The curse of the right brain

Credit: Hiroshi Ishii

 

First a quote from a previous blog post: “When only the left brain is functioning, the test subjects see even animate things as mechanism. Conversely, when only the right brain is functioning, the subjects experience even inanimate things as alive! For instance, the sun is experienced as a living being?!”

It struck me that this could explain a lot of things. For instance, why people until modern times (and many people still today) believe in the efficacy of curses. On the face of it, this sounds very strange. And no, the argument about “superstition” doesn´t work. On New Guinea, at least according to Jared Diamond, people aren´t afraid of snakes. They literally have no snake phobia. They simply learn which snakes are dangerous, which ones are harmless, and that´s that. Obviously, everyone in a “pre-scientific” society needed to have some kind of veridical empirical knowledge in order to survive at all, for instance about edible plants.

So why would the belief in the efficacy of curses emerge at all?

Maybe because people *experienced the efficacy empirically*. Not because of some faulty logic from their part, but very very concretely. This is compatible even with materialism or “naturalism”, since the experience of the curse (or the counter-curse) might be an extreme right brain phenomenon, some kind of Über-detection of agency.

Or it could be mental telepathy. Or the world really is alive...

Make of this blog post what you wish.