The divided brain

I’ve enjoyed learning something of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas about laterisation of the brain/mind.

A question: how do we become aware of things we’re not aware of? How do we learn to emit them? Which comes first, awareness or expression?

Chapter 7 of his book “The master and his emissary” concerns culture and imitation. Might be worth reading.

Alternatively, maybe I should look at tik tok.

I found this passage from chapter 7 particularly illuminating:

Human imitation is not slavish. It is not a mechanical process, dead, perfect, finished, but one that introduces variety and uniqueness to the ‘copy’, which above all remains alive, since it becomes instantiated in the context of a different, unique human individual. Imitation is imaginatively entering into the world of the one that is imitated, as anyone who has tried the exercise of imitating an author’s style will know. That is perhaps what we mean by style: not a fashion, just something superficial, taken up or put off, as it sounds, like a garment, but an essence – le style, c’est l’homme. Even to attend to anything so closely that one can capture its essence is not to copy slavishly. To Ruskin it was one of the hardest, as well as one of the greatest human achievements, truly to see, so as to copy and capture the life of, a single leaf – something the greatest artists had managed only once or twice in a life time: ‘If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.’10 Imitating nature may be like imitating another person’s style; one enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator. In imitation one takes up something of another person, but not in an inert, lifeless, mechanical sense; rather in the sense of its being aufgehoben, whereby it is taken into ourselves and transformed. If one needs to be convinced that there is no necessary opposition between imagination and imitation, one need only look at the long, rich history of Oriental culture. In fact imitation is imagination’s most powerful path into whatever is Other than ourselves.

Imitation is a human characteristic, and is arguably the ultimately most important human skill, a critical development in the evolution of the human brain.11 It is surely how we came to learn music, and though Chomsky may have distracted our attention from this, it is how we learnt, and learn, language. Only humans, apart from birds, are thought normally to imitate sounds directly,12 and only humans can truly imitate another’s course of action.13 Other species may adopt the same goal as another individual member of their species, and may succeed in finding their own way to achieve it, but only humans directly imitate the means as well as the end.14 This may sound like a rather backward step, but it isn’t. The enormous strength of the human capacity for mimesis is that our brains let us escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another being: this is the way in which, through human consciousness, we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person. This comes about through our ability to transform what we perceive into something we directly experience.

It is founded on empathy and grounded in the body. In fact imitation is a marker of empathy: more empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others. In an important study of this phenomenon, there was a contrast between the empathy people said they felt and the empathy they actually evinced, involuntarily, in their faces and bodies. Individuals who were already established as low in empathy didn’t display the same emotion in their faces as high-empathy subjects, but reported in words feeling the same – the feelings their conscious left hemispheres knew that they ought to feel.15 As might be expected, there is significantly increased right-sided activity in the limbic system specifically during imitation, compared with mere observation, of emotional facial expressions.16

There is even some evidence that we identify projectively with people with whom we share a common purpose – when we are co-operating in a task, for example – to such a degree that we seem to merge identity with them. In ingeniously designed experiments where two participants are sitting next to one another, sharing a combined task, but with functionally independent roles, the two individuals appear spontaneously to function as one agent with a unified action plan.17 Children eagerly imitate other human beings, but do not imitate mechanical devices that are carrying out the same actions.18 This is like the finding in adults that we make spontaneous movements signifying our involvement in events we are watching evolve – so long as we believe them to be the result of another’s action. Such movements are, however, absent when we believe that (in other respects identical) results have been generated by a computer rather than a living being.19

Imitation is non-instrumental. It is intrinsically pleasurable, and babies and small children indulge in it for its own sake.20 The process is fundamental and hard-wired, and babies as little as forty-five minutes old can imitate facial gestures.21 It is how we get to know what we know, but also how we become who we are.

It’s interesting to note links to conversation theory: there’s a notion of goals being shared with others in “we identify projectively with people with whom we share a common purpose – when we are co-operating in a task, for example – to such a degree that we seem to merge identity with them”.