- Email: [email protected]
The alphabet versus the goddess: The conflict between word and image
MARTIN MEMORIAL LECTURE
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image Leonard Shlain, MD, FACS. San Francisco, CA Leonard Shlain is the chairman of laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an associate clinical professor of surgery at UCSF. He has written three critically acclaimed national bestsellers: Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (HarperCollins); The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word & Image (Viking/Penguin); and Sex, Time & Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (Viking/Penguin). His work in progress is Leonardo’s Brain: The Left/Right Roots of Creativity. Comments appreciated at [email protected] The conventional wisdom is well known: With videos and movies ubiquitous, television and computer games incessant, and graphic novels challenging “the real thing,” generations of students are becoming less literate, with ominous implications for the future. But the truth might be that the doomsday scenarios of the alarmists are missing a crucial point. Here’s a contrarian view worth considering: First, a reprise of how the human brain works. When a child learns a novel bit of information, a set of neurons light up along their course in the child’s brain. With each repeat of the lesson, the same neurons fire again. The surrounding neurons, sensitized to the discharges of the first set, begin to join in what becomes an evermagnifying electrochemical chorus. Learned information becomes “burned” into neuronal pathways, which is how we acquire knowledge that will endure throughout our lives. Conversely, what we fail to learn causes the withering of whole tracts of other neurons as a result of their disuse. This is why a preschooler can learn a second language with ease if taught at the right time, while the same individual having to learn that second language in college will find it far more difficult. The mantra currently heard at neurocognitive conferences is “Neurons that
fire together wire together; neurons that fail to sync, fail to link.” We are born with an excess number of neurons, as if nature is telling us to learn as much as possible. By the age of 9 to 11, a devastating pruning occurs and each person loses approximately 40% of the neurons with which they were born. Disuse is the primary cause of that drastic culling. Given what we now know about how the brain operates, a larger question emerges: What are the consequences of the kind of learning on the larger organization of the human brain? Two ways of thinking All vertebrates, from fish to fowl, have a bilobed brain. Humans are not special in this regard. What separates us from virtually all others species is a unique attribute: The brain hemispheres in Homo sapiens are highly specialized to process two entirely different types of information. The left lobe in more than 90% of all people is the seat of language perceived in a linear stream organized by grammar and syntax. The majority of other linear, sequential mental processes—logic, reason, algebra, causality, etc—also reside principally in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is superior to the right in carrying out precise, sequential motions—throwing a curve ball, for instance, or pole vaulting. In general, the main functions of the left proceed linearly in time, one thing after another. Natural selection has evolved the left hemisphere in humans into something new under the sun—a new sense organ charged with perceiving sequential time. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is nonverbal, yet it contributes a global (some might say holistic) awareness to events, often endowing them with emotion and larger meaning. In general, the right perceives many things simultaneously, whole images at a glance. It lets us respond to such nonlinear input as body language, voice inflection, and facial expressions. Evolution assigned the right hemisphere the task of perceiving space, which neatly complements the left’s
Presented at the American College of Surgeons 90th Clinical Congress, New Orleans, LA, October 2004.
© 2005 by the American College of Surgeons Published by Elsevier Inc.
157
ISSN 1072-7515/05/$30.00 doi:10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2004.10.016
158
Shlain
Martin Memorial Lecture
skill at keeping time. Simply put, information presented to a human in the form of an image, pattern, or gestalt is primarily processed by the right hemisphere, and information presented in the form of numbers or words is primarily processed by the left. Of course, the complexity of the brain and the broad band of connecting fibers joining the two sides, the corpus callosum, prevents this description from being as neatly compartmentalized and unambiguous as I have presented here. Nevertheless, numerous studies have confirmed this dichotomy. The various functioning of the right and left sides of the brain also can be seen in terms of sexual duality. (To avoid bogging down in disclaimers and qualifiers I’ll concentrate on right-handers, who comprise 92% of the population. No slight to the lefties among us is intended.) Every human is a psychic hermaphrodite, a composite of both a feminine side and a masculine one. Many of the modules located in the brain necessary to care for preverbal toddlers reside principally in the right hemisphere, and the strategy, planning, and cooperation necessary to hunt and kill large mammals (or make hostile bids to take over competing companies) reside principally in the left hemisphere. In general, the right hemisphere of both men and women can be said to be the seat of their feminine side; their masculine side is located mainly in the left hemisphere. Every culture in the world acknowledges these differences in their myths, customs, and culture. The left side of the body controlled by the right brain is considered female and the right side controlled by the left brain is considered male. The poet William Blake captured this dichotomy when he wrote, “Time & Space Are Real Beings, a Male & a Female. Time Is a Man and Space Is a Woman.” All humans are born with the innate capability to learn the grammar of the first language they hear. And every human is born with an innate ability to read the body language, gestures, and facial expressions of others. Evolution did not prepare humans in the same way for the immense innovation called literacy. The invention of writing approximately 5,000 years ago, followed by the simple innovation called the alphabet 3,500 years ago, was on a par with fire, the wheel, and agriculture. Alphabets, the most abstract, linear, sequential, reductionist forms of writing, mimic the features of the left hemisphere. Unlike the spoken word, which requires the use of both verbal and nonverbal cues to interpret, literacy depends primarily on the use of the left hemisphere.
J Am Coll Surg
Western culture, with its monotheistic religions, dualistic philosophies, perspectivist art, advanced science, and written legal codes, is, I propose, the direct result of the reconfiguration of the brains of those who learned alphabets. I am not going to inveigh against the alphabet, which has been an incontestable boon to humanity. But the fact is that historically, women’s rights and images have suffered under regimes newly informed by alphabet literacy. The alphabet provides a method for transferring information that reinforces the left hemisphere of both men and women while denigrating the role of the right hemisphere. In the culture at large, this results in the dominance of masculine thinking, which, over time, led to the downfall of goddesses, property passing not through the mother’s line but instead through the father’s line, and the loss of other important rights for women. The Israelite adoption of the West’s first alphabetic sacred book introduced the rule of law and monotheism, but was accompanied by an abomination of images in general and the concept of the goddess in particular. For instance, literate Athens was misogynist and patriarchal compared with Sparta. Though we have been taught that Sparta was a disciplined, dour military city/state that left to posterity not a single literary work, and Athens was the wellspring and foundation for philosophy, drama, science, and mathematics, the Spartan women enjoyed extraordinary rights, while Athens was entirely dominated by men. Women enjoyed real power in the new Christian religion founded on the oral sayings of Jesus, then suffered a major setback after the transcription of Jesus’s spoken words into a sacred alphabetic text edited and revised by the “Patriarchs.” The importance of visual recognition—the territory of the right brain—waned. Resembling Yahweh and Allah, Jesus did not have an image. Despite all the detail the gospel writers supplied about Jesus, none of the accounts of His life and death included even a paltry sentence describing His appearance. To know Him, one had to read His written words. Both the cause and the effect of the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome was the loss of literacy to 99% of the European population. During this period, the astonishing ascendancy of Mary occurred. Her image soon dominated the European landscape. This was also a time when abbesses headed monasteries, the Chivalric Code and courtly love honored women, and the Church
Vol. 200, No. 2, February 2005
revered its female Christian mystics. During this period of illiteracy, right hemispheric modes of love, intuition, mysticism, romance, and mother worship regained prominence. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1454 caused literacy rates to soar. The prime mover behind people’s desire to read was the New Testament. Because the message of Christ, clear in the Scripture, stresses love, kindness, and forgiveness, the period after the invention of the printing press ought to have been characterized by these three traits. Instead, the printing press spawned the Protestant Reformation, which stressed the destruction of images and the demotion of Mary. The outbreak of fierce religious wars among kinsmen was unprecedented. Neighbors burned neighbors at the stake. This sadistic carnage occurred in the same period that historians call the Age of Reason. The steep rise of literacy in European society reinforced its left hemisphere at the expense of its right. As Sophocles once warned, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” Literacy indubitably was vast. But few have examined the downside of learning to translate the sounds of speech into squiggly filigrees on a page. While the literate countries were bestowing on posterity the works of Galileo, Shakespeare, Newton, and Descartes, equally prominent men suffered a psychosis so extreme they began to believe that their women were so dangerous they must be murdered—and by a most sadistic means, burned alive chained to a stake. The witch-hunts were most virulent in countries that experienced the steepest rise in literacy rates. Russia remained largely illiterate throughout this period and escaped the witch craze insanity. (When the Russians experienced their surge of literacy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they, too, passed through their period of madness with
Shlain
Martin Memorial Lecture
159
their robotic embrace of their version of a sacred alphabetic text, Marx’s Communist Manifesto.) Literacy will never be entirely lost; whatever the Cassandras among us may say, we are not on the cusp of another Dark Ages. But there is reason to believe that the imbalance of right and left brain functions may actually be in the process of a reformation. A colossal shift I call the Iconic Revolution began in the 19th century. The invention of the camera and film and the discovery of electromagnetism combined to bring us first still photographs and then film, television, computers, graphic advertising, and the Internet. We are now living in an increasingly post-Gutenberg world, where text is rapidly receding and the image has become dominant, as it was in prehistory (though with a vast technologic difference—our “cave paintings” exist in cyberspace). Daily we are bombarded with images from ads, movies, television, and computer graphics, with a concurrent decline in literacy, the aforementioned curse of the modern age. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan trenchantly stated, “The medium is the message.” The process with which we take in information is actually more important than the actual information itself. The increasing reliance on right brain pattern recognition instead of left brain linear sequencing has moved culture toward equilibrium between the two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image. Educators must acknowledge that there are now two parallel tracks for learning. Running alongside the three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—are the three arts: dance, music, and the visual arts. To ignore the capacities of the right brain and heavily stress the left ought no longer be a viable educational strategy.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image Leonard Shlain, MD, FACS. San Francisco, CA Leonard Shlain is the chairman of laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an associate clinical professor of surgery at UCSF. He has written three critically acclaimed national bestsellers: Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (HarperCollins); The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word & Image (Viking/Penguin); and Sex, Time & Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (Viking/Penguin). His work in progress is Leonardo’s Brain: The Left/Right Roots of Creativity. Comments appreciated at [email protected] The conventional wisdom is well known: With videos and movies ubiquitous, television and computer games incessant, and graphic novels challenging “the real thing,” generations of students are becoming less literate, with ominous implications for the future. But the truth might be that the doomsday scenarios of the alarmists are missing a crucial point. Here’s a contrarian view worth considering: First, a reprise of how the human brain works. When a child learns a novel bit of information, a set of neurons light up along their course in the child’s brain. With each repeat of the lesson, the same neurons fire again. The surrounding neurons, sensitized to the discharges of the first set, begin to join in what becomes an evermagnifying electrochemical chorus. Learned information becomes “burned” into neuronal pathways, which is how we acquire knowledge that will endure throughout our lives. Conversely, what we fail to learn causes the withering of whole tracts of other neurons as a result of their disuse. This is why a preschooler can learn a second language with ease if taught at the right time, while the same individual having to learn that second language in college will find it far more difficult. The mantra currently heard at neurocognitive conferences is “Neurons that
fire together wire together; neurons that fail to sync, fail to link.” We are born with an excess number of neurons, as if nature is telling us to learn as much as possible. By the age of 9 to 11, a devastating pruning occurs and each person loses approximately 40% of the neurons with which they were born. Disuse is the primary cause of that drastic culling. Given what we now know about how the brain operates, a larger question emerges: What are the consequences of the kind of learning on the larger organization of the human brain? Two ways of thinking All vertebrates, from fish to fowl, have a bilobed brain. Humans are not special in this regard. What separates us from virtually all others species is a unique attribute: The brain hemispheres in Homo sapiens are highly specialized to process two entirely different types of information. The left lobe in more than 90% of all people is the seat of language perceived in a linear stream organized by grammar and syntax. The majority of other linear, sequential mental processes—logic, reason, algebra, causality, etc—also reside principally in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is superior to the right in carrying out precise, sequential motions—throwing a curve ball, for instance, or pole vaulting. In general, the main functions of the left proceed linearly in time, one thing after another. Natural selection has evolved the left hemisphere in humans into something new under the sun—a new sense organ charged with perceiving sequential time. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is nonverbal, yet it contributes a global (some might say holistic) awareness to events, often endowing them with emotion and larger meaning. In general, the right perceives many things simultaneously, whole images at a glance. It lets us respond to such nonlinear input as body language, voice inflection, and facial expressions. Evolution assigned the right hemisphere the task of perceiving space, which neatly complements the left’s
Presented at the American College of Surgeons 90th Clinical Congress, New Orleans, LA, October 2004.
© 2005 by the American College of Surgeons Published by Elsevier Inc.
157
ISSN 1072-7515/05/$30.00 doi:10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2004.10.016
158
Shlain
Martin Memorial Lecture
skill at keeping time. Simply put, information presented to a human in the form of an image, pattern, or gestalt is primarily processed by the right hemisphere, and information presented in the form of numbers or words is primarily processed by the left. Of course, the complexity of the brain and the broad band of connecting fibers joining the two sides, the corpus callosum, prevents this description from being as neatly compartmentalized and unambiguous as I have presented here. Nevertheless, numerous studies have confirmed this dichotomy. The various functioning of the right and left sides of the brain also can be seen in terms of sexual duality. (To avoid bogging down in disclaimers and qualifiers I’ll concentrate on right-handers, who comprise 92% of the population. No slight to the lefties among us is intended.) Every human is a psychic hermaphrodite, a composite of both a feminine side and a masculine one. Many of the modules located in the brain necessary to care for preverbal toddlers reside principally in the right hemisphere, and the strategy, planning, and cooperation necessary to hunt and kill large mammals (or make hostile bids to take over competing companies) reside principally in the left hemisphere. In general, the right hemisphere of both men and women can be said to be the seat of their feminine side; their masculine side is located mainly in the left hemisphere. Every culture in the world acknowledges these differences in their myths, customs, and culture. The left side of the body controlled by the right brain is considered female and the right side controlled by the left brain is considered male. The poet William Blake captured this dichotomy when he wrote, “Time & Space Are Real Beings, a Male & a Female. Time Is a Man and Space Is a Woman.” All humans are born with the innate capability to learn the grammar of the first language they hear. And every human is born with an innate ability to read the body language, gestures, and facial expressions of others. Evolution did not prepare humans in the same way for the immense innovation called literacy. The invention of writing approximately 5,000 years ago, followed by the simple innovation called the alphabet 3,500 years ago, was on a par with fire, the wheel, and agriculture. Alphabets, the most abstract, linear, sequential, reductionist forms of writing, mimic the features of the left hemisphere. Unlike the spoken word, which requires the use of both verbal and nonverbal cues to interpret, literacy depends primarily on the use of the left hemisphere.
J Am Coll Surg
Western culture, with its monotheistic religions, dualistic philosophies, perspectivist art, advanced science, and written legal codes, is, I propose, the direct result of the reconfiguration of the brains of those who learned alphabets. I am not going to inveigh against the alphabet, which has been an incontestable boon to humanity. But the fact is that historically, women’s rights and images have suffered under regimes newly informed by alphabet literacy. The alphabet provides a method for transferring information that reinforces the left hemisphere of both men and women while denigrating the role of the right hemisphere. In the culture at large, this results in the dominance of masculine thinking, which, over time, led to the downfall of goddesses, property passing not through the mother’s line but instead through the father’s line, and the loss of other important rights for women. The Israelite adoption of the West’s first alphabetic sacred book introduced the rule of law and monotheism, but was accompanied by an abomination of images in general and the concept of the goddess in particular. For instance, literate Athens was misogynist and patriarchal compared with Sparta. Though we have been taught that Sparta was a disciplined, dour military city/state that left to posterity not a single literary work, and Athens was the wellspring and foundation for philosophy, drama, science, and mathematics, the Spartan women enjoyed extraordinary rights, while Athens was entirely dominated by men. Women enjoyed real power in the new Christian religion founded on the oral sayings of Jesus, then suffered a major setback after the transcription of Jesus’s spoken words into a sacred alphabetic text edited and revised by the “Patriarchs.” The importance of visual recognition—the territory of the right brain—waned. Resembling Yahweh and Allah, Jesus did not have an image. Despite all the detail the gospel writers supplied about Jesus, none of the accounts of His life and death included even a paltry sentence describing His appearance. To know Him, one had to read His written words. Both the cause and the effect of the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome was the loss of literacy to 99% of the European population. During this period, the astonishing ascendancy of Mary occurred. Her image soon dominated the European landscape. This was also a time when abbesses headed monasteries, the Chivalric Code and courtly love honored women, and the Church
Vol. 200, No. 2, February 2005
revered its female Christian mystics. During this period of illiteracy, right hemispheric modes of love, intuition, mysticism, romance, and mother worship regained prominence. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1454 caused literacy rates to soar. The prime mover behind people’s desire to read was the New Testament. Because the message of Christ, clear in the Scripture, stresses love, kindness, and forgiveness, the period after the invention of the printing press ought to have been characterized by these three traits. Instead, the printing press spawned the Protestant Reformation, which stressed the destruction of images and the demotion of Mary. The outbreak of fierce religious wars among kinsmen was unprecedented. Neighbors burned neighbors at the stake. This sadistic carnage occurred in the same period that historians call the Age of Reason. The steep rise of literacy in European society reinforced its left hemisphere at the expense of its right. As Sophocles once warned, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” Literacy indubitably was vast. But few have examined the downside of learning to translate the sounds of speech into squiggly filigrees on a page. While the literate countries were bestowing on posterity the works of Galileo, Shakespeare, Newton, and Descartes, equally prominent men suffered a psychosis so extreme they began to believe that their women were so dangerous they must be murdered—and by a most sadistic means, burned alive chained to a stake. The witch-hunts were most virulent in countries that experienced the steepest rise in literacy rates. Russia remained largely illiterate throughout this period and escaped the witch craze insanity. (When the Russians experienced their surge of literacy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they, too, passed through their period of madness with
Shlain
Martin Memorial Lecture
159
their robotic embrace of their version of a sacred alphabetic text, Marx’s Communist Manifesto.) Literacy will never be entirely lost; whatever the Cassandras among us may say, we are not on the cusp of another Dark Ages. But there is reason to believe that the imbalance of right and left brain functions may actually be in the process of a reformation. A colossal shift I call the Iconic Revolution began in the 19th century. The invention of the camera and film and the discovery of electromagnetism combined to bring us first still photographs and then film, television, computers, graphic advertising, and the Internet. We are now living in an increasingly post-Gutenberg world, where text is rapidly receding and the image has become dominant, as it was in prehistory (though with a vast technologic difference—our “cave paintings” exist in cyberspace). Daily we are bombarded with images from ads, movies, television, and computer graphics, with a concurrent decline in literacy, the aforementioned curse of the modern age. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan trenchantly stated, “The medium is the message.” The process with which we take in information is actually more important than the actual information itself. The increasing reliance on right brain pattern recognition instead of left brain linear sequencing has moved culture toward equilibrium between the two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image. Educators must acknowledge that there are now two parallel tracks for learning. Running alongside the three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—are the three arts: dance, music, and the visual arts. To ignore the capacities of the right brain and heavily stress the left ought no longer be a viable educational strategy.