====== My research and Iain McGilchrist's hemispheres ======

[[2023-08]]-11

I read Iain McGilchrist's “The Master and His Emissary” a few years ago now, and apart from being impressed by its very obvious display of erudition, Iain's thesis generally made a lot of sense to me. Just this year, this has been somewhat put in perspective by Fanny Norlin, saying that it was essentially from a masculine rather than feminine point of view. But I won't follow that thread just now.

One of the main points of Iain's conceptual mapping of the brain is that the left hemisphere (controlling the right hand) – not only in humans but many animals – is to do with grasping, analysing, rationality, measurement etc., while the right hemisphere is all about global awareness, context, etc. 
This is well explained in his introductory [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI|RSA Animate video on the divided brain]].

But what I had missed was the connection with my own research, following on from my PhD thesis.
In my paper “A Context Model Needed for Complex Tasks”, the section  
[[https://www.simongrant.org/pubs/mmea/text.html#reasons|Reasons for a structure of medium-sized contexts]] speculates on the possibility of explaining why people divide up complex tasks into what I blandly called “contexts”. My approach suggests that there is a sweet spot between having very large and very small contexts.

So the connection? Intra-contextual reasoning (**reasoning within** a context) seems to me now to map very well onto Iain's concept of left-hemisphere thinking. It's just looking a few pieces of variable information, rationally and logically drawing conclusions about what decisions to take within that practiced context. The point being that if we define a context clearly enough, it has already carved out a piece from the surrounding complex world that is less complex, and amenable, at worst, to complicated handling. (I take ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’ in the senses of Dave Snowden's [[wp>Cynefin framework]].) I see this as remarkably similar to Iain's description of a bird looking at the ground to distinguish sand and pebbles from edible grain or seeds. 

In contrast, Iain characterises the right hemisphere, in the same example, as keeping its eyes open for any potential threat — for instance, a predator, in his bird example. This is exactly what I had in mind for switching between contexts in my model. We could call this, not exactly inter-contextual //reasoning//, but rather something like **cross-contextual awareness**. In the work of my own already quoted, I'm seeing this in the same frame, as some kind of rules. But that would be to place it in the same hemisphere. Rather, it seems to me now much more likely to be like pattern matching. The sense of “this doesn't feel right, something is off” is typically a right-brain thing, which can in turn lead to a left-brain process of checking, logically, what the actual situation could be.

So, division of labour: the left hemisphere deals with the inside of known contexts, and the right deals with situation awareness, taking responsibility for being in the appropriate context.

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