In last couple of years, it is always debated how left and right hemisphere of brain are two different brains and manage different aspect of brain functions. Ian Mcgilcrhrist in his book "Brain and His Emissary" argues that instead of focusing. on what left and right hemisphere can do , more important difference is how they do these things differently.

Left vs Right Brain Argument

To understand this, take an example of a bird picking up grain of corn in forest. Bird needs to do two things simulatenously:<ol><li>Focus on the targeted grain and understand what needs to be done;</li><li>At same time it needs to also focus on things which are broader like danger of other animals, otherwise it will be a lunch of someone else.&nbsp;</li></ol>So in this case while piecemeal/fragmented approach is coming from left side hemisphere, awareness of larger picture/broad/vigilant is due to right side and two hemispheres are connected via Corpus Collasum which passes info back and forth more like traffic signal.

How Left and Right Hemisphere works

Title of the book is inspired from a medivial story which is about a Master and his Emissary. In the story, Emissary is deployed in a specfic area and keep reporting back to Master sitting far away in kingdom.&nbsp;At some point in time, Emissary thinks it knows everything and tries to overpower Master and fails miserably at it and results are disaster. In this analogy Right hemisphere is the master an left one is emissary.

Story of Master and  his Emissary

So natural selection led to the physical and functional separation of hemispheres becoming more and more complete, and to their interconnections becoming more and more subtle — a ‘bridge that divides’.<ul><li>Thus our comprehension of the world begins in right hemisphere with our apprehension of sensory input then,</li><li>passed to left hemisphere for technical things like analysis, measurement and language.</li><li>But in end, buck passes back to right hemisphere for synthesis on which we base our ideas and our actions.</li></ul>The point is that both sides are involved in everything, and the health of the system is dependent on the balance.

A Bridge that Divides

With respect to time, Left hemisphere is tending to look for next opportunity, wants to grasp tings within reach, remember left hemisphere controls right hand, which is what right hand does, grab things.However, when it comes to right side, Time can be seen as a continuos flow, which enables one person to look at bigger prespective.&nbsp;However left cant see anything which is moving, because it likes to pause things so you can grab them, so it doesn’t like flow and motions and it sees time as slices of time and then slices are put together to make something (like calculus).

Hemisphere and Time

To conclude, If and when Left hemisphere overpowers the right hemisphere, world would go into a chaos.First of all we loose the big picture, focus will be on details, predictability, organizability, break things into part but not really see what whole is like.&nbsp;Everything will become black and white and we would loose everything which is explicit and we have to create rules for everything, which is where we are heading in today's world.In end, i would say Master knows the value of Emissary however the emissary doesn’t know the value of master.

What happens when emissary overthrows master

Your brain is divided in two: a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. In this 2019 episode of Hidden Brain, we dive into Iain McGilchrist's research on how the left and right hemispheres shape our perceptions. Iain argues that differences in the brain — and Western society's preference for what one hemisphere has to offer — have had enormous effects on our lives.

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Hidden Brain - One Head, Two Brains

Puneet P