A chiropractor discusses Ian McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary," which examines how the brain's two hemispheres differ and what that means for how practitioners talk to patients and build resilience.
Okay, so I know it's only January at this point, but I reckon I found my favorite book of all of 2024 already. This is a book that I've known about for a few years. I'd see it mentioned occasionally. I'd hear about it from friends or somebody else, and I think I should check that out one day. And then I never did because it's. It's not the easiest read, I'll put it that way. But that changed recently when I found a documentary that was based on the book that I went and watched recently. And I watched the documentary, thought, right now I really want to read this book. The book is called the Master and His Emissary by Professor Ian McGilchrist. He's a psychiatrist who spent his entire career studying the brain. The documentary, by the way, which I recommend to Everybody, is called thedividedbrain.com if you're in the UK, it's free on Amazon prime right now, but if you just go to dividedbrain.com, you can rent it for a few pounds. Honestly, I think everyone should watch this, especially healthcare practitioners. It's. It's fascinating. It explains so much about what's going on in the world. I'm now reading the book. The book is a bit more of a slog. There's complex neurology and neuroanatomy. It's given me flashbacks. My third year at uni. It's 27 hours long and I will probably spend double that listening because I'm hitting the rewind button all the time to just go, wait, which side was that? What part of the cortex. But it's a great book and essentially his life's work has been around the difference in the right and left side of the brain. Now, this got really popular for all the wrong reasons. About a decade ago, there was this idea that all these pop psychology books were published about how. Well, the left side of the brain is like the logical, rational, analytical. The human part, the part with language, the serious bit, the bit that, you know, you really need to rely on. And the right side of the brain is. It does the kind of airy, fairy stuff. They're like, oh, it's the creative, artistic. It sings, but it doesn't have language. Kind of floats around a little bit. There was even this idea that the right side of the brain. Sorry, yeah, the right side was female and the left was male, which is absolutely not true. And pretty much all of this stuff was shown to not be the case. It's not that one side does one thing, another thing, does another thing. Turns out both sides, both hemispheres do everything. They're involved in everything. But because of that, it got thrown out. A lot of people didn't consider it seriously. And Professor McGilchrist work has been looking at the differences that are there because it turns out both sides of the brain are involved in everything. But it's the way they go about it, the perspectives they have and the approaches that they use, that's really fundamentally different. Now, I'm still reading this book, so I can't give you a detailed breakdown, and that would take me 27 hours. And you should just go and get the book, to be honest, to do that. But one of the ways I think is really important for us as practitioners is the way in which that we relate to patients, the way in which we learn our models and our approaches and our techniques, but then how we bring that back to patients, because what you can't do the right side of the brain is very good at looking at the overall big picture. It looks at the context. It just looks at something goes, okay, I've got an idea what that is. The left side is much more detail, analytical. What the left side of the brain does is it breaks things down into smaller and smaller pieces and it analyzes them. It looks for linear relationships. It looks for that detail and that precision there. And you need both. You can't do one or the other. The book's main thesis is that in the west, we've become way overly reliant on the left hemisphere, that we're all about breaking stuff down into individual things. We're all. We're very analytical, we're very reductionistic, we're very individualistic. We're not looking at the whole bigger picture. We're not looking at the kind of the global context, the bigger web of contextual effects there. And that's the idea with this book. I think that's really true within chiropractic, for example, I think it's really true within the techniques and the models that we use now. One of the ones that I teach, you may well know, is the social style model for chiropractors. I have a course on this. And the whole point of the social style model is teaching you how to work out how to individualize your communication with for each patient. Because the right side of the brain, it's too broad. You look at it go, this person's totally unique. But you can't then go, well, how do I work out how to respond to someone who's Totally unique. What totally unique things am I going to have to do? That's not going to work. So what the social style model does is it gives the left side of the brain a model to put people into. It essentially gives you some boxes and some instructions on, here's how to sort people into the different social style boxes. And you work out what's their preferred social style, what box should I put them into? And then you go, right, people, people in this box. If I react this way, if I respond this way, they tend to get better results. So, oh, you fit in this box. That means I'm going to do this thing. But you can see how that, that's quite limited in a way when it comes to something like human one to one interaction that's very biased and varied. Not biased, but very varied and unique. You don't want to just pick people in the boxes all the time, but you need to do that when you're learning. So, and this is something that I actually say at the very start of this course is like, look, the social style model is wrong. Like, the model is not how reality works. This is not the way things really go. However, it's still useful and especially when you're learning. When I first started learning, I was looking at the behaviors, I was listening for the tone of voice, the things they said, and I was working out analytically, logically in my brain, okay, which, where am I going to rate this person on the graph? Which box am I going to put them into? And then I'd solve that problem, I'd do it and it works. I started getting better results. It was useful, but that's not enough. At the end of the day, I now don't really use the model consciously. It's there in my subconscious. My left side of my brain will use it, but I tend to. I had this, a conversation with one of my cas the other day. You know, they asked what style they thought and I had to pause and think. That doesn't mean that I didn't know how to respond. But once you learn something, well, in the left side of the brain, you can shunt it back across to the right. And the right side just looks at reality. The left side is all about maps and models. The right study is about what's actually going on and you need to do that to really own something. You know, if you think about this in terms of directions, let's say if I was going to give you directions to drive to my clinic from say five minutes down the road, now what I wouldn't do is describe every single thing you'd see on the way past. That's the right side of the brain. It's going to look at the overall contacts, give you all the things. That's not going to be very helpful. What I could do instead is I could draw you a map. And that's what the left side does. It analyzes the route. You can draw an abstract representation that's not reality. I'm going to leave out 99.9% of the details because if I put every shop name, if I put every tree, if I put, you know, every slight deviation in the road. Now I've just given you a Google Earth photo. You would never try to navigate via Google Earth. That's way too much information. So the left side of the brain helps you to strip out the things you don't need to see there and then. And that will do it. However, if you look at the map all the time, I've learned this now I don't learn directions as well because. Because I'm always looking at the GPS on my phone. You know, you wouldn't learn the route. To learn the route, you'd have to actually drive it enough. But then pay attention to what's going on to spot the things that maybe weren't in the map but would still help you. That's absolutely true for the way we approach patients and I would say that's true for the models that we use beyond that. So whether you are an SOT practitioner, I was when I first started out. Fit them into category one, two or three, yes, that's useful when you're learning, but human beings don't really work that way. And I noticed the people are really good with sot. They broke the rules because they knew when to be able to do that. So whether that's the way that you approach communication, whether that is the technique system that you're using, I wanted to share that today. I hope that was helpful because you can then start to see when it's time to break out of the model and not to try and fit every patient into that box. If I did that religiously, I'd end up squeezing a square peg into a round hole sometimes. So be open to the outliers, be open to the ways that the patient and their reaction, their situation, doesn't fit your model. And don't forget to treat the patient in front of you. The map is not the territory, as the phrase goes. So I hope that was useful. I'll probably have a bunch more things as I study this book that I'm going to share Like I say it's really, really useful I'm putting together I've mentioned this before my course on professional resilience so helping you build confidence and a bulletproof healthcare mindset. I've actually had to rewrite some of that after listening to this book because I'm going to start involving that and as well it's really informing that upcoming course that'll be out in a couple of months I think we'll talk about that later on but right now there's one thing I would say to do is go to the dividedbrain.com or if you're in the UK, go if you've got Amazon prime, go on Amazon watch the Divided Brain documentary. It's brilliant. It's one of the most interesting things and if you want to learn more, the Master and His Emissary is the book. It's a bit of a slog but I'm loving every second so far so hope that's helpful and I'll share some more stuff soon. Take care.
