Lerch et al., 2001, p. 869).

136. Oldfield, 1966, p. 352.

137. Trimble, 2007.

138. Gaburo, 1979-80, p. 218.

139. Henschen, 1926, pp. 112, 115, 116 & 119.

140. Gazzaniga, 1998, p. 191.

141. Gazzaniga, 1983, p. 536.

142. Gazzaniga, 2000, p. 1315.

143. ibid, p. 1302.

144. For those who think that this is restricted to notorious cases such as ‘… why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as “Newton's rape manual” as it is to call them “Newton's mechanics"?’ (Harding, 1986, p. 113), see Patai & Koertge, 2003.

145. The degree of human right handedness is related to weakness of the left hand rather than strength of the right hand (Annett, 1998; Kilshaw & Annett, 1983). There is a clear parallel with the variability in size of the left and right plana temporalia (Galaburda, Corsiglia, Rosen et al., 1987); in symmetrical brains, large plana were found in both cerebral hemispheres, but in asymmetrical ones it was because the right planum was smaller, not because the left planum was greater. The mechanisms inducing human cerebral asymmetry operate by reducing the role of the right hemisphere (Annett & Manning, 1990).

146. Annett, 1998, 1978.

147. Annett, 1998. See also Annett & Manning, 1989; McManus, Shergill & Bryden, 1993; Palmer & Corballis, 1996; Resch, Haffner, Parzer et al., 1997.

148. See n. 145 above.

149. Sun, Patoine, Abu-Khalil et al., 2005; C. Walsh, 2005.

150. Galaburda, Corsiglia, Rosen et al., 1987.

151. Annett & Manning, 1990.

152. See p. 26.

153. Kilshaw & Annett, 1983.

154. Annett & Kilshaw, 1982; Benbow, 1986.

155. Annett, 1991.

CHAPTER 4: THE NATURE OF THE TWO WORLDS

1. On this point, at least, I am in agreement with Dan Dennett: ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination’ (1995, p. 21).

2. In an unpublished study of the degree subjects undertaken by university students who then went on to be admitted to the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital in London during a psychotic episode, I found that a subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia was most strongly associated with having chosen to study engineering, followed closely by philosophy (p > 0.001). The abstract, impersonal, sequentialist approach of philosophy distinguishes it from all other humanities subjects (e.g. literature, history), which were the commonest choices amongst those who were subsequently diagnosed with an affective psychosis.

3. That a statement is either true or false, and that if false, its denial must be true. This tenet of Western philosophy since Plato is, as Pascal saw, a poor guide: ‘Contradiction is a bad indicator of truth. Plenty of things that are certain are mutually contradictory; plenty of things that are false contain no inconsistency. Contradiction is not a sign of falsehood, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth’: 1976, §384 (Lafuma §177); trans. I. McG. (‘Contradiction est une mauvaise marque de vérité. Plusieurs choses certaines sont contredites. Plusieurs fausses passent sans contradiction. Ni la contradiction n'est marque de fausseté ni l'incontradiction n'est marque de vérité.’)

4. Plutarch, ‘Life of Theseus’, §22-3 (trans. J. Dryden), in Plutarch, 2001, vol. 1, pp. 13-14.

5. Novalis, 1967, p. 541.

6. Capgras syndrome, difference in sameness, is like the dichotomy paradox: a real unity becomes fragmented. Fregoli syndrome, sameness in difference, is like the Achilles paradox: with the loss of unity, the attempt is made to recapture it by summing parts, but necessarily fails.

7. Cf. Russell's paradox: the set of all sets that are not members of themselves leads inexorably to a contradiction. If such a set were a member of itself, it would nonetheless have to be excluded - thereby no longer being a member of itself; but if it were not a member of itself, it would have to be included - thereby becoming a member of itself.

8. ‘Why should not logicians, more than anyone, realize the places where hard-edged, clean logic will necessarily run into trouble in dealing with this chaotic and messy universe?’, writes Douglas Hofstadter. He carries on by quoting Marvin Minsky, the famous artificial intelligence researcher: ‘Logic doesn't apply to the real world … This is one of the difficulties that artificial intelligence workers are facing. They are coming to realize that no intelligence can be based on reasoning alone; or rather that isolated reasoning is impossible, because reasoning depends on a prior setting-up of a system of concepts, percepts, classes, categories - call them what you will - in terms of which all situations are understood [context, in other words - I. McG.].’ Hofstadter & Dennett, 1982, p. 343.

9. I have referred to this aspect of Pascal's thought throughout the notes. In the matter of flux, Pascal warned: ‘Individual things break down and are transformed at every moment: he [man] only sees them in passing …’: 1976, §72 (Lafuma §199); trans. I. McG. (‘Les choses en particulier se corrompent et se changent à chaque instant: il ne les voit qu'en passant …’)

10. Spinoza, 1947, V, Proposition 24, p. 269 (the translation here preferred is that of Boyle: see Spinoza, 1910, p. 214). For a full discussion of the evolution of these concepts from the Middle Ages onwards, see Mittelstrass, 1988.

11. These ideas have been illuminatingly explored by Louis Sass (1994).

12. Sass, 1994.

13. Nagel, 1986.

14. ‘Bias for impartiality is as much a bias as is partisan prejudice, though it is a radically different quality of bias … One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value. A standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity. But one may have affection for a standpoint which gives a rich and ordered landscape rather than for one from which things are seen confusedly and meagrely.’ Dewey, 1931, p. 216.

15. ibid., pp. 219, 206 & 212 respectively.

16. ibid., p. 204.

17. Dewey, 1929, p. 241.

18. ibid., p. 212.

19. James, 1979.

20. Toulmin, 1990, p. 10.

21. Dewey, 1988, p. 164.

22. Husserl, 1970, p. 290 (1962, p. 337), quoted in Levin, 1999, p. 61. Sass's thesis that modernism has many of the features of schizophrenia (discussed below, p. 393 ff.) makes an interesting parallel, since he demonstrates that a key element in schizophrenia is not irrationality, but an excessive and misplaced rationalism.

23. Since this is involuntarily absent in subjects with schizophrenia, and voluntarily suspended by philosophers, it may account for the difficulty both have in apprehending the reality of the world.

24. What he called ‘intersubjective phenomenology’ in the fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1995).

25. Husserl, 1952.

26. Gallagher & Meltzoff, 1996, pp. 225-6; Trevarthen, 1979; Aitken & Trevarthen, 1997; Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001.

27. Evan Thompson (2001, p. 2: emphasis in original). Here he refers specifically to Francisco Varela and Shaun Gallagher: Varela, 1996; Gallagher, 1997; Petitot, Varela, Pachoud et al., 1999.

28. See Poundstone, 1992.

29. As so often, I agree with rational-choice theorist Jon Elster: ‘Do real people act on the calculations that make up many pages of mathematical appendixes in leading journals? I do not think so’ (2007, p. 5).

30. Hayashi, Ostrom, Walker et al., 1999; Kiyonari, Tanida & Yamagishi, 2000.

31. de Waal, 2006a, p. 3. For discussion of animals, empathy and morality, see de Waal, 2006b.

32. Panksepp, 1998, p. 258.

33. Human altruism is sometimes described in terms of ‘strong reciprocity’ (Fehr, Fischbacher & Gächter, 2002; Gintis, 2000). Strong reciprocity is ‘a combination of altruistic rewarding, which is a predisposition to reward others for cooperative, norm-abiding behaviours, and altruistic punishment, which is a propensity to impose sanctions on others for norm violations. Strong reciprocators bear the cost of rewarding or punishing even if they gain no individual economic benefit whatsoever from their acts. In contrast, reciprocal altruists, as they have been defined in the biological literature, reward and punish only if this is in their long-term self-interest’ (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003, p. 785).

34. Rilling, Gutman, Zeh et al., 2002; de Quervain, Fischbacher, Treyer et al., 2004.

35. See n. 34 above. An example of altruistic punishment is the schoolteacher staying behind after school to supervise detention because he or she believes that punishment in this case is good for society, even at cost to the punisher.

36. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 185.

37. Merleau-Ponty, 1969, as discussed by Murata, 1998, p. 57: ‘Only something that appears in depth can have “aspects” in the true sense, because without depth there can be no “aspects” nor “sides,” but only parts.’

38. Hécaen, de Ajuriaguerra & Angelergues, 1963, p. 227.

39. Haaland & Flaherty, 1984.

40. Sunderland, Tinson & Bradley, 1994; Benton, 1967; Benton & Fogel, 1962; Black & Bernard, 1984; Black & Strub, 1976; Mack & Levine, 1981; Piercy, Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1960; Piercy & Smyth, 1962; Villa, Gainotti & De Bonis, 1986.

41. Matthews, 2002, p. 136.

42. Edelman, 1989.

43. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 6.

44. Merleau-Ponty, 1964c.

45. ‘From a neuropsychological point of view, Being and Time is a prescient account of right hemisphere functions’ (Cutting, 1999, p. 290).

46. J. Young, 2004, p. 59.

47. Matthews, 2002, p. 139.

48. It is perhaps suggestive that even the concept of invention means literally ‘finding’, as in the phrase ‘the Invention of the Cross’ (L invenire to find), rather than ‘making up’ (putting things together).

49. An idea wonderfully imaged in the Japanese Zen garden, Ryoan-ji, in which, from any one viewpoint, there is always at least one of the 15 stones that cannot be seen.

50. Churchland, 1986, p. 326.

51. Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 58e.

52. Steiner, 1978, p. 130.

53. ibid., pp. 29-31.

54. van Lancker, 1991.

55. Steiner, 1978, p. 34.

56. Heidegger, 1959, p. 33.

57. Steiner, 1978, p. 41.

58. See, e.g., Heidegger, 1999, pp. 458-72.

59. See, e.g., ibid., p. 420 ff: and Inwood, 1999, p. 221.

60. See, e.g., Heidegger, 1999, pp. 98-107.

61. See p. 181.

62. Heidegger, 1977, pp. 3-35.

63. Holzweg refers to a loggers’ path in woodland, and has at least two contrary associations: the positive one, of a path to a clearing in the woods, and the negative one, of a path that goes nowhere, with the word being used in colloquial German to suggest being on the wrong track, or ‘barking up the wrong tree’.

64. On this topic, Poincaré, like many others, found that a walk or journey enabled unconscious processes to yield insight into, for example, mathematical problems: see Poincaré, 1908.

65. Steiner, 1978, p. 12.

66. Descartes, 1984-91d, ‘Rule IX’, p. 33. Descartes's spirit is in total opposition to that of Goethe, who warned that ’zur Einsicht in den geringsten Teil ist die Übersicht des Ganzen nötig’ (‘to have insight into the smallest detail one must have an overview of the whole’): Goethe, 1989, ‘Betrachtungen über Farbenlehre und Farbenbehandlung der Alten’, p. 552 (trans. I. McG.).

67. Rorty, 1989, p. 26.

68. ‘Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten’ (Vermischte Bemerkungen, vol. 8, p. 483; emphasis in original): ‘I think I summarised my position on philosophy, when I said that really one should write philosophy only as poetry’ (trans. I. McG.). As the phrasing suggests, this is a considered view which sums up repeated formulations of the idea in the Nachlass.

69. Heidegger, 1959, pp. 13-14.

70. Heidegger, 1971, pp. 189-210.

71. ‘Understanding arises neither through talking at length [vieles Reden] nor through busily hearing something “all around”. Only he who already understands can listen [zuhören].’ Heidegger, 1999, p. 210.

72. Compare: ’Il y a de certaines choses qu'on n'entend jamais, quand on ne les entend pas d'abord’ (‘Some things are such that if you do not understand them immediately, you never will’), Mme de Sévigné, lettre du 14e mai 1686 au comte de Bussy-Rabutin (Sévigné, 1846, p. 534); and ‘If you have not already got it in you, you cannot receive it’, from the Chuang Tzu, in J. Needham, 1954-98, vol. 2 (1956), p. 85.

73. Heidegger, 1977, p. 47.

74. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 194 & 185 respectively; cited by Levin, 1999, p. 208.

75. C. Jung, 1953-79, vol. 8, p. 200.

76. Schopenhauer, 1969, vol. 2, supplements to First Book, Part 2, ch. 17, ‘On man's need for metaphysics’. The original reads: ‘Das philosophische Erstaunen ist demnach im Grunde ein bestürztes und betrübtes: die Philosophie hebt, wie die Ouvertüre zum Don Juan, mit einem Mollakkord an’ (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, Ergänzungen zum Ersten Buch, ii, 17, ‘Über das metaphysische Bedürfniß des Menschen’, 1960, vol. 2, p. 222).

77. For an unbiased account, see J. Young, 1998.

78. Wittgenstein, 1997, 2003.

79. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, xi, p. 227.

80. Hacker, 2001, p. 73.

81. Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 18.

82. From ‘A biologist's view of Whitehead's philosophy’ (1941), in J. Needham, 1943, p. 183.

83. Wittgenstein, 1967a, p. 27. The phrase, however, has a history: it is first recorded in a sermon by Joseph Butler (1729, Preface, p xxix).

84. Waismann, 1994, p. 112. For Waismann I am indebted to Louis Sass (2001).

85. ‘The difficulty of psychology is precisely that our ordinary concepts are too rigid; we need something looser, more indefinite. This brings out the fundamental character of the mental; everything is equivocal, indefinite, floating. In order to describe the mental we need a language that is just as flexible; which, of course, runs counter to our usual ways of thinking.’ Yet ‘there really is something like digging down to deeper layers, becoming more truthful, struggling passionately, while things become clearer and clearer. There is undoubtedly such a process of plumbing the depths in which one penetrates to one's innermost motives. So things are not entirely subjective: there is truth after all. And yet! When we want to put our finger on it, it will not stand up; when we look more closely at it, it looks different again. It is an interpretation and yet something more than an interpretation, knowledge and yet not quite knowledge: what are we dealing with?’ (Waismann, 1994, p. 136).

86. Sass, 2001, p. 284; Drury, 1984, p. 79.

87. Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 5e.

88. E.g.: ‘The psychical modifications that go along with the process of civilisation are striking and unambiguous. They consist in a progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses. Sensations which were pleasurable to our ancestors have become indifferent or even intolerable to ourselves; there are organic grounds for the changes in our ethical and aesthetic ideals. Of the psychological characteristics of civilisation two appear to be the most important: a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalisation of the aggressive impulses, with its consequent advantages and perils’ (Freud, 1960f, pp. 214-15); ‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction … of instincts’ (Freud, 1960a, p. 97); ‘[The Weltanschauung of science] asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinised observations - in other words, what we call research - and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination. It seems as though this view came very near to being generally recognised in the course of the last few centuries that have passed’ (Freud, 1960c, p. 159); ‘[Civilisation] displaces instinctual aims and brings it about that people become antagonistic to what they had previously tolerated’ (Freud, 1960c, p. 179).

89. Heidegger, 1977, p. 134.

90. ibid., p. 164.

91. Descartes, 1984-91a, Part III, p. 125.

92. See J. Young, 2004, p. 11.

93. Heidegger, ‘In Memoriam Max Scheler’, a eulogy on the death of Max Scheler delivered at the University of Marburg on 21 May 1928 (1984, p. 50).

94. See n. 26 above; as well as the thesis put forward by Peter Hobson (2004).

95. Scheler, 1954, pp. 244-52.

96. ibid., p. 246.

97. ’Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point’: Pascal, 1976, §277 (Lafuma §224).

98. ‘People should not worry so much about what they do as about who they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works’ (Meister Eckhart, ‘The Talks of Instruction’, 1994, p. 7). The position is also that of St. Augustine contra Pelagius. In the realm of art, it is the argument of Maurice Morgann's famous Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (see pp. 304 & 355 below): we do not build up the man from his actions, but understand him whole first (by Scheler's value-ception) and judge his actions in the light of who he is, rather than the other way round. This redeeming of apparent imperfection by the whole is the subject of my Against Criticism (1982).

99. Scheler, 1973.

100. Scheler, 1998, pp. 124-5. It is a perverse inversion, a product of modern humanity's ressentiment, according to Scheler, that has placed pleasure below utility, with the result that the means of pleasure can now be acquired only by those who, paradoxically, value utility more highly. Consequently nobody wins.

101. Scheler, 1998, p. 127.

102. See pp. 180-81 below: Elster, 1983.

103. First formulated by Henry Sidgwick in the Methods of Ethics, it is most succinctly expressed by Victor Frankl: ‘… happiness … cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself’ (1984, p. 17).

104. Watts, 1963, p. 9. See also Wilber, 2001, p. 30.

105. Sweetser, 1990.

106. See pp. 45 & 86 above.

107. Goodale & Milner, 1995.

108. Simons & Chabris, 1999.

109. Noë & O'Regan, 2000; Noë, 2002; Kovács, Papathomas, Yang et al., 1996.

110. Ito, 2000.

111. Schutz, 2005, p. 11.

112. Heraclitus, fr. VII (Diels 8, Marcovich 11), in Kahn, 1979 (Kahn's translation).

113. ‘There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature’: Johnson, 1963, p. 110.

114. Libet, 1989.

115. Nunn, 2005, p. 195.

116. ‘The external world is really there around us. That its existence is normally veiled is due not to existence but to our eyes. The habitual way of consciousness makes us look at things mechanically and think them dead. If only this mechanical view is abandoned, then existence is exposed in its nakedness… . Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism. It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning.’ Sekida, 1975, pp. 103 & 211.

117. See p. 97: C. Jung, vol. 9ii, p. 287.

118. Snell, 1960, ‘Homer's View of Man’, pp. 1-22.

119. ‘We are not cameras. We do not traverse the world as blank slates, on which the environment presses its information’ (Kinsbourne, 2003).

120. Empedocles, §84, lines 8-11 (trans. B. Snell).

121. ‘So much of fire as would not burn, but gave a gentle light, [the gods] formed into a substance akin to the light of every-day life; and the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense, compressing the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it kept out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this pure element. When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight.’ Plato, Timaeus (trans. B. Jowett).

122. Pliny, 1991, Bk. 8, §78 (pp. 117-18).

123. Bray, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 728-54; J. Needham, 1954-98, vol. 2 (1956), pp. 85-93.

124. David Boyle, writing about the deceptive objectivity of precise data, comments on statistics on soil erosion provided by 22 different sources which varied 8,000-fold: ‘The scary part is that all the figures were probably correct, but the one thing that they failed to provide was objective information. For that you need interpretation, quality, imagination’ (Boyle, 2001, p. 42).

125. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 361.

126. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 78.

127. ‘The thickness of flesh’, Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’ (1968, p. 135). ‘C'est que l'épaisseur de chair entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa visibilité à elle comme de sa corporéité à lui; ce n'est pas un obstacle entre lui et elle, c'est leur moyen de communication’ (1964a, p. 178).

128. Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 70.

129. I think this is also what the philosopher A. N. Whitehead is getting at when he describes the way sense perception works - both making us aware of the body and taking us beyond it. But he emphasises the potential treacherousness of vision in this regard. It is the sense that, par excellence, enables detachment and objectivity; it, more than any other sense, allows disengagement from the body. As a result Whitehead stresses the importance of both the presence and the non-presence of the body: ‘The peculiarity of sense-perception is its dual character, partly irrelevant to the body and partly referent to the body. In the case of sight, the irrelevance to the body is at its maximum … In the other modes of sensation the body is more prominent… . The current philosophic doctrines, mostly derived from Hume, are defective by reason of their neglect of bodily reference.’ However, he continues, ‘even in visual experience we are also aware of the intervention of the body. We know directly that we see with our eyes. That is a vague feeling, but extremely important’ (A. N. Whitehead, 1934, pp. 63-4 & 75).

130. Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998.

131. Pendry & Carrick, 2001.

132. Anderson & Dill, 2000.

133. B. Levy, 1996.

134. Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh et al., 2000.

135. Levy, Ashman & Dror, 1999-2000.

136. Zeki, 1999, p. 4.

137. Emery, 2000; Emery, Lorincz, Perrett et al., 1997. It is possible that some birds reared by humans may be capable of joint attention (Pepperberg & McLaughlin, 1996).

138. Kaminski, 2009, pp. 103-7; Call, Bräuer, Kaminski et al., 2003; Virányi, Topál, Gácsi et al., 2004.

139. Dogs may have a greater capacity than some primates to understand and share human attention: see Udell & Wynne, 2008; Miklósi, Polgárdi, Topál et al., 1998. A number of domesticated species can follow the direction of gaze (Tomasello, Call & Hare, 1998), e.g. goats (Kaminski, Riedel, Call et al., 2005) and dolphins (Tschudin, Call, Dunbar et al., 2001).

140. Okada, Sato & Toichi, 2006.

141. Wicker, Michel, Henaff et al., 1998. In both averted and direct mutual gaze, in addition to the expected ventral occipito-temporal region of the right hemisphere, areas including the occipital part of the fusiform gyrus, the right parietal lobule, the right inferior temporal gyrus and both middle temporal gyri are also activated. In both conditions there is an increase in activity in the right superior parietal lobule, right precentral gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus, as well as the right amygdala, right pulvinar and bilateral mediodorsal thalamic nuclei. See also Kingstone, Friesen & Gazzaniga, 2000.

142. Kircher, Senior, Phillips et al., 2001.

143. Decety & Chaminade, 2003.

144. Kanner, 1943.

145. Leekam, Hunnisett & Moore, 1998.

146. Charman, Swettenham, Baron-Cohen et al., 1997.

147. Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1995; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright & Jolliffe, 1997; Leekam, Baron-Cohen, Perrett et al., 1997.

148. Rosse, Kendrick, Wyatt et al., 1994.

149. Levin, 1999, p. 47 (emphasis in original).

150. Kawasaki, 1992, quoted by Ogawa, 1998, p. 153.

151. Belief, like faith and truth, etymologically implies a relation of loyalty, and has the same root as love (and as the German words Glauben and Liebe).

152. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, iv, p. 178.

153. ‘Wittgenstein argued that a truly religious belief should not be understood as a kind of empirical claim, a botched attempt to speak objective truths. Rather it is “something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference … a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It's passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” ‘ Sass, 2001, p. 282, referring to Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 64e.

154. The inevitable reciprocity of such relations is imaged in Meister Eckhart's ‘the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me … one vision or seeing, and one knowing and loving’ (1957, p. 288).

155. Vaihinger, 1935.

156. See p. 151 above.

157. Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003.

158. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part I, §67, p. 32.

159. Nunn, 2005, p. 195.

160. C. Jung, 1953-79, vol. 8, p. 271.

161. ibid., vol. 9i, p. 267.

162. Laban, 1960, p. 4.

163. Jan Patoc?ka (1907-77) was an important Czech phenomenological philosopher, active in the Charter 77 human rights movement. He spoke of the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, at one level an affirmation of the power and determination of those who have suffered political oppression, but at another a recognition of the resolve born of a different kind of suffering, in those for whom the comfortable familiarity of the apparently known no longer disguises the sheer ‘awe-full-ness’ of Being - what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto, 1923). Thus Andrew Shanks writes of ‘those who have been shaken, especially by the experience of great historic trauma, out of life “within a lie” - or, in general, out of the unquestioned prejudices of their culture - into a genuinely open-minded thoughtfulness. This is not the thoughtfulness of scholarly expertise; but, rather, that other sort of thoughtfulness (to be found at all different levels of scholarly sophistication or articulacy) which may also be described as a fundamental openness to transcendence’ (Shanks, 2000, p. 5).

164. Coleridge, 1965, vol. II, ch. xiv, p. 169.

165. Though not the sense of Shklovsky's call ‘to make it strange’, which is more akin to the right hemisphere sense - see pp. 412-13 below.

166. ‘… several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’: Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats dated 21/27(?) December 1817 (2002, pp. 41-2).

167. Again Pascal seems to me to put his finger on it: one cannot begin by assuming one understands one part of this conundrum - say, a neurone - and building up from there to an understanding of an aggregation of such parts: ‘the parts of the world are all so interrelated and linked to one another that I think it is impossible to know one without knowing the others, and without the whole … Since everything, then, is both a cause of, and is caused by, something else, supporting and being supported, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible bond which draws together the most distant and different entities, I maintain that it is impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and equally to know the whole without having an intimate knowledge of the parts … Who would not think, seeing us compose everything of mind and body, that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is what we understand the least. Of all objects of nature, none is more astonishing to man than himself; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is - and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. That is the hardest thing for him, and yet at the same time it is his very being. Modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus comprehendi ab homine non potest, et hoc tamen homo est (St. Augustine, City of God, xxi, 10: The manner in which the spirit is united with the body cannot be understood by man; and yet this is what man is)’: 1976, §72 (Lafuma §199); trans. I. McG. (‘Mais les parties du monde ont toutes un tel rapport et un tel enchaînement l'une avec l'autre que je crois impossible de connaître l'une sans l'autre et sans le tout … Donc toutes choses étant causées et causantes, aidées et aidantes, médiates et immédiates et toutes s'entretenant par un lien naturel et insensible qui lie les plus éloignées et les plus différentes, je tiens impossible de connaître les parties sans connaître le tout, non plus que de connaître le tout sans connaître particulièrement les parties … Qui ne croirait, à nous voir composer toutes choses d'esprit et de corps, que ce mélange-là nous serait bien compréhensible? C'est néanmoins la chose que l'on comprend le moins. L'homme est à lui-même le plus prodigieux objet de la nature, car il ne peut concevoir ce que c'est que corps et encore moins ce que c'est qu'esprit, et moins qu'aucune chose comment un corps peut être uni avec un esprit. C'est là le comble de ses difficultés et cependant c'est son propre être: modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus comprehendi ab homine non potest, et hoc tamen homo est.’)

CHAPTER 5: THE PRIMACY OF THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE

1. Wittgenstein, 1993, pp. 36-44: from Sass, 2001, p. 284.

2. Plato, Theaetetus, 155d2 ff.

3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 2, 982b11 ff.

4. Snell, 1960, p. 42. Democritus, along with Leucippus, is often thought of as the first scientific materialist. He also appears to have been the first person to believe he had a ‘theory of everything’, which led to his being branded by Montaigne and Pascal as impudent and over-reaching (Montaigne, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’, Essais, Bk. II:12 (1993, p. 545); Pascal, 1976, §72 (Lafuma §199)).

5. Descartes, 1984-91e, Part II, §53, p. 350. The opening words of Whitehead's Nature and Life are: ‘Philosophy is the product of wonder’ (A. N. Whitehead, 1934, p. 9). And Einstein once said: ‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle’ (Einstein, 1940, p. 5).

6. Eckermann, 1970, conversation of 18 February 1829, p. 296.

7. Sass, 2001, p. 284.

8. Nagel, 1986, p. 4.

9. Naess, 2002, p. 3 (emphasis added).

10. ‘Unsere meisten Ausdrücke sind metaphorisch, es steckt in denselben die Philosophie unserer Vorfahren’: Lichtenberg, 1967-72, Sudelbuch D (1773-5), §515, vol. 1, p. 308.

11. See Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 82-5; Kemper, 1989; Gibbs & O'Brien, 1990; Nayak & Gibbs, 1990; Gentner, 1982; and Gentner & Gentner, 1983.

12. Nietzsche, 1990, p. 31.

13. Donne, ‘Satyre III’, lines 79-81.

14. Cf. Pascal: ‘Car il ne faut pas se méconnaître: nous sommes automates autant qu'esprit’ (1976, §252, Lafuma §821).

15. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 738).

16. See Leslie Farber (1976) and Jon Elster (1983, see p. 161 above) for further exploration of this paradox.

17. Descartes, 1984-91b, ‘Meditation II’, p. 21 (emphasis in original).

18. Ruskin, 1904, vol. 4, Part V, ch. iv, §4, pp. 60-61 (emphasis in original).

19. Heidegger, 1977, p. 130.

20. ibid., p. 129.

21. Descartes, 1984-91c,’Discourse I: Light’, p. 152.

22. Kerényi, 1962, p. 115. Elsewhere he writes of the ritual nature of ‘the festal world of Homer’, which ‘rests on a special knowledge in the poet, a knowing which is a state of being exactly corresponding to the transparency of the world. The transparency of the world allows the divine figures of nature to shine through for the poet …’ (ibid., p. 144).

23. Diderot, 1995, vol. 2, pp. 86-123.

24. See p. 393 ff. below.

25. Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 164.

26. R. B. Zajonc, 1980; Zajonc, Pietromonaco & Bargh, 1982; and R. B. Zajonc, 1984. Also see Jaak Panksepp: ‘to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotion is subcortically and precognitively organised’ (1998, p. 26) and ‘the normal flow of motivational events in the brain’ is one in which ‘emotions and regulatory feelings have stronger effects on cognitions than the other way round’ (ibid., p. 166).

27. See pp. 159-60 above.

28. Panksepp, 1998, p. 334.

29. The primacy of affect leads me to differ on one point from the analysis of John Cutting, whose exposition of the relationship between the two hemispheres and the two primary major illnesses of schizophrenia and depression forms the core of his magnum opus the Principles of Psychopathology, as well as his subsequent works, Psychopathology and Modern Philosophy, and The Living, the Dead, and the Never-Alive. His insight that the world of the schizophrenic subject is the consequence of over-reliance on the left hemisphere, constructing a world the affectless nature of which derives from the relative absence of contribution from a normal right hemisphere, and whose apparent cognitive distortions are a consequence of the unnatural salience of what the left hemisphere brings into being, is brilliant. I would also accept the general outline of his account of depression as a condition in which there is over-reliance on the world of the right hemisphere; but my problem is with the view that the depressed affect, the mood disturbance, is consequent on the cognitive distortions that come about when the right hemisphere is alone responsible for bringing the world into being, without the countervailing contribution normally made by the left. The cognitive distortions that are undoubtedly present in depression must be, in my view, a consequence, not a cause, of the primary disturbance, which is a disturbance of affect. In short, we believe the world is a crock of shit because we are depressed; we are not depressed because we believe the world is a crock of shit. In the end I think this comes down to the primacy of affect, and applies to the left hemisphere/schizophrenia case as well: in other words, schizophrenia does not result in an affective disengagement from the world because the schizophrenic mind sees the world as mechanical, alien and lifeless: it sees the world as mechanical, alien and lifeless because it has disengaged affectively from the world. The primacy of affect in this case is less obvious, because the whole point is that, in schizophrenia, affect is absent - but the primacy of the effect of its absence applies nonetheless.

30. ‘Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency, which holds the answer to the last “why” in the analysis of thinking’: Vygotsky, 1986, p. 252.

31. Nietzsche, 2001, III, §179, p. 137 (emphasis added).

32. Panksepp, 1998, p. 308.

33. ibid., p. 309.

34. ibid., p. 420, n. 34. To which I can only add that that, too, is grounded on the ultimate declaration of being, once made by the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh, though it might as well have been Heidegger's Sein, if Sein were to be more forthcoming about itself: ‘I AM THAT I AM’.

35. ‘Les passions ont appris aux hommes la raison’: Vauvenargues, 1859, §154, p. 389.

36. A. R. Damasio, 1994a, p. 128.

37. ibid., p. 130. Cf. ibid., p. xiii: ‘at their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we have to make a moral judgment’.

38. ibid., p. 157.

39. For problems associated with seeing oneself, let alone seeing one's own feelings, never mind ‘through a window’, see especially Chapters 6, 8 & 14 of the current work. For further discussion of Damasio, see my review of Descartes’ Error in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 1996, 1(2), pp. 171-9; from his reactions to which I would not anticipate immediate assent from Damasio in what I have to say here, or anywhere else.

40. A. R. Damasio, 1994a, p. xiv. As Panksepp points out (1998, p. 341), ‘animals with essentially no neocortex remain behaviourally, and probably internally, as emotional as ever, indeed more so’. See also: Panksepp, Normansell, Cox et al., 1994.

41. Libet, 1985 (with open peer commentary, pp. 539-58; and Libet's reply, ‘Theory and evidence relating cerebral processes to conscious will’, pp. 558-66).

42. Kornhuber & Deecke, 1965.

43. Pockett, 2002, p. 144.

44. ‘Libet's results seems to be in tension with our commonsense picture only because they suggest positing volitions that initially are not conscious’: Rosenthal, 2002, p. 219.

45. Jaynes, 1976. Lakoff & Johnson (1999) make the same point about the low levels of conscious activity needed for most mental life, however sophisticated (p. 13).

46. Zeman, 2001.

47. See Joseph, 1992.

48. Mlot, 1998 (emphasis added).

49. Barchas & Perlaki, 1986.

50. Corbetta & Shulman, 2002, p. 208.

51. Wexler, Warrenburg, Schwartz et al., 1992.

52. Galin, 1974; Joseph, 1992.

53. Schore, 2003.

54. Freud, 1960d, p. 14.

55. Fullinwider, 1983, p. 158.

56. Meyer, Ishikawa, Hata et al., 1987. See also Gabel, 1988; and Ramachandran & Rogers-Ramachandran, 1996, which demonstrates that stimulation of the right hemisphere can cause an increase in REM sleep.

57. Bolduc, Daoust, Limoges et al., 2003; Goldstein, Stoltzfus & Gardocki, 1972.

58. Gazzaniga, 2000. Gazzaniga's highly influential paper merits further discussion. He is of the school that sees ‘the cortical arena as a patchwork of specialized processes’ (p. 1293: note that the metaphor of patchwork discloses that he sees the processes as stitched together, essentially unrelated in nature, however interconnected they may be); and sees language as having ousted the perceptual functions that were previously in its place in the left hemisphere, but making up for it by outsourcing the work to the right hemisphere on its behalf, so that it is now dependent on the right hemisphere to carry on covering for both (hence the importance of the corpus callosum in keeping the hemispheres in touch). His interpreter, first proposed in an earlier paper (1998), is ‘a device that allows us to construct theories about the relationship between perceived events, actions and feelings’ (2000, p. 1293), and in so doing to create the ‘illusion’ of the self. It will be apparent that I do not agree with the fragmented, patchwork view of hemisphere functions (typical itself of the left hemisphere's piecemeal approach); nor with the view that the division of labour between the hemispheres is a matter of domestic economy and efficiency, reminiscent of Adam Smith's division of labour (typical of the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world as resource to be utilised); nor the view that the left hemisphere invents the unified self by a theory about the relationship between events, actions and feelings (again typical of the left hemisphere view that it is the creator of our experience, and that any unity we may experience is an illusion created by the excellent job it has done in putting the bits together cognitively). This is what I meant when I said that relying on the left hemisphere (as we have to) to assess the relationship between the hemispheres is like asking a pre-Galilean geocentric astronomer whether the earth moves round the sun.

59. Vaihinger, 1935, p. 7.

60. Sapir, 1927.

61. Gallagher & Frith, 2004.

62. McNeill, 1992.

63. ibid., p. 25. Later work by McNeill confirms that ‘the onset of a gesture movement … often precedes and never [emphasis in original] follows the semantically related speech’ (McNeill, 2000, p. 326, n. 6). See also Kendon, 1972, 1980; Morrel-Samuels & Krauss, 1992; and Nobe, 2000.

64. McNeill, 1992, p. 26.

65. ibid., pp. 35 & 245.

66. ibid., p. 248.

67. ibid., p. 245; and see p. 259 for elaboration of this.

68. Black, 1962, p. 46.

69. McNeill, 1992, p. 23.

70. ibid., p. 331; but not so according to Miller & Franz, who found that the majority are synchronised bimanual gestures, and the minority that are one-handed are evenly divided between the hands (Miller & Franz, 2005).

71. McNeill, 1992, p. 343 ff.

72. McNeill, 2000, p. 326, n. 7 (emphasis added).

73. Miller & Franz, 2005; Iverson, 1999.

74. Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996; Rimé, Schiaratura, Hupet et al., 1984.

75. McNeill, 1992, p. 137.

76. ibid., pp. 167 & 269.

77. ibid., pp. 345-52.

78. EEG activity over the right hemisphere predominates in reading stories and over the left hemisphere in reading a scientific textbook: Ornstein, Herron, Johnstone et al., 1979. And see Vitz, 1990.

79. J. Bruner, 1986.

80. One nice detail of embryology is that the right cerebral hemisphere develops gyral complexity earlier than the left: see, e.g., Chi, Dooling & Gilles, 1977a.

81. According to one, it was ‘ “… make-believe. It's not a real war, just an experiment.” If a soldier next to him got wounded, it was just that he injured himself while throwing a grenade. And the flattened houses? “It's a local custom each year to pay certain communes to put on some real shooting on their land” ‘ (‘«… une fantasmagorie. Ce n'est pas une guerre réelle, mais une guerre d'expérience. » Un soldat à côté de lui a été blessé, c'est qu'il s'est blessé lui-même en lançant une grenade. Des maisons détruites? « C'est une coutume de payer chaque année certaines communes pour des tirs réels sur leur terroire. »’ (trans. I. McG.): Vié, 1944c, p. 248, reporting a paper by Demay & Renaux, 1919. See also Vié, 1944a, 1944b, for further examples.

82. Cutting, 1990; Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1952; Dobrokhotova & Bragina, 1977. See also p. 405-6 below.

83. Deglin & Kinsbourne, 1996. Inactivation of either hemisphere was the result of the administration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to that hemisphere: ECT has been shown to be a reliable method of hemisphere inactivation, producing predictable neurological signs indicative of inactivation of the treated hemisphere for a period of 30-40 minutes following treatment (see, e.g., Kriss, Blumhardt, Halliday et al., 1978).

84. Goel & Dolan, 2003.

85. See p. 41 above.

86. Kinsbourne, 2003.

87. Forming a new memory requires new synapses to be formed or existing synaptic connections to be strengthened. This is done in two stages. First, an experience alters certain receptors (known as AMPA receptors) at the synapse, privileging that synapse so that it communicates preferentially. Second, new proteins are synthesized that help the memory persist. Synaptic signals that trigger memories cause mRNA that codes for certain proteins to be transported from the nucleus to the synapse. The proteins that are created, called Arc proteins, having played their part at the synapse, travel back to the nucleus in a loop, an important mechanism for coordinating the changes that subserve the laying down of long-term memory. This sending out of emissaries that later report back to the centre at cellular level is a remarkable image of the process of memory itself as experienced. See Rao, Pintchovski, Chin et al., 2006.

88. See above, p. 88; also Decety & Chaminade, 2003.

89. According to Scheler, the cosmos, and beyond that the human world, is formed by the relationship between Sein and forces which he refers to as Drang and Geist, which stand in a permissive relationship - either saying ‘no’ or not saying ‘no’ - to one another. The interested reader is referred to Scheler's metaphysics (2008); particularly Chapter 7, pp. 323-67. My views on the complex relationship between the hemispheres and Scheler's Geist and Drang can be found in McGilchrist, 2009. In essence I believe that, while the right hemisphere has both Drang and Geist, the left hemisphere has Geist only.

90. Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, 2004; Banich, 1998.

91. LeDoux, 1999, p. 165.

92. The phrase ‘free won't’ is from Douglas Hofstadter (1985), quoted in Nunn, 2005, p. 39.

93. Bogen, 2000.

94. Nietzsche, 1999, §16, p. 76.

95. Cf. (p. 39) divided attention, where, though both hemispheres are involved, the right hemisphere may play the primary role; and (p. 46) the part played by the right hemisphere in conjugate eye movements.

96. ‘Critical Fragments’, §48, in F. Schlegel, 1991, p. 6.

97. Many other examples exist. For example, the German philosopher Novalis wrote: ‘Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical - discursive - atomistic - or purely intuitive - dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?’ (Logological Fragments, I, §10, in Novalis, 1997, p. 49).

98. ‘Ideas’, §48 & §108, in F. Schlegel, 2003, pp. 263 & 265.

99. ‘Athenaeum Fragments’, §53, in F. Schlegel, 2003, p. 247.

100. Coleridge, 1965, vol. II, ch. xiv, p. 171.

101. ‘With what must science begin?’, in Hegel, 1969, vol. I, Bk. i, §112: ‘… [die] Einheit des Unterschieden- und des Nichtunterschiedenseyns, - oder [die] Identität der Identität und Nichtidentität’.

102. Scruton, 1997, p. 152. Similarly Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted by Staude, 1976: ‘The work of the painter, the poet and the composer and the myths and symbols of primitive man [should] seem to us if not as a superior form of knowledge, at any rate as the most fundamental form of knowledge, and the only one that we all have in common; knowledge in the scientific sense is merely the sharpened edge of this other knowledge. More penetrating it may be, because its edge has been sharpened on the hard stone of fact, but this penetration has been acquired at the price of a great loss of substance’ (p. 303: emphasis added).

103. See p. 136 above.

104. Coleridge, 1956-71, vol. 1, p. 349.

105. ibid., p. 354.

106. Nietzsche, 2003, §11 [73], p. 212 (emphasis in original).

107. Hume, 1986, ‘Of the Influencing Motives of the Will’, p. 22.

108. Hegel, 1949, p. 68.

109. Groucho Marx's famous mot about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him for a member wittily inverts the perspective, but has a similar structure.

110. For a fuller treatment see Shanks, forthcoming.

111. Hegel, 1949, pp. 112-13.

112. For a discussion of kenosis in neuropsychological terms, see Teske, 1996.

113. Wittgenstein, 2001, §6.13 & §6.421, pp. 78 & 86.

114. See p. 21 above.

CHAPTER 6: THE TRIUMPH OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE

1. Hellige, 1993, pp. 336-7.

2. ibid., p. 168.

3. Ringo, Doty, Demeter et al., 1994.

4. According to Chiarello & Maxfield (1996), inhibition may be of three main kinds: isolation, interference and suppression. Isolation is inhibition of communication, and enables one hemisphere to be cut off from the other to prevent crosstalk that might interfere. Interference is precisely the failure to inhibit communication, which consequently ‘inhibits’ successful function. Suppression is the active inhibition of the homologous area of the contralateral hemisphere: this is the subject of Norman Cook's The Brain Code (1986).

5. Gazzaniga, 1970.

6. Baynes, Tramo, Reeves et al., 1997, p. 1160.

7. Ferguson, Rayport & Corrie, 1985, p. 504.

8. Sergent, 1983b.

9. Sergent, 1983a, 1986 & 1990.

10. Sperry, 1974, p. 11. See also Joseph, 1988a.

11. Boroojerdi, Diefenbach & Ferbert, 1996; Boroojerdi, Hungs, Mull et al., 1998; Schnider, Benson & Rosner, 1993.

12. Cioni, Bartalena & Boldrini, 1994.

13. Rothwell, Colebatch, Britton et al., 1991; Meyer, Röricht, Gräfin von Einsiedel et al., 1995; Meyer, Röricht & Woiciechowsky, 1998.

14. Swayze, Andreasen, Ehrhardt et al., 1990; Lewis, Reveley, David et al., 1988; Filteau, Pourcher, Bouchard et al., 1991; Velek, White, Williams et al., 1988; Degreef, Lantos, Bogerts et al., 1992; MacPherson, Holgate & Gudeman, 1987.

15. Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000.

16. David, 1987; Merrin, Floyd & Fein, 1989. Studies of the ability to inhibit motor-evoked potentials are in agreement with these findings: Boroojerdi, Töpper, Foltys et al., 1999; Höppner, Kunesch, Großmann et al., 2001.

17. This position would appear to be supported by a recent review of callosotomy: ‘Synchronization and relay of information to inform one hemisphere about the activities of the other hemisphere is a critical function. Another, perhaps more important, function of the corpus callosum is to allow one hemisphere to control and inhibit homologous areas in the other hemisphere, providing a critical pathway for the development of specialized hemispheric functions’ (Devinsky & Laff, 2003, p. 615).

18. Chicoine, Proteau & Lassonde, 2000.

19. Galin, Johnstone, Nakell et al., 1979; Salamy, 1978.

20. Merola & Liederman, 1985.

21. Quinn & Geffen, 1986; Liederman, Merola & Hoffman, 1986.

22. The Upanishads, 1953, p. 27: Brihad-aranyaka, iv, 4, 22 (emphasis added).

23. So quoted and translated by Friedrich Max Müller in The Science of Thought, Longman's, Green & Co., London, 1887, p. 143. There are numerous versions, though Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A51, B75) actually wrote ‘Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind’ (1977b, vol. 3, p. 98). In either case the point is made, though Anschauungen normally suggests something closer to perceptions: thus ‘thoughts without content are empty, perceptions without concepts are blind’.

24. The necessary equipoise between the hemispheres may have been intuited by Pascal: ‘Nature has placed us so well in the centre, that if we adjust one side of the balance, we also alter the other. This makes me believe that there are springs in our brain which are so adjusted that if you touch one, you also touch its contrary’: 1976, §70 (Lafuma §519); trans. I. McG. (‘La nature nous a si bien mis au milieu que si nous changeons un côté de la balance nous changeons aussi l'autre. Cela me fait croire qu'il y a des ressorts dans notre tête qui sont tellement disposés que qui touche l'un touche aussi le contraire.’) This was allied to the ambivalent status of reason: ‘It is equally excessive to shut reason out and to let nothing else in’: 1976, §253 (Lafuma §183); trans. I. McG. (‘2 excès: exclure la raison, n'admettre que la raison’).

25. See Galin & Ornstein, 1972; Levy, Trevarthen & Sperry, 1972; Bogen & Bogen, 1969; and TenHouten, 1985.

26. Levy & Trevarthen, 1976, p. 300.

27. ‘The tonic and/or phasic status of the several modulatory systems of the brainstem seem fully capable of apportioning their effects to favour one or the other hemisphere in gaining ascendancy in metacontrol’ (Kavcic, Fei, Hu et al., 2000, p. 81).

28. Hellige, Jonsson & Michimata, 1988.

29. Hellige, Taylor & Eng, 1989.

30. Banich, 2003, pp. 269-70; Banich & Karol, 1992.

31. Marzi, Perani, Tassinari et al., 1999.

32. Levy, Heller, Banich et al., 1983; Kim & Levine, 1991, 1992; Kim, Levine & Kertesz, 1990; Levine, Banich & Koch-Weser, 1984; Levy, 1990. See also Boles, 1998, for the view that local perceptual asymmetries are more likely than global ones.

33. Spencer & Banich, 2005.

34. Marzi, Bisiacchi & Nicoletti, 1991; Bisiacchi, Marzi, Nicoletti et al., 1994; Brown, Larson & Jeeves, 1994; Saron & Davidson, 1989.

35. Larson & Brown, 1997.

36. Oliveri, Rossini, Traversa et al., 1999; Vuilleumier, Hester, Assal et al., 1996; Lomber & Payne, 1996; Hilgetag, Théoret & Pascual-Leone, 2001.

37. Brown-Séquard, 1890.

38. Kinsbourne, 1993b; Oliveri, Rossini, Traversa et al., 1999.

39. Luck, Hillyard, Mangun et al., 1989, 1994.

40. Outside of the literature on commissurotomy, it is not, in fact, always the left hand that behaves disruptively. There are, albeit rare, cases that show the reverse. Bleuler (1902) described the case of a patient with GPI (‘general paralysis of the insane’), a consequence of tertiary syphilis, whose right hand ‘grabbed at ropes, chopped things with an axe, sowed seeds, and slung away unwanted invisible objects with great vigour. Sometimes it would seize hold of the blankets or the pillow and try to yank them away, and once upset the patient's dinner. When this happened, the sane left hand readjusted the bedclothes, wiped the patient's mouth, and gave every appearance of remaining in contact with reality. The consciousness associated with the delirious right hand had full command of language; the rational consciousness corresponding to the patient's left-handed activities seemed occasionally able to speak, but was considerably more limited in this respect’ (Davidson & Hugdahl, 1995, p. 17; and see commentary in Meyer, 1904a). Similarly Liepmann (1900) described a patient in whom ‘the entire callosum was very atrophic’ (A. Meyer, 1904b, p. 284) and who, additionally had a cyst in the rostral part of the callosum. Following a left hemisphere stroke, he developed aggressive and out of control behaviour with his right hand, which nonetheless completely suppressed the calm and reasonable activity of his, normally functioning, left hand. ‘When asked to pick up and show the use of some objects before him, he blundered in every attempt, acted perversely, and made odd movements with the right arm. When the right arm was held and he had to use the left, he correctly picked out cards which he could not do with the right; movements of the foot could be imitated with the left but not with the right foot. When the right side was inhibited the appearance of dementia was stopped and the patient could be examined. There evidently existed motor confusion and perplexity on the habitually used right side and inability to spontaneously use the left capable side. The right side would at once fumble and distract hopelessly’ (A. Meyer, 1904b, p. 277, emphasis in the original).

41. The relationship has thought-provoking similarities with that described by Meister Eckhart between God and the human soul.

42. Bogen, 1985, p. 38.

43. Sperry, 1985, pp. 14-15.

44. Landis, Graves & Goodglass, 1981.

45. Sperry, 1985, pp. 22-3.

46. Panksepp, 1998, p. 307. See also Lambert, 1991; Pashler, Luck, Hillyard et al., 1994.

47. Panksepp, 1998, p. 312. See also p. 421, n. 45: ‘There are powerful interconnections between the mesencephalic areas implicated in the generation of the primal SELF and the frontal cortex.’

48. Panksepp, 1998, p. 314; see also Passingham, 1993; Mantyh, 1982.

49. Another advantage of the idea that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing entity but a graduated process is that it accommodates the possibility of degrees of consciousness in other sentient beings.

50. Nagel, 1979b, p. 166.

51. ‘[T]he analogical form of the English expression “what is it like?” is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles”, but rather “how it is for the subject himself” ‘ (Nagel, 1979b, p. 170, n. 6).

52. See p. 151 above.

53. van der Merwe & Voestermans, 1995.

54. Panksepp, 1998, p. 303.

55. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, pp. 147-8.

56. As Thomas Nagel writes: ‘I do not wish to claim that the line between conscious and unconscious mental activity is a sharp one. It is even possible that the distinction is partly relative, in the sense that a given item of mental activity may be assignable to consciousness or not, depending on what other mental activities of the same person are going on at the same time, and whether it is connected with them in a suitable way’ (Nagel, 1979a, p. 157).

57. Not quite immediately, if one story of Diana Duff Cooper is to be believed. She was deep in conversation when her passenger remarked on a near miss, to which she is said to have replied: ‘Oh my God, am I driving?’

58. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 94.

59. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 56.

60. Bejjani, Damier, Arnulf et al., 1999; and (hypomanic episode) communication re unsubmitted work. Later Agid & colleagues were able reliably to induce hypomania in two patients who consented to have functional imaging contemporaneously, showing mainly widespread activations in the right hemisphere (Mallet, Schüpbach, N'Diaye et al., 2007: see Chapter 2, n. 299). Others have found that stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei can induce mania post-operatively (see, e.g., Kulisevsky, Berthier, Gironell et al., 2002; Romito, Raja, Daniele et al., 2002; Herzog, Reiff, Krack et al., 2003), but this is less significant than Agid's finding that minute displacements of the electrode can induce episodes of integrated affective, cognitive and motor states with acute onset and cessation related to stimulation.

61. Goethe, Faust, Part I, line 1237.

62. Since this applies to the structure of reason itself, it applies a fortiori to the practical business of science, which is why reductionism could succeed only within a self-enclosed system. Thus Einstein: ‘the supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world-picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or ‘feeling one's way in'] is developed by experience’ (‘Preface’, Planck, 1933, p. 12); and Planck himself: ‘… empiricism is unassailable on the fundamental ground of pure logic; and its conclusions are equally impregnable. But if we look at it purely from the viewpoint of knowledge it leads into a blind alley, which is called solipsism. In order to escape from this impasse there is no other way open but to jump the wall at some part of it, and preferably at the beginning. This can be done only by introducing, once and for all, a metaphysical hypothesis which has nothing to do with the immediate experience of sense-perceptions or the conclusions logically drawn from them’ (Planck, 1933, p. 128).

63. See p. 489, n. 106.

64. Heidegger, 1966, p. 50.

65. According to Max Planck, the aim of science - knowledge - ‘is an incessant struggle towards a goal which can never be reached. Because the goal is of its very nature unattainable. It is something that is essentially metaphysical and as such is always again and again beyond each achievement… . it is just this striving forward that brings us to the fruits which are always falling into our hands and which are the unfailing sign that we are on the right road and that we are ever and ever drawing nearer to our journey's end. But that journey's end will never be reached, because it is always the still far thing that glimmers in the distance and is unattainable. It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him. This is an acknowledgment made long ago by thinkers of deepest insight …’ (Planck, 1933, p. 83).

66. Ramachandran, 2005, pp. 131-2 (emphasis added).

67. Nietzsche, 1973, §68, p. 72.

68. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 151.

69. ibid., p. 141; and see Fink, Marshall, Halligan et al., 1999b.

70. Stanghellini, 2004.

71. Dobrokhotova & Bragina, 1977.

72. Spitzer, Willert, Grabe et al., 2004.

73. Krystal, Bremner, Southwick et al., 1998.

74. Spitzer, Willert, Grabe et al., 2004.

75. Maquet, Faymonville, Degueldre et al., 1999; Jasiukaitis, Nouriani & Spiegel, 1996; Jasiukaitis, Nouriani, Hugdahl et al., 1997; Aleksandrowicz, Urbanik & Binder, 2006.

76. Kosslyn, Thompson, Costantini-Ferrando et al., 2000.

77. Edmonston & Moscovitz, 1990.

78. Rainville, Hofbauer, Paus et al., 1999.

79. Ruby & Decety, 2001.

80. Spiegel & Spiegel, 1987, p. 23. And they continue: ‘It is perhaps no accident that tunnel vision … is associated with the high hypnotisability of hysterics. One responsive hypnotic subject informed us that she experienced tunnel vision every time she entered the hypnotic state.’

81. Spiegel, 1991.

PART 2: HOW THE BRAIN HAS SHAPED OUR WORLD

The Master and his Emissary

CHAPTER 7: IMITATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE

1. Nietzsche, 1999, §1, p. 14. Nietzsche goes on to say that the opposition is bridged only by art, until by a ‘metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “Will”, they appear paired and, in this pairing, finally engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal measure: Attic tragedy’.

2. Jaspers, 1949 (trans. 1953).

3. Weber, 1951, 1952, 1958.

4. Gaukroger, 2006, p. 11.

5. ibid., p. 18.

6. Panksepp, 1998, pp. 426-7, n. 19 (emphasis added).

7. Lumsden, 1988, pp. 17 & 20.

8. Changeux, 1988.

9. Dawkins, 1976, p. 192.

10. Ruskin, 1904, vol. 5, Part VI, ch. v, §2, p. 39 (emphasis in original).

11. Hayek, 1978, p. 241.

12. Thorpe, 1967, pp. 1-12. However bats and marine mammals are also known to imitate sounds on occasion, and recently an elephant was discovered to be imitating the distant sound of a truck: see Poole, Tyack, Stoeger-Horwath et al., 2005.

13. This is a complex area, and opinions differ partly because the definition of imitation differs. Until recently it was accepted that only humans imitate: there is evidence, however, that apes, and possibly even monkeys, are capable of imitation, rather than just emulation. For a helpful summary, see Hurley & Chater, 2005, pp. 13-22.

14. Hurley, 2004.

15. Sonnby-Borgström, 2002.

16. Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau et al., 2003.

17. Prinz, 2005a.

18. Meltzoff, 1995.

19. Prinz, 2005a, 2005b.

20. ‘Human infants derive joy in matching per se’: Andrew Meltzoff, quoted by Melser (2004, p. 59).

21. Meltzoff & Moore, 1983.

22. Taussig, 1993, pp. xiii-xiv (emphasis added).

23. Benjamin, 1986, p. 332. Similarly Adorno wrote: ‘The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings’ (2005, p. 154).

24. Mithen, 2005, p. 318, n. 30.

25. The passage is quoted, at greater length, by Kerényi (‘The mythological strain in Greek religion’, in Kerényi, 1962, p. 29), who describes it as a ‘wonderful realisation’ of the relationship between myth and bios.

26. Snell, 1960, ‘From myth to logic’, pp. 202-3. Snell actually speaks (correctly) of similes, though the force of what he says is clearly that they work like metaphors.

27. Maxwell, 2006.

28. The Prelude (1805), Bk. I, lines 425-7.

29. Ogawa, 1998, p. 147.

30. Le Bihan, Turner, Zeffiro et al., 1993.

31. See p. 167 above.

32. James, 1990, p. 737.

33. Nietzsche, 2003, §34 [247], p. 15 (emphasis in original).

34. The best expression that I know on this subject is that of Schopenhauer, often quoted as ‘Der Mensch kann was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen was er will’. The passage is from Schopenhauer, 1962, p. 563: ‘Ich kann tun, was ich will: ich kann, wenn ich will, alles, was ich habe, den Armen geben und dadurch selbst einer werden - wenn ich will! - Aber ich vermag nicht, es zu wollen; weil die entgegenstehenden Motive viel zuviel Gewalt über mich haben, als daß ich es könnte’ (‘I can do as I will: I can, if I will, give everything that I have to the poor, and thereby become one of them myself - if I will! - but I cannot will it, since countervailing motives have much too much power over me, for me to be able to do so’: trans. I. McG.)

35. See p. 160 above.

36. See p. 233 above. This suspension of the natural attitude is part of what Husserl meant by epoche, and is a good example of the Master and the emissary working in harmony: the left hemisphere is involved in facilitating the process of phenomenology, despite the fact that the aim of that process is to regain the right hemisphere's apprehension of the world.

CHAPTER 8: THE ANCIENT WORLD

1. Brener, 2000.

2. ’Die unterhaltendste Fläche auf der Erde für uns ist die vom menschlichen Gesicht’: Lichtenberg, 1967-72, Sudelbuch F (1776-1779), §88, vol. 1, p. 473.

3. A recent paper comparing the productions of an autistic child painter and early cave paintings gives some incidental support to Brener's thesis that primitive art shows a paucity of right-hemisphere function (Humphrey, 1998).

4. Pontius, 1976, 1983 & 1984; Farah, 1994.

5. Hufschmidt, 1980, 1983.

6. McManus & Humphrey, 1973; see also Humphrey & McManus, 1973. Research comparing profile direction with other indications such as the relationship of the painter to the sitter confirms that the reason for favouring the left-facing profile is almost certainly the more emotionally engaging nature of the image: for example, family portraits are more likely to evince the leftward-facing, right hemisphere bias than professional portraits (Nicholls, Clode, Wood et al., 1999). Remarkably enough, portraits of scientists actually evince a rightwards-facing, left hemisphere bias (ten Cate, 2002).

7. For example, Conesa, Brunold-Conesa & Miron, 1995. Of the two advantages attendant on the leftward orientation, it seems likely that an inclination to place the focus of interest in the viewer's left visual hemifield (right hemisphere) predominates, since it is more probable that we have intuitive experience of a greater emotional sensitivity in one half of the experiential world than that we have subliminal recognition of the expressive advantage of the left hemiface. Some evidence would appear to bear this out in a manner that is germane to the thesis of this book. Images used in advertising, which are aimed not at the empathic right hemisphere, but at the ‘grasping’ left hemisphere, show a rightward bias of the profile, which is apparently consistent over time from the beginnings of pictorial advertising in the Victorian period to the present day (Burkitt, Saucier, Thomas et al., 2006).

8. Grüsser, Selke & Zynda, 1988. There is some support for these conclusions in subsequent research, e.g. Latto, 1996.

9. Shanon, 1979; Jensen, 1952a, 1952b.

10. Latto, 1996; Nicholls, Clode, Wood et al., 1999.

11. R. Jung, 1975. It should be pointed out that he was unusual in demonstrating such a change so clearly following right-hemisphere stroke. Most other painters who have had right-hemisphere strokes have evinced sometimes remarkable changes in style (though some evinced none at all), without altering the direction of profile. For a survey, see Bäzner & Hennerici, 2007.

12. Coles, 1974; Grüsser, Selke & Zynda, 1988.

13. For the different points in the history of the Ancient world that have been put forward as candidates in this development, see, for example, Christopher Pelling, in the preface to Pelling, 1990, p. v.

14. Jaynes, 1976.

15. Clarke, 1999, p. 115.

16. ibid., p. 119.

17. ibid., pp. 74-5.

18. ibid., p. 77.

19. ibid., p. 68.

20. ibid., pp. 114-15.

21. ibid., pp. 110-11.

22. ibid., pp. 121-2.

23. ibid., p. 123.

24. ibid., p. 287.

25. Jaynes, 1976, pp. 70-71.

26. Clarke, 1999, pp. 277-8.

27. Dodds, 1951, p. 28.

28. Gill, 1996.

29. Snell, 1960. In referring to Snell, I am aware that his writings suffer from the fact that they were written some 60-70 years ago, and that they have inevitably and rightly been taken as classics to be reckoned with and criticised. Gill, for example, objects to Snell's philosophical standpoint and his presupposition, according to Gill, of the ‘post-Cartesian conception of self and the post-Kantian conception of morality’ (Gill, 1996, p. 41). He sees Snell taking ‘modern ideas about personality and selfhood as being normative, and [classifies] ancient Greek ideas as relatively “primitive” or “developed” by reference to this norm’ (ibid., p. 3). This is, I believe, too harsh and simplistic. In his introduction to The Discovery of the Mind, Snell writes: ‘Since the turn of the eighteenth century our growing awareness of evolutionary patterns may have contributed to the elimination of such rationalist concepts as the ageless, unchanging “spirit”. Yet a proper understanding of the origins of Greek thought remains difficult because all too frequently we measure the products of early Greece by the fixed standards of our own age … we are quick to forget how radically the experience of Homer differs from our own’ (Snell, 1960, p. 5). Whether or not Snell is in fact guilty of being normative, and thoughtlessly applying modern conceptions and standards (and in my reading he does so very much less than Gill would seem to imply), I have no interest in making value judgments of this kind.

30. The discussion of ‘seeing’ words is in Snell, 1960, pp. 1-5.

31. Snell compares the German schauen, as in Goethe's ‘Zum sehen geboren, zum schauen bestellt’ (Faust, Part II, v, lines 11288-9).

32. Snell, 1960, ‘Homer's View of Man’, pp. 1-22.

33. Russell, 1946, p. 25.

34. Most of what we know of Anaximander comes down to us from Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. This fragment of Anaximander is all that remains to us of his treatise On Nature, and it does so only as reported by the philosopher Simplicius of Cilicia, writing 11 centuries later. The translation here is adapted from that of W. K. C. Guthrie.

35. Although I see Anaximenes as having taken a retrograde step, by concluding, more along the lines of Thales, that a physical element could be a candidate for the arche-, I grant that from the standpoint of scientific materialism this could be seen as a step forward, in that at least we are back in the realm of the empirically testable, and the idea is more reductive in intent.

36. Diogenes Laertius, 1964, IX, §5.

37. Heraclitus, fr. VII, Diels 18 (I use Kahn's notation (1979), but give Diels's numbers for reference. Translations from Heraclitus are Kahn's unless otherwise stated).

38. ibid., fr. XXXIII, Diels 93.

39. Kahn, 1979, p. 124. Similar points have been made about Heidegger, who learnt so much from Heraclitus, and were indeed made by Heidegger about himself.

40. Kahn quotes Hölscher: ‘Paradox ist seine Rede, weil seine Wahrheit paradox ist’: Hölscher, 1968, p. 141.

41. Heraclitus, fr. LXXX, Diels 54.

42. ibid., fr. IX, Diels 35; fr. X, Diels 123.

43. ibid., fr. XXXV, Diels 45 (translation adapted from Snell).

44. Aristotle, De Anima, I.5, 411a7.

45. Kahn, 1979, pp. 128-30.

46. Snell, 1960, pp. 17-18.

47. Heraclitus, fr. IV, Diels 17.

48. ibid., fr. XIV, Diels 55; fr. XV, Diels 101a. In a deliberately provocative (because probably aimed at the astronomers of the Milesian school) expression of the primacy of phenomena, he is even reported to have said that ‘the sun is the size of a human foot’, and that ‘the sun is new every day’: ibid., fr. XLVII, Diels 3; fr. XLVIII, Diels 6.

49. ibid., fr. XVI, Diels 107.

50. Kahn, 1979, p. 102.

51. ibid., p. 21.

52. Heraclitus, fr. XLIX, Diels 126.

53. ibid., fr. LXXXIII, Diels 53.

54. ibid., fr. LXXXI, Diels A22.

55. ibid., fr. LXXVIII, Diels 51.

56. ibid., fr. LXXIX, Diels 48.

57. Known to us from Plato's report: Cratylus, 401d.

58. Heraclitus, fr. L, Diels 12; fr. LI, Diels 91.

59. ibid., fr. LXXVII, Diels 125.

60. ibid., fr. XL, Diels 90.

61. ibid., fr. III, Diels 2.

62. ibid., fr. LXX, Diels 61.

63. Kahn, 1979, Appendix I, p. 289. The fragment in question is included in the corpus by Diels (122), though not by Kahn. The conversation on Gelassenheit in Heidegger's late Feldweg-Gesprächen originally bore the title ‘Anchibasie’; he suggests that we should understand the term as in-die-Nähe-hinein-sich-einlassen (‘letting oneself into a tentative closeness with’ whatever it may be).

64. Parmenides, 1898, fr. DK B3 (trans. A. Fairbanks).

65. Heidegger, 1959. I am also aware of Peter Kingsley's view (2001) that Parmenides is a misunderstood mystic. I am in no position to evaluate his position authoritatively, though I note that it has generally not been well received by those who are.

66. Plato, Parmenides, 134c (trans. S. Scolnicov).

67. Plato, Sophist, 259e.

68. Plato, Theaetetus, 152e.

69. According to Diogenes Laertius (1964, IX, §6), Theophrastus blamed the ‘half-finished’ nature of Heraclitus’ work, and its apparent ‘inconsistencies’ on melancholia (The Master and his Emissary The Master and his Emissary): I am grateful to Edward Hussey and Chris Pelling for help in interpretation of the phrase The Master and his Emissary. Heraclitus became known as ‘the melancholy philosopher’, probably on the basis of Theophrastus’ comments, and Democritus as ‘the laughing philosopher’, a tradition that may begin with his essay Peri euthumies, ‘On cheerfulness’ (Diogenes Laertius, 1964, IX, §13). For whatever reason, the tradition persisted, with notable treatments in literature by Juvenal, Rabelais and Burton, and in painting by Bramante, Rubens, and (in an interesting portrait of himself painting his self-portrait) Rembrandt. There is, if nothing else, an appropriateness, in terms of hemisphere asymmetry, since Heraclitus’ philosophy is, as I have suggested, expressive of the right hemisphere's understanding of the world, and Democritus’ philosophy of the left hemisphere's.

70. Drama is ‘the Apolline embodiment of Dionysiac insights and effects’: Nietzsche, 1999, §8, p. 44.

71. Snell, 1960, pp. 200-1.

72. Nietzsche, 1999, §8, p. 43.

73. Prometheus’ name means ‘forethought’, which might seem to suggest the frontal lobes. However, as Aeschylus has him say, ‘I caused men no longer to foresee their death … I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness’ (Prometheus Bound, lines 249-51, trans. P. Vellacott): the combination of foresight with inability to foresee death, a state of optimistic denial, could only be left frontal. His name could also signify ‘cunning’, which again would go with representing the capacities of the left frontal lobe. Born a Titan, he realised that the Olympians would win in the struggle of the Titans and the Olympians, and sided with the Olympians, thus initially evading the punishment meted out by Zeus to the other Titans. His greatest punishment, which however he did not foresee, the punishment that Zeus stored up for him, was to see humankind suffer, to suffer so badly that they would rather desire death than life, and yet to be powerless to help them. For Prometheus, empathy is his nemesis, the punishment he didn't foresee; for that other Promethean figure, Faust, empathy (at least according to Goethe's version of the myth) is his salvation, the reward he had not foreseen.

74. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, I, lines 443-4, 447-50 & 457-61 (trans. I. McG.).

75. Hagège, 1988, p. 74.

76. Kerényi, 1991, p. xxii.

77. A. W. Schlegel, 1886, p. 79.

78. ibid., p. 93.

79. Mark Griffith, in the introduction to his edition of Prometheus Bound (1983), writes: ‘it has certainly been regarded as Aeschylean since the third century BC, and no doubts as to its authenticity are recorded from ancient authors or in the scholia to the play. Most modern scholars have seen no good reason to doubt the traditional ascription …’ (p. 32).

80. The story of Aeschylus being put on trial for profaning the mysteries may, however, not be reliable: Lefkowitz, 1981, p. 68.

81. A. W. Schlegel, 1886, p. 95.

82. ibid., p. 93.

83. Skoyles, 1988.

84. de Kerckhove, 1988a.

85. Miller, Liu, Ngo et al., 2000.

86. Amengual, Drago, Foster et al., 2008.

87. While Chinese script continues to be written from right to left, in the construction of an individual graph the general rule is, as one might expect, given the different nature of the exercise, left before right (Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, personal communication).

88. de Kerckhove & Lumsden, 1988, p. 5.

89. Naveh, 1988.

90. de Kerckhove & Lumsden, 1988, pp. 5-6; see also de Kerckhove, 1988b, pp. 156-7.

91. de Kerckhove, 1988b, pp. 169-70 (emphasis added).

92. ibid.

93. Babkoff & Ben-Uriah, 1983; Eviatar, 1997; Faust, Kravetz & Babkoff, 1993; Lavidor, Ellis & Pansky, 2002; Vaid, 1988.

94. Nakamura, Oga, Okada et al., 2005.

95. See, e.g., Tokunaga, Nishikawa, Ikejiri et al., 1999; Thuy, Matsuo, Nakamura et al., 2004.

96. Chee, Tan & Thiel, 1999; Chee, Weekes, Lee et al., 2000; Tan, Spinks, Gao et al., 2000; Tan, Liu, Perfetti et al., 2001; Kuo, Yeh, Duann et al., 2001.

97. Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2007.

98. Tan, Feng, Fox et al., 2001.

99. See Havelock, 1963; Skoyles, 1984, 1985.

100. Hagège, 1988, p. 75.

101. Braudel, 2001, pp. 76 & 78.

102. Hagège, 1988, p. 77.

103. Seaford, 2004, esp. pp. 136-46.

104. ibid., pp. 30-33.

105. ibid., pp. 68-9.

106. ibid., pp. 149-65.

107. ibid., p. 67.

108. Braudel, 2001, p. 264.

109. ibid., p. 246.

110. See West, 1971; and West, 1997.

111. The earliest coins date from the late seventh century or early sixth century, according to Seaford, 2004, p. 129 ff.

112. Braudel, 2001, p. 146 ff.

113. ibid., pp. 147-8.

114. Gombrich, 1977, p. 103.

115. Braudel, 2001, p. 265.

116. ibid., p. 271.

117. ibid., p. 265.

118. ibid., p. 266.

119. ibid., p. 268. The demand that such love should be ‘reasonable’, and is otherwise pathological, revives memories of Fontenelle, which otherwise seem so far from Braudel's spirit.

120. Braudel, op. cit., pp. 287-8.

121. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II. 6, 1106b35 (trans. W. D. Ross). It is impossible not to be reminded of the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.

122. Pliny, Natural History, Bk. 35, §88, cited by Elsner, 2007, p. 203 (equivalent passage is at Pliny, 1991, p. 333).

123. Boys-Stones, 2007, p. 111.

124. Elsner, 2007, p. 216.

125. Nietzsche, 1999, §1, p. 16.

126. Snell, 1960, p. 229.

127. Plato, Republic, 529d-530c (trans. H. D. P. Lee).

128. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 202.

129. Nietzsche, 1954, aphorisms 5, 6 & 10, pp. 476-8 (emphasis in original).

130. Panksepp, 1998, p. 335.

131. Plato, Republic, 595b, 599a, 600d, 601a, 602b, 603a, 605a,b.

132. ibid., 397d-e.

133. ibid., 398-400.

134. Cf. Lenin's words about the arts in relation to the state, p. 412 below.

135. Plato, Phaedo, 60e5 ff.

136. Nietzsche, 1999, §14, p. 71.

137. Malinowski, 1926, p. 39.

138. Kerényi, 1962, p. 28.

139. Plato, Timaeus, 44d-e (trans. F. M. Cornford).

140. Empedocles, fr. 57-9, as trans. in Burnet, 1892, p. 214.

141. Geikie, 1912; Fairclough, 1930.

142. Virgil, The Aeneid, I, line 462. This is a hard line to translate: Fagles gives ‘the world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart’, but that misses the idea that there are tears for passing things and what they mean to humanity (compassion, not just misery), which other translators have tried to capture, none quite satisfactorily.

143. Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, lines 160-66, 194-204, 250 & 264-7 (trans. R. Humphries).

144. Braudel, 2001, pp. 338-9.

145. ibid., p. 344.

146. Aristotle does so pronounce at Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a15.

147. Braudel, 2001, pp. 351-2.

148. Freeman, 2002, p. 77.

149. Braudel, 2001, p. 344.

150. L'Orange, 1965, p. 3.

151. ibid., pp. 3-8.

152. ibid., pp. 9-11.

153. Fractality is the property of forms as diverse as plants, river systems, coast lines, snowflakes and blood vessels that dictates that their form at higher levels of magnification replicates their form at lower levels. Although the term is modern, and derives from the mathematics of Benoît Mandelbrot in the mid-1970s, Leibniz may already have intuited, possibly on the basis of microscope findings, that nature is fractal: see Leibniz, 1992, §67-8, pp. 25-6, and commentary on pp. 41 & 234 ff. Elsewhere in this aphoristic late work, Leibniz relates his description of these worlds within worlds that formed part of his monadology to two further concepts of relevance for the theme of this book: the way that each body mirrors its environing universe, and each soul mirrors its environing body (and consequently the entire universe) (§61-2); and the way in which ‘all bodies are in a perpetual flux, like rivers, and some parts enter into them and some pass out continually’ (§71-2).

154. L'Orange, 1965, pp. 11 & 14-15.

155. ibid., p. 106.

156. ibid., p. 110.

157. ibid., p. 18.

158. ibid., pp. 22-4.

159. ibid., pp. 24-5.

160. ibid., p. 30.

161. ibid., pp. 88-9.

162. ibid., pp. 100 & 128-9.

163. Braudel, 2001, pp. 345-7.

164. Freeman, 2002.

165. Lançon, 2000, p. 93 ff.

166. Freeman, 2002, p. 67.

167. ibid., p. 137.

168. Beard, 2002.

169. Freeman, 2002, p. 21.

170. Lloyd, 1987, p. 57.

171. Ward-Perkins, 2005, p. 32.

CHAPTER 9: THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION

1. Huizinga, 1972, p. 142. Of the danse macabre, which became a feature of French literature, art and even public performance from the thirteenth century onward, he writes: ‘Three young noblemen suddenly meet three hideous dead men, who tell them of their past grandeur and warn them of their own near end’ (ibid., p. 140). Martial took it further by applying it, in true Renaissance fashion, to women as well as men.

2. Wyatt, no. 38 in The Egerton MS.

3. Morgann, 1963.

4. Quoted in Godfrey, 1984, p. 11.

5. Gombrich & Kris, 1940, pp. 10-12 (emphasis added).

6. See pp. 258-9 above.

7. Grüsser, Selke & Zynda, 1988, p. 278. For Pompeii and Herculaneum, see Kraus & von Matt, 1977. The effects appear to be modified by hand preference: e.g. Hans Holbein the Younger and Leonardo da Vinci, both left-handers.

8. Hall, 2008, p. 211. This may also explain why we wear wedding rings on the left hand, as there was believed to be a vein that carried blood direct from the ring finger of the left hand to the heart. Clearly there are a number of possible reasons why the left hand came to be preferred, one being that it was less involved with the ordinary practicalities of doing and getting. But this may do no more than redescribe the phenomenon at another level, and one is still in need of an explanation of why it arose when it did.

9. Hall, 2008, p. 222.

10. See, e.g., Klibansky, Saxl & Panofsky, 1964, p. 233; Screech, 1983, pp. 22-4. In fact the connection between wisdom and melancholy, like all right hemisphere truths, is ancient: ‘In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow’ (Ecclesiastes 1:18).

11. Aristotle, ‘Problems Connected with Thought, Intelligence, and Wisdom’, in Problems II, xxx, (trans. W. S. Hett, 1965, p. 165).

12. Radden, 2000, p. 57.

13. ibid., p. 12.

14. James, 1912, p. 24.

15. ‘Illud nullo modo probo, quod ait Metrodorus, esse aliquam cognatam tristitiae voluptatem’ (‘I do not in the least accept what Metrodorus says, that there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness’): so Seneca on Metrodorus, in his Epistles (XCIX). For discussion, see Marcus Wilson (1997, p. 53).

16. Snell, 1960, p. 19.

17. ‘Happen’, too, incorporates this sense of non-origination, since it derives from ‘hap’, meaning chance, the neglected positive of a meaning still present in the negative ‘mishap’.

18. A. N. Whitehead, 1926, pp. 290-91.

19. Burckhardt, 1955, the second part of which is entitled ‘The Development of the Individual’, esp. pp. 80-84 & 279.

20. van Mander, 1936, p. 430; Ridolfi, 1914-24, vol. 1, p. 180.

21. Kris & Kurz, 1979.

22. ibid., p. 27.

23. In Richter, 1952, pp. 181-2: the passages, which are worth reading in their entirety, for their unwitting description of the right hemisphere's ability to extract a face or other meaningful form from highly degraded information, are to be found in M. S. Bibl. Nat. 203822 verso, and Vat. Libr. Trattato della Pintura (Codex Urbinas 1270) 66.

24. Kris & Kurz, 1979, p. 46; for Sung-Ti, see Giles, 1905, p. 100.

25. Jonson, ‘De Shakespeare Nostrati. Augustus in Haterium’, 1951.

26. Vasari, 1987, vol. 1, p. 206.

27. Kris & Kurz, 1979, p. 17; for Han Kan, see Giles, 1905, p. 58.

28. Kris & Kurz, 1979, p. 129; for Han Kan, see Ku Teng, 1932.

29. Kris & Kurz, 1979, p. 128; Fischer, 1912.

30. The story of Zeuxis comes from Pliny's Natural History of the first century AD (Bk. 35, §65, in Pliny 1991, p. 330) though Zeuxis lived in the fifth century BC.

31. ‘Chinese painters are said to have lived for weeks on end in the mountains and forests, among animals, or even in the water, in order to lose themselves completely in nature. Mi Fei called an oddly shaped rock his brother; Fan K'uan (circa 1000 AD) lived in the mountains and forests, often spending the whole day upon a crag and gazing about him, just to drink in the beauty of the countryside. Even when there was snow on the ground, he would wander to and fro by moonlight, staring determinedly ahead, to achieve inspiration. Kao K'o-ming (tenth century AD) loved darkness and silence: he used to roam about in the wild and spend days on end contemplating the beauty of the peaks and woods, oblivious of himself. When he reached home again he retired to a room where he would not be disturbed and allowed his soul to pass beyond the bounds of this world. In this condition he produced his pictures … It is related of Ku-Chün-chih (fifth century AD) that he erected a kind of platform in his house, which he used as his workshop. He would climb up to this loft, draw up the ladder behind him, and then was not seen again by his wife and children for many a long day. Hsin Ch'ang (fifteenth century AD) was incapable of painting when anyone's presence disturbed him.’ Shades of Montaigne's tower, the original ivory tower. Kris & Kurz, 1979, pp. 113-14 & 127-8; for Mi Fei, Fan K'uan and Kao K'o-ming, see Giles, 1905, pp. 86, 99 & 115; for Ku-Chün-chih and Hsin Ch'ang, see ibid., pp. 25 & 152.

32. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 738). See also Screech, 1983, p. 115.

33. Greville, ‘Chorus Quintus Tartarorum’, from Mustapha.

34. One sees something of the same in the visual arts, with the ‘choice’ theme, which had been a common topos in Greek and Roman mythological thinking, gaining prominence in Renaissance art. I agree with Hall (2008, p. 129) that it suggests an antipathy to moral absolutism which is highly characteristic of the Renaissance. More than that, the choices of the flesh are often rendered subversively eloquent: e.g. Raphael's Allegory of Virtue and Pleasure, or Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.

35. Burckhardt, 1965, p. 178. Later in the same passage, in fact, Burckhardt acknowledges that ‘in the fifteenth century, the great masters of the Flemish school, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavour to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain poetical meaning - in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression’ (p. 181). Later Kenneth Clark was to write that ‘Hubert van Eyck has painted in the Adoration of the Lamb the first great modern landscape … As in a landscape by Claude, our eye floats over the flowery lawns into a distance of golden light’ (1949, p. 15). The classic study of the topic, apart from a passage in Humboldt's Cosmos, is that of Alfred Biese (1905); in 1882 he had published a volume on the development of a feeling for nature in the Ancient world (Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern), although it has to be admitted that, for a fascinating topic, it is rather a dull read.

36. Piccolomini, 1988, p. 148.

37. ibid., pp. 251-2.

38. ibid., pp. 308-9.

39. See Huizinga, 1957, p. 177.

40. Schleiermacher, 1893, p. 126: ‘… alles übernatürliche und wunderbare ist proskribiert, die Phantasie soll nicht mit leeren Bildern angefüllt werden’ (‘Über die Bildung zur Religion’, 1958, p. 82).

41. Koerner, 2004.

42. ibid., p. 12.

43. Luther, 1883-1986, vol. 10, i, p. 31; quoted by Koerner, 2004, pp. 99-100.

44. Koerner, 2004, p. 26.

45. ibid., p. 436.

46. ibid., p. 279.

47. ibid.

48. ibid., p. 151 (emphasis in original).

49. ibid., p. 283 (emphasis added).

50. ibid., p. 289; Kriss-Rettenbeck, 1963, p. 3.

51. ibid., p. 47.

52. ibid., p. 136.

53. Ricoeur, 1978, p. 21; see also Ashbrook, 1984.

54. Koerner, 2004, p. 58.

55. ibid., p. 138.

56. Bakan, 1966, p. 15.

57. Koerner, 2004, pp. 420-21.

58. See, e.g., Koerner (ibid.), figs. 209 & 201; (‘graph paper’) 209, 82 & 83.

59. Cited at Koerner, 2004, p. 429.

60. ibid., p. 415-16.

61. ibid., p. 413.

62. ibid., fig. 211.

63. Montaigne, ‘On Experience’, Essais, Bk. III:13 (1993, pp. 1265-9). Translation adapted: Screech translates ‘mets sur ses ergots’ (which I have translated ‘gets on her high-horse’) more closely as ‘starts crowing out ergo’.

64. Toulmin, 1990, pp. 23-4.

65. ibid., p. 21.

66. ibid., pp. 30-34.

67. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096b4.

68. Screech, 1983, p. 6.

69. Montaigne, ‘Of the power of the imagination’, Essais, Bk. I:21 (trans. I. McG.).

70. Donne, Devotions, ‘Meditation VI’.

71. Donne, Devotions, ‘Meditation IX’.

72. Eliot, 1950, p. 247.

73. Eliot, 1975, p. 93.

74. In one of his sermons Donne writes: ‘I throw my selfe down in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore … A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer’ (‘Preached at the funerals of Sir William Cokayne Knight, Alderman of London, December 12. 1626’, Sermons, vol. I, LXXX, 1640: in Donne, 1953-62, vol. 7, pp. 264-5). One should not imagine, though, that Donne and his contemporaries were the first to notice such things. For example, the following comes from St. Nilus of Sinai in the fifth century: ‘Although our outward aspect is appropriate to prayer, for we kneel and appear to those who see us to be praying; in our thought we imagine something pleasant, graciously talk with friends, angrily abuse enemies, feast with guests, build houses for our relatives, plant trees, travel, trade, are forced against our will into priesthood, organize with great circumspection the affairs of the churches placed in our care, and go over most of it in our thoughts, consenting to any thought that comes along’ (Kadloubovsky & Palmer, 1954, p. 145).

75. Hacker, 2001, p. 46.

76. Bacon, 1859, ‘Of Heresies’, p. 253.

77. Pesic, 1999; Mathews, 1996.

78. Bacon, 1858, Bk. I, aphorisms III & X, pp. 47-8.

79. Descartes, 1984-91a, Part VI, pp. 142-3.

80. ibid., Part IV, p. 127.

CHAPTER 10: THE ENLIGHTENMENT

1. Black, 1983, p. 20.

2. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 123 & 129.

3. Black, 1962, p. 46.

4. Descartes, 1984-91b, ‘Meditation I’, p. 13.

5. McGilchrist & Cutting, 1995.

6. Sass, 1992, 1994.

7. Stanghellini, 2004.

8. ‘Schizophrenics very often hold beliefs which are as rigid, all-pervasive, and unconnected with reality, as are the best dogmatic philosophies. However, such beliefs come to them naturally whereas a “critical” philosopher may sometimes spend his whole life in attempting to find arguments which create a similar state of mind’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 45n).

9. Levin, 1999, pp. 37-42 (emphasis in original).

10. Descartes, 1984-91b, ‘Meditation VI’, p. 53.

11. ibid., p. 52.

12. ibid., p. 51.

13. ibid., ‘Meditation II’, p. 22.

14. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 4-5.

15. ibid., p. 77.

16. Sherover, 1989, p. 281. See Descartes, 1984-91b: ‘it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this moment … it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence’ (‘Meditation III’, p. 33); ‘there is no relation of dependence between the present time and the immediately preceding time’ (‘Objections and Replies’, Second Set, Axiom II, p. 116); and ‘this can be plainly demonstrated from my explanation of the independence of the divisions of time … the individual moments can be separated from those immediately preceding and succeeding them, which implies that the thing which endures may cease to be at any given moment’ (‘Objections and Replies’, Fifth Set, §9, p. 255).

17. Descartes, 1984-91a, p. 125 (emphasis added). With greater wisdom, Bacon had written of Pythagoras, who made a similar claim: ‘In this theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on’ (1857, p. 421).

18. Levin, 1999, pp. 52-3.

19. Cutting, 1997.

20. Moravia, 1999, p. 5.

21. Spacks, 1995, p. 20.

22. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 30.

23. ‘The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants … one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’ (Wordsworth, 1973, pp. 24-5).

24. Zijderveld, 1979, p. 77.

25. Waugh, 1975, p. 541.

26. I. Berlin, 1999, pp. 21-2.

27. Trevor-Roper, 1970, p. 52.

28. J. Needham, 1969, p. 17.

29. Verene, 1997, p. 70.

30. Locke, 1849, II, i, §4, p. 54.

31. Vico, 1988, §1106, p. 424. Vico developed a cyclical theory of history, in which there were ricorsi, or recurrent phases. He described three ages of man: the first is the age of the gods, in which he follows the divine; the second the age of heroes, in which he follows noble human exemplars; and the third the age of men, in which he pursues narrowly his own interests. (Note that this follows a slow decline down Scheler's pyramid of values, from das Heilige to die Lebenswerte, and thence to the merely sinnliche Werte.) The barbarism of reflection, characteristic of the third age, the age of men, makes humans more inhuman than had the barbarism of the senses. It is, when ill used, ‘the mother of falsehood’ (ibid., §817, p. 312), opposing the poetic imagination, and leading to Descartes's world of abstraction and alienation. Vico is a hugely sympathetic figure, whose observations represent a penetrating critique of modern Western thought since the Enlightenment. He lamented the lack of wisdom exhibited by the Cartesian philosophy of his time, and complained that the scholars of the day, ‘although they may become extremely learned in some respects, their culture on the whole (and the whole is really the flower of wisdom) is incoherent’ (1990, p. 77). His thought is known to many through his influence on James Joyce, but more significant is his impact on thinkers as diverse as Horkheimer, Croce, Collingwood, Heidegger, Habermas, Gadamer, Benjamin, Ricoeur, and Auerbach. He was the subject of a classic study by Isaiah Berlin (1976). See also Price, 1999.

32. Gray, 1935, vol. 3, pp. 1107 & 1079.

33. Gilpin, 1808, p. 47.

34. Packe, 1954, p. 16.

35. Mill, 2003, p. 66 (emphasis in original).

36. On reading Helvétius, who gave the opinion that legislation was the most important of earthly pursuits, he gasped: ‘And have I indeed a genius for legislation? I gave myself the answer, fearfully and tremblingly - Yes’ (Bowring, 1838-43, p. 27).

37. Richards, 2005.

38. Bentham, 2003, p. 18.

39. Packe, 1954, p. 16 (citing Bentham's Memoirs).

40. Bentham, letter to Lord Holland dated 31 October 1808 (1838-43, vol. 10, p. 442).

41. Bentham, ‘The Rational of Reward’ (1825) (1838-43, vol. 2, p. 253).

42. See Kramer (2005) for a perceptive examination of these aspects of Haydn's music.

43. Stanhope, letter dated 11 December 1747 (1901, vol. 1, p. 192).

44. Keats, letter to Charles Dilke dated 4 March 1820 (2002, p. 429).

45. Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, lines 298 & 318.

46. Scheler, 1954, pp. 252-3 (emphases in original).

47. McGilchrist, 1982.

48. ‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,/ Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben’: Goethe, ‘Natur und Kunst’, lines 13-14.

49. Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, canto III, lines 7-8.

50. Dryden, ‘To the memory of Mr Oldham’, lines 21-5.

51. Dryden, concluding chorus of ‘The Secular Masque’, lines 93-8.

52. There is a ‘biological trend away from perfect symmetry in primates consequent to adaptive evolutionary alteration favouring functional asymmetry in the brain, perception, and face’: Zaidel & Deblieck, 2007, pp. 423-31. See also Zaidel & Cohen, 2005; and Swaddle & Cuthill, 1995.

53. Zaidel, Aarde & Baig, 2005.

54. Martin, 1965, p. 11. He had noticed that in cleaning the famous portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi by Bronzino one could see that an eighteenth-century restorer had touched up the eyes to make them more equal.

55. Cassirer, 1948, p. 135: ‘Hammer-Purgstall [see Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, ‘Das Kamel’, in Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft: Philosophisch-Historische Classe 6, 1855, pp. 1-84 and Classe 7, 1856, pp. 1-104] has written a paper in which he enumerates the various names for the camel in Arabic. There are no less than five to six thousand terms used in describing a camel; yet none of these gives us a general biological concept. All express concrete details concerning the shape, the size, the colour, the age, and the gait of the animal …’. In ‘the Bakairi language - an idiom spoken by an Indian tribe in Central Brazil - Karl von den Steinen [Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens, p. 81] relates that each species of parrot and palm tree has its individual name, whereas there exists no name to express the genus “parrot” or “palm”.’ While reasonable scepticism has been expressed about the number of terms here claimed for camel, and the absence of a single term for ‘camel’, the OED states that the term ‘camel’, coming to us from Greek kamelos, via Latin camel(l)us, ‘if of Semitic origin’ may come, not from an Arabic term for a camel, but from the Arabic jamala ‘to bear’, presumably suggesting a pack animal (including, therefore, but not confined to, what we call a camel).

56. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 7.

57. Burke, 1881, p. 178.

58. Tönnies, 1887.

59. de Tocqueville, 2003, pp. 723-4.

60. Passmore, 1970, p. 267.

61. Nochlin, 1994, p. 10.

62. ibid., p. 11.

63. When Descartes’ body was exhumed in 1666 to be returned from Sweden to France, his head was stolen, and subsequently bought and sold several times before ending up in a museum, Le Musée de l'Hommein Paris. His body is buried with another head in the church of St. Germain-des-Prés (Verene, 1997, p. 20). Who says God does not have a sense of humour? Fascinatingly, in another parable of what happens when you separate mind from body, the great utilitarian Jeremy Bentham's dissected and embalmed body, at his request, was (and is) displayed at University College, London, as an ‘Auto-Icon’ - man become his own representation. But the plan didn't go as expected - his head ‘shrivelled ghoulishly and extremely fast. A few years later, the college decided to replace it with a waxwork. The original was placed between his legs, from where it has occasionally been stolen’ (Boyle, 2001, p. 17).

64. Freedberg, 1989, pp. 378-428.

65. Koerner, 2004, p. 93.

66. ibid, p. 109.

67. Descartes, 1984-91d, ‘Rule IX’, p. 33 (the translation here preferred is that of Haldane & Ross: see Descartes, 1911, vol. 1, p. 29).

68. Castle, 1995.

69. ibid., pp. 4-5. The passage Castle quotes in brackets is based on Freud, 1960e, p. 244.

CHAPTER 11: ROMANTICISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

1. ‘Das große Wort, das The Master and his Emissary (das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne) des Heraklit, das konnte nur ein Grieche finden, denn es ist das Wesen der Schönheit, und ehe das gefunden war, gab's keine Philosophie’: Hölderlin, 2008, p. 109 (trans. I. McG.). Hölderlin is thinking of Heraclitus fr. LXXVIII, Diels 51: ‘They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement (or ‘fitting together’, harmonie-) turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre’ (Kahn, 1979, p. 195 ff.). See p. 270 above, and discussion in Ankersmit, 2005, pp. 386-9.

2. ‘La dernière démarche de la raison est de reconnaître qu'il y a une infinité des choses qui la surpassent. Elle n'est que faible si elle ne va jusqu'à connaître cela’: Pascal, 1976, §267 (Lafuma §188); trans. I. McG.

3. ‘So the reason that some subtle minds are not rationalistic is that they simply cannot apply themselves to the principles of rationalism; but what makes the rationalists incapable of such subtlety is that they do not see what is there in front of them, and, being used to the crude, cut and dried, principles of rationalism, and to never reasoning until they are certain of their principles, they're lost when it comes to the subtleties, where you can't lay your hands on the principles in this way. Such principles are scarcely to be seen at all; they are sensed rather than seen; it is well-nigh impossible to get anyone to understand them if they do not sense them for themselves. They are so fine and so numerous that you must have a very delicate and very acute sense to perceive them, and without for the most part being able to demonstrate them in sequence, as one would analytically, because such principles are not to be had, and because there would be no end to such an undertaking. You've got to see it just like that, at one glance, and (at least to a degree) without going through any reasoning process. So it is rare that the rationalists achieve subtlety and that subtle minds are rationalistic, because the rationalists want to treat matters of intuition rationalistically, and make fools of themselves, wanting to start with definitions and then move on to principles, which is not the way to deal with this kind of reasoning. Not that the mind does not do so, but it does it implicitly, naturally, and without artifice; for it is beyond man's wit to say how, and even to intuit it belongs only to a few’: Pascal, 1976, §1 (Lafuma §512); trans. I. McG. (‘Ce qui fait donc que certains esprits fins ne sont pas géomètres, c'est qu'ils ne peuvent du tout se tourner vers les principes de Géométrie: mais ce qui fait que des géomètres ne sont pas fins, c'est qu'ils ne voient pas ce qui est devant eux, et qu'étant accoutumés aux principes nets et grossiers de Géométrie, et à ne raisonner qu'après avoir bien vu et manié leurs principes, ils se perdent dans les choses de finesse, où les principes ne se laissent pas ainsi manier. On les voit à peine: on les sent plutôt qu'on ne les voit: on a des peines infinies à les faire sentir à ceux qui ne les sentent pas d'eux-mêmes: ce sont choses tellement délicates et si nombreuses, qu'il faut un sens bien délicat et bien net pour les sentir, et sans pouvoir le plus souvent les démontrer par ordre comme en Géométrie, parce qu'on n'en possède pas ainsi les principes, et que ce serait une chose infinie de l'entreprendre. Il faut tout d'un coup voir la chose d'un seul regard, et non par progrès de raisonnement, au moins jusqu'à un certain degré. Et ainsi il est rare que les géomètres soient fins, et que les fins soient géomètres; à cause que les géomètres veulent traiter géométriquement les choses fines, et se rendent ridicules, voulant commencer par les définitions, et ensuite par les principes, ce qui n'est pas la manière d'agir en cette sorte de raisonnement. Ce n'est pas que l'esprit ne le fasse; mais il le fait tacitement, naturellement, et sans art; car l'expression en passe tous les hommes, et le sentiment n'en appartient qu'à peu.’)

4. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 721).

5. Johnson, 1963, p. 109.

6. Pope, 1963, pp. 44-5.

7. Carlyle, 1935, p. 409 (emphases in original).

8. Morgann, 1963.

9. ‘The exchange of two whims and the contact of two skins’: Chamfort, 1923, §359, p. 127.

10. Arnaud, 1992, pp. 101-5.

11. See Cassirer, 1950, pp. 145-6, quoting Goethe (trans. Cassirer): ‘Das ist die wahre Symbolik wo das Besondere das Allgemeinere repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen’ (Goethe, 1991, §314, p. 775).

12. Eckermann, 1970, conversation of 18 February 1829, p. 296.

13. Quoted in Amiel, 1898: entry for 3 February 1862, p. 83. I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation in Goethe, and so, it would appear, have the editors of the édition intégrale of Amiel's Journal Intime (see vol. 4, p. 521).

14. See p. 272.

15. Scruton, 1986, p. 392.

16. Kuehn, 2001.

17. Descartes, 1984-91e, Part II, §124, p. 371.

18. Or so it is said. Balzac in his essay Théorie de la démarche (Theory of demeanour), published in 1833, attributes it to Fontenelle, another Enlightenment philosopher, saying only that Voltaire took his lead from Fontenelle. According to Balzac, Fontenelle boasted that he not only never laughed, but never wept tears, and in fact never became impassioned at all; never raised his voice or even spoke in a carriage for fear of having to do so; and had a colleague deliver his lectures for him. He never entered into argument, but simply lay back, closed his eyes and thought of the Collège de France. He never ran, and avoided walking by being carried wherever possible. According to Balzac, he never loved anyone, and had no vices or virtues. ‘Cette petite machine délicate,’ he wrote, ‘tout d'abord condamnée à mourir, vécut ainsi plus de cent ans’: ‘this delicate little piece of machinery, from the outset condemned to die, by this means lived to be more than a hundred’ (Balzac, 1853, pp. 75-8). In fact, by another of the ironies meted out to Enlightenment philosophers, he died less than a month short of his perfect century (if, of course, he had not already done so). How prescient was Montaigne when he wrote: ‘There are those who, from an uncouth insensibility, hold (as Aristotle says) bodily pleasures in disgust. I know some who do it from ambition. Why do they not also give up breathing, so as to live on what is theirs alone, rejecting the light of day because it is free and costs them neither ingenuity nor effort? … I suppose they think about squaring the circle while lying with their wives!’ Montaigne, ‘On Experience’, Essais, Bk. III:13 (1993, pp. 1265-9 & 1257).

19. Spinoza, 1947, IV, Appendix § 27, p. 249.

20. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, iv, p. 178.

21. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 6.

22. ‘Underlying our most sublime sentiments and our purest tenderness there is a little of the testicle’: Diderot, lettre à Étienne Noël Damilaville, 3 novembre 1760 (1955-70, vol. III, p. 216; trans. I. McG.).

23. Blake, Jerusalem, ch. I, plate 24, line 23.

24. Wordsworth, 1974, vol. 1, p. 103.

25. Wordsworth, 1973, pp. 26 & 29 (emphasis added).

26. Carlyle, 1897-9, p. 55.

27. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. VIII, lines 604-5.

28. ibid., Bk. IV, lines 172-80.

29. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 16.

30. Luria, 1980. Until the age of four or five, dendritic systems of the language areas of the right hemisphere are more exuberant than those on the left: see Simonds & Scheibel, 1989.

31. Horowitz, 1983; Ardila, 1984.

32. Cimino, Verfaellie, Bowers et al., 1991; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Neufeld et al., 1999; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Haupts et al., 1993; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Fink et al., 1997; Markowitsch, 1995; Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992; Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995; Tulving, Kapur, Craik et al., 1994.

33. Trevarthen, 1996.

34. Chiron, Jambaque, Nabbout et al., 1997.

35. O'Boyle & Benbow, 1990; and see Gorynia & Müller, 2006.

36. Wordsworth, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood’.

37. Henry Vaughan's ‘The Retreat’, a paean to childhood, contains an anticipation of Blake's ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, /And a heaven in a wild flower, /Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, /And eternity in an hour’: ‘… on some gilded cloud, or flower, /My gazing soul would dwell an hour, /And in those weaker glories spy /Some shadows of eternity'; and Thomas Traherne anticipates Wordsworth: ‘All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful … My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which, since my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence … The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor ever was sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting … The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things …’ (Traherne, 2007, ‘The Third Century’, §2-3, pp. 151-2).

38. Goethe, 1988, ‘Significant help given by an ingenious turn of phrase’, p. 39. In relation to ‘Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself’, cf. Snell: ‘Man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself’ (p. 272 above); and Matthews: ‘my awareness of myself as a subject necessarily presupposes awareness of other things as objects … awareness of our own subjectivity is possible only if we are also aware of a world that transcends it. Subject and object of experience are inseparably bound up together; our being is “being-in-the-world” ‘(2002, pp. 89-90).

39. There is a similarity here with Plotinus: ‘For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen. No eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like …’ (1966, Sixth Tractate, §9).

40. Kuhn, 1970, p. 24.

41. A. Zajonc, 1998, p. 26.

42. Brady, 1998, p. 88.

43. Goethe, 1988, p. 159.

44. Goethe, 1989, ‘Bedingungen unter welchen die Farbenerscheinung zunimmt’, §217, p. 85: ‘Bei allem diesen lassen wir niemals aus dem Sinne, daß diese Erscheinung nie als eine fertige, vollendete, sondern immer als eine werdende, zunehmende, und in manchem Sinn bestimmbare Erscheinung anzusehen sei’ (trans. I. McG.).

45. Goethe, 1991, §555, p. 821: ‘Die Vernunft ist auf das Werdende, der Verstand auf das Gewordene angewiesen … Sie erfreut sich am Entwickeln; er wünscht alles festzuhalten, damit er es nutzen könne’ (trans. I. McG.).

46. Constable, 1970, pp. 52-3.

47. His Dido Building Carthage hangs, under the terms of his will, in the same room. In a perfect articulation of the way in which Romantic paintings evoked depth in both time and space, Turner repeatedly expressed a wish to be buried in the painting (see Thornbury, 1862, vol. 1, pp. 299-300).

48. The canvas was originally known as Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid. According to Colvin, the lines in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ which speak of having ‘charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’, were inspired by the painting, which Keats certainly knew, if only through an engraving, and which he elsewhere mentions in a letter to his friend J. H. Reynolds (letter to Reynolds dated 25 March 1818 (2002, p. 110); Colvin, 1917, pp. 264-5). For further discussion see Jack (1967) and Levey (1988).

49. Baillie, 1967, p. 32.

50. I. Berlin, 1999, pp. 102-4.

51. Frederick Locker-Lampson recalled the poet's comment: ‘He told me that he was moved to write “Tears, idle Tears” at Tintern Abbey; and that it was not real woe, as some people might suppose; “it was rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever”. That in him it was strongest when he was quite a youth’ (Tennyson, Hallam Lord, 1897, vol. 2, p. 73).

52. Quoted by Knowles, p. 170.

53. ‘… for oft/On me, when boy, there came what then I called,/Who knew no books and no philosophies,/In my boy-phrase “The Passion of the Past” ‘ (Tennyson, ‘The Ancient Sage’, lines 216-19).

54. Hazlitt, 1824, vol. 2, pp. 220-23. Hazlitt here half-quotes ‘… hung upon the beatings of my heart’ from the Tintern Abbey ode (line 54), and Claudio's ‘come thronging soft and delicate desires’ from Much Ado About Nothing (Act I, Scene i, line 287). That Wordsworth's poem is an archetype of Romantic retrospection is evidenced by Tennyson's inspiration occurring at Tintern Abbey, and Hazlitt's almost involuntary recurrence to its lines here.

55. Keene, 1988, p. 38.

56. ibid., pp. 38-42.

57. ibid., p. 43.

58. See p. 83 above.

59. Wordsworth's famous lines from the Tintern Abbey ode referring to ‘the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create, / And what perceive’, were themselves half-created, half-remembered from a phrase in Edward Young's Night Thoughts, where Young speaks of our ‘senses, which … half create the wondrous world they see’ (Bk. VI, lines 420 & 427).

60. Diderot, ‘Éloge de Richardson’, Journal étranger (janvier 1762): ‘C'est lui qui porte le flambeau au fond de la caverne’ (1821, p. 8).

61. Russell & Konstan, 2005, p. 79.

62. Hegel, 1896, p. xxx.

63. Steiner, 1978, p. 18.

64. Coleridge, 1965, vol. I, ch. x, p. 106.

65. Zeki, 1999, p. 4.

66. Herder, 2002, pp. 40-41 (emphasis in the original).

67. ibid.

68. Herder, 1878c.

69. Winckelmann, 2006, p. 199. And later, even more rapturously, Winckelmann writes again of the Apollo Belvedere: ‘An eternal springtime, like that of the blissful Elysian Fields, clothes the alluring virility of mature years with a pleasing youth and plays with a soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs … Scorn sits upon his lips, and the displeasure that he contains within swells the nostrils of his nose and spreads upward to his proud brow. But the tranquillity that hovers over him in a blissful stillness remains undisturbed, and his eyes are full of sweetness, as if he were among the Muses as they seek to embrace him… . A brow of Jupiter, gravid with the goddess of wisdom, and eyebrows whose motions declare his will; eyes of the queen of the gods, arched with grandeur, and a mouth whose shape infused desire in the beloved Branchos. His soft hair plays about his divine head like the tender, waving tendrils of the noble grapevine stirred, as it were, by a gentle breeze: it seems anointed with the oil of the gods and bound at the crown of his head with lovely splendour by the Graces. In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it … My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence - for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion's beauty. How is it possible to paint and describe it!’ (ibid., pp. 333-4).

70. ibid., p. 203.

71. ibid., p. 334.

72. ibid., p. 199.

73. Hegel, 1970, p. 92.

74. Herder, 1878b, p. 65-6; Herder, 1878a, p. 12.

75. ibid., p. 64.

76. Winckelmann, 2006, p. 314.

77. Goethe, Römische Elegien, V, lines 13-18.

78. Wordsworth, 1933, Bk. XI, lines 173-6.

79. Blake, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, d, lines 103-6. He almost repeats the phrase in one of his most famous passages of prose: ‘ “What”, it will be Question'd, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty”. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it’ (1972, p. 617).

80. ‘Il y a une impression qui résulte de tel arrangement de couleurs, de lumières, d'ombres, etc. C'est ce qu'on appellerait la musique du tableau. Avant même de savoir ce que le tableau représente, vous entrez dans une cathédrale, et vous vous trouvez placé à une distance trop grande du tableau pour savoir ce qu'il représente, et souvent vous êtes pris par cet accord magique …’ (Delacroix, 1923, ‘Réalisme et idéalisme’, vol. 1, pp. 23-4; trans. I. McG.). This idea was echoed later by Baudelaire: ‘The right way to tell if a picture is melodious is to look at it from far enough away that one cannot make out the subject or the lines’ (1975-6, vol. 2, p. 425: ‘La bonne manière de savoir si un tableau est mélodieux est de le regarder d'assez loin pour n'en comprendre ni le sujet ni les lignes’; trans. I. McG.).

81. Goethe, 1989, ‘Verhältnis zur Philosophie’, §716, p. 215: ‘[Der Physiker] soll sich eine Methode bilden, die dem Anschauen gemäß ist; er soll sich hüten, das Anschauen in Begriffe, den Begriff in Worte zu verwandeln, und mit diesen Worten, als wären's Gegenstände, umzugehen und zu verfahren’ (trans. I. McG.).

82. Goethe, 1988, p. 311.

83. See p. 74 above.

84. Shelley, 1972, pp. 33 & 56.

85. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. XI, lines 336-7.

86. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 102.

87. Steiner, 1989, p. 27.

88. I have discussed these aspects of Wordsworth's style at greater length elsewhere (1982).

89. From ‘Extract from the Conclusion of a Poem’, ‘An Evening Walk’, and ‘Calm is all Nature as a Resting Wheel’, respectively.

90. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. XI, lines 258-65.

91. Horton, 1995.

92. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. XI, lines 302-16.

93. ibid., Bk. XI, lines 329-43.

94. ibid., Bk. I, lines 341-50, and Bk. V, lines 404-13. This second passage is an astonishing evocation of depth through language: ‘And when it chanced / That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill, / Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung / Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise / Has carried far into his heart the voice/ Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene / Would enter unawares into his mind/ With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, / Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, receiv'd/ Into the bosom of the steady Lake’. In fact I would say that the whole intent of the last image is to compare the realm of the imaginative mind (‘the heart’) with the depth of the lake, itself imaged in the vastness of the landscape which can be ‘received’ into its ‘bosom’ (heart) - therefore intensifying the sense of vastness and strangeness evoked by the phrase ‘far into his heart’.

95. de Quincey, 1851, vol. I, ch. xii, ‘William Wordsworth’, pp. 308-9.

96. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. XII, lines 12-14.

97. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, lines 55-7.

98. Bayley, 1962; Ricks, 1974.

99. Blake, Milton, ‘Book the First’, §15, lines 47-9. As in Bernini's St. Teresa in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Vittoria, the mystical and spiritual are closely allied to - at least have no other available imagery than - the erotic: Blake's original illustration (now partly obscured by a later sense of propriety) clearly shows him with phallus erect.

100. Tennyson, ‘Maud’, xiv, stanza 4.

101. Hopkins, ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, lines 5-8.

102. Hopkins, 1963, pp. 145-6.

103. Heidegger, 1959, p. 33: ‘You can, as it were, smell the being of this building in your nostrils. The smell communicates the being of this essent far more immediately and truly than any description or inspection could ever do.’

104. Hopkins, 1963, pp. 90-91; and see pp. 106-10 for further instances.

105. See, for example, his superb unfolding of the word ‘horn’ in a diary entry for 24 September 1863 (1963, pp. 89-90).

106. Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’, lines 13-14.

107. Graves, 1956, p. 141. But then Graves was consumed with rage about poets who enjoyed greater popularity than himself, such as ‘sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence’ (ibid.).

108. Hopkins, 1963, p. 91.

109. ibid., ‘On the Origin of Beauty: a Platonic Dialogue’, pp. 92-104.

110. Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges dated 1st September 1885 (1970, p. 288n).

111. Wordsworth, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, line 24.

112. Conrad, 1973, p. 1.

113. Korff, 1923, vol. 1, p. 28: ‘Denn auch der Verstand kommt nicht ohne Phantasie, die Phantasie aber nicht ohne Verstand aus. Aber die Ehe zwischen ihnen ist doch eine so eigentümliche, daß sie sich gegenseitig auf den Tod befehden und doch nur miteinander, nämlich als die höhere Form der Ideenbildung, die wir Vernunft zu nennen pflegen, ihre größte Leistungen zu vollbringen imstande sind’ (trans. I. McG.).

114. Olson, 2008.

115. ‘da der Glaube nur eine Eigenschaft der Körperatome ist, so hängt eine Veränderung des Glaubens nur von der Art und Weise der Ersetzung der Körperatome ab’: Vogt, 1851, p. 5.

116. Büchner, 1885, p. 194; quoted in Gregory, 1977, p. 9.

117. Gregory, 1977, p. 9.

118. Hedley Brooke, 1991, p. 31.

119. Gaukroger, 2006, p. 11.

120. ‘… gegen alle himmlischen und irdischen Götter, die das menschliche Selbstbewußtsein nicht als die oberste Gottheit anerkennen … der vornehmste Heilige und Märtyrer im philosophischen Kalender’: Marx, 1968, p. 262 (trans. K. Merz).

121. Hitler, 1943, p. 290.

122. Kerényi, 1991, p. 31.

123. ibid., p. xxii.

124. Gaukroger, 2006, pp. 11-12.

125. Dewey, 1931, p. 220. As Dewey remarks (ibid., p. 217), ‘Newton may have supposed that he was thinking God's thoughts after him, but so far as he thought, he thought Newton's thoughts.’

126. Gaukroger, 2006, p. 16.

127. See p. 472, n. 182.

128. For accounts, see Hedley Brooke, 1991, and Gaukroger, 2006.

129. Shlain, 2001, p. 33, citing Delacroix. Arnheim also quotes Delacroix as writing, in his Journal, that straight lines ‘never occur in nature; they exist only in the brain of man. Where men do employ them, the elements gnaw them away’ (Arnheim, 1954, p. 175). There is certainly a passage in Delacroix, where, speaking of architecture, he wrote that: ‘Tout y est idéalisé par l'homme. La ligne droite elle-même est de son invention, car elle n'est nulle part dans la nature’ (Delacroix, 1893, entry of 20 September 1852, vol. 2, pp. 121-2). That is the key: that it is idealised, conceptual, lacking a counterpart in the real world. It has been pointed out that at the microscopic level there are straight lines in crystals: but even there they exist only over very short distances, and all depends on the level at which one chooses to inspect them (in other words, the straightest line in nature is as jagged as a coastline, if viewed sufficiently accurately). With typical forthrightness Blake wrote: ‘They say there is no Strait Line in Nature; this Is a Lie, like all that they say. For there is Every Line in Nature'; but he added: ‘A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art; it is destructive of Humanity & of Art’ (1972, ‘Public Address: additional passages’, p. 603).

130. ‘… [erscheint dann die Technik] fast nicht mehr als das Produkt bewußter menschlicher Bemühung um die Ausbreitung der materiellen Macht, sondern eher als ein biologischer Vorgang im Großen, bei dem die im menschlichen Organismus angelegten Strukturen in immer weiterem Maße auf die Umwelt des Menschen übertragen werden …’ (Heisenberg, 1955, p. 15; 1958, pp. 19-20). The translation here is that of Hannah Arendt (1958, p. 153: emphasis added).

CHAPTER 12: THE MODERN AND POST-MODERN WORLDS

1. Woolf, 1924, pp. 4-5, first read to the Heretics in Cambridge in May 1924, under the title ‘Character in Fiction’.

2. Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974.

3. Giddens, 1991.

4. ibid., p. 27.

5. Panksepp, 1998, p. 262.

6. ibid., pp. 248 & 402, n. 7. See also Panksepp & DeEskinazi, 1980.

7. Putnam, 2000.

8. Toulmin, 1990, p. 159 (emphasis in original).

9. Sass, 1992, pp. 159-60.

10. ibid., p. 168.

11. Moberg & Turetsky, 2006; Clark, Kopala, Hurwitz et al., 1991; Bertollo, Cowen & Levy, 1996; Moberg, Agrin, Gur et al., 1999.

12. Indeed for the relation between the sense of smell and empathy, see Spinella, 2002.

13. It is particularly relevant that the current version of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, the most widely espoused theory of the genesis of schizophrenia, proposes an interaction between a posterior dopamine hyperactivity and a frontal dopamine hypoactivity, which, on the basis that the frontal lobe inhibits posterior activity in the same hemisphere, compounds the effect of a preponderant, though aberrant, left hemisphere in schizophrenia: Laruelle, Kegeles & Abi-Dargham, 2003; Abi-Dargham, 2004.

14. This appears to be the underlying tendency. It is yet more pronounced during the acute phase, is attenuated or reversed by medication, and relatively remits or reverses in the so-called ‘negative’ syndrome, though in that case the clinical picture is also marked by overwhelming bilateral frontal deficits. A well-substantiated intellectual asymmetry, with a relative superiority of verbal skills to spatial skills, is commoner in schizophrenics (see, e.g., Heinrichs & Zakzanis, 1998; Amminger, Schlögelhofer, Lehner et al., 2000). It is also present in the relatives of schizophrenics, and ‘represents a putative endophenotype of schizophrenia’ (Kravariti, Toulopoulou, Mapua-Filbey et al., 2006). This may well be related to the fact that schizophrenics attend selectively to the right ear (left hemisphere) (Hugdahl, Rund, Lund et al., 2003). Auditory and visual hallucinations in schizophrenia tend to occur more commonly in the right hemifield of attention (Bracha, Cabrera, Karson et al., 1985; Nayani & David, 1996; Sommer, Aleman & Kahn, 2003). Functional neuroimaging evidence is complex, and does not yield a clear picture. Several factors contribute to this, including the heterogeneity of clinical sub-syndromes, the difficulty in reliably and adequately distinguishing acute from chronic subjects, and such factors as the effects of illness staging, drug treatment (both current status and the effects of chronicity of treatment) and handedness. But perhaps the most important consideration is that, since it is now widely accepted that schizophrenia involves abnormal cerebral lateralisation (neither the normal asymmetry nor a simple reversal of the normal asymmetry) one would expect some, but crucially not all, of the functions normally associated with one hemisphere to be associated in schizophrenia with the contralateral hemisphere (and it is likely that the way in which aspects of brain functioning co-segregate within either hemisphere in schizophrenia may differ between individuals, exacerbating the problem). Knowing which is which presents a very serious methodological challenge. For this reason, I believe comparison of the detailed clinical findings in schizophrenia with those in non-schizophrenic subjects with partial or total inactivation of one hemisphere (whether experimentally induced or as a consequence of brain pathology) gives more reliable evidence of what the phenomenology of schizophrenia represents in terms of hemisphere asymmetry of function than does functional neuroimaging of subjects with schizophrenia. Having said all of that, some neuroimaging findings, which need to be interpreted with caution, would tend to confirm that, in the acute syndrome at least, there is overactivation of an abnormal left hemisphere, which then partially remits with treatment (Sheppard, Gruzelier, Manchanda et al., 1983; Gur, Resnick, Alavi et al., 1987; Gur, Resnick & Gur, 1989; Gur, Mozley, Resnick et al., 1995; Gur & Chin, 1999; Rotenberg, 1994; Bogerts, 1997). But, for example Russell and colleagues (Russell, Early, Patterson et al., 1997) found hyperperfusion in the right, not left, temporal lobe. A useful review of the complex and sometimes heterogeneous findings in this area can be found in Gruzelier, 1999. The acute disturbances of schizophrenia are also due to dysfunction of the right hemisphere, leading to left-hemisphere prepotency, but persistent or chronic abnormalities leading to the withdrawn or negative picture suggest, in addition, hypoactivation of the left hemisphere (Mendrek, Laurens, Kiehl et al., 2004) which may account for the overlap between depressive features and some aspects of the chronic syndrome. Impairments in emotional behaviour in patients with chronic schizophrenia are similar to those found in right-hemisphere brain damage patients, and they display the deficits in appreciating metaphor and humour suggestive of right frontal deficits (Hunca-Bednarska & Kucharska-Pietura, 2002). There is a specific deficit in right-hemisphere attentional functions in schizophrenia, which is separate from a general impairment in facial processing (Kucharska-Pietura, David, Dropko et al., 2002); but such patients do show separate impairments in recognising facial stimuli, vocal stimuli and emotion (Kucharska-Pietura, David, Masiak et al., 2005). Ultimately, given the likelihood of abnormal lateralisation in schizophrenia (see, e.g., Tiihonen, Katila, Pekkonen et al., 1998), it is perhaps safest to rely on the resemblances of the clinical picture to hemisphere deficit states in normal subjects. The findings in schizophrenia are related to others in the schizophrenia/autism spectrum, such as hypoactivation of the so-called ‘face area’ in the right fusiform gyrus, which has repeatedly been reported in adults with autistic spectrum disorder while looking at faces (Toal, Murphy & Murphy, 2005; for a review see Critchley, Daly, Bullmore et al., 2000). Similarly there are suggestions of an asymmetry in favour of the left hemisphere in schizotypy, with low scores on right, but not left, hemisphere language tasks significantly predicting high scores on positive schizotypal symptomatology scales (Nunn & Peters, 2001). There is particular impairment of normal right hemisphere function (Platek & Gallup, 2002). But schizotypy, too, may be associated with abnormal lateralisation.

15. Sass, 1994.

16. Schreber, 1903.

17. Sass, 1994, p. 12.

18. ibid., p. x.

19. Rees, 1968, quoted in Sass, op. cit., p. 35.

20. Sass, 1994, p. 35.

21. Sass, 1992.

22. All quotations from patients with schizophrenia in this chapter are taken from Sass, 1992, unless otherwise stated.

23. Frith, 1979, p. 233.

24. See Sass & Parnas, 2003, 2007.

25. See Stanghellini, 2004; Parnas, 2000; Parnas & Sass, 2001; Sass & Parnas, 2003; Sass & Parnas, 2001; Zahavi & Parnas, 1999.

26. Kafka, 1949, p. 202.

27. Sass, 2004, p. 71, citing Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000 (see p. 213 above).

28. Sontag, 1978, pp. 15-16.

29. See Sass, 1992, p. 238 (and p. 187). The quotation from Artaud is from Nin, 1966, p. 229.

30. Benjamin, 1969, p. 84.

31. Nietzsche, 1968, §15, pp. 14-15.

32. Nietzsche, 1973 [1886], §209, p. 120.

33. ‘Der Don Juan der Erkenntniß’: Nietzsche, 1970, Bk. IV, §327, p. 234. In Hollingdale's translation: ‘The Don Juan of knowledge - no philosopher or poet has yet discovered him. He does not love the things he knows, but has spirit and appetite for and enjoyment of the chase and intrigues of knowledge - up to the highest and remotest stars of knowledge! - until at last there remains to him nothing of knowledge left to hunt down except the absolutely detrimental; he is like the drunkard who ends by drinking absinthe and aqua fortis. Thus in the end he lusts after Hell - it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps it too proves a disillusionment, like all knowledge! And then he would have to stand to all eternity transfixed to disillusionment and himself become a stone guest, with a longing for a supper of knowledge which he will never get! - for the whole universe has not a single morsel left to give this hungry man’ (1997, p. 161).

34. Sypher, 1962, p. 123.

35. Heller, 1988, p. 157. The passage he refers to is in Nietzsche, 1977, p. 47: ‘Den letzten Philosophen nenne ich mich, denn ich bin der letzte Mensch. Niemand redet mit mir als ich selbst, und meine Stimme kommt wie die eines Sterbenden zu mir …’: ‘I call myself the last philosopher, for I am the last man. No one speaks to me but myself, and my voice comes to me as from one dying ’ (trans. I. McG.)

36. Gazzaniga, 1998.

37. Wittgenstein, 1967c, §161, p. 29e.

38. Moravia, 1999, p. 5.

39. Plumb, 1982, p. 316.

40. Klapp, 1986, p. 32. See also Healy, 1984.

41. Spacks, 1995, p. 3.

42. Zijderveld, 1979, p. 84.

43. Scheler, 1998, p. 126.

44. Psychopaths, who have right frontal deficits, show little alteration in heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, or galvanic skin responses when they are subjected to fear, stress, or unpleasant pictures (Intrator, Hare, Stritzke et al., 1997; Raine, Buchsbaum & LaCasse, 1997; Levenston, Patrick, Bradley et al., 2000); and, consequently, seek constant stimulation.

45. See Sass, 1992, p. 165.

46. Heidegger, 1977, pp. 129-30.

47. Levin, 1999, p. 54.

48. ibid., pp. 52-3.

49. The story in its entirety, which is feigned to be an excerpt from an old travel book by ‘JA Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes [Travels of Praiseworthy Men], libro iv, cap. xlv, Lerida, 1658’, is as follows: ‘… In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography’ (Borges, 1975).

50. Borges, 1964, ‘Borges and I’, pp. 246-7 (trans. J. E. Irby).

51. Healy, 1984, p. 69.

52. Canetti, 1974, p. 48.

53. See, for example, Jamison, 1993; as well as Post, 1994.

54. Fromm, 1984.

55. Ellard, 1987; Scull, 1979; Hare, 1983, 1988.

56. Tuke, 1894; Tagliavini, 1985; Grob, 1973.

57. Jablensky, 1986.

58. See, e.g., Suvisaari, Haukka, Tanskanen et al., 1999.

59. Saha, Chant, Welham et al., 2005.

60. Weich, Twigg & Lewis, 2006.

61. van Os, 2004; Pedersen & Mortensen, 2001.

62. Krabbendam & van Os, 2005.

63. See, e.g., Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2005; Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2007.

64. See, e.g., Bennett, Sharpe, Freeman et al., 2004; Morgan, Marsden & Lacey, 2000; Bhadrinath, 1990; Rampling, 1985.

65. See Uher, Murphy, Friederich et al., 2005, which shows that the right parietal cortex is underactive in anorexic patients compared with either bulimic patients or normals. An underactive right parietal cortex was also found by Grunwald and colleagues (Grunwald, Weiss, Assmann et al., 2004). A systematic review of 54 case reports revealed that eating disorders are associated with right frontal and temporal lobe damage (Uher & Treasure, 2005). Anorexics display an atypical left hemisphere preponderance in cognitive function (Maxwell, Tucker & Townes, 1984). The same bias towards the left hemisphere may obtain in bulimia nervosa (Wu, Hagman, Buchsbaum et al., 1990).

66. Dusoir, Owens, Forbes et al., 2005.

67. Harrington, 1987, p. 108.

68. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 282, n. 12.

69. Flor-Henry, Tomer, Kumpula et al., 1990.

70. Kluft, 1987; Mesulam, 1981.

71. Ahern, Herring, Tackenberg et al., 1993.

72. Stern, 1938.

73. American Psychiatric Press Review of Psychiatry, 1989, p. 8.

74. de la Fuente, Goldman, Stanus et al., 1997.

75. Irle, Lange & Sachsse, 2005; Irle, Lange, Weniger et al., 2007.

76. See Chapter 2 above for discussion of these deficits in relation to the right hemisphere. Apart from these deficits, autistic subjects exhibit other typical right hemisphere neuropsychological deficits: individuals with autism cannot differentiate meanings by context (Frith & Snowling, 1983; Happé, 1997; Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1999); they attend to local, not global, ‘information’ (Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1997; Shah & Frith, 1993); and they tend to have difficulty using personal pronouns appropriately, especially ‘I’ and ‘me’, a faculty which is associated with self-recognition, and is right-hemisphere-mediated (Imbens-Bailey & Pan, 1998). Subjects with autism or Asperger's syndrome show deficits in theory of mind, which are associated with right-hemisphere dysfunction (Gunter, Ghaziuddin & Ellis, 2002; Ellis & Gunter, 1999). Subjects with autistic spectrum disorders show white matter deficits in the corpus callosum and the right hemisphere (Waiter, Williams, Murray et al., 2005). Because of the likelihood of anomalous dominance, however, scanning data need to be interpreted with caution.

77. Agis-Balboa, Pinna, Pibiri et al., 2007.

78. Tzara, 1951.

79. Eksteins, 2008.

80. Griffin, 2007, p. 1. Some have made the, to me not unreasonable, connection between the bureaucratic mentality of Nazism, which saw people as mere Stücke (inanimate bits and pieces), and a surrender to what in terms of this book would be left-hemisphere modes of being: Portele, 1979.

81. Marinetti, 1909.

82. Boccioni, U., Carrà, C., Russolo, L. et al., 1910a.

83. Virilio, 2003, pp. 41-2.

84. Ortega y Gasset, 1968, p. 47.

85. From the conversation with the artist Yuri Annenkov (2005); The Master and his Emissary The Master and his Emissary The Master and his Emissary The Master and his Emissary I am grateful to Dmitri Smirnov and Martin Sixsmith for help in tracking down and translating this passage.

86. Mandelstam, 1999, p. 204.

87. Martin Sixsmith, ‘Challenging the Silence’, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 14 August 2006.

88. Shklovsky, 1988, p. 12.

89. Boccioni, U., Carrà, C., Russolo, L. et al., 1910b.

90. For a discussion of all these phenomena, see pp. 66-9 & 89 above.

91. Valéry, 1964, p. 36; original: 1957, ‘Réflexions simples sur le corps’, vol. 1, p. 927.

92. Cassileth, Vickers & Magill, 2003; Cepeda, Carr, Lau et al., 2006; Siedliecki & Good, 2006.

93. Gioia, 2006, p. 100.

94. A few examples include Iannis Xenakis, who was drawn to electro-acoustic and computerised musical composition through a prior interest in probability calculus and set theory, which led to his founding, in Paris in 1966, the Centre d'Études de Mathémathiques et Automatiques Musicales. Edgard Varese became obsessed with mathematics at the time of composing Intégrales (1925), writing in the programme note for its New York premiere: ‘there is more musical fertility in the contemplation of the stars - preferably through a telescope - and in the high poetry of certain mathematical exposition than in the most sublime gossip of human passions’. Amongst contemporary musicians, the American composer Elliott Carter read mathematics at Annapolis University, Pierre Boulez studied applied mathematics before turning to composition, and György Ligeti discovered fractal geometry in the early 1980s, after which his music was influenced by the complex, many-layered structure of this branch of mathematics. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who displayed many characteristics of a schizotypal personality, used confessedly inappreciable mathematical series to structure his works.

95. Adorno, 1973, p. 87.

96. Nietzsche, 1996, §217, pp. 129-30 (emphasis added).

97. Balkwill, Thompson & Matsunaga, 2004; Balkwill & Thompson, 1999; Ilie & Thompson, 2006.

98. Mithen, 2005, p. 91; Oelman & Loeng, 2003.

99. Tramo, Cariani, Delgutte et al., 2001; Tramo, 2001.

100. Tramo, Cariani, Delgutte et al., 2001.

101. Evers, Dannert, Rodding et al., 1999.

102. Blood, Zatorre, Bermudez et al., 1999; Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Koelsch, Fritz, von Cramon et al., 2006.

103. Zentner, 1996; Zentner & Kagan, 1998; Trainor & Heinmiller, 1998.

104. See above (p. 75); and Wieser & Mazzola, 1986.

105. Passynkova, Neubauer & Scheich, 2007.

106. See above (pp. 74-5).

107. Pleasants, 1955, p. 135.

108. Re Haydn and Mozart: from Hadden, 1902, p. 169. Re Tippett: personal communication from composer David Matthews.

109. Pleasants, 1955, p. 108.

110. See Paul, 1988, p. 15; Paul, 1985.

111. D. E. Brown, 1991.

112. Sass, 1985, p. 76.

113. Schroeder, 2001, p. 211.

114. ibid., p. 225.

115. Sass, 2001, p. 284.

116. Humphrey, 2006, p. 3.

117. ibid., pp. 121-2.

118. ibid., pp. 127-8.

119. Quoted by Humphrey, ibid., pp. 2, 4, 80 & 132: Sutherland, 1989; Nagel, 1986, p. 4; Newton, 2001, p. 48 (emphasis in Newton); Fodor, 1992, p. 5; McGinn, 1993.

120. For Wittgenstein, see p. 157 above. Montaigne's most famous saying was, after a lifetime of learning, que sçais-je? The saying that ‘the more you know, the more you know that you don't know’ is attributed both to the Buddha and to Socrates. St. Paul wrote: ‘And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know’ (1 Corinthians 8: 2).

121. The poem is both beautiful and relevant, and in its entirety reads: ‘When the immense drugged universe explodes / In a cascade of unendurable colour / And leaves us gasping naked, / This is no more than the ecstasy of chaos: / Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love / Which alone, as we know certainly, restores / Fragmentation into true being’ (Graves, 1968, ‘Ecstasy of Chaos’).

CONCLUSION: THE MASTER BETRAYED

1. ‘Toutes ces misères-là [de l'homme] même prouvent sa grandeur. Ce sont misères de grand seigneur, misères d'un roi dépossédé’: Pascal, 1976, §398 (Lafuma §116); trans. I. McG.

2. In this section I do not repeat the references to the neuropsychological literature, which are given in Part I of this book (especially throughout Chapter 2).

3. Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974, esp. p. 44 ff.

4. Marcel, 1962.

5. See discussion at pp. 87-91.

6. See, e.g., Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Kenny, 1999.

7. Inglehart & Klingemann, 2000; Easterlin, 1995. Though such findings have been disputed by some, they have been robustly defended: see, for example, Easterlin, 2005.

8. Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004, p. 1380.

9. Easterlin, 2005.

10. Christoph & Noll, 2003.

11. Hamilton, 2003, p. 87.

12. Boswell, 1851, p. 511.

13. G. Miller, 2008.

14. Layard (2005, p. 34) quotes $20,000 (£13,000); G. Easterbrook (2003, p. 170) quotes a figure of only $10,000 (£6,500).

15. Putnam, 2000, p. 333; Argyle, 1987; Myers & Diener, 1995; Veenhoven, 1996.

16. Weissman, Bland, Canino et al., 1996.

17. Vega, Kolody, Aguilar-Gaxiola et al., 1998.

18. Kleinman & Cohen, 1997.

19. Cross-National Collaborative Group, 1992.

20. Putnam, 2000, p. 326.

21. See, e.g., House, Landis & Umberson, 1988.

22. Putnam, 2000, p. 327.

23. ibid., p. 329; Egolf, Lasker, Wolf et al., 1992.

24. Foss, 1949, p. 83.

25. Laing, 1965, p. 49, as cited by Sass, 1992, p. 102.

26. See e.g. pp. 120, 149 & 332-4 above.

27. Corbin, 1988.

28. Cf. probably the greatest of all Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich: ‘One in everything and everything in one, God's image in leaves and stones, God's spirit in men and beasts … the Divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand’ (quoted in Barber, 2008, p. 392). Panentheism is a long tradition, however, not in any sense confined to Romanticism, evident in Christianity from the early Desert Fathers onwards, in many other religions, perhaps especially Buddhism, and reaching a high level of intellectual sophistication in the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (1926, 1934).

29. A far from complete list of artists using urine or faeces, apart from Marcel Duchamp and Chris Ofili, who made himself famous by using elephant faeces in a portrayal of the Virgin Mary, would have to include the names of Piero Manzoni, Gilbert & George, Stuart Brisley, Cornelius Kolig, Wim Delvoye, Adrian Searle, Santiago Sierra, Kiki Smith, John Miller, Patty Chang, Knut Amsel, Richard Long, Graham Durward, Jonathan Monk, Julia Morrison, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy (in his case, inflatable) … One might think it would be difficult for music to be subjected to the same treatment, but one would be wrong. Daniel Barenboim gives this example: ‘the most extraordinary example of offensive usage of music, because it underlines some kind of association which I fail to recognise, was shown to me one day when watching the television in Chicago and seeing a commercial of a company called American Standard. And it showed a plumber running very, very fast in great agitation, opening the door to a toilet and showing why this company actually cleans the toilet better than other companies. And you know what music was played to that? The Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem’ (BBC Reith Lecture, ‘The Neglected Sense’, broadcast 14 April 2006).

30. Nietzsche, 1973, §55, p. 63.

31. In the case of the Khora mosaic, one of the greatest achievements of all time, the name of the artist is unknown. In much modern art, in reflection of the left hemisphere's world, one sees not art without a name, but a name without art.

32. Commercial radio stations now break it up into small pieces that will not demand concentration and market it as an anodyne aid to relaxation. In this way it soon becomes fragmented, dismembered, and trivialised by context (or the lack of it), and rendered inauthentic through mechanical repetition. It is turned into a life-style aid. Similarly the great visual works of art of the past suffer from over-reproduction on a million table mats and T-shirts; again there seems to be a worry that they will be valued only if they can become a commodity, and perhaps understood at all only if they can demonstrate utility. This worry appears to have afflicted the custodians of one of the world's great collections of paintings, London's Tate Gallery. They have produced a series of leaflets with titles such as ‘The Calming Collection’, ‘The First Date Collection’, ‘The Happily Depressed Collection’, or ‘The I've Just Split Up Collection’. It includes ‘The I Have a Big Meeting Collection’, which helpfully advises, like the packet insert that comes with a laxative: ‘For maximum effect we recommend you experience this Collection twenty-four hours prior to a meeting. Whatever the reasons for your meeting, we are here to help you look good and to ooze confidence. Let's start by putting you in the mood. Look at Harvest Home by John Linnell. You can almost breathe the fresh air from that golden afternoon. Fill your lungs with greatness …’ And so on. Another recommendation from this ‘Collection’ is The Battle of Camperdown, a late eighteenth-century painting of a famous sea battle between the English and the Dutch, in which hundreds died and thousands were wounded: ‘Meetings are often like that. No one said it was going to be easy. But the painting still depicts the moment of victory. Bravery is the name of the game. Off you go’ (Quoted in Humphrys, 2006, pp. 127-31.)

33. Nietzsche, 1999, §4, p. 1 (emphases in original).

34. Leibniz, 1996, Bk. II, ch. xx, §5, p. 163 (conventional pagination); the phrase in German is ‘uneigennützige und nicht nach Lohn haschende Liebe’ (1904, p. 140); and in the original French, ‘l'amour désintéressé ou non mercenaire’ (1845, p. 105). The point he makes, which is different from that made here by Kant, is that, although one takes pleasure in and is fulfilled by beauty, the focus is not on one's own pleasure and fulfilment; in this it is like the benevolent love, rather than concupiscent desire, one might experience for a living being.

35. Kant, 1952, Part I, Section I, Bk. I, i, §5, p. 210 (conventional pagination): ‘taste in the beautiful may be said to be the one and only disinterested and free delight; for, with it, no interest, whether of sense or reason, extorts approval’ (emphasis in the original). The original reads: ‘Man kann sagen: daß, unter allen diesen drei Arten des Wohlgefallens, das des Geschmacks am Schönen einzig und allein ein uninteressiertes und freies Wohlgefallen sei; denn kein Interesse, weder das der Sinne, noch das der Vernunft, zwingt den Beifall ab’ (1977c, p. 123). The point is that one's judgment is not reducible to an argument arising purely from sensual or rational considerations.

36. Burke, 1990, p. 57. Burke's point is different again, though closer to that of Leibniz: ‘I likewise distinguish love, by which I mean that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating any thing beautiful, of whatsoever nature it may be, from desire or lust; which is an energy of the mind, that hurries on to the possession of certain objects, that do not affect us as they are beautiful, but by means altogether different. We shall have a strong desire for a woman of no remarkable beauty; while the greatest beauty in men, or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing at all of desire …’

37. Adachi, Kuwahata & Fujita, 2007.

38. See p. 387 above.

39. Dante (Paradiso, xxxiii, line 145, the last line of the Divine Comedy; trans. J. D. Sinclair), Shakespeare (Tempest, Act IV, Scene I, lines 157-8), Ralegh (‘The 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, line 433).

40. Donne, 1953-62, vol. 4, p. 330.

41. Pregnancy, both literally and metaphorically, also being a state of roundedness … The quotation from Shelley is from his ‘One word is too often profaned'; those from Wordsworth are from the Tintern Abbey ode and ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’.

42. van Gogh, referred to in Bachelard, 1969, p. 232. But the whole passage, which comes from a letter to Émile Bernard dated 23 June 1888 (2003, p. 370), is interesting for its talk of the ‘hemisphere’ - presumably half a world - that we now know, and the ‘other half of our life’ revealed by religion, and to be revealed one day by science: ‘Science demonstrates that the earth as a whole is round, something nobody nowadays disputes. For all that, people still persist in thinking that life is flat and runs from birth to death. But life, too, is probably round, and much greater in scope and possibilities than the hemisphere we now know. Future generations will probably be able to enlighten us on this very interesting subject, and then science itself - with all due respect - may reach conclusions that are more or less in keeping with Christ's sayings about the other half of our life’ (emphasis in original).

43. Jaspers, 1947, p. 50.

44. See Nicholas of Cusa, 1985, Bk. II, ch. xii, p. 93; Bruno, 1879-91, Bk. II, ch. ix, vol. 1, p. 291; Pascal, 1976, §72 (Lafuma §199): ‘C'est une sphère infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part’. In his annotations to the first volume of Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, Jasper Hopkins traces the image of God as an infinite sphere to Meister Eckhart, but acknowledges that its history does not originate with him. For discussion of the metaphor and its history, see Harries, 1975. She refers to Borges's opinion that ‘it may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors’ (Borges, 1964, ‘The fearful sphere of Pascal’, p. 192; trans. A. Kerrigan).

45. In the case of Kierkegaard, it begins with his differentiation of the aesthetic and ethical spheres in 1843 (1987, 1983); he explicitly describes three spheres in Stages on Life's Way in 1845 (1988), and refines his analysis to essentially four spheres in 1846 (1992); Heidegger, 1999, p. 246.

46. Koestler, 1964, p. 199.

47. Eliade, 1971.

48. Nietzsche, 1990, p. 31; quoting, without acknowledgment, the second-century Roman author, Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae, Bk. 18, section xi, §4), himself quoting, and championing, the earlier Roman poet Furius Antias (c. 100 BC).

49. ‘So trust in the eternal laws of the Gods is silenced, and the oracles, who knew in every situation what was to be done, no longer speak to men. The statues have become stone corpses from which the living soul has flown; the faith that used to animate the hymns of praise has passed away. The tables of the gods are bare of spiritual food and drink, the games and festivals no longer occasions of joyful communion with the divine. The works of the muse lack the power of Spirit, which drew its self-conviction from the ruinous crushing of gods and men. They have already become just what they are for us — beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed those works on to us, much as a girl might offer us such fruit. The actual life-world in which they exist is no longer there, neither the tree that bore them, nor the earth, nor the elements which constituted their substance, nor the climate that produced their particular character, nor the succession of seasons which determined their growth. In similar fashion Fate does not preserve for us the living world of those works of art, nor the spring and summer of that ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but only a veiled remembrance of all that reality. When we enjoy them, therefore, it is not an act of worship, through which our conscious life might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full, but an outer act, as if wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits. In place of the inner elements of the original ethical reality, a reality that environed, created and inspired these works, we construct, in prolix detail, a mere exoskeleton out of the dead elements of its outward existence, — philology, historiography, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into its actual life, but only so as to represent it ideally or pictorially (vorstellen). But just as the maiden who hands us the plucked fruits is more than the Nature that produced them in the first place — the Nature which granted the specific conditions and context for them, tree, air, light, and so on — since she brings all this together at a higher level in the glint of self-awareness in her eye, and her gesture in offering the gifts; so too the Spirit of the fate which presents us with those works of art is more than the ethical life realized in the actual world of that nation. For it is the recollective inwardizing (Er-Innerung) in us, of the spirit which in them was still only outwardly manifested; — it is the spirit of the tragic fate which gathers all those individual gods and attributes of the divine substance into the one Pantheon, into the Spirit which is itself conscious of itself as Spirit.’ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. Baillie, pp. 753-4; in Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Miller), pp. 455-6): translation adapted and synthesised, in Hegelian fashion, from Baillie, Miller, and in particular the translation of Andrew Shanks, to whose work Trans-Metaphysical Theology the interested reader is referred for a thought-provoking interpretation of the passage: ‘in other words, the worse it gets, the better it gets, as the widely shared experience of alienation opens up the possibility of a truly fresh start’: Shanks, forthcoming).

50. In the spirit of Erasmus's great work countering dogmatic certainties, In Praise of Folly, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes! … Our greatest stupidities may be very wise … Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense … It's only by thinking even more crazily [verrückter] than philosophers do that you can solve their problems … Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness’: Wittgenstein, 1984, pp. 39, 56, 75 & 76.

51. See, e.g., Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part I, §133, p. 51; ibid., §309, p. 103. He also saw that the roots of many problems in philosophy lie in the way we are enthralled by language: ‘These problems are solved, not by adducing further information, but by putting together what we have known all along. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intellect through language’ (ibid., §109, trans. I. McG.); in the original: ‘Diese Probleme werden gelöst, nicht durch Beibringen neuer Erfahrung, sondern durch Zusammenstellung des längst Bekannten. Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache’.

52. Kleist, 1982, p. 244. I am here following a train of thought set out by Sass in Madness and Modernism, where he says something very similar: his point, it seems to me, cannot be bettered.

53. Gombrich, 1977, p. 389 (emphasis added).

54. In not having definite or indefinite articles, of course, it is hardly alone: cf., among Indo-European languages, Russian.

55. Kawasaki, 2002. I am indebted to Kawasaki at various points in what follows.

56. Nakamura, 1993, pp. 533 & 350.

57. Shigematsu, 1981, p. 3.

58. Nakamura, 1993, pp. 530-36.

59. ibid., p. 537.

60. ibid., p. 355.

61. Kawasaki, 2002.

62. Ogawa, 1998.

63. Iwata, 1989: see Ogawa, 1998, p. 158.

64. ‘The impermanence of grass, trees and forests is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the person's body and mind is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the (land) country and scenery is verily the Buddhahood.’ Nakamura, 1993, p. 352.

65. Nietzsche, 2003, §9 [26], p. 145 (emphasis in original).

66. Gutchess, Yoon, Luo et al., 2006.

67. Norenzayan, Smith, Kim et al., 2002; Chiu, 1972.

68. Norenzayan, Smith, Kim et al., 2002.

69. Nisbett, Peng, Choi et al., 2001.

70. Ji, Zhang & Nisbett, 2004.

71. Peng & Nisbett, 1999.

72. Masuda & Nisbett, 2001.

73. Nisbett & Masuda, 2003.

74. Miyamoto, Nisbett & Masuda, 2006.

75. Markus & Kitayama, 1991.

76. Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura et al., 2003.

77. Hoshino-Browne, Zanna, Spencer et al., 2005; Kitayama, Snibbe, Markus et al., 2004.

78. M. Miller, 1997.

79. Tafarodi, Marshall & Katsura, 2004.

80. Gudykunst, Yang & Nishida, 1987.

81. Baumeister, Smart & Boden, 1996.

82. Heine, Lehman, Markus et al., 1999.

83. ibid.

84. S. E. Taylor, 1989; Goffman, 1967.

85. Heine, Lehman, Ide et al., 2001.

86. In ancient Rome although the right hand was preferred for skilled work, the left hand was preferred for extraordinary activities such as religious ritual (Guillaumont, 1985). Virgil (Moretum, line 25) states that laeva ministerio, dextra est intenta labori: the left hand is for performing rites, the right for work (ministerium has the sense both of a skilled art and a religious observance). This superiority of the left hand in the religious domain in ancient Rome influenced Latin Christian arts, which is why St. Peter was always depicted on Christ's left hand; in Byzantine art the opposite rule applied, and he was depicted on Christ's right hand. The Roman priest pours out with his left hand the libation that causes the earth to open. Roman physicians or other makers of medicaments, in order to render certain plants efficacious, must pluck them with the left hand. Remedies applied with the left hand and to the left side of the organ or the body, and even the application of the left hand alone, will effect a cure. Animals, also, should be caught with the left hand in order to subdue them and make them harmless. The left horn of a bull and the left hoof of a black ass are compelling charms. Tisiphone brandishes her snakes in her left hand. The Furies carry their torches in their left hands. Medea gathers with her left hand the ingredients of her magic brew. Remedies applied with the left hand and to the left side of the organ or the body, and even the application of the left hand alone, will effect a cure (Frothingham, 1917; Ouspenski, 1976). In Greek The Master and his Emissary (‘honoured’, lit. ‘of good name’) and The Master and his Emissary (root aThe Master and his Emissary, ‘best’) are two of the words for left, though Lloyd says these are euphemistic (Lloyd, 1991).

87. Fabbro, 1994; Tan, 1998.

88. Evans-Pritchard, 1956, p. 234 ff. (where other examples are given). In this regard, Hall mentions the Jewish custom of teffilin (Hall, 2008, p. 45).

89. Lloyd, 1991.

90. Granet, 1999, 1973: see Lloyd, 1992.

91. Wang, He, Tong et al., 1999.

92. Kochunov, Fox, Lancaster et al., 2003.

93. Valaki, Maestu, Simos et al., 2004.

94. Robertson-Dunn, Metreweli & Brown, 1996.

95. J. Needham, 1969, p. 17. See also ibid., p. 224: ‘Atomism in the physico-chemical sense never played any role of importance in traditional Chinese scientific thinking, which was wedded to the ideas of the continuum and action at a distance’.

96. See p. 131 above.

97. Masuda & Nisbett, 2001.

98. Norenzayan, Smith, Kim et al., 2002.

99. If that sounds too ‘Romantic’ (in that old putdown), think of the inspiring example of El Sistema, the youth music programme in Venezuela, and its many offshoots in other countries, a programme that gave rise to the much-lauded Simon Bolivar Orchestra, and has drawn thousands of poverty-stricken urban youngsters away from disillusionment and a life of crime. Who would have thought that music might have the power to bring so many back to life, inspire them to change their values and behaviour, and create such infectious social good-will, determination, and a sense of belonging?

100. Lewis, 1972.

101. See p. 47 above. Also: ‘we should remember that insightful observation of the systematic patterns in nature (whether easily visible or not) remains our second highest calling. In the final accounting, that is the most lovely aspect of science’ (Panksepp, 1998, p. 341).

102. Popper, 1980, p. 280.

103. Planck, 1933, pp. 214 & 217.

104. ‘Nicht die Wahrheit, in deren Besitz irgend ein Mensch ist, oder zu sein vermeint, sondern die aufrichtige Mühe, die er angewandt hat, hinter die Wahrheit zu kommen, macht den Wert des Menschen. Denn nicht den Besitz, sondern durch die Nachforschung der Wahrheit erweitern sich seine Kräfte, worin allein seine immer wachsende Vollkommenheit bestehet. Der Besitz macht ruhig, träge, stolz — Wenn Gott in seiner Rechten alle Wahrheit und in seiner Linken den einzigen immer regen Trieb nach Wahrheit, obschon mit dem Zusatze, mich immer und ewig zu irren, verschlossen hielte, und spräche zu mir: wähle! Ich fiele ihm mit Demut in seine Linke und sagte: Vater gib! Die reine Wahrheit ist ja doch nur für dich allein! …’: Lessing, 1979, vol. 8, pp. 32-3; trans. H. B. Garland (1937, p. 174). Cf. Heraclitus fr. LV, Diels 78: ‘Human nature has not the insights that the divine has'; and Goethe, 1991, ‘Naturwissenschaft’, §1033: ‘das schönste Glück des denkenden Menschen ist, das Erforschliche erforscht zu haben, und das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren’ (‘the greatest good fortune for a man of thought is to have fathomed what can be fathomed, and peacefully to respect what is unfathomable'; trans. I. McG.).

105. Waismann, 1994, p. 134.

106. Thus the philosopher Wolfgang Blankenburg on the important, and much misunderstood, concept of common sense: ‘We should not allow ourselves to interpret the concept's evanescent quality and lack of contours merely negatively. We may be tempted to do so for the sake of greater conceptual clarity. While such clarity is often a desirable goal, it will in the present case make our concept dissolve into nothing. The very “sponginess” of the concept, rather, is connected with its richness and vitality. We should not presume that its vagueness signifies lack of clarity on our part. It says at the same time something about the peculiarity of the matter itself. It withdraws from our efforts to conceptualise it unambiguously as an object. However, we must not simply yield to this withdrawal. In our very striving to overcome this resistance, we should take heed of it. We should take this withdrawal as an indication of the mode of Being of common sense itself’ (Blankenburg & Mishara, 2001, pp. 304-5).

107. Such divisions have intuitively been connected with right and left. In a survey of the significance attached to the terms right and left across many cultures, Sir Geoffrey Lloyd comments that, though they may vary in the moral or affective significance attached to them, they ‘tend to be used as the symbols of opposite spiritual categories’: Lloyd, 1992, p. 39.

108. Goethe, Faust, Part I, line 1112.

109. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, ii, §19, 1960, vol. 1, pp. 163-4.

110. Bergson, 1908, ‘De la multiplicité des états de conscience: l'idée de durée’, p. 74.

111. Scheler, 1976, ‘Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung’, p. 95. Kant said as much, but never used the exact phrase (though see, e.g., 1977a, p. 89). Similar formulations have been made by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Nikolai Hartmann. The expression is often misunderstood to have something to do with dualism, which is far from the intention of any of these philosophers; in separating mind and matter one is cutting through the human world in the wrong direction.