Iain McGilchrist’s “Attention is a Moral Act”
An Overview
Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist, well-known for his research on left brain vs. right brain thinking. McGilchrist goes beyond popular tropes like left = logical and right = creative to give a more robust, research-backed understanding of how the brain’s hemispheres relate and function. He then extrapolates theories on how the different types of thinking (or attention) shape our lives and our societies.
McGilchrist argues that the hemispherical structure of the brain affords two different ways of attending to the world. The left brain provides a kind of piecemeal, analytical attention that sees the world in parts to be manipulated and used. The right brain provides a kind of broad, meaning-making attention that sees the world in relationships. The left brain processes the individual notes on the page so that they can be played; the right brain hears the symphony.
McGilchrist is clear that this system of dual-attention-in-dialog is ultimately a strength. But, he argues, the fragmented analysis of the left brain ought to serve the integrated, wholistic perspective of the right brain. And in his view, we live in a world that is increasingly getting that backwards. He feels we are increasingly obsessed with abstracted, fragmented, immediate-gratification tasks, without placing those tasks in a broad, embodied sense of meaning. I’m reminded of the quote from Jurassic Park: ”Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should". The scientists were stuck in a left-brain loop instead of integrating their functional knowledge into the right-brain’s framework. McGhilchrist puts it this way in his summarizing work Ways of Attending:
What the left hemisphere offers is, then, a valuable but intermediate process, one of “unpacking” what is there and handing it back to the right hemisphere, where it can once again be integrated into the experiential whole, much as the painstaking fragmentation and analysis of a sonata in practice is reintegrated by the pianist in performance at a level where he or she must no longer be aware of it. That, at any rate, is how the two should work together: the emissary reporting back to the master, who alone can see the broader picture. But the self-consistent rationalism of the left hemisphere has convinced it that it does not need to concern itself with what the right hemisphere knows: it believes it has the whole story itself.
This leads to McGilchrist’s central thesis: attention is a moral act. Which is to say, the type of attention we prioritize ends up dictating what we see and how we see it. And by extension, we then create the kind of world that matches our attention. In his own words, “How you attend to the world changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is 'firmed up' - and brought into being." If we only see the world as things to be manipulated and used, we’ll likely create a world of technological achievement that lacks embodiment, perspective, and relationship. We’ll no longer see ourselves in the context of a connected whole; we’ll just try to solve whatever abstract puzzle is in front of us at the moment.
McGilchrist says, “The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is.” What does that mean for us, in our current context? What is claiming our attention and what is the effect? Do you agree with McGilchrist’s concern over the dominance of left brain attention?
McGilchrist Quotes
“Attention is a moral act ... it brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.”
“Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.”
“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity - or art, sex, humour, or religion - to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms - all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”
“Being aware of how one’s attention shapes the world is not easy. And that’s because there is a kind of vicious circle at work: the more one pays, for example, dehumanising, mechanising attention to the world, the more only those aspects of the world that can be construed in terms of mechanisms stand forth. The rest recedes. And, as they say, to a man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. The way we start out looking at the world soon hardens up; and after a while, any model comes to look like a surprisingly good fit, largely because everything that doesn’t fit that model becomes helpfully invisible.”