Why Bilaterality Is So Important

An excerpt from my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

Walking Your Blues Away

Chapter 3

Why Bilaterality Is So Important

Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.
—Carl Jung

Bilaterality is the ability to have both the left and right hemispheres of the brain fully functional and communicating with each other. It represents an optimal way of functioning for the brain, a way that reflects how most animals’ brains function.

         Many people in our society are “stuck” in a groove of habitual emotional response,with only one hemisphere of the brain taking responsibility for much of the brain’s functioning. Bilateral exercises have been demonstrated to encourage healthier brain functionality. Now we’re finding that walking can also perform this healing function.

         As recently as thirty years ago, before the availability of sophisticated brain-imaging equipment such as PET and MRI scanners, it was widely believed that the left hemisphere of the brain—which controls the right side of the body—was responsible for logic and thinking, and the right hemisphere—which controls the left side of the body—took charge of emotions. Interestingly, while we now know that it’s not quite that simple, we also know that there is a significant grain of truth to this long-standing belief.

         A healthy person functions with both hemispheres of the brain fully engaged and able to hand off information to one another in such a way that we can think about our emotions and evoke feelings with our thoughts. Evidence of this dual-hemispheric functioning can be recognized by simply watching an able-bodied person walk or talk—both sides of the mouth open the same amount when the person speaks, and both legs and arms swing comfortably and reach the same distances when they walk. A person who is said to “speak out of one side of his mouth” is showing signs of either brain damage (such as from a stroke) or of serious emotional or psychological illness. One hemisphere has taken over the brain’s functioning. Depending on which hemisphere has taken charge, such people often are either overly emotional or are lacking in the ability to easily experience emotions.

         Hemispheric dominance—one side of the brain controlling the functions of both—is no small matter, and not only has an effect on individuals but, some scientists suggest, actually shapes society and culture itself.

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What we now call civilization can be traced back to the oldest written tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story set six to seven thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) about the first ruler to defy the gods and seize control of others in the process. Gilgamesh was history’s first warlord. His epic tale, which predates the Bible, not only describes a hierarchical social order but a hierarchical religion as well: it tells the story of a good man named Utnapishtim who was told by his god, Ea, to build an ark and put into it two of every animal. By doing this, Utnapishtim survives a great flood that Ea brings upon the city of Shurippak because its people aren’t sufficiently worshipful of Ea.Gilgamesh’s culture established, in many ways, the prototype for later agriculture-based (and violence-based) social and political systems. A regnant king or queen with the power to remove the head of any person who dared defy him or her ruled every civilization from Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia to today’s Saudi Arabia (except for the easily ignored blip of Athens two millennia earlier). With millenia of history as background, by the turn of the nineteenth century Darwin and others of his era reasoned that this must be the way humans were meant to live.

In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin summarized the notion, common at the time, that society is best held together by dominance rather than true democracy, by the elite few rather than the unwashed masses, by those most willing to wield force rather than those willing to compromise or sacrifice. Darwin was making a case that most humans are biologically presdisposed to living under the dominance of others. The assumption of conquerors has always been that they are superior in every way to the conquered. How else does one justify the conquest?

         Darwin, however, had a problem making his view fit into what he was learning about the social models of the tribal people he and his contemporaries called savages. Reports were beginning to trickle in to the scientific and political communities that these so-called savages—tribal people from the Americas to Africa—weren’t the stupid, selfish, and violent characters they’d been portrayed as in European history. Instead, they often displayed altruistic behavior, and had social and political systems that were sophisticated and in many cases far more democratic than England in Darwin’s time.

At the time there were probably as many indigenous people living tribally around the world as there were “civilized” people. They were living the way all humans had apparently lived for all of human history, and yet their tribes were troublingly democratic.

Pesky Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had written and spoken extensively about the lessons to be learned from the democratic forms of governance of the savages of North America. And the savages of Asia and Africa were getting along fine as well.Even though two centuries earlier Thomas Hobbes had proclaimed, “Life in an unregulated state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” there was little evidence to be found of such living conditions among the “unregulated” tribal people of the time.

         Presumably Darwin’s ancestors had once been savages, too. Why hadn’t these modern-day savages evolved a civilized society, as Darwin’s fellow Englishmen had?

         “It is, however, very difficult to form any judgment,” Darwin wrote, about “why one particular tribe and not another has been successful and has risen in the scale of civilisation. Many savages are in the same condition as when first discovered several centuries ago. As Mr. Bagehot [economist and political writer Walter Bagehot] has remarked, we are apt to look at progress as normal in human society; but history refutes this.”

         Why did modern tribal peoples of the time live the way they did, even when offered an opportunity to become “civilized”? The stories of Native Americans brought up in white communities who later escaped back into the “savage wilds” were legendary; similarly, Africans fiercely resisted being taken into white communities as slaves, even though it represented a “civilized” improvement over their tribal conditions.

         There had to be something he was missing, but Darwin couldn’t figure out what it was. A theory about was being put forth by the Duke of Argyll, although Darwin found that wanting. “The arguments recently advanced by the Duke of Argyll and formerly by Archbishop Whately, in favour of the belief that man came into the world as a civilised being, and that all savages have since undergone degradation, seem to me weak in comparison with those advanced on the other side,” Darwin wrote. And yet he had no way to account for the apparent nobility and quality of life among the savages.

Darwin was a scientist, and he knew that that meant bringing unpopular views forward at times. Darwin began to consider that perhaps civilized people had once been savages, too. But if civilized people had once lived as savages, why didn’t we remember those times?

The Cultural Dissociative Barrier

In his brilliant Ishmael books, writer Daniel Quinn popularizes the idea of a memory barrier between modern civilization and what Darwin called the “savage” state. Quinn calls this “The Great Forgetting,” a cultural amnesia so strong that we’re unable to even imagine how our ancestors lived.

         For example, when we think of another “civilized” country, we imagine our stereotypes of people in full color: Greeks dancing like Zorba, or French women and men sipping wine, or Italians eating pasta in a café in Venice. Even if we don’t speak their language, we can hear fragments of it, and can easily imagine them speaking the language. We can bring to mind the smells, tastes, and even the feel of their world, because on the whole it is so culturally similar to our own.

         But when we think of our own ancestors’ pre-literate history, our mindscape often turns to black and white. Our ability to imagine language or other sounds from that time is minimal. (Indeed, up to the past decade some anthropologists speculated that our “savage” ancestors were mute, suggesting that the development of civilization coincided with a recent evolutionary mutation that increased the size of the nerve bundles that control the human tongue.) Most people have never tried to conjure a sense of what the food of our prehistoric ancestors must have tasted like, what sorts of herbs, seeds, and pollens they used as spices, how their living areas smelled, or what brought them joy.

         We all have a collection of different “selves,” or roles, that we necessarily play in life: parent, teacher, employee, spouse, friend. They each require us to move slightly different skill sets and personality attributes to front and center when engaging one of these selves. When a person loses the ability to remember that he or she carries the same identity when acting out various roles, that person is said to have developed a dissociative disorder. Multiple-personality disorder is the most well known of these

         Collectively, it appears that we’ve erected a cultural dissociative barrier that is so complete that we believe Darwin was right in his assumption that a dominance- and violence-based culture is biologically based, and has grown and thrived because of natural selection.

The Left Brain Takes Over

Into this centuries-old debate about why “civilized” society is so violent and “savages” are often so non-violent steps modern science. In 1982, Walter J. Ong published a book titled Orality and Literacy, in which he suggests that there was a profound difference in the way cultures that learned to read at an early age [ developed relative to cultures that were entirely oral in the way they passed along teaching stories, mores, and social traditions.

In 1999, physician and science writer Leonard Shlain expanded on this hypothesis in his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, suggesting that the process of learning to read is an entirely left-brain exercise that causes children to develop left-hemisphere brain dominance at an early age.

         The left hemisphere (which controls the right side of the body) is largely responsible for abstract and logical thought. Alphabets are pure abstractions—there is nothing about the shape or characters of the word bird, for instance, that would cause somebody who didn’t read to know that that particular collection of symbols referred to a feathered animal. Thus, learning to read is a process that works out the left brain, and exercising this side of the brain prior to the age of seven—roughly the age when hemispheric dominance is determined—will cause people to develop left-hemisphere dominance, rather than the more functional right-brain/left-brain bilaterality.

         As more and more people in a society become literate, and therefore left-brain-dominant, Shlain suggests, they also become more disconnected from their emotional and empathic right-brain side. Shlain suggests that this early left-hemispheric dominance and disconnection from the empathic right-brain self means that we become more willing (or even driven) to use violence, particularly by men against women. He presents evidence of this by showing how time-waves of literacy in Europe have corresponded with alternating waves of goddess-worship (in the form of Mary cults during times when it was illegal to read), noting that, within a generation of the widespread introduction of literacy to Europe, the Inquisition murdered over a million women as “witches” and made a determined effort to stamp out the cults that worshiped the divinity of Mary.

         Thus, Shlain, Ong, and others suggest, literacy is the element in the soup pot of civilization that irrevocably altered the way “civilized society” developed. Because literacy changes how our brains are forming as we grow and develop, we have no reference point for understanding how we may have been had we not grown up literate, and thus no ability to truly understand or empathize with non-literate and non-violent societies. The result is that we assume that non-violent societies can’t really exist, and that our type of brain development is “normal” for the human race.

         Ironically, the explanation offered by most literate societies for the “fall of man” is that it’s all women’s fault. From Pandora to Eve, women have been scapegoated by literate (and therefore left-brain-dominant) men (and women), causing us to assume that there really was a “fall” that made us different from the humans that God (or the gods) had originally created, and that we’re cursed because of it. (In Genesis the early references to divinity are plural.)

         Interestingly, the poisoned fruit that Eve ate was of the tree of knowledge. This has caused many scholars of biblical anthropology to wonder whether the Eve/apple story may have been an attempt by early scholars to convey an accurate description down through the ages of the difference they were observing between oral tradition and literate tribes.

        In any case, it illustrates the power and importance of hemispheric dominance, and why it’s so useful for us now to try to restore bilateral brain function to put us back in touch with “all parts” of ourselves.