For thirty years I have been using the two hemisphere approach under the names of the written and the oral, the hot and the cool, the medium and the message, figure and ground, and so on. Now it turns out that the medicine has been building a great beadch-head for this approach with its new understanding of the two hemispheres of the brain. If you look at the traits of the left hemisphere, you will discover the lineaments of the First World – the literate and industrial world – and, on the other hand, in the right hemisphere you will perceive the characteristics of the Third World – the world without the phonetic alphabet. During the past century, while the knowledge of the two hemispheres has been growing, there has been a new electronic milieu or environment which automatically pushes the right hemisphere into a more dominant position than it has held in the Western world since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. The two hemispheres naturally respond to the milieu or total surround in which people live and work. My work has been a dialogue between the two hemispheres in which the characteristics of the right hemisphere are given so much recognition that I have been unintelligible to the left-hemisphere people. It happens that the left-hemisphere people are completely out of touch with the results and the formal characteristics of their own new electric technologies.
Letter to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt December 17, 1968, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) pp 359-360
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Hemispheres of the Brain
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan