Does AI mimic human intelligence? Only if you are half-brained.
If you have any sense of embodied wisdom, experiences of oceanic feeling of oneness with All, any deep social and emotional intelligence understanding the complexity of face-to-face responsive human relationships, or any working creative artistic bones—all of which means your right hemisphere is working at some level—you likely cringe at the thought of people thinking that AI mimics human intelligence. Far from it.
AI is capturing the attention of many because we have so dumbed down human potential that it seems as smart or smarter than humans. It’s because we’ve been encouraged to lose half our minds.
In a well-functioning brain, the right hemisphere picks up, through a plethora of senses and whole-body immersed experience, how the real world works in relation to the self. (This requires lots of self-directed playing with diversity—different ages, genders, contexts—throughout childhood. Sitting with screens does not do it.)
The RH then passes these impressions to the left hemisphere (LH), an isolated ivory tower magician that picks out patterns and makes generalizations. The LH then passes those generalizations back to the RH for assessment of veridicality. The RH tosses out the distortions (but only with adequate life experience). Individual knowledge/wisdom/knowhow is transformed by this dynamic process.
RH is the seat of emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, self-control, embodied awareness, and the true self.
This back-and-forth process has been failing across industrialized capitalism for centuries. Left-brain confabulations have taken over—that the world is empty of spirit, that what is valuable can be calculated on a spreadsheet or through logical analysis, that humans are making life-enhancing progress, and so much more.
These days we so undercare for babies during critical periods that we’ve commonly impaired their brain development. For example, we distress them even purposefully (e.g., with sleep training; separate sleeping; out of arms most of the day) when their right hemispheres are scheduled to grow more rapidly (till age 3 years or so) in coordination with carers. But RH development is undermined by undercare (lack of the evolved nest).
Distressing babies by not providing the evolved nest undermines basic physiological functions, even the mitochondria that through ATP provide the metabolic energy for growth (Naviaux, 2008). Dysregulating events during accelerated right brain growth create alterations in metabolic energy, impairing the ANS, HPA axis, immune, and cardiovascular systems (McEwen & Wingfield, 2003).
This is the period when attachment is set up to be disorganized, organized insecurely or, hopefully, organized securely. Attachment scores are a superficial signal of whether the early months and years have gone well enough for social fittedness. Attachment scores are not measuring RH relational right-brain-to-right-brain functioning.
Virtually all mental illness comes from the undermining of the RH development prenatally (from maternal stress) or postnatally during this period, and boys are affected more (Schore, 2025).
After the critical period for RH growth in the first nearly three years, the LH growth spurt begins. This is the seat of ego consciousness, the confabulator.
If the foundations of the true self in the RH are weak from undercare and toxic stress, the LH takes over with a false self to protect the weakling, for better or for worse. Narcissism of various kinds emerges here.
We exist in a culture of increased confabulation and narcissism and decreased relational intelligence and wisdom.
To heal, we restore the evolved nest and revamp our worldviews.
References
McEwen, B. S., & Wingfield, J.C. (2003). The concept of allostasis in biology and biomedicine. Hormones and Behavior, 43, 2-15.
Naviaux, R.K. (2008). Mitochondrial control of epigenetics. Cancer Biology and Therapy, 7, 1191-1193.
Ray, D., Roy, D., Sindhu, B., Sharan, P. & Banerjee, A. (2017). Neural substrate of group mental health: Insights form multibrain reference frame in functional neuroimaging. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1627.
Schore, A.N. (2025). The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. W.W. Norton.