Who's Running Your Mind, Your Right Brain or Your Left Brain?
Guest Writer: Lara Patriquin
We've all heard it: left brain logical, right brain creative. It's cuter than it is true. Both sides think. Both sides feel. The real question is who's in charge.
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist spent twenty years on that question. His book The Master and His Emissary takes its title from a fable: a wise master governs his realm through a gifted emissary. The emissary is brilliant — focused, articulate, efficient. But over time, he forgets he's the emissary. He starts to believe the realm is his.
That, McGilchrist argues, is the story of the modern mind. The right hemisphere is the master — it sees the whole, keeps us connected to what's alive and meaningful. The left hemisphere is the emissary — the narrator, the planner, the one with the words. It's supposed to serve. Instead, it's running the show.
You know what that feels like. It's the ticker tape — the voice that keeps score at 2 a.m. and can't say "I don't know."
Here's the thing: the left brain is a superb employee and a terrible boss.
The calendar, the plan, the sentence — give it a task and it delivers. But we've handed it questions it was never built for: Am I happy? Am I enough? And it just answers. Badly.
The work, then, isn't self-improvement. It's a demotion. Return the left brain to the role it was made for, and let the master back in the room.
Start tomorrow morning. Whoever gets to your mind first runs your day — and left unattended, the emissary clocks in early with a to-do list and a grievance from 2011.
Throw a Morning Party instead:
phone off, long breaths, hydrate, sunshine, journal, meditate, something inspiring. Let the master speak first.
Happiness isn't something the emissary can deliver. It's what's already here when the master is back in the chair.
There's a whole book about this!
Thrive Mind - An Illustrated Guide to the Subconscious
The bunker is the subject of my book — how we build it, what it quietly costs us, and the glitch in the nervous system that lets it seize the controls: the mechanism that convinces us we’re small and under threat, when our real nature is joyful and brilliant.
It’s in my editor’s hands now, out in the next few months. Here’s an early look at the bunker itself:
What working with me looks like
We go into the bunker together, calmly, and take inventory — questioning the beliefs that keep you defended, and changing your relationship to the emotions you’ve been bracing against. Less a discipline, more like clearing out a room you forgot had a window.
Curious what’s in yours?
Thinking 2.0, 961 S. McClelland, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, United States
Lara Patriquin, MD, Associate Professor of Radiology
School of Medicine, University of Utah, Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0, (505) 269-4097 Book your complimentary call here.
Joanna joannaseibert.com.