The God of the Left Hemisphere

Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation

Roderick Tweedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367101404
• eBook ISBN: 9780429920905
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity. The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'. The book draws in particular on the work of Bolte Taylor, whose study in this area is having a profound impact on how we understand mental activity and processes.

PART I

THE LOOKING-GLASS

CHAPTER ONE


The origins of Urizen

Dark revolving in silent activity:

Unseen in tormenting passions;

An activity unknown and horrible;

A self-contemplating shadow,

In enormous labours occupied.

—William Blake, The Book of Urizen

The pre-history of the left hemisphere

One of the main themes of Blake’s creative work concerns the historical emergence of a Power within the human psyche which he calls the “Reasoning Power” or, more usually, simply “Urizen”. This term was not intended to signify a “person” as such, but rather a force or function, a complex activity of the human brain: “An activity unknown and horrible;/A self-contemplating shadow,/In enormous labours occupied” (Ur 3:20–22, p. 71). Blake associated the emergence of this rationalising, self-contemplating, abstracting power with the origins of human history itself: for him, it is the power that has dominated and controlled much of human development, since it has also dominated and controlled the human psyche. As the primary force driving the psychological evolution of mankind it might in one sense be described as a sort of “God”; as Urizen himself proclaims in Blake’s Jerusalem: “I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!” (J 54:16, p. 203). The aim of the first part of this book is to argue that the qualities and functions ascribed by Blake to “Urizen” correspond remarkably closely to the activities and programs of what modern neuroscientists identify as the “left hemisphere” of the human brain. In order to explain this more clearly, an account of the evolutionary emergence of left-brain dominance within Homo sapiens is provided, followed by a brief description of the specific functions and character of the left brain and how these relate in particular to Blake’s concept of Urizen.

The development of left hemisphere dominance within the division of the human brain (including all the analytic, rationalising, abstracting aspects of consciousness) seems to have originated with the very emergence of Homo sapiens as a species. Indeed the very term “homo sapiens” (Latin for “wise man” or “knowing man”) suggests the profound and defining role that this newly emergent “Reasoning Power” was to play in all subsequent human development. As recent research suggests, the development of a division in function between the left and right-hand sides of the brain—which also results in our tendency to be right or left-handed—seems to have been a major factor in our leap from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens (Crow, 2002b, pp. 295–297; Joseph, 1990, pp. 31–71). Whilst it is with the development of Homo sapiens that significant lateralisation starts to appear (about 200,000 years ago), the whole evolution of the human species is intimately bound up with the emergence of specifically left hemisphere brain characteristics. Thus, if one were able to use time-lapse photography to record those gradual developments over the vast periods of time from the earliest human beginnings, one would see the earliest hominids such as Ardipithecus ramidus (about 4.4 million years ago), already partially able to stand upright, gradually evolve into Australopithecus (between 2 to 3 million years ago), the immediate forerunners of the Homo species. Australopithecus was fully bipedal—the cranium and head rising to the “north” of the body, coinciding with and epitomising the ascendancy of peculiarly “mental” and intelligent features which start to dominate and control the whole body, whilst also allowing for the crucial development of the right hand (free now from purely locomotive demands) for tool-making, using weapons, gesturing/communication, and indeed all subsequent manual skills (Corballis, 1991, p. 53).¹ Australopithecus themselves probably only used stones as primitive weapons and did not use tools, have speech, or use fire. All these emerged with Homo erectus (1.8 million to 300,000 years ago). These extraordinary beings reveal the extent to which the interior changes within brain structure and consciousness had already materialised. They had a much larger cranial capacity, could use fire, had developed some form of speech, and employed tools and wooden spears. Tool-making is especially relevant to left-brain dominance as it shows that early man had somehow developed a consciousness that experienced itself as being separate from the now “outside” universe and therefore able to begin to control and manipulate it. These are all key left-hemisphere traits. It is of course the left hemisphere of the brain that controls the right hand (and indeed the right side of the whole body) and there seems to have been an evolutionary feed-back system between the right hand and left brain functions, the development of the one continually strengthening and allowing for further development of the other. Thus it appears that language and motor functioning are both lateralised to the left hemisphere partly because “modern human language is, in large part an evolutionary outgrowth of and is directly related to neuroplastic changes induced in the left hemisphere in response to tool making and gathering activities by men and women over the course of human evolution” (Joseph, 1990, p. 118). As McManus similarly notes, “the evolving hand and brain were in continual dialogue … Right-handedness must have come from the evolution of the brain” (McManus, 2002, p. 242; see also Corballis & Beale, 1976, pp. 89–98; and Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 2009, pp. 483–484). This notion of “continual dialogue” between hand and hemisphere is crucial: the more the right hand was used to manipulate and control the external world the more it strengthened and reinforced the left hemisphere circuitry. Indeed it is possible that language itself emerged as another form of tool, as the left brain gradually exerted its control in increasingly complex ways: “there is considerable evidence that the evolution of language and linguistic thought are related to and are, in part, an outgrowth of right hand temporal-sequential motor activity. The right hand appears to serve as a kind of motoric extension of language and thought in that it acts at the behest of linguistic impulses” (Joseph, 1990, p. 143). Homo habilis (popularly translated as “Handy Man”, for his sophisticated tool-making skills) further developed these skills, until with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens (approximately 137,000 to 200,000 years ago) they had progressed so much that a radical shift in the entire culture occurs, with the developments of cave art, burying the dead, use of clothes, and the making of basic mechanical hunting devices such as traps. Many of the early cave drawings are simply images of the human hand: fit emblem for the dominance of the powerful new rationalising, instrumental, and manipulative Power that was now in command of the human psyche. “Intelligent” Urizenic man had arrived.

As the early history of man’s cognitive and physical development suggests, it was the emergence within man of specifically left-brain activities and characteristics that played a decisive and fundamental shaping role. And as has already been suggested, the left hemisphere is itself a complex of specific but deeply inter-related functions and traits. There are six main aspects or processes associated with left-brain activity: the capacity for abstraction; language; linear sequencing; ego-centric awareness; judgments and law-making; and reasoning (calculating and instrumental reasoning). Remarkably, these are also the key characteristics of Blake’s Urizen. Indeed, what is so prescient about Blake’s portrayal of this Urizenic configuration is that rather than it merely representing, in a rather crude one-dimensional way, “human reason”, it combines a whole living complex of related processes and functions. It is to these six functions and their correspondence to the modern understanding of left-brain complexes that the next part of this book now turns. To help clarify the particular nature of these processes I draw on the recent work by Bolte Taylor on brain lateralisation.

Bolte Taylor and the left brain

In her extraordinary account of the haemorrhage that exploded in the left side of her brain on the morning of 10 December 1996, and which soon wiped out most of the left hemisphere skills and functions associated with that area, Jill Bolte Taylor eloquently describes how very different the two sorts of entities are that we refer to as the “right brain” and “left brain”.

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about ‘right here, right now.’ Our right hemisphere … thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. [Bolte Taylor, 2008b, TED podcast]

What is so valuable about Bolte Taylor’s account of the distinctions between left and right hemisphere brain states is that they come from actual personal experience. Indeed this makes her almost unique amongst the scientific community. Many books, internet sites, and scientists provide neat, Urizenic lists of the basic differences between these two brain hemispheres (left brain usually being classified as logical, linguistic, mathematical, law-based, ego-centric, and analytic, while right brain is generally viewed as intuitive, feeling-based, spatially aware, spontaneous, and holistic). What Bolte Taylor’s experience brings home is that these are not just functions or activities: they also make us who we are. For example, since at least the 1960s (when researchers into epilepsy first seriously investigated brain lateralisation), scientists have been aware that the left and right sides of the brain operate in quite different ways, sometimes even independently of each other, but there was some disagreement and confusion concerning whether these differences were that fundamental (since the brain also functions as an integrated whole), and doubts as to whether any such basic “left versus right” categorisation was too crude and simplistic an extrapolation. What Bolte Taylor’s experience suggests is that the left and right hemispheres do indeed operate in very different ways—she even talks about them as having in a sense their own distinct “personalities”—and that while nothing about the human brain is ever crude or simplistic, it is possible now to see what very different psychic world systems are operating inside each of our heads.

When I experienced the hemorrhage and lost my left hemisphere language center cells that defined my self, those cells could no longer inhibit the cells in my right mind. As a result, I have gained a clear delineation of the two very distinct characters cohabiting my cranium. The two halves of my brain don’t just perceive and think in different ways at a neurological level, but they demonstrate very different values based upon the types of information they perceive, and thus exhibit very different personalities. [JBT, p. 133]

To illustrate the different nature of these two distinct characters or modes of attention within us, Bolte Taylor describes her right hemisphere mind as being “open to the eternal flow whereby I exist at one with the universe”, and she relates how for the first time in her life she experienced herself as being a “fluid” rather than a solid within space: wave-like rather than particular. “I sensed the composition of my being as that of a fluid rather than that of a solid.” Indeed, because of the feelings of peace, “at oneness”, and occasional euphoria which the right hemisphere delivers, she refers to it as being “the seat of my divine mind” (ibid., p. 140). Contrast this with how she describes the very different sort of circuitry, programming, and characteristics of the left hemisphere,—the one which I will be comparing with Blake’s Urizenic mode of being:

My left hemisphere—our left hemisphere—is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. [Bolte Taylor, 2008b, TED podcast]

On the morning of her stroke, as she movingly relates, this “brain chatter” went completely silent. That whole mode of experiencing reality went off-line. What was left was the “right hemisphere” version of reality, a mode of experiencing reality quite different to that of the left, under whose dominance our brains usually operate. What is challenging about Bolte Taylor is that here we have a first-hand account of how differently the right hemisphere of the brain and the left hemisphere experience reality. This allows us to understand much more vividly and directly than ever before the peculiar nature of left-brain dominance: the dominance that has controlled and been responsible for the larger part of human history, and which indeed is in control of contemporary society more now than at any other time in our development. By connecting the modern understanding of these functions with Blake’s portrayal of Urizen, fascinating new interpretations of his “prophetic verse” are possible, and an astonishing and compelling exegesis of the whole machinery of human consciousness becomes available to us. The following chapter examines the main features of Urizen, and connects each of them to corresponding processes and functions within the left hemisphere.

CHAPTER TWO


Urizen and the left hemisphere

I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!

Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!

—William Blake, Jerusalem

In the Brain of Man we live

Urizen is repeatedly associated by Blake with the human brain, and indeed that is where he is located. Los, who shares this location with him, specifica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Looking-Glass
• Part II: Down the Rabbit-Hole
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index