1: “My parents were, in many ways, the Odd Couple,” Arthur Brooks writes in The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
His father was a mathematician who earned a PhD in biostatistics.
“He loved the elegance of math and statistics and talked about these subjects constantly,” Arthur recalls. “During dinners when I was a kid, he would describe great unsolved problems and give us math puzzles to think about.”
His mother was “an artist through and through—a painter of some renown in the Pacific Northwest and an excellent amateur violinist and pianist,” he writes.
When Arthur was young and came home from school, he would practice his French horn and then spend time with his mom in her studio, “painting and listening to the music she loved, mostly late-nineteenth-century Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov,” Arthur remembers.
In the 1970s, scientists would have described his dad as “left-brained” (rational and methodical) and his mother as “right-brained” (artistic and imaginative).
“This designation was based on a neuroscientific theory called hemispheric lateralization,” he notes, “which posited that different sides of the brain process different functions, and that some people show a preference or aptitude for using one side over the other.”
In his twenties, Arthur became a professional musician. He also painted and wrote poetry for fun. Like his mother, he was drawn to the arts.
But shortly after turning thirty, Arthur changed direction, studying math and science on his way to becoming a college professor.
“Did I switch hemispherical dominance, going from right-brained to left-brained as an adult?” he asks.
“Not really,” he writes. “That old hypothesis of hemispheric lateralization turned out to be a clumsy and inaccurate account of neural processing, and over time, it largely fell out of favor among neuroscientists.”
2: British psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has proposed a different way of understanding the relationship between the brain’s two hemispheres.
In Iain’s 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he “argued that the two halves of the brain do not so much have different functions; each hemisphere deals with just about everything.
“But they do so in consistently different ways,” Arthur notes. “He presented evidence that the right side of the brain is the ‘master,’ which asks big, transcendent questions such as ‘Why am I alive?’
“The left side—which [Iain] calls the ’emissary’—addresses such practical questions as ‘How do I get food so I can keep being alive?'”
In Iain’s framework, the right hemisphere is associated with life’s larger “why” questions, while the left focuses more on practical questions of what to do and how to do it.
Iain believes that “both hemispheres of the brain are relevant to the business of living, but the right side’s mysterious questions need to take precedence over the left side’s more mundane ones, for life to make sense.”
Arthur points out: “The left side of the brain manages what is clear and straightforward in life, the necessary but prosaic tasks you do all day.
“The right side deals with what is spiritual, mysterious, and awe-inspiring in life,” he notes. “This is where you understand things that defy description and precise definition.”
Exhibit one: Emotions.
“A lot of your emotional life,” Arthur observes, is “easy to understand but impossible to articulate.”
Many of your emotions are controlled by the right hemisphere.
This is also where love resides.
“My wife, Ester, and I have been married for thirty-four years,” he notes. “We know each other deeply and have no secrets. This morning, she told me she loves me, and she meant it.
“But this evening,” Arthur continues, “she might get mad at me. I can’t predict exactly, because I don’t know what will happen between now and then. And even if I could predict what’s going to happen, I can’t predict her moods.
His point?
“There is no way to ‘solve’ my marriage—only to live it.”
Religious experience is also mostly a right-hemisphere experience. “This is where you sense the existence of the divine without being able to find or define it like you would, say, your car or your house.”
How do you recognize the right-hemisphere parts of your life?
Arthur provides some clues:
- Hearing a beautiful song and becoming emotional without knowing why.
- Sensing something is wrong in a conversation with your partner.
- Feeling called to do something bigger than yourself without knowing exactly what.
- Loving your spouse but being unable to explain fully why.
What do all these experiences have in common?
They cannot be simulated. They must be lived. Experienced in real life.
“They are also, not coincidentally, where you find your life’s meaning,” Arthur notes, “and what we obliterate today in our real-life version of The Matrix.”
3: Arthur makes an important distinction between two kinds of challenges: complex and complicated.
“Complex challenges in life are easy to understand,” he writes, “but impossible to solve, so they can only be lived and understood.”
Examples include love, faith, and understanding other people.
The left hemisphere handles the complicated parts of life. These challenges might be hard to understand, but you can solve them.
These include things like learning a new language, changing a tire, or deciding where to go on vacation.
“Life is full of both kinds of challenges,” Arthur explains. “I need to understand others’ emotions (a complex challenge), but I also need to make smart decisions, which in many cases means acting despite these emotions (a complicated challenge).
“I perceive God’s love (complex) but also have to figure out how to get to church (complicated).
“My love for Ester is complex,” he observes, “but we have a lot of complicated challenges as well, such as raising our kids and taking care of household finances.”
The important lesson? “The things you really care about the most, which can never be ‘solved,’ are complex.
“The things you care about less but can solve with knowledge and technology are complicated.”
To function in the world, you must do both: Navigate the complex and complicated problems in life.
“If you hang out, neurologically speaking, only on the right, you will have all of life’s complex questions of meaning front of mind,” Arthur writes, “but you will be incompetent at doing anything practical to take care of yourself and others.
“Think of an absent-minded philosopher like Immanuel Kant, who was so absorbed in his big questions that he had to be reminded to bathe and eat.”
But what if you get stuck on the left side of your brain, dealing only with complicated problems? It’s easy to get distracted by whatever small stuff comes your way.
“Think of someone who becomes übercompetent at a technical task like playing a video game,” he notes, “but never thinks about what they actually want to accomplish in work and life, leading to total dysfunction in their relationships and a lack of purpose.”
That’s a real danger in today’s “increasingly complicated, technology-dominated, and endlessly distracting world,” Arthur writes.
“People are shoved to the left side of their brains. They are stuck in a complicated simulation of their complex lives, where there is a lot going on, but which is bereft of mystery and meaning.”
Modern life increasingly emphasizes mechanisms, measurements, and representations at the expense of mystery, beauty, and meaning.
Arthur’s concern? You can become so focused on solving life’s practical problems that you lose sight of the deeper questions that give your life meaning.
More tomorrow!
Reflection: Are you spending so much time solving everyday problems that you’re neglecting the deeper questions about what makes your life meaningful?
Action: Set aside ten minutes today without your phone or other distractions. Reflect on one experience, relationship, or belief that matters deeply to you, even if you can’t fully explain why.
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