Historical changes in everyday human lifestyles and their effects on hemispheric activation: Speculations on McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary

ABSTRACT

McGilchrist [McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and His emissary: The divided brain and the making of the modern world. Yale University Press] argued that Western society has undergone a population-level shift from greater right hemisphere influence on cognition to increasingly greater left hemisphere influence over the past few centuries. Four historical lifestyle changes that replaced behaviours associated with right hemisphere activation with behaviours associated with left hemisphere activation may be responsible: (i) shifts from standing to sitting, (ii) from being outdoors to indoors, (iii) from communal to solitary activities, and (iv) from analogue/concrete to holistic/abstract representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Left hemisphere
• right hemisphere
• society
• history
• western civilization

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Gina Grimshaw for her helpful comments and constructive criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

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