Thursday, May 01, 2025
Thursday, May 01, 2025
Dr. Leandro Herrero’s Monthly Column for Strategic:
The work of Dr Iain McGilchrist on the brain’s hemispheres, challenges the simplistic notion that the brain’s left and right hemispheres serve distinct, modular functions, one for logic, the other for creativity. Instead, he eloquently argues that their differences lie in how they ‘attend to the world’. It’s not so much about what they do (differently) but how they do it.
The left hemisphere narrows its focus, dissecting reality into parts, grasping details, and prioritizing order, control, sequential analysis, and execution. It loves predictability, manipulation and control. The right hemisphere, by contrast, sees the broader picture, perceiving context, relationships and meaning. It engages with the world in a more open, integrative way, capable of holding ambiguity rather than resolving it prematurely.
He uses a wonderful example: the animal needing narrow attention for grasping food or prey, but with an awareness of the context to watch out for predators. Extraordinary focus may mean death.
The left hemisphere’s way of attending is fertile territory for project managers and accountants. It loves the 7Ss, Kotter 8 steps and any process that needs following. It’s a colossal how-to manual. Add now the gift of extraordinary computational power at hand from AI, and it will use it at the speed of light and as extensive as you want. The left hemisphere is AI Nirvana.
Both ‘modes of attention’ are essential, but McGilchrist, a fellow psychiatrist whose work I admire, warns that modern society increasingly privileges the left hemisphere’s way of knowing (its precision, categorization, and mechanistic approach), at the expense of the right’s capacity to hold complexity, perceive depth, and recognize the interconnectedness of things.
These differences are not just neuroscience territory, but are at the core of the profound, historical cultural shift in society, with practical consequences for how we think, educate, lead, and now, crucially, how we build and interact with artificial intelligence. Our society puts a premium on analytical skills (when did you see a job advert asking for synthesis skills?) and this is self-reinforcing. AI and Large Language Models feel very much at home here. Artificial intelligence is so good that it could even provide artificial stupidity.
Incidentally, detractors of ‘the hemisphere hypothesis’ seem to have in common that they appear not to have read the thousands of pages that McGilchrist has written in two separate monumental works: ‘The Master and his Emissary’ and ‘The matter with things’. But this is a conversation for another day.
There are tons of data showing what happens when there is damage to some parts of the hemispheres. The insight that has always fascinated me is the loss of the ability to understand a joke, and the loss of abstraction, in people with lesions in the right hemisphere.
Asking one of these patients to draw a picture of a sad person whose heart has just been broken (‘Mary died of a broken heart’) they will draw the silhouette of two halves of heart, or something similar like a broken object. They take things literally. In fact, you don’t have to have damage to your brain, we all know certain people who would fall into that category: subtle jokes, teasing, nuances, metaphors, are not their natural territory.
When people talk about AI, they talk, mostly, about what a left hemisphere ‘on steroids’ could look like. It knows (can know) everything that is known. It may even give you some predictions of what is unknown, by extrapolating from tons of data. The fields of application are many. If in doubt, take a look at Palantir’s website.
We are a bit far from understanding how AI can deal with what is truly, fundamentally human. Needless to say, the more human, the less chance of a ‘scientific approach’ or explanation. Apologies for the statement. Try love, awe, introspection, or the platonic trio of goodness, beauty and truth. Although truth can easily be hijacked by the supercomputational world.
Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, one of the world centres of Complexity studies, have put GPT4 to multiple challenges. A fascinating one was to find out whether AI could make sense of analogies, for example pairing them with others, or with statements. Multiple tests have drawn the conclusion that although AI wasn’t bad at all, human reasoning was a bit better. Should I say still better? ‘Humans were essentially able to solve the analogies’, says one of the researchers, ‘GPT models found that a lot more difficult’.
Reasoning, making a judgement, making sense could have AI as a friend. Outsourcing these human faculties to AI/Large Language Models is a dangerous thing.
It does not take much to realize that Western society is working on Left Hemisphere override mode: the parts have become more interesting than the whole, specialisation is the real thing, kids are taught for the test, linear thinking is the default, answers are more important than questions, certainty sells (in consulting for example), ambiguity is seen as poor thinking, and having a structure of processes, steps, models and methods is more important than making sure that they are not delivering garbage faster and more efficiently.
I am not an expert, just a user. I am learning to use GPT as a critical friend, not as Google on steroids. I often ask something of some complexity, requesting a list of arguments in favour of (supporting) the answer or answers. It does it very well.
Then I ask it to provide me with a thorough write up that completely contradicts all the previous answers and arguments. Sometimes it does, sometimes it says it can’t, but would always provide extra angles. I believe that holding contradictory arguments is key for my mind to work. I will make a final judgment. Then I will come back for more. It’s the cheapest psychotherapy I can find. By the way, I have decided that, when using GPT, I am talking to Li, a researcher in a basement in California. He works for me and even wishes me a safe trip if I had said that I needed something for a presentation abroad. He is a really nice guy.
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Dr Leandro Herrero, Chief Organizational Architect & Founder of The Chalfont Project, Author and International Speaker
Written by: Editor
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Thanks for the great article.
One thing that interests me (not an expert) is the frontal lobe (because of personal experience). I know someone who sadly had a stroke in their frontal lobe at a young age. Before the stroke he was one of the nicest guys… a Scout leader among other things. After the stroke he lost all sense of empathy and responsibility. His wife and children eventually left for safety reasons.
The other thing that fascinates me is how people react to social media. The recent documentary about Ruby Franke is a great example. People slavishly follow and adore these celebrities. When it becomes clear they are not who they say they are, people turn on them overnight in a very nasty way. Then they rebrand and suddenly people love them again. What drives this behaviour among people following influencers is fascinating.