Humans have long interpreted nature and society through the question “Why?” – first through religion and mythology to understand natural phenomena, and later through philosophy and science to take a more logical and systematic approach. Research shows that the left brain drives interpretation and language, creating logic to convince ourselves in the face of contradictions. In this process, humans instinctively create stories to make sense of the world, and our modern scientific worldview is connected to the myths of the past in that it is an extension of these stories to explain the world.
We are cause-and-effect animals. “Why?” has been a central question in human history. Questions like “Why do lightning strikes and storms make us suffer?”, “Why doesn’t it rain?”, “Why do people die?”, and “Why do people die?” were probably sparked by early civilizations’ fears of surviving in a harsh natural world. Initially, they created religion. God was a source of nature beyond human understanding, a force at the center of destruction. Humans believed that the wrath and anger of the gods were responsible for natural disasters like droughts and floods, and they offered sacrifices, built altars, and prayed to them. Myths and scriptures were written, and they became the way humans interpreted and made sense of the world.
This mode of interpretation is also found in the realm of academia. In ancient Greece, people tried to make natural phenomena more logical: they debated what nature was made of, what its most basic elements were, and gradually this discussion expanded into social analysis and discourse about the state and war. In China, too, many thinkers made it an essential task to “understand” and “interpret” society, criticizing and proposing solutions to the violent conditions of the times.
Mythology and religion are found all over the world, with only varying degrees of intensity. Analyses and interpretations that exclude God, and understandings of society and the state, also appear in different cultures. It’s a universal phenomenon that humans strive to analyze phenomena in some way, to find cause and effect, and this can be seen as a characteristic of human nature. To answer the question of where this nature resides, I would argue that it is directly related to our brains. Since our language and thinking originate in the brain, the way the brain understands the world and the way humans understand the world within structures like society are bound to be similar. To understand this, we need to look at the studies that have analyzed how the brain takes in the world.
As most people know, our brains are divided into compartments. The largest of these is the cerebrum, which is made up of two hemispheres, the left and right. Between these two hemispheres is an area of countless nerve cells called the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres, and because it contains so many nerve cells, it’s responsible for information exchange in the brain. Signals that normally access the brain via the spinal cord go through the pons and the thalamus in the midbrain, so they reach both hemispheres relatively equally, even if they don’t pass through the corpus callosum. While both hemispheres of the cerebrum are connected to the midbrain and can exchange related information, this is not the case for information that travels through the corpus callosum, such as visual information. Visual stimuli in particular are a prime example of such information. When the corpus callosum is removed, the left brain cannot see objects in the left field of vision and the right brain cannot recognize objects in the right field of vision. In this sense, the corpus callosum is a very important area for information exchange.
Some people have had surgery to remove this part of the brain. This is called a corpus callosotomy, and it has been shown to reduce the symptoms of epilepsy. This makes sense given the function of the corpus callosum, as epilepsy is a disease caused by abnormal signaling in localized areas of the brain or throughout the brain. These surgeries were able to alleviate the symptoms of patients suffering from unpredictable seizures. This was possible because the function of the corpus callosum was not clearly understood at the time. The patients who underwent the surgery were surprisingly able to live their lives without much difficulty, and it was Dr. Roger Sperry who began to study them. Through his research, he demonstrated what he called “lateralization,” in which both hemispheres of the brain are specialized for different roles. This confirmed what had been indirectly confirmed by the speech impairments that resulted from left-brain damage. Dr. Michael Gazzaniga would go on to discover the “interpreting left brain” along with other aspects of ubiquity using a variety of methods.
In Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of The Mind, Dr. Gazzaniga describes how he presented a split-brain patient (P.S.) with a piece of paper in his left visual field with specific instructions. For example, if the instruction read, “Get up from your seat,” P.S. would spontaneously stand up, but when the patient was asked why he did so, he would give an incorrect answer, such as, “I was just going to get a Coke. It could be interpreted that she was acting on instruction, but was unaware of the instructions and was trying to justify her actions.
Dr. Gajaniga uses the “simultaneous concept task” in his split brain research with Dr. Joseph E. Ledoux. In this study, split-brain patients are presented with two different pictures in both hemispheres. Because different visual information is presented to different visual fields, the patient’s left eye cannot recognize the information in the right field, and the right brain cannot recognize the information in the left field. For example, if P.S. is presented with a snowy road in his left visual field and a chicken’s foot in his right visual field, the appropriate association would be to select the snow shovel and the chicken from a series of pictures. In reality, the patient selected the picture of the shovel with his left hand and the picture of the chicken with his right hand, and the experimenter asked the split-brain patient why he chose the picture. When asked why he chose the chicken, he replied that it was because he was presented with chicken feet, but when asked why he chose the shovel, he explained that he “needed it to clean the chicken coop”. This shows that the patient was unable to comment on the visual information sent to his right hemisphere and tried to explain his behavior as logically as possible with what he knew about it.
From this experiment, Dr. Gazzaniga interprets that the left and right hemispheres were unable to exchange visual information when the corpus callosum was removed, and that the right and left hemispheres were unable to understand each other. Because the part of the brain responsible for language is ubiquitous in the left hemisphere, only information perceived by the left hemisphere could be expressed in language, so P.S. could say why he chose the chicken, but not why he chose the shovel. Dr. Gazzaniga concludes that the left brain is solely responsible for language and tends to interpret phenomena and situations.
Separate brain studies have shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain share some roles, with the left hemisphere being particularly important for language and logical and causal thinking. The right hemisphere can also recognize objects and process information, but information in the form of speech or visual symbols comes from the left hemisphere. The left brain’s “excuses” are also of interest here. In Cognitive Neuroscience, Gazzaniga noted that the left brain tries to provide the most logical explanation for the patient’s choice. In other words, the left brain approaches phenomena from an interpretive and analytical perspective, and he attributes the human tendency to think rationally to the left brain. In other words, explaining phenomena we don’t understand is deeply embedded in our cognitive structure.
When there is a gap between reality and our understanding, we invent and structure stories in our own way. This trait of the left brain gave rise to ancient myths and tales, and we used them to make sense of the world. Philosophy emerged as an attempt to transform and revise myths and to understand nature and society at a higher level. In modern times, these structures remain in a worldview dominated by science. For example, the establishment and change of life and chemical reactions is viewed as a grand narrative, with atoms and elementary particles as the “protagonists.” In this narrative, the laws of physics are worshipped as gods, and everything they make up is a narrative and a “hero. It is still our human instinct to try to understand the world through such a grand narrative, even if its structure limits our view.
