Two Brains, One Mind

In “The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles” the Russion-American linguist and literary critic Roman Jakobson describes two types of experience revealed when a patient suffers from either natural or induced aphasia (natural damage to the brain related specifically to speech or induced by a corpus callosotomy, the purposeful severing of the corpus callosum ..the bundle of fibers connecting the two sides of the brain).  He labels these two “poles” as “metaphor” and “metonymy” and elates that they reflect two methods of decoding meaning in the environment, including linguistic events with which is chiefly concerned.
 
As he notes,
 
Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, of the faculty of selection and substitution, or for combination and connection  The former affliction [i.e. The impairment of selection and substitution] involves a deterioration of metalinguistic [focused on semantics or meaning] operations, while the latter [i.e. the impairment of combination and connection] the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units.  [All editorial insertions will be denoted by square brackets]
 
He then further attaches to these two poles the terms, metaphor and metonymy, which he borrows from literary criticism, and notes how
 
The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity.  The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second.
 
Summarizing how these two concepts are connected to aphasia he notes that:
 
In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked--an effect which makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminating for the linguist. In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over another.
 
His references to experimental science reflect the use of linguistic responses in children follow.  He recounts experiments where the child is told to respond with the first thing that comes to them. Classifying the responses it was found that the response functioned as a substitution or a predicative.  In other words, the child’s response substituted a similar word (a word capable of replacing the original due to semantic similarity and function) or either restrict or expand by contiguity the original words semantic position.
 
For instance, to the word “hut’ the responses included, cabin and hovel.  The semantic structure of these server as substitutes because of their similarity to the original, a function of metaphor.  Other responses included, “thatch,” and “poverty,” words which cannot server as a substitute but which either restrict the scope of the original by representation (“thatch” represents “hut” in the same way that “head” represents the whole cow as in ‘fifty head of cattle”), or is a concept in contiguity to the original word, as “poverty” may be linked to “hut” by cultural assumptions about those living in a hut.
 
Thus, the responses can be classified as metaphor (substitutions) or metonymy (contiguity).  The significance of this line of reasoning is reflected in further studies of patients suffering from aphasia which reveal that the centers of metaphor and metonymy reside in the left and right hemisphere’s respectively.
 
At the end of his article Jakobson notes that
 
Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted.  Consequently, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes [common cultural patterns of speech], the researcher possesses more homogeneous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle easily defies interpretation.
 
Based on Jakobson’s research, Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, researchers at the California Institute of Technology, did an interesting set of examinations of aphasia patients sometime in the early 1970’s.  They discovered that the linguistic processing of images by which a patient is shown a image and asked to say what they are seeing, is very much dependent upon which eye receives that image.  By covering one eye and showing the image to each eye independently, in aphasia patients it was discovered that when an image was presented to the left eye (which connects to the right brain) the patient reported that they did not see the image.  But when asked if they could pick out an object similar to the image (and thus not provide a linguistic response) they were able to do so.  Conversely, when they were shown the same image to the right eye (mapping to the left hemisphere) they could describe what they were seeing linguistically.  
 
Other scientists, following Gazzaniga and Sperry’s lead, have refined the understanding and discovered that the “left brain interpreter” attempts to explain stimuli within a narrative structure, linguistically and semantically.  The right brain, on the other hand, focuses particularly on the spacial relationships between things and thus their contiguity to each other.
 
From this I postulate that the left brain is predominately metaphoric and the right, metonymic, which, I further suggest, explains a lot of the various intellectual and explanatory tensions we experience in societies, including many competing academic conflicts.  More on that at a later time.  For now I will focus on the connections between the underlying structures of the left brain interpreter as related to the ideas of Noam Chomsky, the controversial linguist.
 
Noam Chomsky produced in the late 1950’s works describing something he called “transformation grammar,” or “generative grammar.”  The terms are pretty inter-changeable, but what Chomsky was after is a method to determine how it is that a natural speaker can generate an entirely, previously unheard, sentence,  The question may seem a bit esoteric but finding an answer may impact the fields of artificial intelligence, the psychology of creativity, language acquisition and psychiatry, among others.  In any case, he describes his work he suggest that the mind uses two linguistic levels, one on the surface the other “deep structures.”  These deep structures represent the syntactical structures used to “map” new sentences and to measure the grammatical properties of sentences or phrases understood.  
 
Chomsky himself describes the need for his concepts in Syntactic Structures, saying:

But the fundamental reason for [the] inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative," the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics.

The concepts used in transformational grammar amount to only three key ones.  The first is the concept of surface expressions.  What you produce as you speak are the surface expressions or surface structures.  Below them, more deeply hidden in the mind, are the “deep structures” which give syntactical structure to the surface expressions.  How they do that is through the third concept, that of transformations.  To put is perhaps more simply than I should, you can imagine you have a mattress laying upon a bunch of rocks.  You lie down on the mattress and the unseen rocks determine how you can best sleep.  Sleep in the wrong position and you are uncomfortable. Sleep according to the rock placement and you might sleep very well indeed.  Chomsky suggested that beneath all languages is a unifying “deep structure” upon which all human utterances and are molded.
 
If you’ve been paying attention, and if you’ve read this far you know doubt have been paying attention, you might note that within Chomsky’s suggestion of deep structures and the concepts of Jakobson’s poles of language resides a suggestion that language, at least left brain linguistic production, is mapped by the similarities of syntactical artifacts.  In other words, the “deep structures” are themselves artifacts derived by exposure to language and when we speak we map our surface communication by the underlying map as a process of metaphor. I would suggest that structures of the left brain dealing with the input of stimuli metaphorically encode the stimuli over a matrix of relationships similar to the relationships denoted by previous experience.  In other words, what is taken in is aligned with what has been previously heard no in conceptualization but in relationship between concepts.  Thus, if I say “the world is adrift” I am using a verb (“is” to denote a condition (“adrift”) which parallels my experience of linking a noun (“world” in this case) with a predicate (“adrift”) via a verb (“is”).  It is this process pattern which I would argue are the real “deep structures” and that they are, at least in the left brain, the maps by which we both interpret and create utterances.
 
Aristotle, in De Anima, reflects upon what happens in reasoning by noting that within the mind there is a “proportional mental space not unlike that of geometry.”  In another work he argues that the “enthymeme” (literally “in the mind”), is the “source and heart of persuasion.” (John and Martha Kneale’s, “The Development of Logic, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962) covers a good deal of this and is worth a good read.  And finally, Aristotle then spends a good deal of time explaining the syllogism, his grammatical representation of logic.  From this over the last few hundred years we have developed many diagrams to represent a good deal of the 256 possible forms of the syllogism, almost all of which do not lead to valid conclusions, as the diagram reveals.  In other words, the syllogism and it’s underlying architecture, the enthymeme, are so close to two dimensions that we can easily represent them in two dimensional space.   Aristotle was, I think, correct in his understanding of the core of human grammar in his suggestion that it parallels four dimensional space and time by mapping sentences onto the “proportional mental space.”  What holds grammar together and makes it useful are the parallels between the four dimensions we experience and the prepositions we use to relate parts of sentences to each other.  It is my belief that prepositions represent the core of the deep structures we use to map linguistic acts.  In the example above, “the world is adrift,” the term “adrift” compresses spacial relationship and a time to produce a mental experience of non-directional movement in relation to a fixed point or fixed goal.  Thus, the sentence is mapped onto deep structures of our dimensional experience. (I should note that my own research into the enthymeme is contrary to the modern assumptions on the matter, but I’ve never been afraid to run contrary on other.  The real problem is that very few have written much on the enthymeme exactly because Aristotle never fully explains what he is thinking about it.)
 
These deep structures enable us to, by analogy, communicate and to construct new sentences based upon our experiencing of the actual four dimension in which we live.  But of course the four dimensions on which we structure our grammar are infinite and this enables us to imagine an everlasting or eternal projection into each dimension of space and time which, if allowed to continue would render the whole process useless as we contemplated the infinite,  To combat the infinite recursion of mental space we either choose to break the cycle and leave the ambiguity necessary with infinity or we place a cap on it, the cap being a finite symbolic recognition of the infinite.  The concept of “God” or “Devil,” and the various ‘god and devil terms’ are used to cap these imaginary infinite and are, in some ways, a protective mechanism.
 
Now if my survey has accomplished anything you may now see why so many of our modern controversies represent a basic interpretive tension between the two sides of our mind.  The left side interprets in a linear manner (in keeping with the four infinite dimensions of which it can conceive), while the right brain is focused upon contiguity, the immediate experiential field before us necessary for our immediate survival.  The left brain enables language, society, history, and thought in general, the right, because it is focused upon immediate survival, brings out our emotions, compassion, and initial experience of the world (sans interpretation).  Most people are right brained and it might be noted that social sensitivity is greatly hampered when two things are missing: the immediacy of the individual with whom we are interacting; and the use of the left ear, which is the primary ear for sensing emotional cues in the voice.  Thus, it may be, and I think it’s a good bet, that since we have two brains we may draw different conclusions based upon how each processes incoming verbal and non-verbal information.
 
Take for instance, the traditional conflict between determinism and free will.  Whatever the source of evidence might be, both sides often hold to a position which “explains the away” the other by showing the logical or experiential consistency of their position.  A complete argument for determinism uses a strict logic of cause and effect to reach a point where all choices are a manifestation of previous states reaching back to the creation or the “big bang” depending on your cup of tea.  “Free will,” on the other hand relies upon the immediacy of evidence in that is says, “since I can’t see or determine what is influencing me, it must be that those influences are so weak that I can actually make a choice.”  Notice that one focuses upon a cause-effect temporal structure of interpretation whereby the explanation comes from a analogy to time and space, while the other provides a conclusion drawn from the the contiguity of the immediate.  The first is a structured, and usually linguistic interpretation (left brain), while the second is a metonymic one in that is takes a temporal “snapshot” of things and determines the absence of force means the choice is free of significant influences, and thus, free.
 
In the field of cosmology you have a similar dichotomy, though the parallels may be less strong, the imaginary matrix of each side follows the same two sided explanation.  In cosmology you approach explaining observations with cause-effect reasoning in Newtonian physics and with probability in Quantum physics.  Newtonian physics lead to imprecision's which led Einstein to develop his special theory of relativity (which lead to the General Theory of Relativity) whereby he explained the apparent discrepancy between the actual orbit of Mercury and the Newtonian prediction of that orbit. The Newtonian explanation was, of course, good enough for things of a certain scale. But once you leave the scale of general human existence and either go to the cosmological or the sub-atomic you have to conceive of things as probabilities rather than discreet.  In other words, what “is” becomes not what actually “is” but what might be, the state of which can only be inferred by a snapshot where that state finds contiguity with observations.  
 
In my own studies of this I conclude, perhaps incorrectly or not, that the very structure of quantum understanding is driven by the principle of metonymy while metaphor drives the conceptualization of Newtonian mechanics. Hiesenberg’s uncertainty principle rests upon the same descriptive dichotomy as wave and particle physics, both of which are the result of, I think, in this case, metonymic (wave) and metaphoric (particle) conceptualizations or imaginations.  
 
In ethics and morality the duality between conceiving of a situation in metaphorical (left brain) terms as versus metonymic (right brain) terms leads to a similar tension when faced with many decisions.  For instance when you meet a homeless person on the street the right brain sees the contiguity (connection) between the immediate situation and the condition of your ability to help, and the left brain interprets the whole experience in terms of religious, philosophical or imagined projections into the future.  If you are right brain dominant you are more likely to help and to insist on others helping, while if you are left brained you interpret the immediate condition on a larger, cause-effect temporal scale and thus, because of the complexity of such an analysis, may more often elect to do nothing.
 
In economics you divide the field into micro and macroeconomic studies.  When you study at the microeconomic scale you look to cause-effect and conceive of economics as strictly cause-effect.  Macroeconomics does much the same thing, but the concepts are much closer to metonymic thinking exactly because their scale is much larger and the tendency is to look not measures of valuation but at probabilities and contiguities inherent in governments and large corporation moves.  The underlying tension is between what I label the “contiguity of force” (a measure of the “gravitational” pull of government and large business decisions on the “economic field” surrounding them both immediate and long term) and “transactional force”which measures the impact of a transaction on the  direction and health of the participants in that transaction.  The point is that each of these uses a different understanding and the mathematics of each is different.  The mathematics of transactional force is based upon cause and effect to a much, much larger degree, than macroeconomic measures which are usually probabilities.
 
But these are, of course very speculative suggestions. Less speculative are the linguistic and communication results of left brain or right brain dominance.  For if Jakobson and those who followed him are correct it may be that the experiencing of meaning itself is determined by brain structure over any philosophical determination. Here we are on more solid ground as we look to where the concepts of metaphor and metonymy express themselves in popular culture and politics.
 
As you may have noted, the right brain is more “imagistic” than the left which is linear.  Because of that, the interpretation of thins is either within the immediate context (contiguous) or within the framework of projection (linear).  If you think of the controversies between the political left and the political right, the left focuses on how things are currently and what can be done immediately about them often with little to no real analysis of the causes of the problem or long term effects of the proposed solutions.  The right, on the other hand, has all kinds of theories as to why things should be left as they are and thus shows little immediate compassion.  It is my theory that the left is dominated by right brain dominate persons and the right is dominated by left brain people.
 
A more concrete example is talk radio versus television.  While there are many who would argue that FOX is a right wing propaganda organ, there are many more who argue that all the other networks are left wing propaganda machines.  At the same time, it is pretty evident that talk radio (with the exception of NPR) is dominated by right wing politics.  The differences between television and radio is that television is dominated by imagery and radio by linearity.  Television speaks to the right brain listener as it gives immediate experience without deep analysis, while talk radio is linear and thus one follows he reasoning of a textual stream to a conclusion.  Of course you have FOX and NPR which run contrary to the theory, but in the case of FOX you will find that they spend longer on a story than the other three major networks and thus the series of images can become an stream of argument in ways a shorter presentation cannot.  NPR’s stories are also longer and more complex than talk radio and that may serve to balance them out.  But of course that is probably also why NPR’s listenership is much smaller than that of the rest of talk radio.  
 
I could go on with other examples but here I’ll draw a suggestion or two and close.
 
First, the two brain idea has a lot of merit if we consider the functions of each brain.  But if you view the overall function of the person it is pretty clear that the mind is single.  It would be difficult to imagine a person functioning in society if they had only one or the other upon which to rely.  Knee jerk and emotional reactions may be necessary to survive in the jungle, but they tend to get you into trouble in a sophisticated social environment.  On the other hand, it’s hard to feel compassion if your conjectures end up explaining away why you should care.  
 
From all this I would conjecture that there is a direct correlation between the size and structure of the corpus callosum and the integration of the two brains into a single mind.  I believe that in mapping the corpus callosum it will be found that the more connections between the two brains there are, the more the person can tolerate ambiguity, but the fewer the connections the more the person will find it necessary to take unyielding stances on all sorts of things.
 
There are other things I could say, but this will do for now.
 
AJ



Edited by ajqtrz - 23 Aug 2015 at 21:29

How about just half a brain?

7/8ths?

AJ - can I hire you to help me create my IT Master Plan?