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Drawing from the author’s background in English literature and medicine, it describes turning from literary criticism’s abstractions toward neuroscience, especially hemispheric differences, to explain failures in understanding and the consequences of internal imbalance.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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story does the text use to introduce the brain-related argument?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"It recounts an allegory of a master who rules a prosperous domain and relies on emissaries, who eventually become contemptuous and seize power, leading to collapse.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"Why does the author criticize the academic study of literature in the text?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"The author argues that literary criticism makes what should remain implicit explicit, replacing irreducible uniqueness with abstractions and coded messages, thereby missing the embodied point.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What is the author’s key motivation for training in medicine?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"The author wanted first-hand experience of how brain and body affect mind, and how mind affects brain and body, to address limitations in a disembodied philosophical 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the first part of his thesis explained in his forthcoming book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. His background in English literature and medicine gives him a unique perspective.  \nThere’s a story somewhere in  \nsomething like this. There was master, who was the ruler of a  \nNietzsche that goes once a wise spiritual small but prosperous  \ndomain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and even to remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own … the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.  \nThis story is as old as humanity, and I think it tells us something important about what is going on inside ourselves, in our very brains. It is being played out in the world around us right now, and, since the consequences are grave indeed, we need to understand what it is.  \nFor the last 15-20 years I have been gathering material for and writing a book about the structure of the brain and its influence on Western culture, entitled The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I will try to give an idea of how it came about, since it may be of interest outside the world of neuroscience.  \nProblems with the Explicit  \nThe idea of writing it probably goes back to the time before I even started training in medicine more than 25 years ago. I had been troubled by problems of the academic study of literature, which was my business at the time: why was it that the things we prized about the work of a great poet, for example, turned to a handful of dust when one tried to inspect them more closely? On analysis and explicit discussion, the uniqueness of the work, which lay in these very same much-valued qualities, seemed to consist only of imperfections. I began to think less well of perfection. The whole process of literary criticism seemed inevitably to involve making explicit what had to remain implicit (if it was  \n[www.scimednet.org](www.scimednet.org)  \nnot to be seriously disrupted), substituting general words and thoughts, that one might have got almost anywhere else, for the irreducible uniqueness of the work of art, and replacing the incarnate being before us with a series of abstractions, a coded message of which the author was unaware. We cerebralised what had to remain the ‘betweenness’ of two living things. The result was a sort of superior knowingness that traduced the innocence of the work. Something often of undeniable interest emerged, but it nonetheless, subtly, missed the point altogether.  \nThe crux seemed to be a misunderstanding of what is embodied, both in us and in the work of art, in the world we bring about for ourselves. I studied what was then thought of as the ‘mind-body problem’, but found the philosophers too disembodied in their approach (I had not yet come across the European philosophers – particularly Merleau-Ponty – who were aware of this difficulty, and made it the centre of th","cbCaittYOQQ74vI2","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaittYOQQ74vI2","pdf",198067,"English","# The Master and his Emissary\n## An old story and an inner problem\n## Gathering material for the book\n## Problems with the explicit\n## Embodiment and the mind-body question\n## Training in medicine and the right hemisphere","[{\"question\":\"What story does the text use to introduce the brain-related argument?\",\"answer\":\"It recounts an allegory of a master who rules a prosperous domain and relies on emissaries, who eventually become contemptuous and seize power, leading to collapse.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the author criticize the academic study of literature in the text?\",\"answer\":\"The author argues that literary criticism makes what should remain implicit explicit, replacing irreducible uniqueness with abstractions and coded messages, thereby missing the embodied point.\"},{\"question\":\"What is the author’s key motivation for training in medicine?\",\"answer\":\"The author wanted first-hand experience of how brain and body affect mind, and how mind affects brain and body, to address limitations in a disembodied philosophical approach.\"}]","The Master and his Emissary - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World | PDF"]