Free The Most Human Human by Brian Christian

“primitive” than the left, the latter being seen as the unique flower of human evolution. And in a sense this is correct: the left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialised,a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognising reality which every living creature must have in order to survive. The left hemisphere, like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain, is designed for programs and schematics; and classical neurology was more concerned with schematics than with reality, so that when, at last, some of the right-hemisphere syndromes emerged, they were considered bizarre.
    The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran echoes this sentiment:
    The left hemisphere is specialized not only for the actual production of speech sounds but also for the imposition of syntactic structure on speech and for much of what is called semantics—comprehension of meaning. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, doesn’t govern spoken words but seems to be concerned with more subtle aspects of language such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity—skills that are inadequately emphasized in our elementary schools but that are vital for the advance of civilizations through poetry, myth and drama. We tend to call the left hemisphere the major or “dominant” hemisphere because it, like a chauvinist, does all the talking (and maybe much of the internal thinking as well), claiming to be the repository of humanity’s highest attribute, language.
    “Unfortunately,” he explains, “the mute right hemisphere can do nothing to protest.”
Slightly to One Side
    This odd focus on, and “dominance” of, the left hemisphere, says arts and education expert (and knight) Sir Ken Robinson, is evident inthe hierarchy of subjects within virtually all of the world’s education systems:
    At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to; we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
    That side, of course, being the left.
    The American school system “promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability,” says Robinson. If the left hemisphere, as Sacks puts it, is “like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain,” then by identifying ourselves with the goings-on of the left hemisphere, by priding ourselves on it and “locating” ourselves in it, we start to regard ourselves, in a manner of speaking, as computers. By better educating the left hemisphere and better valuing and rewarding and nurturing its abilities, we’ve actually started
becoming
computers.
Rational Agents
    You see the same left-hemisphere bias in the field of economics. Emotions are considered barnacles on the smooth hull of the mind. Decisions should be made, to the greatest extent possible, in their absence—and, as much as possible, calculatingly, even algorithmically.
    “If you had asked Benjamin Franklin, ‘How should I go about making up my mind?’ ” says Baba Shiv of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, “what he would have advised you to do is, list down all of the positives and all the negatives of your present option, list down all of the positives and all the negatives of the alternative that you have. And then choose that option that has