The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

The human brain appears to be the most complexly interdependent, agency-driven, adaptively self-organizing system known to science.  It is said to contain some one hundred billion neurons with trillions of connections. Contemporary neuroscience research has revealed much about its structures, though just exactly how our 'consciousness' arises from those remains obscure. That difficulty in determining how consciousness emerges from the brain's interdependent physical networks is not surprising, when one considers how study of all such complex adaptive systems shows these to be fundamentally unpredictable -- and always "more than the sum of their parts."

 

The neuroscience now available has disproved some earlier assumptions about brain functions. One is the idea that our left and right brain hemispheres generate distinctly different cognitive functions, such as emotion in the right and reason in the left. The more recent understanding is that both hemispheres participate in most types of cognitive activities. However, in doing so, they provide very different ways of  'framing' how we attend to (or 'mind') the world, and thus how we tend to experience, then interpret, phenomena.  The right hemisphere diffuses our attention across larger fields of concurrently appearing things and events, without focusing on specific parts, as when viewing a crowd of people as a continuous whole. That inclusive mode of attention enables us to register a multiplicity of components engaged in recursive, interdependent relationships, from which emerges the dynamic whole of 'a crowd.' In sharp contrast, the left hemisphere promotes a narrowed focus on specific things or events. That framing of our attention excludes the majority of available information so that we can 'think' in terms of specific parts and actions. Thus, the most prominent contrast between the two sides of our bi-lateralized brain is their influence on 'how' we perceive and interpret, not 'what' we think or feel.  When the right hemisphere mode is prominent we are more likely to perceive and interpret phenomena as 'complex interdependent wholes.'  When the left is dominant we are more likely to register separate parts and think more analytically. Thus we can pose the notion that we have 'two ways of mind-ing' or 'cognating' the world.

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Left hemisphere exclusive attention and right hemisphere inclusive attention 'push and pull'

on our overall awareness, interpretation, and understanding:

 

Left Hemisphere Point-Specific Attention                                                       Right Hemisphere Full-Field Attention

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While the right hemisphere framing provides broad, inclusive awareness of some 'field of view,' such as our extended environment, as a 'constellated whole' of interdependent phenomena, the left enables us to exclusively narrow our focus and separate out specific components or events. The exclusive left-hemisphere mode is essential to understanding sequences of predictable cause and effect, which then enables us to 'grasp' and effectively manipulate, thus control, some phenomena, such as physical materials. In consort, these two attentional modes provide us with the capacity to register, and then interrelate, both predictably deterministic ordering, such as how a specific rock falls from a cliff and strikes a car, and the spontaneously synergistic, emergent ordering of complex system networks, such as ecosystems or societies.

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Our awareness is constantly 'informed' by these contrasting 'mind-ings'

of the left hemisphere's exclusive reduction and the right's inclusive correlation:

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'Seeing' Separate Parts & Events                            'Seeing' Interdependent Networks

 

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Most importantly, though the two hemispheres have evolved as separate 'ways of mind-ing' the world, they are connected to each other by a band of nerve fibers called "the corpus callosum," and function in a complex dance of cooperation. Each can elaborate the perspective of the other, like 'zeroing in' on one person in a crowd, or 'zooming out' to perceive many things and events simultaneously. But these shifts necessarily involve one side 'blocking' the other, so that it can become primary in our awareness. We cannot functionally 'think' through both perspectives simultaneously. Such is the paradox of how we 'mind the world' through our bilateralized brain.

 

Overall, it appears that we evolved to form our initial awareness of a situation through broad-perspective right-hemisphere attention, awareness that is then elaborated more specifically by the narrow-focused left modality. However, it is now thought that our brains also evolved to 're-process' that secondary, more analytical information, provided by left hemisphere attention, by 'passing it back' to the right hemisphere for incorporation into its inclusive 'field' view and understanding. Our brains supposedly function best in this right-to-left and back-to-right emphasis. However, that exchange can evidently be disrupted, either by brain damage or by cultural conditioning.

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Studies have indicated that people from Asian cultures are more prone to scanning a scene or picture before narrowing focus on some particular aspect -- suggesting their perception and experience are initiated through right hemisphere attention. In contrast, people conditioned by Western European cultures tend to seek one specific focal point immediately. That tendency is understood to be an expression of greater left hemisphere dominance in Western culture.

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