The Divided Brain: Rebalancing the Brain, Healing the Collective

We live in a culture shaped by what we prioritize: efficiency, structure, control, and certainty. From our schedules and spreadsheets to our cities and institutions, modern life often reflects a particular way of seeing the world—one that values clarity over complexity, productivity over presence.

But what if this is only half the story? What if the very way we’ve come to think, perceive, and relate has been shaped by an imbalance deep within the brain itself?

As psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues, our brains are not simply processors of information—they are shapers of experience. And the two hemispheres, though interconnected, offer profoundly different ways of attending to reality. Over time, our collective over-reliance on the left hemisphere—with its tendency to dissect, label, and control—has shaped more than our thoughts. It’s shaped our systems, our relationships, even our sense of self.

This is not metaphor. It’s neurology.

And it may help explain why so many of us feel disconnected, disembodied, and starved for meaning.

The Müller-Lyer Illusion: A Glimpse into Cultural Perception

In the Müller-Lyer illusion, participants are shown two identical horizontal lines—one flanked by inward-pointing arrows, the other by outward-pointing ones. Westerners consistently perceive the lines as different lengths, even though they’re the same. But people from pre-industrialized cultures are largely immune to the illusion.

Muller-Lyer Illusion

Why? Because their environments—their cultural context—shape how their brains perceive the world. Western minds are trained in straight lines, boxes, and angles. We’re conditioned to analyze, compartmentalize, and seek certainty. And much of our environment reflects this conditioning—man-made spaces filled with right angles and rigid edges. In contrast, nature organically tends toward curves, textures, and irregularity.

This illusion is more than a perceptual trick. It reveals how deeply culture shapes not just what we see, but how we see.

The Divided Brain and the Culture We’ve Built

As psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues, the modern Western world is increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain: the side concerned with control, analysis, categorization, and narrow focus. McGilchrist states that this is an imbalance in the brain. 

But McGilchrist doesn’t rely on pop-psych clichés about “left brain = logical, right brain = creative.” Instead, he offers something more profound: that the two hemispheres represent radically different ways of attending to reality.

• The right hemisphere is relational, embodied, emotional, and attuned to context. It perceives the whole, holds nuance, and remains rooted in the present.

• The left hemisphere is abstract, analytical, goal-oriented, and obsessed with certainty. It breaks things down into parts and often detaches from lived experience.

  
  

McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere is actually meant to lead, with the left in service—offering precision and focus within a broader, embodied understanding. He refers to the right hemisphere as the “master” and the left as its “emissary.” But in modern culture, this order has reversed and the left is generally more dominant.

Indeed, early neuroscience privileged the left hemisphere as more “rational” and advanced. This bias has shaped systems and values: we prioritize productivity over presence, data over meaning, and structure over spontaneity.

And it’s not just a neurological imbalance. It’s become a cultural one.

Developmental Trauma and the Origins of Disconnection

“The right brain is the psychobiological core of the self.” —Allan Schore

This left-brain dominance doesn’t begin in adulthood. As neuropsychologist Allan Schore shows, it begins in our earliest relationships.

The right hemisphere dominates in the first three years of life, governing:

• Emotional processing

• Nonverbal communication

• Somatic awareness

• Implicit memory

• Attachment and relational attunement

  
  

When caregivers are present, responsive, and attuned, the infant’s right brain develops a strong foundation for emotional regulation and secure connection.

But when caregiving is misattuned, neglectful, or traumatic, that development is disrupted. And here’s the survival adaptation: the left brain steps in to compensate. It creates distance, organizes overwhelming emotion, and gives the illusion of control.

This is not because the left is better—but because the system is trying to stay functional.

Over time, this becomes a default mode:

• Overthinking replaces emotional presence.

• Disconnection from the body becomes a norm.

• Verbal skills mask an inability to feel safe in intimacy.

  
  

We become adults who live “from the neck up”—thriving in structured, achievement-based systems but struggling with presence, pleasure, and vulnerability. Of course, the brain is more complex than left vs. right, and not all people express these imbalances in the same way. Race, gender, class, and historical trauma all shape how disconnection is lived in the body. But I suspect this is why Westerners are particularly susceptible to illusions like Müller-Lyer: we’ve been conditioned to favor abstraction over direct experience.

Trauma Structures: When Culture Mirrors Nervous System Defenses

“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.” —Resmaa Menakem

I often think about this quote from Resma Menakem. At the cultural level, trauma passed down through generations and the collective begin to shape social norms, behaviors, and identity—often without awareness that it’s rooted in unresolved pain. This often occurs outside of our awareness and becomes hardened and normalized over time; solidified into the culture. 

• Colonialism fractures people and land into parts to be managed.

• White supremacy thrives on hierarchy, categorization, and dehumanization.

• Patriarchy devalues emotion, intuition, and relationship—all hallmarks of right-brain knowing.

  
  

These systems arguably represent an imbalance; left brain dominance.

Healing as Right-Brain Restoration

Schore reminds us that healing doesn’t happen through logic alone. It happens right-brain to right-brain—through emotional presence, co-regulation, and safety in relationship.

The goal is not to silence the left hemisphere (we need it), but to reintegrate it—so that analysis and structure serve, rather than dominate, our emotional and relational lives.

In therapy, this might look like tone of voice, pacing, and eye contact—not just what’s said, but how it’s said.

In parenting, it looks like presence over productivity, repair over punishment.

In collective spaces, it looks like slowing down, listening to the body, and restoring connection amongst people and the land.

“In returning to the body and remembering how to listen to our own blood and bones and glorious guts, we return to ourselves and each other. We aren’t alone. We are never alone. There’s comfort in that. There’s also responsibility. Returning to deep relationship with the world and with our own bodies can’t only be about what we get. It also has to be about what we give, even if all we can give is our deep, reverent presence.” —Abigail Rose Clarke

Six Practices for Reweaving Wholeness

Here are six ways to begin shifting from left-brain survival to right-brain presence:

1. Return to the Body

Trauma pulls us out of the body. Healing brings us back.

Gentle movement, somatic therapy, or even placing your hand on your heart can begin to reawaken right-brain presence.

Instead of managing your body, try listening to it.

2. Make Time for Meaning

The right brain speaks through metaphor, image, and story.

Engage in journaling, dreams, poetry, or art—not as hobbies, but as medicine. These practices restore the symbolic and emotional layers of life that trauma flattens.

3. Re-Attune to Nature

Nature regulates the nervous system. It teaches interdependence.

Walk without earbuds. Learn the names of local plants. Sit with the moon. The more you attune to nature’s rhythms, the more your right brain finds its place in the whole.

4. Connect with Others

In relationships, prioritize attunement over control.

Slow down. Practice presence and curiosity. Right-brain healing happens in connection, not correction.

5. Reconnect with Ancestral and Collective Memory

Unhealed stories live in our lineages.

Explore your ancestral practices, rituals of grief, or lineage repair. Whether you descend from the colonized or the colonizer, there is healing in remembering what was lost—and reclaiming what was sacred.

6. Integrate Through Bilateral Processing

Trauma fragments. It splits the past from the present, sensation from meaning, emotion from narrative. One powerful way to begin reweaving these fragments is through bilateral stimulation—the foundation of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro, EMDR supports the brain in metabolizing overwhelming memories by gently activating both hemispheres—often through rhythmic eye movements, tapping, or alternating tones.

This process helps the nervous system shift out of frozen survival states, restoring communication between the emotional, relational right brain and the organizing, meaning-making left. As neuroscientist Ruth Lanius notes, EMDR facilitates integration: the movement of raw sensory material into coherent experience, of trauma into memory.

Even outside of formal EMDR sessions, simple bilateral practices—such as mindful walking, drumming, or rhythmic self-tapping—can support this reconnection.

From Fragmentation to Wholeness

The world we’ve built—through disconnection, trauma, and overreliance on left-brain logic—is unraveling. But maybe that unraveling is an invitation.

An invitation to restore balance.

To listen more deeply.

To live in relationship—with ourselves, each other, and the earth.

McGilchrist reminds us that the right hemisphere was meant to lead, offering a wise, embodied, contextual understanding of the world and each other. The left was always meant to serve—not dominate. Because when we tend to our nervous systems, when we bring presence to our relationships, when we remember the wisdom of the body and the land—we begin to reweave a culture that has context again.

Rebalancing the brain is not just personal work.

It’s cultural repair.

It’s revolutionary.

References

Clarke, A. R. (2024). Returning home to the body. North Atlantic

Lanius, R., & Vermetten, E. (Eds.). (2010). The hidden epidemic: The impact of early life trauma on health and disease. Cambridge University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.

Matter of Mind: The divided brain [Film]. (2011). National Film Board of Canada.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy: Basic principles, protocols, and procedures (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.