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Explores the connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity.
List of contents
Preface , Introduction , The Looking-Glass , The origins of Urizen , Urizen and the left hemisphere , The myth of Genesis , The marriage of heaven and hell , Down the Rabbit-Hole , The God of reason , Urizenic religion and Urizenic reason: R1 and R2 , The left hemisphere agenda , Twilight of the psychopaths , More than man: the dragon Urizen , The Selfhood & the fires of Los , Conclusion , Appendix
About the author
Roderick Tweedy, PhD, completed his education at Oxford University in 1997, researching the poet Shelley's interest in contemporary science and natural philosophy. He has written a number of articles and reviews on Romanticism and the English Romantics, and is an active member of the Blake Society. He is currently editor for Karnac Books, and an enthusiastic supporter of the user-led mental health organization, Mental Fight Club.
Summary
The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity. The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'. The book draws in particular on the work of Bolte Taylor, whose study in this area is having a profound impact on how we understand mental activity and processes.
