Bicameral Mind – Marshall McLuhan
Channel: Transition21
Date: 2017-09-26

Since Marshall's time, science has discovered that while language is more dominant on the left, and attention more dominant on the right, the hemispheres always work in tandem. A mistake in the past has been to over-simplify and apply this finding to suggest that logic is on the left and creativity is on the right. In fact, creativity and logic are complex, requiring both-hemispheres working in tandem. Regardless, the terms "left-brained" and "right-brained" may still hold for an individuals place in culture, as demonstrated by Iain McGilchrist:

RSA ANIMATE: The Divided Brain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI

Brain Games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIKeB0LYLho

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An Unpublished Letter From Marshall McLuhan to Father Walter Ong:

"For thirty years at least, I have in effect been using the two hemispheres approach under the names of the *written* and the *oral*, the *visual* and the *acoustic*, the *hot* and the *cool*, the *medium* and the *message*, *figure* and *ground*, and so on. Now it turns out that medicine has been building a great beach-head for this approach with its new understanding of the two hemispheres of the [human] brain. If you look at the traits of the left hemisphere, you will discover the lineaments of the First world – the literate and industrial world – and, on the other hand, in the right hemisphere you will perceive the characteristics of the Third world – the world without the phonetic
alphabet.

During the past century, while the knowledge of the two hemispheres has been growing, there has also been a new electronic milieu or environment which automatically pushes the right hemisphere into a more dominant position than it has held in the Western world since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. The two hemispheres naturally respond to the milieu or total surround in which people live and work. *My work has been a dialogue between the two hemispheres in which the characteristics of the right hemisphere are given so much recognition that I have been unintelligible to the left hemisphere people. It happens that the left hemisphere people are completely out of touch with the results and the formal characteristics of their own new electric technologies*”

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