A Game Of Two Halves

How Iain McGilchrist’s Divided Brain Could Impact The Coaching World

Over the past months I have been reading (and re-reading) Iain Mcgilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary. It is a long book of quite extraordinary depth and scope ranging, as it does, from the infinitely complex and mysterious neurophysiological attributes of the human brain, through the evolution of perception, to a whistle-stop tour of Western intellectual history.

Mcgilchrist delicately weaves together a profound narrative that strikes right to the core of the human condition as he charts the influence of the brain’s hemispherical differences on culture from the rise and fall of the Greco-Roman civilizations, through the Dark Ages, The Renaissance, The Reformation, Romanticism, both Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and right through to our most recent epochs of Modernism and Post-Modernism.

It is a tour de force of quite staggering magnitude and I have already had to consign several of my previous sense-making frames to the scrap-yard to make possible the assimilation of just a tiny proportion of Mcgilchrist’s insights.

I have never read a book about the brain before, I always assumed it ‘beyond me’. But, thanks to the lightness of touch and great explanatory power of the author, I feel that I have just about been able to keep my head above water when, at times, it may have been tempting to submit to and be pulled under by the sheer weight of the perspectives that are in play.

The ‘Master’ of the book’s title refers to the brain’s right hemisphere. Mcgilchrist argues, by way of extensive references to studies on patients with damage to either one of their brain’s hemispheres, that the division of our brain into two halves is no accident of nature. Evolutionary theory would suggest that there must be some adaptive advantage to this schism, otherwise why would it exist?

Mcgilchrist demonstrates that the right hemisphere is concerned with a connected, contextualized and deeply empathetic mode of thinking. Its view is one of first-contact with the surrounding world, of an almost playful interaction between subject and object, of an appreciation of ‘the whole’ as something more than just a sum of its parts. It is uncertain in its disposition, aware, as it seems to be, of the limitlessness of what might be dis-covered, and of the ever-changing, ever-fluid nature of reality.

Heraclitus’ proclamation that ‘everything flows’ is referred to throughout the book in relation to the right-hemisphere’s view of the world as a place of harmony and difference –

The title’s ‘Emissary’ is the brain’s left hemisphere. He is his Master’s bureaucratic translator. He takes the implicit and intuitive and makes it explicit and verifiable. He breaks down the world of feeling and connectedness into bitesize pieces of information that may be processed and understood. His view of the whole is that it can be built from its fragmented parts, that it does not exist ‘out there’ but can be reassembled through meticulous re-arrangement, re-presentation and re-animation. The left hemisphere re-cognises things, makes models out of reality and substitutes them in place of the thing itself.

In a startling demonstration of the disconnectedness of the left-hemisphere perspective, Mcgilchrist shows the results of clinical experiments. In one, a patient with a right-parietal lesion (damage to the right hemisphere) was asked to draw a man, a bicycle and a house. In a second, a subject was asked to draw a picture of a tree while the functionality of his respective hemispheres was deactivated.

As the drawings show, the left hemisphere seems to see only in parts, unable to grasp the idea of the whole. Its focus is narrow and fixed, stuck on what it knows to be the case rather than open to the realm of infinite possibilities that come with an encounter with The Other. It represents a restriction of bandwidth which views the world, and its own body, as decontextualized bricks from which its reality is reconstructed. It lacks authenticity, a ‘being’ or existing in the world, and replaces them with a simplified and reductionist interpretation of the stimuli that it receives.

The book is almost 500 pages long, and I shall not waste time nor breath attempting to explain it much further, but Mcgilchrist’s thesis is broadly this: Ever since the beginning of Western Civilisation over 2000 years ago, the brain’s previously ruling hemisphere (the right) has been ‘betrayed’ by its serving Emissary. The bureaucratic left hemisphere has ‘gotten tired of doing all the work’ and has launched a power grab of its own, seemingly unaware of the vital role which the right-hemisphere plays in making sense of the world.

Thusly, as an epic to-and-fro has played out across the centuries, this tug-of-war has manifested itself in the ever-increasing influence and eventual primacy of mechanistic thought. The beauty, longing and depth of Renaissance, and later Romantic art, has been usurped by the two-dimensional flatland of Modernist fragmentation and dislocation. Our perspective has become skewed, unable to see the wood for the trees, and as we tread further and further down a path that appears to be leading toward materialist technocracy, the rise to power of the left-hemisphere seems to be showing no signs of slowing down.

We now seem to live in a world viewed through frames of ever-decreasing size, stuck inside an infinite regression like one of those never-ending pictures of a television with another television on its screen. Nassim Taleb puts it well –

So, how might all this be applicable to how we act as football coaches? Well, I’d say that there are likely to be more answers to that question than possible to conceptualize given the wealth of insight that the book contains. However, I think it is a worthwhile exercise to at least attempt to demonstrate how one might begin to take one such philosophical idea and apply it to football.

One of Mcgilchrist’s favoured metaphors is that of the human hunting for food. Mcgilchrist suggests that to secure lunch, man (and other animals) must utilize the narrow, focused attention that is the calling-card of the left-hemisphere. He must pay great attention to his prey to capture and grasp it, he must watch it intently and stay fixed, laser-like to his target lest it should escape.

The problem here is that if one is too busy concentrating on what is ‘right in front of you’, it becomes increasingly likely that something from out-with your scope of perception might just sneak up and make you lunch for itself.

Primordial man was both hunter and hunted, both predator and prey, and thus, Mcgilchrist argues, we have had to master the ability of using narrow, focused attention (left-hemisphere) in conjunction with the broader, contextual attention of the right.

The right-hemisphere plays the role of the lookout, listening for some rustle in the undergrowth that might pose a threat. It scans its environment for stimuli while the left-hemisphere focuses on achieving the immediate goal, it has its partner’s back.

I’m pretty sure that if you’ve read this far you’ll know where I’m going with this. As coaches we are forever encouraging players to ‘lift their heads’ so that they might ‘see the bigger picture’ of what is happening around them. Players who are too fixated with the ball at their feet risk losing the ability to make decisions based on stimuli that exist towards the outer limits of their perceptual fields.

‘Too many touches’ are the bane of many players who dream of playing at the highest level, but the ability to play quickly, with fluidity rather than stickiness, itself comes from a perceptual capability to exist with an awareness of the context that you are in.

At times, I have become frustrated with players who appear unable to ‘get their head up’ and assess their options. I have thought them ‘greedy’ and lacking in humility, egotistic and selfish, and perhaps they were. But maybe I was too hasty, guilty of the very lack of empathy that is endemic of a left-hemisphere dominated disposition.

Perhaps we now live in an age where a growing number of young footballers are weighed down by the psychological burden of growing up in these (post)modern times, arriving with pre-packed perceptual baggage that might hinder their ability to perform well amidst the fluid miasma of chaotic interactions which characterize the game of football.

They lift their heads from their devices only when training starts but could it be that they never really lift them at all?

Football is a game of perception, and as coaches our task is to shape those of our players. But how can we hope to achieve this if we ourselves do not understand the nature of the thing that we trying to influence? Perhaps we too bring with us a world-view that is too fixated with what we think we know rather than what we might learn if we paid attention differently, if we were to revive the contextual nuance of right-hemisphere primacy.

We claim that we are teachers of ‘vision’ but purport to achieve this by proscribing to our players that they must turn their head 30 times every minute. We talk of our ‘philosophies’ yet we download our exercises from My Online Soccer Coach Dot Com. We speak of an ‘holistic approach’ yet we decontextualize the game and force our players to enact only fragments of the actions that they will be required to produce come matchday.

It seems obvious to me that we are dealing with a game that is infinitely more than merely the sum of its parts, just as a human is more than a collage of inanimate limbs.

Mcgilchrist likens this idea of ‘the whole’ to that which is captured in a caricature, where the subject’s features are not realistically represented but exaggerated and deformed. It is not an accurate portrayal of these facial features, yet we are taken aback by the uncanniness of the likeness, the whole exists despite the alteration of its parts. It seems to capture what we might call the ‘essence’.

The world of balance between the right and left hemispheres, the world of harmony towards which Mcgilchrist urges us to strive, is one of paradox. A place where the features of a caricature can be exaggerated yet accurate, where ideas can be general yet specific and where works of fiction can be the truest things of all. And it is this idea of becoming comfortable with paradox, a feeling of opposites united, that I shall leave you with. For it is here that we might find an escape route from the boxy models and dis-located perspectives that permeate so much of contemporary football theory.

Is it really a case of dismantling the game into the four moments of attack, defence, and transitions in either way? Does the simplistic addition together of these component parts give us a representation that is true enough to do the game justice?

Perhaps if we can begin to resist the modernist temptation of fragmenting reality into its constituent ‘bits and pieces’, if we look instead to the fluidity and connectedness of the ‘whole’, to a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, then we might open ourselves to submitting our ‘knowledge’ to the ambiguity of paradox, to enter a realm where attention can be narrowly focused yet aware of a broader context, where a team might defend while also in attack, where the hunter is also the hunted.

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