Master and Emissary: The Brain’s Drama of Dark Energy

Abstract

Recent science estimates that visible matter constitutes only about 4 % of the known universe, while 73 % is composed of invisible or “dark” energy, a force that makes possible the existence of the visible universe. This paper posits that in the universe of human relations and literature, attention can be considered a comparable form of invisible but immensely influential creative energy. Scientific sources include Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011), and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009). McGilchrist’s concern that modern culture is being ever more dominated by the power and control-seeking left hemisphere of the brain, as opposed to the empathic, holistic and judicious right hemisphere, is applied to two recent works of literature. Alice McDermott’s short story “Someone” is seen as illustrating the hurtful effects of status seeking and uncaring attention in a failed romantic relationship. When the victim of this treatment looks up into the sky, a dramatic opening occurs in her consciousness, switching from what McGilchrist would call a left-hemispheric focus of attention, that she has been rejected as physically imperfect, to a right-hemispheric focus that is nonverbal and integrative. This depicts a human drama of the skies: between the mind’s scientific, goal-oriented, detail-conscious form of reasoning—what McGilchrist’s associates with our world as conceived by the brain’s left hemispheric “emissary,” as it competes and conflicts with the holistic, compassionate, and metaphoric capacity of the brain’s right hemisphere. The discussion then moves to a science fiction piece by Carol Emshwiller, “Desert Creature.” This story presents a more explicit drama between right-hemisphere-motivated humans of contemporary society and questionably more evolved humanoid extraterrestrials as harbingers of the left-hemisphere-driven beings we might well become. The paper argues for a renewed focus on the quality of attention as the ground of moral awareness, in works of the imagination and in life as we help create it.