The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation

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 rationalizing 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 rationalizing, 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".