Recent neuroscience suggests that the right side of the brain wants to present reality as a unified whole while the left side aims to break things up into their component parts. Iain McGilchrist's book tackles the rivalry between the two. Gary Lachman summarizes:
McGilchrist argues that in a left-brain dominant world, the emphasis would be on increasing control, and the means of achieving this is by taking the right brain’s presencing of a whole and breaking it up into bits and pieces that can be easily reconstituted as a re-presentation, a symbolic virtual world, shot through with the left brain’s demand for clarity, precision, and certainty. Furthermore, McGilchrist contends that this is the kind of world we live in now, at least in the postmodern West.
The Dish 