What’s in a Name?

Perceiving with an open mind

Art by author

January 4, 2026

According to the Iain McGilchrist, the left and right hemispheres of our brain have different ways of perceiving. The left hemisphere focuses on parts, categories and abstractions, and creates a simplified, mechanistic map of reality. The right hemisphere sees context, and the relationships between parts. It understands reality as a living, interconnected complex system. The left hemisphere uses words and symbols to describe what it sees, and confuses the names of things for the things themselves.

We look up at the night sky and name the constellations.

We look at an unfamiliar flower and use the Seek app to identify it.

We think we know what something is because we know the name of it and what it can be used for. We get caught in the left hemisphere’s way of knowing, confusing the map for the terrain, seeing objects in the foreground and ignoring the background, ignoring relationships, ignoring context.

It’s been very interesting to set aside the left hemisphere’s way of knowing sometimes, to have the experience of being in the world with an open awareness. Not as an observer, not as the subject looking at an object, but as an awareness that is IN the world, part of the fabric of it.