Summary: Seeing how cultures move toward a technical mode and lose sight of the less structured, natural way of living helps explain how societies seldom recover, once they have collapsed. Recent brain research provides clues. The growing inability of the logical, calculating brain to find solutions in the environmental field is, somehow, exacerbated by neglect of the non-scientific part of the brain. In the environmental context it is the slow rejection of hard reality that has disastrous consequences.

Excerpt

I felt certain that the existing research into brain hemisphere specialization would help explain the problems caused by intellectual overspecialization. In the same light, I expected that the same research would help clarify the process by which awareness declines. In this chapter we have discussed the role played by the rational mind in general terms. In the next chapters we will look more closely at the clinical work of scientists who have studied the specialization of left and right brain hemispheres. In the absence of a rational scientific explanation for the shortcomings of the rational scientific mind, it is surely reasonable to look elsewhere for an answer: in the non-rational, nonscientific mind. The research provides many answers and insights, but the insights gained will probably be felt, not spelled out explicitly, because words and definitions are not the strong point of the intuitive, creative mind.

Michael Gazzaniga has studied this phenomenon, initially in collaboration with Joseph LeDoux, who went on to study basic emotions, particularly fear and the way it overrides thought, inspiring Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. In the next chapter we will look more closely at the early research(1978–1985) of Gazzaniga and LeDoux into epileptic patients whose treatment required that their brain hemispheres be separated. Another pioneer, Nobel laureate Roger Sperry inspired new confidence in the role of the right brain, when he said in 1983:

we have come around to accept today a substantially revised and upgraded picture of the right hemisphere and its functional capacities. The classic neurologic doctrine of one-sided dominance, with a major and a minor hemisphere, is replaced by the idea of a bilateral complementary specialization.

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