Visual Science // An Animated Look At The Divided Brain

Today we bring you another great video from RSA Animate, the same folks that turned Sir Ken Robinson's "Changing Education Paradigms" into a mind-blowing animation. This time they've taken up their pens to illustrate "The Divided Brain," a lecture by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

McGilchrist explores how the common perception of the brain being divided into to halves, with the left handling logic, reason and language and the right taking care of emotion, visual imagery and creativity, doesn't tell the whole story. The brain is indeed "profoundly divided," he says, and has become more so as humans have evolved, but the major difference between the two hemispheres is the right's capacity for broad sustainable awareness and the left's narrow focus and attention to detail, both of which are needed for reason and imagination.

An imbalance between these two hemispheres, with the left's "what" taking precedence over the right's "how", can be found at the root many problems in contemporary society, McGilchrist says, driving things home with a killer Einstein quote.

Hit play and give both sides of your brain a little exercise:

-- John Ruscher