Conflict is the essence of story. Put your character into trouble, then make it worse.

But he’s already in trouble. He’s human, isn’t he? It’s the same for all of us. He’s had conflict since his first swim as a sperm. And ever since, it’s just got bigger and much worse.  Even before he was born, he was already at war in his own mind – one half of his mind wrestling with the other.

The notion of the divided brain became a bit of an obsession for me, an explanation for so many things I could see around me, and it became the central theme in my novel, Solomon’s Keepers.

What purpose does this conflict serve? Where does it come from? Where does it lead when we interfere with it?

The intellectual fuel for my interest came largely from the work of Iain McGilchrist and, in particular, his book, THE MASTER AND HIS EMSSARY – The divided brain and the making of the western world. I don’t want to mangle or misrepresent his ideas and so recommend that you check him out directly (I highly recommend the book and the TED talk here is a good start). But here’s what I made of it:

The pop version of the divided brain theory, you know the one, the functional view that says left brain for thinking and language, right for feeling and creativity – put the whole notion out of fashion.  That’s a shame because there’s lots of evidence to support the view that the two hemispheres do indeed have undeniable differences at every physical level – and that these have profound consequences.

McGilchrist says that the two hemispheres differ not in functional terms (both are involved in every function, reason and language included), not in what they do, but in how they do it.

They see different truths, relate to different elements, and work in different dimensions: The left brain focuses on the narrow task at hand, on fitting it onto a schema, on its details and on getting it just right. It simplifies, reads the map, and gets the job done. It thinks in categories, in black and white but not grey. It deals with logic, data, mechanics, labels, concepts, and it measures things in terms of speed, quantity, precision. Think of a bird pecking about for seeds.

Recognise it? Then you probably know how it reacts when not in control (as it likes to be): angry, anxious, and aggressive.

The right brain sees a bigger picture but a rawer picture too. It doesn’t quite pin things down; it deals with ambiguity, complexity, and recognises patterns. It understands social connections, the flow of things rather than the points, metaphor, melody, the relation of the parts to the whole. Think of that same bird sensing the world around it, a vast world of interconnected patterns, of social behaviour, of weather, of predators circling. It needs to be able to stand back from the task at hand and keep that necessary distance from the immediate. It has to be aware all the time as it pecks.

You recognise the right brain in a sense of awe and wonder, in a social bond, in belonging, a sense of humour, when striving to understand something fully rather than merely to use it.

The human mind deals with primary experience (right) from our senses and creates processed experience (left). The right takes what it is presented with and the left creates representations.

Crucially, that applies to self-perception too; the right brain sees itself as needing the left, as imperfect, but as unique. It is the ‘tarnisher.’ The left brain is the ‘polisher,’ it sees itself as fine on its own, it seeks perfection and tends to find it; it is optimistic, self-believing.

McGilchrist’s assertion is that the left brain developed for handling tasks (as an emissary for the master) but has over the course of time become over-assertive. It is usurping the power of the master. And our modern society is helping it.

The trend in Western society has been for the left brain to rise. The industrial revolution mechanised societies (and introduced new diseases strongly associated with the left brain, such as schizophrenia, which was unknown in ancient times). It isn’t healthy to view ourselves as machines.

What will the digital revolution bring? If society is already becoming pathological, where do we get to further down the road?

That’s where I left McGilchrist, his evidence and his cogent argument. From here on it’s my guesswork. But I’m betting that the sponsorship money will be for technology that continues to beef up the left brain. In my novel it’s the military and then private industry that develop and deploy microchips that augment the brain. Guess what for – you’ve seen the internet. What happens then?

And for the individual with that added pressure, how does it feel? What happens to the right brain? What happens to understanding, how do we connect with the wider world, what happens to love?

So we’re in trouble alright, and it’s getting worse; the only question, as in all good stories, is how the hell are we going to get out of it?