Finding a Place Beyond Words
How Stories Shape Our World
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I’m sure we have all had moments where we tell ourselves a story about our life, about who we are, and about who we could become. When we start a new goal or endeavor we say,
“Maybe I could make something out of this,” or,
“Maybe this is my passion, and what I’m meant to do with my life.”
Similarly, we may tell ourselves other stories when we face resistance like,
“Who was I kidding, I don’t like this at all,” or,
“I don’t have enough discipline to do this, so why even try?”
Regardless of how we feel about these stories, the reality is that they are just that — stories.
Just now I sat down to write. I have started to enjoy the writing process, and have been told by others that I am good at it. I have started to tell myself a story about how I want to pursue writing, and that
“maybe I could make something out of this one day.”
And so I started to type, but I couldn’t get any of my words right, and I couldn’t find my voice. I started to think about all the research that would need to be done to write good articles, and I found myself saying,
“actually, maybe this isn’t for me.”
But in that moment of despair, regret, whatever you want to call it, I had a thought.
The stories we tell ourselves can either build us up, or tear us down. Stories can be the thing that helps us achieve our wildest dreams, or they can be the things that leave us empty handed.
If in that moment I decided that I would listen to that story. If I decided that despite all the time I have put towards this craft of writing, despite all of the encouraging messages from others, and despite all of the times that I really did enjoy the process. If I decided that, because I didn’t feel good about it in that moment, that it just “wasn’t for me,” then I would have done myself a great disservice.
What I now realize is that all of the stories we tell thrive on only one thing — belief. Ancient texts like the Bible have been passed down from generation to generation for the simple fact that people believed in the stories it told.
Without belief in a stories truth, or without an ability for it to speak to our hearts in some way, the story will die.
The Bible clearly had a huge impact on the formation of the Western world, and continues to. In fact, everything that a society builds relies on a belief in some kind of narrative or story.
Engineers must believe in the narrative that Newton created about the laws of physics in order to send an astronaut to space, or send a burnt out 9–5er on a flight to the Caribbean. Likewise, some of the greatest travesties of our time like the Holocaust have occurred because of a belief in the narrative that certain people do not have a right to exist.
Clearly, choosing the right stories are of paramount importance.
And so I wonder —
What determined the past narratives or stories we chose to believe in?
And how can we go about choosing the right ones in the future?
This article is my attempt to find the answer to those questions, and I believe the best place to start is by looking at the place where all stories begin— our brain.
The Left and Right Hemispheres of the Brain
In a BigThink article written in 2012, Jason Gots discusses the theory that the left hemisphere of the brain acts as ‘the interpreter’ of our experiences. Essentially the role of the left hemisphere is to provide us with a coherent narrative of the world, regardless of how accurate that narrative may be (which is why first person witnesses are seen as less and less reliable, and why optical illusions work). The left hemisphere of the brain is extremely focused, allowing us to take abstract ideas and make them comprehensible.
On the other side, the right hemisphere offers a broad brush and big picture view of the world. It is responsible for creating meaning, picking up on social cues, connecting to art, nature, and music, seeing the whole as more than the sum of its parts, and imagining something greater than ourselves.
Despite the fact that many neuroscientists have diminished these differences, Iain Mcgilchrist, psychiatrist and author of the book: The Master and His Emissary argues that they do indeed exist, and that the differences are critically important for understanding what makes us human, and how we build stories about the world and ourselves.
Mcgilchrist’s arguments are grounded in the discovery that patients with strokes or tumours on one side of the brain have completely different reactions from patients with the same damage to the opposing side. One example he gave in the book was of a patient who suffered a right hemisphere stroke. Since the stroke occurred on the right side, the patient was unable to move or feel the left side of their body (the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa).
The patient was then asked by researchers about the paralyzed left side of their body. Since the patients left hemisphere was still intact — the side that creates a coherent story — they went on to vehemently justify that they never had a left side of their body, and that the researchers must be crazy. When the researchers provided evidence that the patient was wrong, this ‘coherent story’ came under increased scrutiny, leaving the patient frustrated, annoyed, or in some cases, mentally blank.
However, when a patient had a stroke that occurred in the same place on the left side, sure they had struggles verbalizing, and had slower movement, but since the big picture perspective of the right hemisphere was still intact, their reactions were much less bizarre.
To understand the hemispheric differences better, we can draw an analogy to a spotlight on a stage. The spotlight represents the left hemisphere of the brain — very pointed and focused, whereas the right hemisphere represents the stage as a whole. When we focus only on the spotlight, we can forget that there are all kinds of other things that exist outside of it. And when the right hemisphere is not there to remind us that there is actually an entire stage beyond the spotlight, strange behaviors like believing you never had a left side of your body can occur.
Take the famous gorilla experiment. Participants were asked to watch a video of basketball players and count how many passes were made between them. During the video, the researchers had someone dressed in a gorilla costume walk right into the center of the court, pound their chest, and then walk off. Afterwards, when asked about the gorilla, half of the participants had no idea what the researchers were talking about, believing that the researchers must again, be crazy.
But upon playing the video again, sure enough, to the shock of 50% of participants, there the gorilla was. The participants were so narrowly focused on counting the passes, that they missed it. This study proves our attentional limitations, and that there is much more occurring in our everyday experience than we immediately notice, even though the left hemisphere tends to have us believe otherwise.
Mcgilchrist goes on to argue that the left hemispheres ‘interpretive’ nature has come to control and manipulate Western culture so strongly, that we are starting to lose touch with our humanity. This sense of our humanity, he says, comes from the more relational, big-picture part of the brain — the right hemisphere.
However, our current society and the reductionist philosophy we use to understand and conceptualize things, lays ruin to any sense of awe and wonder those things may have initially held.
In my undergraduate degree, I took an elective called Film Studies: Comedy. The professor had committed his life to figuring out what made comedies funny. He broke down all of the different aspects of the film, figuring out the nuance, motif, and themes the movie employed, and what character structures the actors fit into. After years of studying, he admitted to us that he was no longer capable of laughing at any of the movies he watched because he was too busy studying and trying to understand them. His “spotlight” mind stunted any ability to just sit back, take in, and enjoy the full piece of art.
I believe Mcgilchrist has a strong point. Western Cultures scientific and technological progress has led to unprecedented innovation. Our ability to thoroughly conceptualize and understand complex ideas has enabled us to develop better and better tools for accomplishing our aims. But it has also created a society of people isolated from nature, each other, art, and the interconnectedness of all things.
When you listen to your favorite song, you don’t enjoy it because you think of the tenor of the singer’s voice, the resonance of the bass, the time signature, or the key the song was played in. You enjoy it because of how all of these different parts come together and somehow create a deeply emotional impact within you in a way that no other song can.
When we look at a classic piece of art like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we don’t say that its just a bunch of colours put together in a certain configuration, and that there were certain brush strokes that were moved in a particular orientation in order to produce the final painting. All of these things are technically true. But what remains is a certain indescribable element that we resonate with, and any attempt to put words to it actually diminishes it.
The next time you look at a painting, try to describe it. You could say:
“that’s spectacular,”
“that’s horrifying,”
or “that’s beautiful.”
You could even get fancy about it and say,
“the sheer ability and raw talent of this artist, their bravado to combine colours, texture, and brush strokes, everything about their perspective is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, bravo art, bravo.”
But the reality is that none of these statements are able to capture its essence, it remains and always will remain, beyond words. And herein lies its sacred element.
The sad reality is that rather than using art as a lens through which we can better understand ourselves and our place in the world, we look to remake or repackage it to achieve greater financial or technological gain. More and more musicians put out music not because they connect with it in any kind of deep way, but so they can make cash off of their devote followers. Social media continues to foster an inauthentic environment where creators feel compelled to increase their follower count and gain approval, rather than create something deeply meaningful. And app developers design their platforms to encourage this behavior (see the Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix).
Art is able to connect and speak to the deepest parts of who we are, and to neglect art is to neglect our humanity.
Think about it, if the left hemisphere of the brain is focused, efficient, and quantitative, and we work to conceptualize and break everything down into a science, you can imagine what the natural progression of that might look like. It starts to look awfully robotic, and awfully artificial, does that ring any bells?
Mcgilchrist believes that we get out of this by finding some way to reincorporate the right hemisphere in the way we approach the world, and to recapture a sense of the sacred in our lives.
The industrial revolution provided us with great advances materially, but it started to slowly erode the spiritual component of our lives until we finally “killed God” as Nietzsche referenced in 1882.
Across the course of human history, the word God may be the most contentious one of all. Some believe the word is the answer to all the worlds problems, others have used the word as a justification for oppressing others, some have claimed the word saved their lives, and others want nothing at all to do with the word. But at base, the word is simply a fill in for whatever that force is that ties all of being together. I argue that art is a way for us to connect with that which we don’t know, and to connect with this ineffable thing we call God.
You can tell the difference between something made with efficiency, utility, and quantity in mind (left hemisphere), or if it was inspired by something deeper (right hemisphere).
Living in Toronto for 7 months, I saw the big, modern buildings, the business atmosphere, and the drive for efficiency continually at play; its a “get shit done” kind of town. Whereas just down the road, Montreal brings a much different flavor. Despite the outgrowth of industry, the Basilica Cathedral, Old Montreal, and many of the classic historic buildings are still maintained. There was an inherent quality and character, and a cultural and human element encapsulated in Montreal that Toronto’s big, bold, and modern designs just couldn’t compare to.
Beginner’s Mind
There is a teaching in Zen Buddhism called Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind, and its basic tenant is to approach life with an air of openness, and newness, without any preconceptions. Even when studying a topic you have vast experience in, you should approach it like a beginner would, with a childlike curiosity, wonder, and humility.
The orientation of the left hemisphere is to categorize things for the sake of efficiency. When we see a house, we don’t tend to look or care much about the colour of the paint, if it has a fence, or how big the garage door is. We simply see it as a house, and we place it into that category. An artist on the other hand brings a sense of uniqueness to the situation. They could take that same house, recreate it on a beautiful canvas, hang it up on a wall, and make us feel compelled to stop, look, and admire its beauty.
In reality, that exact same beauty was right in front of us the whole time, but we just failed to notice it.
Approaching our experience on this earth with a beginner’s mind makes life come alive once more. And deep down, experiencing art, the sacred, and the ineffable are all things human beings are inherently drawn to.
This article is a call for a return to art, a cry to rediscover what makes us human, and a hope that we can recapture that which we have lost, before we lose ourselves completely.
So to answer my initial question — how can we go about choosing the right stories to believe in?
Well, if you value humanity, and believe in more than efficiency, work, and quantity, I’d say the answer lies in rediscovering the stories that bring us closer to nature, art, music, and the sacred; the places beyond words.
Thanks for reading.
Sources:
Big Think Article: https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/your-storytelling-brain/
Beginners Mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
Gorilla Experiment: https://www.livescience.com/6727-invisible-gorilla-test-shows-notice.html
The Master and His Emissary Book: https://www.ttbook.org/interview/iain-mcgilchrist-master-and-his-emissary
