Leading thinker, philosopher-psychiatrist-neuroscientist, Dr Iain McGilchrist takes this further in The Matter with Things. He tells us that we can either see separate parts (reductionism) or interconnectedness (holism), but not the two at the same time.  This fundamental difference is why our brains are divided in two. 

In fact, seeing the systems and the interconnectedness of things, rather than looking at the separate parts, forces us to question the very fundamentals of how things come into being.  As McGilchrist so clearly explains, everything we see is ultimately dependent on the whole because everything is ultimately interconnected – being a feature of a wider whole. It is useful to see the parts but we need also to see the whole. This is very different from our current scientific, societal and cultural ‘common sense’. In fact, the interconnectedness or holistic view is more fundamental and gives us ultimately a better understanding of the world – even in physics where we know that separate subatomic particles arise from quantum fields which are not separate things, but an indivisible whole connected over all of time and all of space.  

It turns out that we cannot separate how we understand the world from the way we process information – and there are two fundamentally different ways of doing this.  We can either see parts or we can see interconnectedness – and these two functions, which tell us, are the core of why our brains are divided into two halves.  The left half of the brain focuses on the detail or the parts but cannot see the big picture (e.g. it may know what an arm, a leg, a head is, but literally cannot put them together into a complete human form when asked, as McGilchrist explains in ‘The Matter with Things’.  The right half of the brain can see the bigger picture, including the context, and has a far better understanding of the world. 

Interestingly, and probably not coincidentally, there are two fundamentally different types of databases in computing – Excel-type databases which hold information in its parts (in separate cells), and so-called ‘graph’ or network databases which hold information on the basis of its interconnectedness.  

Ultimately seeing the bigger picture can take us on a journey in which we see the world as an indivisible whole, like mystical experience whereby we understand ourselves as not separate from everything else.  It is move from what we might call an ego consciousness where we see ourselves as separate to a universal or cosmic consciousness which sees ourselves as ultimately indivisible from the whole. 

In modern culture, this understanding the whole has been subservient to seeing separate parts and this affects everything from how we are organised to work and think in separate siloes. Examples of this is a focus on treating separate diseases rather than promoting health (which arises from everything including our diets, lifestyles, cultural and socio-economic factors); trying to reduce carbon emissions without considering land use, and social inequity; or trying to increase crop yields without considering factors such as nutritional value of the food, impact on soil and carbon emissions, or the effects of pesticides and fertilisers on waterways and biodiversity.