BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Eagleman has dubbed the brain a “team of rivals” pitting mainly automatic emotional responses
against cognitive reason. 72 Unconscious “zombie systems” work to keep the team of rivals
integrated seeking structure in meaningless patterns and creating narratives to explain social
reality. According to this scenario the mind as a blank slate becomes a mere euphemism and free
will gets demoted to a dubious veto power at the end of a chain of unconscious reactions. 73
Several recent studies in neuropsychology reveal aspects of the bilateral brain highly
relevant to group identification and stereotyping. The non-verbal right brain plays a crucial role
in self-awareness, particularly in the self-related emotions of pride, guilt and shame, as well as in
appreciating humor and inferring the mental states of others. Autism and Arsperger patients lack
the right-brain capacity for empathy, deception or deception detection. 74 The right brain has also
been designated a “primitive and egocentric hemisphere,” indispensable for synthesizing a
holistic view of social situations, apprehending an internal representation of others and forming a
sense of identity in relation to others. 75 It has been associated with the survival instinct and the
capacity to extract connotational and contextual meanings—getting the moral of a story or the
11, (November, 2009): 1469-1474.
72 Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 109.
73 Ibid., 83, 137, 139, 166-67. Eagleman writes, however, that the materialist monist
paradigm of modern neuroscience does not negate the idea of mind as a sum of parts, nor can it
disprove the brain’s potential function as a sophisticated receiver of a higher absolute reality.
Plato and Descartes live on (pp. 217, 222).
74 Julian Keenan, Gordon G. Gallup, and Dean Falk, The Face in the Mirror: The Search
for the Origins of Consciousness (New York: Ecco, 2003), 233, 242-43, 250.
75 Susan Hart, Brain, Attachment, Personality: An Introduction to Neuroaffective
Development (London: Karnac, 2008), 239, 242.
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