Left Brain & Right Brain: 20 Brain Hemisphere Differences from “The Master and His Emissary” (+ Infographic)

I’m currently reading the ~600-page book The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (Amazon). The second chapter alone is an absolute beast with 500+ footnotes highlighting the differences between the left brain and right brain hemispheres.

I’m trying something a little different with this post—it’s a “summary in progress.” What’s that mean? So far, I’ve captured 95%+ of all the left brain and right brain hemisphere mentions through chapter 3 of the book. Since there’s quite a bit of repetition, I organized them all into themes. As I read more of the book, I’ll update this post and continue to further organize and distill it all.

If you aren’t familiar with Iain McGilchrist, a good place to start would be his documentary The Divided Brain. Here’s the trailer:

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Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below

• Brain Hemispheres Overview (+ Infographic)
• How Each Hemisphere Works
• Ways of Being & Knowing
• Types of Attention
• Views of Body
• Views of Self
• Views of Other
• Roles in Language
• Roles in Memory
• Roles in Emotions
• Roles in Numbers
• Roles in Color
• Abstraction vs Experience
• Familiar vs New
• Stasis vs Flow
• Categories vs Individuals
• Parts vs Wholes
• Decontextualized vs Context
• Explicit vs Implicit
• Non-Living vs Living
• Certain vs Uncertain

Left Brain & Right Brain: 20 Brain Hemisphere Differences from The Master and His Emissary (+ Infographic)

Left Brain & Right Brain Hemisphere Overview

The Metaphor: “The brain is—in fact it has to be—a metaphor of the world. … In terms of the metaphor of the Master and his emissary, the Master realises the need for an emissary to do certain work on his behalf (which he, the Master, must not involve himself with) and report back to him. That is why he appoints the emissary in the first place. The emissary, however, knowing less than the Master, thinks he knows everything and considers himself the real Master, thus failing to carry out his duty to report back. The right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, ‘both/and’, synthetic, integrative; it realises the need for both. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, ‘either/or’, analytic and fragmentary – but, crucially, unaware of what it is missing. It therefore thinks it can go it alone … The work of the left hemisphere needs to be integrated with that of the right hemisphere, that is all. The left hemisphere is the Master’s most prized counsellor, his valued emissary.”

Myth Busting: 

• “I don’t want it to be possible, after reading this book, for any intelligent person ever again to see the right hemisphere as the ‘minor’ hemisphere, as it used to be called – still worse the flighty, impetuous, fantastical one, the unreliable but perhaps fluffy and cuddly one – and the left hemisphere as the solid, dependable, down-to-earth hemisphere, the one that does all the heavy lifting and is alone the intelligent source of our understanding.”

The Fundamental Left Brain Right Brain Difference:

• “The most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world. … The left hemisphere can only re-present; but the right hemisphere, for its part, can only give again what ‘presences’. This is close to the core of what differentiates the hemispheres.”

How (not What):

• “It is not what each hemisphere does, but how it does it that matters. Each hemisphere is involved in everything, true enough; just in a quite different way. … The difference, I shall argue, is not in the ‘what’, but in the ‘how’ – by which I don’t mean ‘the means by which’ (machine model again), but ‘the manner in which’, something no one ever asked of a machine. I am not interested purely in ‘functions’ but in ways of being, something only living things can have.”

Right Brain → Left Brain → Right Brain Progression: 

• “In summary, the hierarchy of attention, for a number of reasons, implies a grounding role and an ultimately integrating role for the right hemisphere, with whatever the left hemisphere does at the detailed level needing to be founded on, and then returned to, the picture generated by the right. This is an instance of the right → left → right progression which will be a theme of this book. And it lies at the very foundation of experience: attention, where the world actually comes into being.”

Iain McGilchrist’s Thesis:

• “My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”

The Connection Between Left Brain & Right Brain (Corpus Callosum):

• “The corpus callosum contains an estimated 300–800 million fibres connecting topologically similar areas in either hemisphere. Yet only 2 per cent of cortical neurones are connected by this tract. What is more, the main purpose of a large number of these connections is actually to inhibit – in other words to stop the other hemisphere interfering. Neurones can have an excitatory or inhibitory action, excitatory neurones causing further neuronal activity downstream, while inhibitory neurones suppress it. … The evidence is that the primary effect of callosal transmission is to produce functional inhibition. So much is this the case that a number of neuroscientists have proposed that the whole point of the corpus callosum is to allow one hemisphere to inhibit the other. … Clearly the corpus callosum does also have excitatory functions – the transfer of information, not just prevention of confusion, is important – and both this and the inhibitory role are necessary for normal human functioning.”

The tension:

• “There are at all levels forces that tend to coherence and unification, and forces that tend to incoherence and separation. The tension between them seems to be an inalienable condition of existence, regardless of the level at which one contemplates it. The hemispheres of the human brain, I believe, are an expression of this necessary tension. And the two hemispheres also adopt different stances about their differences: the right hemisphere towards cohesion of their two dispositions, the left hemisphere towards competition between them.”

Left Brain & Right Brain Hemisphere Summary

Left Brain (“The Emissary”): The hemisphere of “what”; a wonderful servant, but a very poor master.

Right Brain (“The Master”): The hemisphere of “how” (preoccupation with context, relational aspects of experience, emotion and the nuances of expression); can use the left hemisphere’s preferred style; reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched, whole.

How Each Hemisphere Generally Works:

• Left Brain (Local Communication, Parasympathetic Nervous System, Dopamine): Prioritizes transfer of information within regions; more interconnected within itself and within regions of itself; parasympathetic nervous system (produces relaxation of autonomic function appropriate to the familiar, the known, and the emotionally more neutral); more reliant on dopamine.

• Right Brain (Cross-Regional Communication, Eye Movement, Sympathetic Nervous Control, Noradrenaline): Facilitates information transfer across regions; right hemisphere is longer, wider; generally larger, heavier; greater dendritic overlap in cortical columns; more white matter; controls conjugate eye movements (makes the two eyes move together); more intimately connected with the unconscious and automatic systems for regulating the body and its level of arousal (autonomic control of heart rate or neuroendocrine function); more reliant on noradrenaline.

Ways of Being & Knowing:

• Left Brain Way of Being & Knowing: Step outside the flow of experience and “experience” our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, static (though its “bits” can be re-set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful … Its great strength is that its findings are repeatable; an affinity with the non-living; with “pieces” of information; general, impersonal, fixed, certain and disengaged.

• Right Brain Way of Being & Knowing: Allow things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence, and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of that whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective … It’s the way we naturally approach knowledge of a living being; it’s to do with individuals, and permits a sense of uniqueness; it’s “mine”, personal, not something I can just hand on to someone else unchanged; and it is not fixed or certain. It’s not easily captured in words; the whole is not captured by trying to list the parts; it has at least something to do with the embodied person; it resists general terms; it has to be experienced; and the knowledge depends on betweenness (an encounter).

Types of Attention:

• Left Brain (Local, Narrow, Focused Attention): Concerned narrowly with the right half of space and the right half of the body (one part, the part it uses); yields narrow, targeted, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding (our needs); takes a local short-term view; assists focused grasping of what has already been prioritized; actively narrows attentional focus to highly related words; operates focally, suppressing meanings that are not currently relevant; prefers single meanings.

• Right Brain (Global, Broad, Vigilant Attention): Responsible for every type of attention except focused attention; global attention (which comes first); vigilance, alertness, sustained attention (“intensity” aspects of attention); vigilant for whatever it is that exists “out there”; “on the look out”; attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come; directs attention to what comes to us from the edges of our awareness (regardless of side); awareness of signals from the surroundings (especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends); directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves; threat monitoring; detection of anomalies; dominance for exploratory attentional movements.

Views of Body:

• Left Brain (Detached Body): Sees the body as something from which we are relatively detached, a thing in the world, like other things, devitalized, a “corpse”; an assemblage of parts.

• Right Brain (Lived Body): Responsible for our sense of the body as something we “live” (something that is part of our identity, and the phase of intersection between our selves and the world at large); living image of the whole body intimately linked to activity in the world (affective experience); understands mental experience within the context of the body (rather than abstracting it); concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience.

Views of Self:

• Left Brain (Objectified Self): Self as an expression of will; individual self-belief (positive or negative).

• Right Brain (Embodied Self): Deeply connected to the self as embodied; plays an important part in personality (who we fundamentally are); self-recognition (face or voice); the self as intrinsically, empathically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others; the continuous sense of self; personal “interior” sense of the self with a history and a personal and emotional memory (“self-concept”); self-experience; tendency for independence and motivation; acting “for ourselves” (initiating new action rather than following another’s lead); planning and monitoring the outcomes of one’s own actions; more engaged by emotional, autobiographical memories; concern for what has personal meaning; self-awareness; responsible for maintaining a coherent, continuous, and unified sense of self; connects the individual to emotionally salient experiences and memories underlying self-schemas; the “glue” holding together the sense of self; enables human adults to see themselves as selves (continuous existence over time); establishes the appropriate relationship between the self and the world; “It is hardly surprising that the ‘sense of self’ should be grounded in the right hemisphere, because the self originates in the interaction with ‘the Other’, not as an entity in atomistic isolation: ‘The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.’”

Views of Other:

• Left Brain (Disconnected from Other): Pays attention to the virtual world that is has created, which is self-consistent but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful but ultimately only able to operate on and to know itself.

• Right Brain (Interested in Other): Affinity for all that is “other,” new, unknown, uncertain, unbounded; interest in whatever exists apart from ourselves; pays attention to the Other (whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation); deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other; open to whatever exists apart from ourselves without preconceptions.

Roles in Language:

• Left Brain (Language & Speech): The speaking hemisphere; the nitty-gritty of language; “I-it” world of words; abstract concepts and words, along with more subtle and complex syntax; close lexical semantic relationships; much more extensive vocabulary; extends our power to map the world and explore the complexities of causal relationships between things; sign language; clichéd metaphorical or non-literal expressions; symbol manipulation; explicit manipulation involving language and serial analysis; has precision but no intuitive sense of what it is actually doing other than following rules and manipulating symbols.

“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modelled, so that it can be grasped and controlled.”

• Right Brain (Understands Language, Narrative, Metaphor, Deduction, Insight): Activates a broader range of words; takes whatever is said within its entire context; specialized in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor; processes non-literal aspects of language; integration of two seemingly unrelated concepts into a meaningful metaphoric expression; subtle ability to use metaphor; processes information in a non-focal manner with widespread activation of related meanings; looser semantic relationships; makes infrequent or distantly related word meanings available; generating unusual or distantly related words; understanding and expression of emotion in language; memory for emotional language; uses language to understand what others mean; language reception and perception; understanding of narrative; makes judgments about the truth or plausibility of narratives; understands many of the subtlest and most important elements of language better than the left; deductive reasoning; less explicit reasoning (problem solving, scientific and mathematical problem solving); “aha!” phenomenon of insight; insight into illness.
• Right Brain (Humor): Smiling, laughing; underpins the appreciation of humor since humor depends vitally on being able to understand the context of what is said and done and how context changes it; understands the emotional or humorous aspect of a narrative; subtle ability to use irony and humor.
• Right Brain (Music): “I-thou” world of music; the natural “language” of the right hemisphere; production of words in song; melody, tone, timbre, pitch-processing, harmony.

Roles in Memory:

• Left Brain (Public Knowledge): Concerned with memory for facts that are “in the public domain”; affinity with public knowledge.

• Right Brain (Longer Working Memory & Episodic Memory): Able to access more information and hold it together at any one time for longer; capable of bearing more information in mind and doing so over longer periods with greater specificity; greater capacity to hold experience in working memory; deals preferentially with whatever is approaching it, drawing near, into relationship with it; deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature; critical for personal identity and adopting the first person perspective.

Roles in Emotions:

• Left Brain (Emotionally Relatively Neutral): Specializes in more superficial, social emotions; conscious representation of emotion; explicit representational content of the observed emotion.
• Left Brain (Rivalry, Malice, Anger, Denial): Competition, rivalry; capacity for deliberate malice; more likely to get angry or dismissive, jump to conclusions, become deluded or get stuck in denial; denies discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things; in denial about its own limitations.

• Right Brain (Emotionality): Physiological changes that occur in the body when we experience emotion; more intimately connected with the limbic system; subjective appreciation of the body’s physiological condition;  dominant in all forms of emotional perception and most forms of expression; identifies emotional expression; affinity with emotions and the bodily experience of them; essential to emotional understanding and regulation; preponderance of emotional understanding; emotionally engaging; gives emotional value to what is seen; primary-process emotionality; unconscious emotional processing; the power of inhibiting immediate response to environmental stimuli; exerts inhibitory control over emotional arousal; capacity to inhibit our natural impulse to selfishness; power to resist temptation; capable of freeing us through negative feedback.
• Right Brain (Past, Sadness, Depression): Concern with personal past; tendency towards feelings of sadness; communicates sadness through tears; tendency to melancholy; tendency to be more sorrowful and prone to depression (related to not only being more in touch with what’s going on but more in touch with, and concerned for, others); depression is (often) a condition of relative hemisphere asymmetry (favoring the right hemisphere).
• Right Brain (Reads Faces): capacity to read the human face; unconscious reading of facial expressions; interpretation of facial expression, vocal intonation, and gesture; identifies not just the facial expression of emotion, but the emotion as it relates to an individual face; principally responsible for our ability to identify and remember faces at all; appreciates a face’s age, sex, and attractiveness.
• Right Brain (Theory of Mind): Important role in “theory of mind”; capacity to put oneself in another’s position and see what is going on in that person’s mind; critical for making attributions of the content (emotional and otherwise) or another’s mind (particularly the affective state of another individual); subtle unconscious perceptions that govern our reactions; better at detecting deceit; picks up subtle clues and meanings; understands how others are feeling and thinking.
• Right Brain (Social Understanding & Empathy): Interested in others as individuals and in how we relate to them; identification with others; inter-subjective processes; mediator of social behavior; social understanding; empathic connection, understanding how others feel, what they mean in context/body expressions; mediator of empathic identification; capacity for empathy/to empathize; more reciprocally inclined; moral judgment; sense of justice; capable of compassion.

Roles in Numbers:

• Left Brain (Absolute Numbers): Numbers in absolutes (quantifiable amount).

• Right Brain (Relative Numbers): Intuitive sense of numbers and their relative size; numbers in relations.

Roles in Color:

• Left Brain: Identification of color.

• Right Brain: Perception of color; color discrimination.

Abstraction vs Experience:

• Left Brain (Re-Presentation & Abstraction): Role in re-presenting experience in non-living, mechanical form (the closest approximation as it sees it); re-presents categories of things and generic, non-specific objects; we “experience” our experience in a special way: a “re-presented” version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based; takes a “God’s eye” or invariant view in its representation of objects; abstraction (the process of wresting things from their context); affinity for the abstract or impersonal; operates an abstract visual-form system, sorting information that remains relatively invariant across specific instances, producing abstracted types or classes of things.

• Right Brain (Grounds Experience): Your grasp of reality as it comes into being; concerned with what it experiences; awareness of any object begins in the right hemisphere which grounds experience; the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected.

Familiar vs New:

• Left Brain (Familiar): Deals with what it knows, prioritizes the expected, more efficient in routine situations where things are predictable; deals with what it already knows, the world it has made for itself (self-referring nature of the world); takes the single solution that seems best to fit what it already knows and latches onto it; once skills become familiar through practice, they shift to the left hemisphere; “stickiness” (tendency to recur what it’s familiar with, tends to reinforce whatever it is already doing); only discovers more of what it already knows; only does more of what it is already doing; tends to positive feedback (we can become stuck); well-worn familiarity, certainty, finitude; over-familiar, inauthentic and therefore lifeless.

• Right Brain (Attuned to the New): Interested in discovery/exploration; new experiences of any kind; attuned to the apprehension of anything new/novel experiences (includes learning of new information/skills—even verbal information); response to the new, the uncertain, and the emotionally demanding; novel uses for objects; gathering new information; things are still “present” in their newness as individually existing entities.

Stasis vs Flow:

• Left Brain (Stasis & Interruptions of Flow): Focus on stasis or a point in time; artificially decontextualized, unrelated, momentary events, or momentary interruptions of temporal flow (what takes over when the sense of time breaks down); detection of brief temporal flow interruptions that are decontextualized; the summing up of an infinite series of static moments.

• Right Brain (Flow, Time, Space): Sense of time passing (sustained attention); compare duration in time; sense of past, present, and future; perceives flow as a single, unified motion across time; sustained monitoring of temporal information; focus on flow over time or fluency of motion; sees things as flowing/animate; gives “depth” to our sense of time; appreciates depth in space; deals with spatial relations in degree of distance; sense of time duration; presents the world realistically with visual detail and in 3D with depth; aesthetic sense of the intensity and beauty of visual representations; represents objects as having volume and depth in space; advantage in dealing with the visuospatial.

Categories vs Individuals:

• Left Brain (Categorization): “Re-presented” as representatives of a category; tendency to classify; concerned with abstract categories and types; more general, superordinate categories; categorization of stimuli and fine control of motor response; utilizes abstract categories; identifies single features that would place the object in a certain category in the abstract; capacity to categorize things once they have been abstracted; superior at identifying simple shapes and figures which are easily categorized.

• Right Brain (Individual): Concerned with the uniqueness and individuality of each existing thing or being; distinguish individuals of all kinds, places as well as faces; presents individual, unique instances of things and individual, familiar, objects; processes complex figures, being less typical, more individual; identify individuals; interested in the personal; concerned with finer discriminations between things, whether living or non-living; detailed discrimination, topography; capacity to distinguish specific examples within a category, rather than categorize alone; stores details to distinguish specific instances; aware of and remembers what it is that distinguishes specific instances of a type (one from another).

Parts vs Wholes:

• Left Brain (Exclusive & Parts): Sees agglomerate of parts; sees part-objects; sees parts (units) which go to make up something which it recognizes by the category to which it belongs (an aggregate); biased towards identification by parts; understanding things by starting from the observation of “pieces” and builds them up to make something; sees things abstracted from context and broken into parts (from which it then reconstructs a “whole”); view is exclusive, “either/or”, analytic, fragmentary, isolated, frozen, inanimate.

• Right Brain (Holistic & Whole): Broader field of attention, open to whatever may be, and coupled with greater integration over time and space, is what makes possible the recognition of broad or complex patterns, the perception of the “thing as a whole”, seeing the wood for the trees; concerned with the whole of the world as available to the senses whether what it receives comes from the left or the right (delivering a single complete world of experience); sees the bigger/whole picture; sees things as a whole, before they have been digested into parts; holistic processing capable of making fine discriminations in global patterns; constantly searching for patterns in things; understanding based on complex pattern recognition; more global and holistic, based on the recognition of similarity with an ideal exemplar, and on where this is positioned in the context of other examples; operates more effectively using specific exemplars; view is inclusive, “both/and”, synthetic, integrative; greater integrative power; it realizes the need for both; better able to integrate perceptual processes (bringing together different kinds of information from different senses); openness to the interconnectedness of things; making connections across distantly related information during comprehension; ability to make more and wider-ranging connections between things; concerned with the relations between things (more than entities in isolation); databank of information about categories; perceptual links between words.

Decontextualized vs Context:

• Left Brain (Decontextualized & Schematic): Thinking is decontextualized; identifies by labels rather than context; represents the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail (and even in one plane); systematic thought; offers simple answers.

• Right Brain (Sees Context): Sees things whole and in their context; actively watching for discrepancies (more like a devil’s advocate); presents an array of possible solutions; sees each thing in its context, as standing in a qualifying relationship with all that surrounds it (rather than taking it as a single isolated entity); contextual understanding; understands from indirect contextual clues; sees individual entities (units) as belonging in a contextual whole (an aggregate) from which they are not divided; understanding meaning as a whole and in context (the moral of a story or point of a joke); understanding the meaning of a whole phrase or sentence in context, its tone, its emotional significance, along with use of humor, irony, and metaphor.

Explicit vs Implicit:

• Left Brain (Linear, Sequential, Explicit): Linear, sequential argument; explicit reasoning; more explicit, more conscious processing; isolates, fixes, and makes each thing explicit; works on experience to clarify, “unpack,” and generally render the implicit explicit; the world is known/explicit.

• Right Brain (Non-Verbal & Implicit): The “silent” hemisphere (literally no voice); utterances are implicit; specializes in non-verbal communication; deals with whatever is implicit; the world is nuanced/implicit.

Non-Living vs Living:

• Left Brain (Non-Living, Man-Made Things): Codes for non-living things (both hemispheres code for living things); affinity for what is mechanical; interested in what it has made; world is a resource to be used; affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive; codes for tools and machines; affinity for everything it has itself made (“the fruits of human invention”); mode of thinking prizes consistency above all, and claims to offer the same mechanistic models to explain everything that exists; designed to aid you in grabbing stuff; principal concern and ruling value is utility; its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing “things”; drive towards manipulation; need to influence and manipulate; interested in getting a precise/clear hold on an idea/thing; always has “an end in view”, a purpose or use, and is more the instrument of our conscious will.

“The idea of ‘grasping’ implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wresting it away from its context, holding it fast, focussing on it. The grasp we have, our understanding in this sense, is the expression of our will, and it is the means to power. It is what enables us to ‘manipulate’ – literally to take a handful of whatever we need – and thereby to dominate the world around us.”

• Right Brain (Affinity for the Living): Affinity for what exists before and after and beyond ourselves (nature); prioritizes whatever actually is and what concerns us; more able to assimilate information from the environment; more sensitive to environmental influences; deals preferentially with actually existing things, as they are encountered in the real world; uses stored “real world” views in order to group experience.

Certain vs Uncertain:

• Left Brain (Optimistic and Certain but Unrealistic): Unreasonably optimistic, confident, but less aware of its short-comings; tends to take a more optimistic view of the self and the future (may take an unwarrantedly optimistic view); tends to insist on theory at the expense of getting things wrong (and later cheerfully insist that it got it right); needs certainty and needs to be right; may be unreasonably and stubbornly convinced of its correctness; unaware of what it is missing (therefore thinks it can go it alone); doesn’t know what it doesn’t know; unwitting of what goes on in the right hemisphere; positive bias towards whatever is bizarre, meaningless or non-existent; deals with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic—ultimately artificial—images; less reliable in matters of attention, perception, judgment, emotional understanding, and indeed intelligence as it is conventionally understood; based on a fear of uncertainty and lack of control; uncomfortable with uncertainty/ambivalence; tendency for passivity.

• Right Brain (Comfortable with Uncertainty & Ambiguity): Acknowledges the importance of ambiguity; holds several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome; deals with incomplete information; tolerance for uncertainty; “opposites” are not incompatible; more likely to espouse another point of view; appreciates multiple views/possibilities; more capable of a frame shift; flexibility of thought; more realistic about how it stands in the world at large, less grandiose, more self-aware; aware there are things it’s not aware of; takes a relatively more pessimistic view of the self.

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