The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

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Using the 'Two Minds' of Our One Brain to Understand More Realistically

 

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Brain Lateralization into Left and Right Hemispheres and Cognitive Abilities

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 the functions of the bilaterally divided hemispheric brain. One of those was 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. There do appear some differentiation of neural tasks and cognitive functions  between the hemispheres, resulting in their primary operation being seated more in one side than the other. However, overall, both hemispheres are said to participate in the majority of cognitive functions, from visual and auditory processing to spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability.  Nonetheless, the hemispheric division is considered to likely enhance the over efficiency of these functions.

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Two Brain Hemispheres and Two Modes of Attending, thus 'Mind-ing,' the World

What, then, are we to make of this fundamental aspect of brain anatomy and neurological network configuration? A more recent understanding is that the two hemispheres, when participating in most types of cognitive activities, provide very different contexts for them. The hemispheres somehow  'frame' how we attend to (or 'mind') the world, and thus how we tend to experience, then interpret, phenomena.  The right hemisphere evidently promotes a more diffuse form attention, spreading awareness out across larger fields of concurrently appearing things and events, without focusing in 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 is thought to promote a more narrowed focus on specific things or events. That framing of our attention excludes the majority of available information, reducing factors 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. Each has a distinctly different influence on how we form our sense of 'how things are happening' and thus how we interpret phenomena. Our one brain can generate two ways of attending to, or 'mind-ing,' phenomena.

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Hemispheric Contrasts, Dominance, and Coordination

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. Either hemispheric mode of attention can be dominant in our cognitive awareness at a given moment. But, due to their differences, it appears impossible for both to be equally prominent at the same time. Thus, they are understood to be exerting influence in an alternating manner.

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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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If these contrasting ways the world appears in our attention simply remained 'at odds with each other,' we would be unable to make actionable interpretations about 'what is happening' and 'how to respond.'  We would be in a sense 'of two minds,' perceiving a 'split sense of reality.' So, cognition somehow constantly 'smooths out' their alternating dominance to create a continuous sense of attention and awareness. Brain anatomy indicates a physical aspect of how that interplay is orchestrated.

In placental animals, the hemispheres are connected by a thick bundle of nerve fibers termed the "corpus callosum." In marsupials there is a different but similar connection between the hemispheres termed the "anterior commissure." These connections are thought to facilitate communication between the the hemispheres. In particular, the corpus callosum appears to be involved in how each hemisphere can effectively 'block' the other from interfering in its influence on cognition, while also incorporating the each other's cognitive influence.   

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​Right and left hemispheres communicate through the corpus callosum:​

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​Can One Hemispheric Modality 'Have the Final Say'?

These notions of oscillating dominance, blocking, and incorporation between the hemispheres, prompts a question about our 'overall take' or interpretation of a given situation. If the world appears differently depending upon which hemispheric mode of attentions is dominant at a given moment, can we be aware of the bias in our thinking or can one mode take priority in our eventual interpretation of particular phenomena? It has been suggested that there is evidence for an inherent sequence in our cognitive evaluations. The thought here is that the inclusive or holistic right hemisphere mode provides our initial 'take' on a situation. That information is then 'passed' to the left hemisphere mode where it is analyzed in a more reductive, 'parts and sequences' manner. Subsequent to this assessment, this more particularized information is supposedly 'passed back' to the right hemisphere to be 'fitted back together' in a more detailed holistic evaluation. This process would be like initially perceiving a large crowd of people in a 'field focus' perspective, then narrowing attention down to a few people, in a 'point focus' manner, to determine their specific traits and direction of movement, then returning to an inclusive 'field focus' to understand the crowd's purposes and overall behaviors in greater detail, yet also as 'an entity.'

 

It further appears that such shifts of emphasis in the two styles of attention are not purely exclusive. Rather, when one 'takes the lead' the other is operating in support. When narrowing focus to a few people in a crowd, thus promoting left hemisphere attention, the right must continue to provide a larger frame of reference for that shift. Similarly, when emphasizing the 'field focus' of the right, the left still supplies background awareness of specific details. One does not simply 'turn off' while the other exerts more influence on awareness.

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​This contrast and shifting priority has a 'global' versus 'local' character, which appears to have implications for how we interpret and form more long-standing assumptions. We can pose a contrasting list to characterize how the two attentional modes might 'make the world appear.

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Contrasting traits of more reductive left-hemisphere 

verses more inclusive right attentional interpretations:​

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Two Mental Modes of Attention and Two Paradoxically Contrary Experiences of the World

These thoughts on how contrasting hemispheric modes of attention might influence our interpretation and understanding of phenomena can be extended to 'how we feel.' The more isolating, 'parts and sequences' tenor of left hemisphere attention would seem to promote the 'feeling' that the world is 'made of' discretely separated elements and factors, or 'things and events.' If so, then experience of phenomena might be more a sense of 'isolated entities in empty space' and time as a sequential progression of distinct actions. Right hemisphere attention would appear more likely to prompt a sense of large scale connection, relatedness, and interaction.​ Similarly, time might be experienced more as a concurrency of factors and events 'happening all at once,' thus as ultimately inseparable. We can think of this as experiencing an ecosystem as 'so many trees,' in the left mode, versus as 'a forest,' in the right.

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The separate 'trees' of left hemisphere experience and 

the relational wholeness of a 'forest' in the right​

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​Similarly, one might experience a particular group of people as a hierarchically ordered 

set of individuals versus as an interacting complex of undifferentiated interactions.

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​Hemispheric Inflections on Thinking and Influence on How We Experience Phenomena

​If experience is about 'how the world feels' to us, then it is more than intellectually abstract conceptions. However, how we conceive phenomena in abstract conceptual terms forms a kind of 'filter' for how our overall experience is engaged. Preexisting interpretations and assumptions about 'what can be' and 'how it happens' are likely to alter how we experience -- or perhaps how experience is overtly 'registered' in our thinking about it. In that view, overall experience might be registered in either a more left hemispheric frame of reference versus a more right hemispheric one. One way to consider this contrast is to consider left inflected sense of experience as 'of explicitly distinguishable phenomena' verses as 'implicitly relational phenomena.' Again, brain science appears to indicate we must experience in both ways top perceive and understand with our 'whole mind.' But the potential for having one mode dominate also appears possible. In that case, a self-reinforcing feedback loop could exist in which one hemispheric mode of attending, then thinking abstractly, then registering a sense of 'how the world feels.'

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​A left versus right hemisphere conditioning of experience:

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​'Hemispheric Understanding' as Rational Reasoning versus Intuitive Gestalt

This sketch of hemispheric influences on attention and associated traits of thinking is dubiously simplistic. Yet, it appears to have a compelling factual basis in neuroscience. That evidence is derived from sophisticated techniques of quantitatively and chemically reductive scientific analysis. Here, as with the larger field of complex systems science, we are presented with reductively derived information about phenomena that involve complex dynamics and emergent self-organization. The brain is perhaps the most complex physical manifestation of a complex adaptive system. Whatever 'mind' is, as a semiotic or 'meaning making' phenomena, it appears to emerge unpredictably from brain dynamics as 'something more than' the quantifiable aspects of that organ.

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In general, this presents us with the conundrum of how to comprehend the emergently self-ordering dynamics and system properties indicated by, yet not fully analyzable or explainable in the terms of, causally based reductive scientific method. 

for the 'mechanistic minded' this notion can feel intolerable. It seems impossible that a reductive mode of analysis could provide evidence for what is evidently irreducibly interdependent, unpredictably transformative phenomena. 

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However, returning to the posed contrasts in how the two hemispheres frame attention, thus can influence interpretation and understanding, it appears obvious that we evolved to have both modalities because these are somehow essential to survival. How might we differentiate these as 'ways of thinking' or 'understanding' phenomena? The left hemisphere modality associates with thinking through rationally progressive reasoning -- whether or not that reasoning is complete or derived from accurate information. The left mode's facilitation of discreet differentiation and sequential progression assist perceiving then interpreting phenomena as self-consistent, causally predetermining components, whether as events or 'trains of thought.' The terms reason and rational both derive from the Latin rationem, with meanings such as reckoning, motive, cause, and ratio or rat, for calculate, think, believe. The word ratio has the same root and is specifically understood in modern usage as account, numbering, calculation, or numerical relationship. Such references for thinking and understanding appear distinctly analytical in that there is a sense of 'taking things apart' by reduction to parts, quantities, and deterministic sequences. All this appears to associate well with the left hemisphere style of attending.

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But how, then, to characterize understanding that derives from the non-differentiating or holistic attentional mode of the right hemisphere? As described, this inclusive mode cannot be linearly progressive reasoning, cannot be 'in terms of' quantities, sequences, or calculations. Rather, it must have qualities of constellation, correspondence, interrelation, plurality, diversity, even contradiction. When perceiving overtly complex phenomena or agentic systems, this mode is 'attending to' order emerging unpredictably from disorder. That necessarily includes overt inconsistency, conflict and contradiction. Yet such complex phenomena are entities whose wholeness intrinsically manifests through this entire range of continuity and discontinuity. How does mind understand that?

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It is difficult to find words for such understanding. In English the only word that seems applicable is intuition. That word derives from the Latin intueri and intuitionem, translated as to look at or consider and has modern meanings of insight, perceiving directly without reasoning, or by immediate perceptions. Intuition is sometimes regarded as a "sixth sense," as irrational and inexplicable. It once even had a theological usage as specifically spiritual perception. None of these meanings seems to specify 'how one understands' through right hemisphere attention -- at least not in terms that are coherent to a rationally reasoned, analytically reductive perspective. Nonetheless, these traits of intuition do seem to fit with 'perceiving holistically.'

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Another word that seems appropriate is "gestalt," a modern term coined in German philosophy and psychology, with the definition: "quality of perceiving a complex organization of things or events as an organized whole and also as more than the sum of the parts." This meaning does seem to fit well with the the traits of right hemisphere attention. It is, however, still incoherent the terms of understanding associated with left hemisphere attention. Nonetheless, perhaps a working term for right hemisphere inflected understanding could be "intuitive gestalt.' As such, this mode of understanding must be a rather indistinct, thus not likely to make an overt impression on intellectual awareness. We must be experiencing it constantly without it being as obvious as the more distinctive left hemisphere framed attention and understanding.

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The Evolutionary Necessity of Two Hemispheric Minds in One Brain

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Most Animals have Bilateralized Left and Right Brain Hemispheres

The bilateralized structure of left and right brain hemispheres is typical of more complex animal species. This anatomical trait and associated specialization of cognitive functions is found to varying degrees from some insects to fish and mammals, the latter having the most complex brains that are associated with 'higher intelligence.' It thus appears to be something of an 'evolutionary necessity' for the more elaborated cognitive processing and adaptive capacities of such species. On a very basic level, the holistic 'field focus' of right hemisphere attention facilitates an animal's broad awareness of his environment, in which numerous factors are concurrently active. The more reductive 'point focus' of left hemisphere-inflected attention provides a capacity to narrow focus in ways that facilitate differentiation of details and formulate potential responses to these. Again, adaptive behaviors derive from oscillating emphasis on either mode as well as a capacity to incorporate both into a larger yet more detailed interpretation of the environment. The coordination of these paradoxical modes of attention is essential for survival. Creatures must scan environments in a 'field focus' manner to detect potential food sources, predators, and prey. that they can then examine separately in a 'point focus' mode.

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Human Adaptation through Technological Means and the Expansion of Left Hemispheric Thinking

When considering the characteristics associated with reductive left hemisphere attention, these appear particularly appropriate to formulating concepts about how phenomena occur as distinct events in progressively causal sequences. In that case, left hemisphere biased thinking would be especially useful in promoting technical methods of manipulating materials and events, thereby enhancing capacity for some degree of controlling these. Humans, as a species, are particularly dependent upon such manipulative control for their adaptive survival. Considering their adoption of technological enhancements which elaborate such control, they appear particularly adept at promoting the dominance of the left-hemisphere attentional mode in interpreting 'how things happen.' The word manipulation derives from the Latin manus, meaning hand. It could be said we evolved as 'creatures of the hand.' The word technology has a similar sense in its derivation from the Greek tekhnē , understood to mean skill, craft in work, a method or system for making or doing. 

 

If the manual dexterity and accompanying cognitive capacities for reductive thinking are central to human evolution, then these traits also appear fundamental to the subsequent inventions of civilized technologies. The point here is, humans appear particularly reliant upon the reductive left hemisphere mode of attention to formulate their technologically oriented basis for adaptive survival. As discussed elsewhere on this site, civilizations can be understood to manifest as 'cultural evolution' of that emphasis upon manipulative control and the reductive, causally preoccupied modes of interpretation that promote it. There is a feedback loop between technical extensions of manual-mental manipulations and selection for it in 'cultural evolution.'

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Adaptive Survival and Hemispheric Bias

Given the contrasts for how the two hemispheres influence interpretation of phenomena, one can ask whether one has had a preeminent role in the evolution of long-term human adaptive survival. It has been suggested that the brain evolved to operate in an overall 'right to left and back to right' processing of perceptions. The inference here is that human evolution favored a bias toward the inclusively holistic understanding of the right in promoting human adaptation within ecologically embedded conditions of archaic hunter-gatherer cultures. However, when considering how human thinking 'evolves' within the 'selection forces' of civilization's control-obsessed 'tame domain,' it could be posited that a reversal of emphasis would have been 'selected for.' If cultural bias toward the right hemisphere modality is indeed essential to long-term human survival, then civilized societies would have to deliberately counter their reflexive impulse toward left hemisphere-inflected thinking.

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

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How the 'Two Mind-ings' Attend to the 'Two Ways Things Happen' Revealed by Systems Science

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Network Structures in Brain Hemisphere Perspectives

If we consider the contrasting attentional traits of the two hemispheres, it readily becomes evident how each is more suited to detecting one of the 'two ways things happen' now differentiated by systems science. The right hemisphere framing of inclusive awareness in a 'relational field of view,' presents our extended environment as a 'constellated whole' of interdependent phenomena. That attentional emphasis promotes awareness of the recursively connected network structures in complex systems. That would greatly facilitate perception and interpretation of complex dynamical activity and its emergent system properties. The left hemisphere emphasis upon a few particularities, framed in a more exclusively narrow focus, favors 'separating out' specific components or events from a more complex overall context. This more exclusive 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, how network dynamics involve both predictably deterministic ordering and the spontaneously synergistic, emergent ordering of complex adaptive systems.

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The hemispheric 'double minding' of sequential and interdependent network dynamics :

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Differentiating Parts & Sequences                            Constellating Interdependencies:

 

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How Our Reductive Left Hemisphere Understanding Revealed Its Limitations through Systems Science

As analytical reduction to quantifiable factors and causally predictive theories, all science seems to be a left hemisphere dominated mode of attention and understanding. Scientific research would thus seem to necessarily reinforce reductive left hemisphere thinking. Paradoxically, when that quantitative method of analysis was applied to complex systems in nature, it generated factual evidence for unpredictably emergent self-organizing systems -- systems whose 'behaviors' are 'more than the sum of their parts' and cannot be fully reduced to explicit causal sequences. Our science has thereby confounded our expectations for how it 'should' represent reality. Yet, having arrived at this factual basis for 'irreducible complexity' and unpredictably purposeful network agency -- through our reductive left hemisphere methodology -- we appear incapable of fully appreciating its 'logical conclusions.' To do that we would have to confront how our thinking remains dominated by our left hemisphere cultural bias.  So, most astonishingly, our cultural bias toward the left hemisphere attitude in modernity that has led to a factually logical understanding of its limitations for comprehending reality: by giving rise to complex systems science.

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Using Our Right Hemisphere 'Mind-ing' to Perceive Emergent Self-Organization and Network Agency

Neuroscience insights into how our brain hemispheres influence our perception, thus our conception of phenomena, illuminates the difficulty in appreciating the implications of complex systems science. Though systems science, as a reductive left hemisphere mode of 'mind-ing,' has generated evidence for a 'way things happen' that is not predictably deterministic and explicitly causal, that same mode of understanding cannot, by its fundamentally reductive orientation, fully appreciate the irreducible, unpredictably purposeful phenomena it has revealed. Only our right hemisphere modality could somehow conceive of the world as a paradoxically 'integrated whole,' composed by both predictably causal ordering and unpredictably emergent self-organizing system networks. So, the neuroscience provides an essential reference for any effort to shift our cultural worldview in ways that can fully incorporate the implications of systems science. We must find ways to promote and foreground the more inclusive, holistic perspective of our innate right brain attention.

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But, how do we 'see' the literally invisible phenomena of synergistic network interdependencies and the unpredictable emergence of self-directing system agency? How to we 'conceive' such ultimately irreducible phenomena -- even with our right hemisphere style of inclusive attention overtly engaged to provide more and holistic understanding?

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​'Putting It All Together'

Re-Integrating Hemispheric Modes of Thinking

 

Our Inherent Resistance to Right Hemisphere-Biased Thinking

However valid these thoughts on how brain hemispheres influence our thinking and how important the right is for understanding the implications of systems science, there remains the profound obstacle of our existing cultural worldview. Despite the fact that our reductive causal-obsessed application of scientific method has given us both the relevant insights into how our brains and and complex systems actually work, our assumptions about reality remain conditioned by that reductive mentality. Understanding what we have learned, by promoting right hemisphere attention and thinking, will involve challenging confrontations with our existing left hemisphere bias.

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Experiencing the Ineffable Dynamics of an Emergent and Agentic World through both Hemispheres

If we are to greatly expand our understanding the emergent and agentic version of 'how things happen,' as revealed by complex systems science, it would seem we must make overt efforts to foreground right hemisphere attention. Given the elusive traits of complex adaptive system dynamics, we can only go so far in understanding these in the reductive terms of the left hemisphere attention and rationalistic reasoning.  These are effectively 'ineffable' from that perspective. Perhaps this is not just a 'modernist dilemma.' Perhaps it was always a problem for human awareness and understanding of complexity. If it was essential to human long term survival in earlier stages of our evolution, then perhaps cultural adaptation supplied a way of compensating for our preoccupation with manipulative control, thus left hemisphere inflected attention and thought, by amplifying the influence of the right hemisphere through the dynamical modeling of metaphoric symbolism and spiritual imagination. In that view, it is a fundamental human concern to regulate our propensity to privilege our left hemisphere inflected thinking. We are, in effect, inherently 'imbalanced' in how we incorporate the 'two minds' in our one brain. Thus, our long-term survival, in so far as it depends upon an adequately realistic worldview, depends upon cultural basics that serve to promote right hemisphere influence as a compensation for this human strength that can become a threat to that survival.

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Affirming Right Hemisphere Appreciation of 'Holistic Complexity' thru Accumulations of Left Hemisphere Analysis

Obviously, this entire website is devoted to promoting awareness of complex emergent dynamics and agentic systems as fundamental aspects of reality -- aspects which our modern culture is mostly ignorant about. However, it is only possible to present these phenomena as actual, as factually verified, because of reductive scientific method. It is left hemisphere inflected intellectual attention that has calculated their actuality -- thus, demonstrated their existence in its own rationalistic and quantitative terms. Thus, if we seek to expand our understanding of how complex adaptive systems 'make the world' agentically, we should vigorously promote these left hemispheric insights into those systems as utterly essential knowledge for all people. Systems science is at least as important as fundamental physics and chemistry. Perhaps even more so, when it comes to our long-term survival.

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Promoting Right Hemisphere Intuitive Understanding through Artistic and Mythological Symbolism

​As brain science continues to assist in discerning what types of mental activities and experiences promote right hemisphere understanding, there are indications that the metaphorical symbolism of artistic expressions, literature, and mythological traditions are potent stimulants to that inclusive manner of 'mind-ing' the world. By correlating such symbolism with the factual insights of complex systems and network science, we can begin to understand how symbolism can assist humans to 'see' complexity more realistically. Symbolism can activate right hemispheric 'intuitive gestalt' understanding in an imaginal yet emotionally potent manner, thereby making more tangible the strange 'way that things happen' revealed by this new science.  Through that correlation we can also enhance our understanding of the implications of systems science for our worldview. Symbolism is essential to condensing the diverse and even contradictory aspects of a worldview into 'meme-like' images and linguistic phrases. Somehow, we must generate some such new, scientifically appropriate, symbols for the 'magic' of emergent ordering and the 'spiritual agency' of self-asserting, agentic systems.

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What the left hemisphere 'sees' can be understood with 'intuitive gestalt insight' by right hemispheric symbolism:​

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​The 'underlying' complexities of disorderly ordering in complex adaptive systems can be given overt metaphors:

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The participation of seemingly physical objects​ in the relational fields of agentic systems

such as humans and whole cities can be expressed dynamically in an image:

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The unconstrained self-assertion of super organism systems can be represented in an agsentic 'personification':

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The Essential Role of Culture in Mediating Our Right and Left Hemisphere Versions of Reality

These concerns about how to reaffirm and promote our right hemisphere inflected attention, thinking, and metaphorically symbolic expressions are not 'about science' but culture. We are failing to comprehend the implications of systems science because our culture is reflexively reductive, mechanistic, and control-obsessed. No amount of standard science education is likely to alter our ecologically devastating, thus self-threatening behaviors. To restore a realistic relationship between the 'two minds in our one brain' we must reconfigure our cultural assumptions, thus values -- 'from the bottom up,' with emergence and agentic system properties at the core of our references for reality

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​The Danger of Failure to Shift Our Cultural Worldview toward Right Hemisphere Thinking

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Our Worldview is 'Trapped' in a Culture of Left Brain Hemisphere Bias​

Our decades long, obviously ineffectual struggles to restrain the ecological and climate disrupting effects of our behaviors are not only symptoms of 'psychopathic' super organism self-assertion.  Our technologically enhanced powers of manipulation have promoted a control-obsessed, left-brain hemisphere biased cultural mentality. In the terms of the psychology of addiction, we are addicted to that mindset and the power over things and people it has generated. We are unwilling to confront the catastrophic consequences of that 'psychological dependency.' Changing our destructive behaviors thus not only requires better understanding of complex systems science but also a profound shift in our cultural worldview -- and that requires re-activating and prioritizing our right-brain hemisphere perspectives upon the systems science version of 'how the world actually works .'

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Confronting the Suicidal Left Hemisphere Bias of Our Modern Worldview

If we correlate this view of how our 'divided brains' enable us to generate two modes of attention with the new insights of complex systems and network science, we can see the dangers of favoring the exclusively reductive left hemisphere perspective over the more inclusively holistic right one. The right mode is more suited to perceiving the interdependent relationships of complex system networks, while the left mode is more prone to focusing upon sequentially dependent ones of predictable cause and effect.  Thus the left mode obscures awareness of how the 'wholes' of complex systems emerge unpredictably from the interactions of system parts. Yet that left mode which our technologically preoccupied, control-obsessed modern mentality promotes: it reflexively privileges the reductive left hemisphere mode, creating a cognitive bias in our worldview. If our modern worldview is dominated by left hemisphere attention and thought, then our difficulty in understanding the interdependent networks of self-organizing complex systems becomes not simply a problem with our science, but a consequence of a cognitive bias embedded in our cultural worldview. It is this cognitive bias that has blinded us to understanding how our manipulative, control-obsessed behaviors have disabled the self-ordering ecological systems of the biosphere -- including the global climate system -- and how that threatens even our own survival. Our modern left-hemisphere dominated mentality is proving suicidal. Indeed, our collective behavior has been compared to that of patients with damage to their right brain hemispheres. We are acting as if we have no inclusively holistic 'mind-ing.'

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Our decades long, obviously ineffectual, struggles to restrain the ecological and climate disrupting effects of our behaviors are symptoms of a control-obsessed, left brain hemisphere biased, cultural mentality. In the terms of the psychology of addiction, we are addicted to that mindset and the power over things and people it has generated. We are unwilling to confront the catastrophic consequences of that 'psychological dependency.' If we were to do so, we would have to undergo a kind of 'cognitive cultural therapy' that will provoke a metanoia -- a profound and shocking 'change of mind.'

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For More on How Our Two Brain Hemispheres Shape Our Understanding

see the Work of Neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist by clicking here

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