As noted in multiple earlier posts, we’ve been somewhat blindly undernurturing half our brains, leading to a diminished understanding of intelligence.
Specifically, we neglect to provide the evolved nest care needed to nourish the right hemisphere (RH) which is scheduled to grow more rapidly in the first years of life. As a result, the RH will be shaped to be weak and easily bullied by the left hemisphere. That is, when the left hemisphere (LH) has its accelerated growth beginning in the third year of life, it takes over and protects the weaker partner (RH) by developing a false self. A weak RH is not a partner but becomes a silenced slave to the LH when it should be the master (McGilchrist, 2009). This imbalance is one of the main sources of mental illness (Schore, 2025).
If protection of the weakling self (RH) were the only thing the LH did, maybe that would not be so dangerous. But without a stronger, more dominant RH, without the veridicality checking of LH generalizations and world modeling by a well nurtured RH, ego consciousness can go nuts. LH can become paranoid and delusional. After all, the LH is only ‘wired’ to itself, focused on its own inventions. It is a representer, an information processor, unaware of what the RH knows about real life.
Left-brain-driven functioning—using words, linear logic, verbal argument—is limited in assessing or conveying reality. Pattern matching is a left brain occupation. Seeing and appreciating uniqueness is a right brain activity. Reality is dynamic and relationally entangled. Most of our communications are nonverbal, or at least they used to be when we cultivated our whole brains and human potential.
With so many adults dominated by the LH, the culture has adopted these messages: Don’t believe your senses, don’t trust your intuitions, don’t believe your body. They are stupid, primitive, childish. Believe what we authorities tell you to believe.
Notice how this LH view sounds like authoritarian religion, even scholarship in psychology, philosophy, and techno-colonizing bureaucracies. It’s a death knell for untamed planetary life.
Left brain utopia is control over static objects. Deadness is preferred. That’s why it’s necessary to tame or kill things that are unpredictable, from wild animals to rivers, from free play to the human spirit. Everything is to be domesticated, controllable, predictable. Pay no attention to the [living] Earth over there.
Remember it’s authoritarianism all the way down.
Unfortunately, we are on a downward slope shrinking our human capacities, even though at the same time, we are led to believe that humanity is getting smarter because of the technologies humans have created.
And now we have AI acting like the left brain.
AI is authoritarianism writ large. It magnifies the left brain’s hall of mirrors, confabulating and misdirecting. It takes our sovereignty as individuals, as collectives, as Earthlings on a living planet. Sure, it can help us find patterns in millions of data points, but that is not wisdom. Sure, it can mimic personhood, but it’s an empty mask. Just like a clever sociopath, it can trick you into believing it’s a friend, until it clearly is not.
Living is a process not a product. We enact our beingness. A well-nurtured RH knows how to live with uncertainty, how to play flexibility in the dynamic, co-creation of the world with others, moment by moment, enhancing the flow of life.
In fact, the highest levels of human behavior “sit atop an early-evolving right-lateralized subcortical foundation” which includes “empathy, intuition, creativity, imagery, symbolic thought, imagination, humor, music, poetry, dance, art, morality, altruism, compassion, spirituality, and love” (Schore, 2025, p. xxxi). Each of these gifts grows from a plethora of skills and subskills deep nestedness cultivates (to be explored later).
Machines and AI are useful for producing products. But if you want to be fully human, you have to dive into doing—dancing, singing, composing music and art, relating face to face, body to body, breathing in Nature. The RH grows in wisdom from lived experience of nestedness with real-live beings, human and non-human.
It is the process of creation that engages our spirit and grows our wholeness, entangled with a living world.
Life is a process, not a resume.
Cultivate your poetic soul. Now. Feel the beauty around you. Open your heart to it. Join in cocreating beauty through play with willing others. Use your voice, your hands, and always, your heart. Sense the oneness with All.
References
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schore, A.N. (2025). The right brain and the origin of human nature. W.W. Norton.
Tweedy, R. (Ed.) (2021). The divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy. London: Routledge.