The Divided Brain (2019)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so when The Divided Brain takes its intriguing findings about the left/right hemisphere divide and starts applying them to society at large, the leap from evidence to conclusion is just too high to follow comfortably. Much of the film is adapted from the works of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (specifically his book The Master and His Emissary). McGilchrist is notably not a neuroscientist but his review of available evidence should be familiar enough: The left hemisphere of the brain is focused on details, while the right hemisphere is focused on the whole. The film (unlike, apparently, the book) doesn’t spend a lot of time on those neurobiological fundamentals — it’s far more interested in the second and far less convincing part of McGilchrist’s thesis: That western society, in general, has grown far too detail-centred at the expense of looking at the whole picture, and that state of affairs is squarely to be blamed on… wait for it… the divided brain. Now, I’m open to new ideas — I have a regrettable tendency to latch on to new cool concepts and apply them indiscriminately to all sorts of different areas as long as they give me the impression of knowing something that others don’t yet. (Fortunately, I have resisted most conspiracy theories so far.)  But there’s a leap in The Divided Brain that I find suspicious — and it’s reinforced by some curious choices that make the thesis seem all the more superficial. By the time the interviewees blame all of western society’s ills on the divided brain (while predictably praising other modes of more primitive thought), they all sound like cranks moaning and complaining about what they don’t like about life, and latching on this single idea as a universal explanation. Adding John Cleese as an interviewee and colour commentator makes the film funnier but not necessarily more credible when it’s already dubious. I may end up being more favourable to the thesis if ever I read the book, but I’m not feeling like it: Having looked at my general impression of the film rather than focusing on its details, I’ve come to an intuitive whole-picture skepticism about The Divided Brain.