Heroes Not Zombies

I took this photo a number of years during a trip to Italy. I’m often drawn to sculptures and this particular one is pretty unmissable I think you’ll agree. I’ve returned to look at this image many times and, particularly in the light of our new understanding of neurology and how the two cerebral hemispheres engage with the world differently, (thank you Iain McGilchrist) I find this a really powerful statement.

The first thing I think when I look at this is “Look at the size of that head!” It’s massive. See how small the people look in comparison. Every time I look at this it challenges me to consider how we over-represent the human head. How often do we think that “I” am what exists “in here” – in here being inside the skull we point to as we say that. But we know better now. We know that “I” is both an embodied concept – existing within a whole body – and an extended concept – existing within a network of ever-changing, co-influencing relationships with others and with the environment. You could say our more recent understandings have blown the head wide open and set the “I” free! Perhaps like this sculpture?

The second thing I think of that phrase “head over heart” which we use to set rational thinking and decision making against intuitive, feeling-based ways. In fact, we now know that the heart is more than a mere pump used to circulate blood around the body. There is a dense network of the specialised cells we call neurones around it, and the information processed in that network flows more from the heart to the head, than the other way. So we do actually make sense of our lives using our heart (physically and symbolically) as well as using our head. The fact this particular head is so over-sized reminds me of how we tend to give too much emphasis and attention to so called rational and cognitive ways of thinking, and not enough to our embodied, heart-focused, soulful, intuitive ways – which in many ways precede the work of the brain.

The third thing I think of is provoked by noticing that half the brain is missing in this sculpture – although we can’t see the cerebral cortex here, it seems that the right half is missing, even if the left half is still there behind the skull. That reminds me of the imbalance which is the basis of Iain McGilchrist’s thesis as described in such wonderful detail in his “The Master and the Emissary”. He argues that our left and right hemispheres have different world views and each half creates the kind of world it sees on a moment to moment, and historic basis. He claims that the right hemisphere is where all the information flows first (well, most of it does), that the right then hands off some of that information flow to the left, which processes it by analysing it, matching it to what we already know, categorising and labelling it. Then, it should hand the results back to the right, for it to set back into contexts and see it as a whole. As this sculpture suggests, things have gone wrong and we are using the left hemisphere way too much, and the right way too little.

Interesting what can emerge from one sculpture?