In response to Scott Barry Kaufman’s article yesterday arguing the right-left brain hemisphere split isn’t true, the main proponent of the view, Iain McGilchrist, responds.

Scott Barry Kaufman would appear to be way behind the curve on the topic of hemisphere differences. It is true that there is a diminishing band of people – often life coaches and management seminar psychologists – who still go around mouthing the sort of nonsense with which he starts his article:

‘So yea, you know how the left brain is really realistic, analytical, practical, organized, and logical, and the right brain is so darn creative, passionate, sensual, tasteful, colourful, vivid, and poetic?’

This is, as should be obvious, a straw man, and underestimates his audience, most of whom can be assumed by now to have caught up with the vast increase in understanding of hemisphere differences in recent years.  It’s like lecturing us all on the news that physics no longer believes phlogiston to be the cause of fire. 

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There is a catch-22 involved here: we all learnt in our training that the sort of thing Kaufman puts forward was debunked ages ago.

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Increasingly cognitive neuroscientists are catching up with developments in this field, on which I have written at length in principally two books, The Master and his Emissary (Yale University Press 2009) and The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press 2021). These books total approximately two thousand pages together, represent the results of three decades of research specifically into what the real hemisphere differences are, and are backed by the findings of over 6,000 papers in the area.  Fifteen years ago I still had to warn people that just about anything they thought they knew about hemisphere differences was likely to be either flat wrong, or at the very least in need of much qualification – and at worst the complete reverse of the truth.  I have had to do this much less recently; but Kaufman’s article shows how necessary it is for me to keep repeating it.

SUGGESTED READING Creativity is not a right brain phenomenon By Scott Barry Kaufman