David Boulton: Thank you for this opportunity to talk with you.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: My pleasure.

David Boulton: My sense is that you're trying to help us understand something that's generally overlooked, not commonly understood, and yet fundamentally important to understanding how our civilization developed and how our minds function. Your book deals with the consequences of becoming alphabet literate both in terms of its effects on civilization and on an individual brain/being level.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Right.

David Boulton: Let’s begin with a sketch of how you came to this work and then move through some of the components of your book.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: I have been very influenced by Marshall McLuhan, the 1960’s media theorist who said, "The medium is the message." In other words, that the process by which we take in and put out information is actually more important than the content of that information. In parallel, as a vascular surgeon, I’ve had many years of experience operating on the carotid arteries to the brain. So, I've long been fascinated by the very different functions between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere of the human brain.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Many years ago I went on an archeological tour of Mediterranean sites and our group had the good fortune to have an incredibly knowledgeable guide—a University of Athens professor who told us essentially the same story wherever we went. She said, "You know, these temples that stand before you, whether they're dedicated to Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo," she said, "these were all once consecrated to a goddess. And then unknown persons came along and changed that."

So, the essence of my book is the question: ‘What happened to the goddesses?’ There's indisputable evidence from archaeological and historical records, that there was a time when men all over the world worshipped women. Japan and China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome—I mean, those rough, tough, warriors in Athens voted to have Athena look over them rather than Poseidon. This is reason that the name of the city today is Athens and not Posieds.

Beginning about 3,000 years ago, with the start of Western culture, there were three religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - that denied the existence of a goddess. My question is: If everyone used to worship a female deity, what event in culture could have been so immense and so pervasive that it changed the sex of God? How did we go from a female deity to a male one?

The more I thought about this, it occurred to me that this all changed in culture about the same time that people learned how to read and write.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: The first forms of writing, hieroglyphics and cuneiform, were extremely difficult to learn, and they were limited to a very small percentage. Less than two percent of the population of Egypt and Mesopotamia could read and write.

There’s an old saying, "In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." If you know how to read and write, and nobody else does, within a very short period of time, you gain all the power.

Then about 3,500 years ago, a group of people halfway between Mesopotamia and Egypt figured out a much simpler way to read and write called the alphabet.

The alphabet transformed the world. The alphabet continues to transform the world. And the reason why is that alphabets are so simple to learn that a four-year-old can learn the alphabet. I mean, Forrest Gump can learn the alphabet.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: So, the reason I consider reading and writing so very different from speaking and listening is that they reconfigure the brain. Reading and writing are very linear, sequential processes; where speaking and listening engage many more senses, and all together it's a much more holistic kind of processing. The left hemisphere processes linear and sequential information, such as language and algebra and reason and logic, and the right hemisphere processes—and again, I'm talking about right-handed people here—processes primarily holistic image gestalt information, such as recognizing images, seeing patterns, recognizing how the parts fit with the whole.

So, as a result, I concluded that learning how to read and write the alphabet changes, reconfigures – literally - the brain of anybody who learns the skill. This has been confirmed by brain scans on non-literate people compared to literate people.

My questions are: What happens to a culture when brains are reconfigured in such a way that a lot of people learn this skill? How does it cause the whole culture to change? How are the literate culture’s religions reorganized? What happens to the relationship between men and women? I concluded that these were powerful questions.

When you're listening to me right now, what's happening is that your left hemisphere is following what I'm saying in a very linear fashion. But your right hemisphere is watching me. You're checking me out. You want to see if I have dandruff on my shoulders, or alcohol on my breath, or you want to see how sincere I am. If I were drumming my fingertips on a table top, your peripheral vision would pick that up, and that would go into the mix of what's going on in this conversation.

Then when I speak, Broca's area area in my left hemisphere is creating these sentences that I'm speaking. But to articulate speech, I need the cooperation of both sides of my lips, tongue and vocal chords. If I've been to the dentist and have had Novocaine, I have trouble talking. So, to speak and listen there has to be enormous cooperation across this broadband of fibers called the corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemispheres.

When you write, you write with only one hand. For 5,000 years, up until the invention of the typewriter keyboard, it didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman writing, it didn't matter what language you were writing in, it didn't even matter what you were writing about. The hand that controlled the writing implement was the same hand that hurled spears, swung swords and pulled triggers. So, it became clear to me that a new form of communication, one that reinforces the left hemisphere of the brain at the expense of the right hemisphere, will cause culture to veer off in a very left hemispheric mode.

People will agree that they're a mixture of masculine and feminine traits.  Men (in general) have a more masculine side than a feminine side, but men can't exist without a feminine side, just as women can't exist without a masculine side. Everyone, I believe, would agree with that concept.

I would like to give them anatomical mailing addresses. I think that the processes that are primarily used for masculine thinking—and again, both men and women have these—are located primarily in the left hemisphere of both men and women who are right-handed. It’s the converse for the feminine, in the right hemisphere.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: What happens, then, in a culture when the left hemisphere is given this extra power? Patriarchy and misogyny become evident in the culture, and these manifest themselves in a rather extraordinary way. Number one, image information is suppressed; it becomes an abomination. Women's rights are curtailed, and the goddess disappears.

That's the thesis of my book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess.  If you look in history and see what happened, the first book that was ever written in an alphabet is the Old Testament. That's about 900 BC. In this book, the most important centerpiece is the Ten Commandments. The First Commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever transcribed. It states, "I am the Lord, thy God, there is no other." Now, the Old Testament doesn't actually state that this deity is a male. But all of the nouns and adjectives used to describe this deity, "Lord," "Ruler," "Host," "King of the Universe" - they're all masculine. So, it's safe to assume that this is a male deity. If he's the only one, then what the First Commandment states is that no woman was involved in the creation of the universe. And up until the time this Commandment was written, no people anywhere in the world ever believed that a man alone created the universe. It was usually two women together, or a woman alone, or a man and a woman together—never a man alone.

Now, if I were to place the Ten Commandments on a table and ask viewers to come up and put them in order of importance in their lives today, I have no doubt that every single person would put as number two, "Don't murder." But that's not number two, that's number six. The second most important rule [Commandment] of righteous living is, "Make no images." How strange! And for those who would argue that it's a prescription against graven images, if you read the Commandment, it says, "And thou shall create no images of anything that flies in the air, creepeth in the ground, or is under the sea" - in other words, no art.

So, the question is: Why would art be more dangerous than murder? Why was there a prescription against art that you see playing itself out every time people become alphabet literate? For example, the first act of the Orthodox Christians in 313 AD, when they became the state religion of Rome, was instructions to the minions to go into the street and destroy all of the images. Not just graven images but every Greek or Roman image they could lay their hands on. And then after this incredible destruction of images, all the goddess temples were shut down.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Then you have this extraordinary period in Western culture called the Dark Ages where literacy got lost. It was during this period of time when less than one percent of the population of Europe could read and write. So, this was a time filled with superstition and barbarity. Strife was the order of the day. Commerce dried to a trickle. Travel was exceedingly dangerous. You would think that this would be the period when women's rights would have thoroughly suffocated, but when the stage of history gets re-illuminated in the 9th Century, what you find is male troubadours all over Europe, singing the praises of women.

So, you have courtly love and the chivalric code; women Christian mystics are hailed by the Popes as having a clearer connection to the Kingdom of Heaven than the male clerics. It's nearly always illiterate peasant girls that are having visions that the church certifies. It isn't some lawyer in the Vatican that's having these visions. Why illiterate peasant children?

Then you have this extraordinary phenomenon, and the people of Medieval Europe begin to spend enormous sums of time, energy and money erecting these fabulous cathedrals dedicated to Notre Dame. So, the question is: Where did Mary come from? Mary is mentioned eight times in the New Testament and the Gospels. She's a peripheral character in the whole story. And yet, during the medieval period, she becomes the central figure of Christianity. Mary doesn't say anything. I mean, there are no gospels according to Mary. It's her image that is everywhere. She leads every procession and is at every crossroads. The phenomenon of Mary reaches its height during the high Middle Ages.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: The Renaissance was this extraordinarily testosterone-driven surge of male creative energy driven by the left hemisphere, which was supported by what LIFE magazine called, "The most important invention of the last thousand years” - Gutenberg's printing press of 1453. Literacy rates that were in Western Europe were in the high teens in some of the cities and, with the invention of the printing press, skyrocketed.

So, books became cheap, easy and available, and everyone rushed to learn this new art called "reading and writing," because they all wanted to read this book that they had heard so much about, but it was always locked up in a monastery somewhere. Once they read the book, the New Testament, which is indisputably about love and kindness and forgiveness - shouldn't it follow that the people would behave towards each other in a loving, kind and forgiving fashion?

But that's not what happened. What happened? Religious wars broke out all over Europe so that neighbors began to murder their neighbors. In France, the Huguenots and the Catholics killed each other with the most unbelievable ferocity. In England, Anglicans killed Presbyterians, and Puritans killed Anglicans. In Germany, Calvinists and Lutherans were killing each other at the start of the Thirty Years’ War before the Catholics and the Protestants squared off, and they killed one third of the population of Germany and destroyed their economic base for a hundred years. In Spain, Jews and Moors had lived side by side with Catholics peacefully for centuries - then the Catholics suddenly decided they couldn't tolerate the presence of Jews and Moors, and they had to either kill them or expel them.

Now, if you're looking for this period of history in the history books, you'll find it under the heading, "The Age of Reason." And it's really strange, because this is the time in Western culture when the left-brain is exercising dominion and making the most extraordinary contributions in science, mathematics and architecture and global exploration.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: But evidence suggests that some new factor was driving this culture mad - that the men suffered a psychosis so extreme, thinking that their women were so dangerous, they needed to be murdered. And murder them, they did! The witch-hunts were the most severe—not in the Dark Ages, not during the bubonic plagues—they were the most severe in the gilded Renaissance. The people who were bringing about the witch-hunts were not the peasants. The peasants were trying to protect their women. It was the lawyers and doctors and clerics and priests who were supporting the witch-hunts.

Now, if you were to go to a Polynesian, or a Hopi, or a San Bushman, and you were to tap him on the shoulder, and say, "Would you believe that there is a culture in the world where the men are murdering their wise women?" - they'd look at you in disbelief. They'd say, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Everybody knows that the men are supposed to raid the next village and kill those men and steal their women. You don't kill your own women." There has never been an explanation for why sophisticated Europe, the only culture in the world that dined with a knife and fork, killed their own women. The  witch-hunts were the most severe in those countries that had the steepest rise in literacy rates: Germany, France, England, Switzerland. They had terrible witch-hunts. Russia, which remained illiterate, did not have any witch-hunts. Bosnia and Hungary, which were under Muslim rule - and the Muslims did not adopt the printing press until the 19th Century - they didn't have any witch hunts. So, it's a strange set of coincidences that you have along with these extraordinary developments.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Now, two things happened in the 19^th Century that changed all of this. One was the discovery of electromagnetism, and the other was the invention of photography. Photography did for images what the printing press had done for the written word, made them cheap, easy and available. By the end of the 19^th Century, there was virtually no one who had not sat for a photograph at least once. In the 200 years after the Protestant Reformation, if you were to ask people, "Your house is on fire. If you can run in and retrieve one personal object, what would it be?" The answer would be the same - it would be the family Bible. Within one generation of the invention of photography, the answer changed. It became "the family photo album."

Then electromagnetism and photography had begun to interweave to bring forth a new medium of communications based on images. The first one was film. Think of this: film attendance surpassed church attendance within eight years of its introduction, and it's never been close since.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Then in the 1950’s, all of the people who had been educated in the standard Western style—a very linear, sequential method of reading, writing and arithmetic—suddenly had to contend with a new form of communication called television. And television completely up-ended our culture. Television required a new hemispheric strategy to see television. And by that I mean, if you put EEG leads on a person’s scalp to measure their brain waves, and you give him a book to read, as  McLuhan said, "Medium is the message, it's the process." It doesn't matter what the content of the book is. It could be about sex and violence, it could be a mystery story, it could be a political book - doesn't matter. The person generates beta waves.

Beta waves are what you generate when you're concentrating on a task. Everyone knows that if you're trying to read a book, you have to concentrate. If you're in a real noisy room, you'll get up and find some place to sit that's quiet. But if you ask that person to look up from the book and start watching a television program—it doesn't matter what the content of the program is: cuddly koala bears or some violent cops and robbers program—what happens is the beta waves go away and alpha and theta waves come up.

Alpha and theta waves are what you generate when you meditate. Who here has not had the experience of going home after a hard day's work and taking that clicker in your hand and just kind of going into a trance watching television? When asked, people say that the word they most commonly use to describe watching television is "hypnotize." If you look at it from another way, if you put somebody in a brain scanner, you give him a book to read, and you measure brain activity, it doesn't matter what the book is—any reading will generate it—the whole left hemisphere is lit up, and the right hemisphere is relatively dark. If you ask the person to look up from the book and start watching any television program, the left hemisphere goes dark and the right hemisphere lights up. Now, in a world that has one television set for every two people on the planet, how could that not make a profound difference in our culture?

What's happened is that Western culture has been moved for 3,000 years by long, imageless tomes written by esteemed white males.  Augustine, Aquinas, Marx, Hegel, Freud - those are the authors of books that moved our culture. I challenge anybody to name a single book written since the advent of television that has the power to change consciousness as much as images have.

We now live in a culture where we have a virtual archive in our brain of the most important events that have happened in our lifetime. If I mention "little naked girl running down the street with her arms outstretched," I don't have to finish the sentence, because most of your viewers know that I'm talking about that image from the Vietnam War. The image of the atomic bomb did more to change the consciousness of the planet than anything that was written about the atomic bomb. Does anybody doubt that the atomic bomb would have been used if there was only a written description of its effects? I think it was that film clip of the extraordinary power of the bomb, after it had been dropped in Japan, that stayed the hands of people from using it. And ultimately, the image that was even more powerful than that was of the earth beamed back from space in 1968. People seeing this blue marble floating in this dark space were moved by not only the sheer beauty of this image, but the implications of seeing our world as one interconnected whole, instead of some geographical map with artificial lines drawn in.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: I think that we're witnessing—and the reason I think you're able to even make this program now is that we've exited 5,000 years of text-based culture. It's only because we're moving away from text information that we're able to develop some degree of objectivity, to look back at it and begin to assess what exactly the effect was on our human culture, particularly Western culture, because it's primarily in the West that the alphabet has played such an important role. And why is it that Western culture is so different from native, indigenous cultures and Eastern cultures, which haven't used alphabets until recently? I think that McLuhan was absolutely right on the money when he said, "The medium is the message." The process by which we take in information and we put it out is very important.

We know that babies come into the world with all these extra neurons in their brain. It's almost as if evolution said, "Okay, go learn something." So, what is the effect of aiming a machine gun at a child's eye at about age five and firing in a steady stream of numbers and letters, numbers and letters, numbers and letters, for the next twenty years? We know that there's a dying off of neurons that aren't used. So, if you diminish the value of dance, music and art, and focus only on reading, writing and arithmetic—left hemispheric stuff as opposed to right hemispheric stuff—you're going to get a culture that's going to be very left hemispheric—very macho, very yang, very beta-mode—and that will manifest itself in the larger arena of world history.

In the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, I essentially show how these trends in history have played out against the backdrop of whether or not the culture was acquiring alphabet literacy or losing it. And as a result there was this extraordinary number of coincidences that you could say, "Well, maybe they're not causal, they're just coincidences." But they require some explanation.

David Boulton: Right. The ‘coincidences’ are amazing. In Alphabet, Mother of Invention (McLuhan and Logan) and also in The Alphabet Effect (Logan) both of which you took to another level in your book -- I was startled by the historical intersection that was apparent when archaeological linguists traced back the origin of the alphabet to the same tribe the Bible says Moses was living with when he received the Ten Commandments.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Yes. Well, the oldest alphabet ever discovered is called the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and it dates to about 1800 BC, where on a temple dedicated to a goddess they found what looks like the very first beginnings of an alphabet. This was in an area of the Sinai that the Midianites were traveling through, and the Midianites were the family that Moses married into when he ran away from Egypt after killing his overseer.  So I find it an extraordinary coincidence that the most important event memorialized in the Israelite and Hebrew and Jewish religion is the giving of the Ten Commandments that takes place at Mount Sinai.

If you mention the name "Sinai" historically, there's only one event that's associated with it, and that is the giving of the Ten Commandments. I think it's amazing that the oldest alphabet that was ever discovered was in Sinai. So the question is: Was the enormous event that really happened there the invention of the alphabet?  (see Johanna Drucker interview for more)

David Boulton: Yes, it seems like a significant coincidence. Whether the alphabet originated there or not, it’s still significant that the major radiation of the alphabet into the world takes off from there.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Was Moses the first wordsmith? Was the giving of the law in the Ten Commandments really the ability of the first people, the common people, to be able to learn a process of communicating, using twenty-plus little squiggles—squiggles that just stand for sounds and are able to be arranged in such a way to make it very easy to communicate?

David Boulton: Relative to this initial invention, there are a couple of different theories as to the reason it was created, or the background pressure that created it. There's Robin Allott's articulatory theory that says the letters are icons representing side views of facial expressions made when producing their sounds. Such a notation would allow a trader in a bazaar to basically note-take any language and be able to play it back like a transcription system. And then there's Acrophonics, where each letter represent the image of something whose beginning sound shares the same sound as the letter.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Well, it's interesting that it developed in a place somewhere halfway between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Here you had these two very different writing systems: cuneiform, which was this very complicated system of wedge marks; and then hieroglyphics, which is primarily based on images. So, the cuneiform was based on a linear sequence of syllables and hieroglyphics on a icon like images.  All it takes is a pollinator from cross-cultures who sees "these are the advantages of this system, these are the advantages of that system," and then combines the two to make it simple.

Many people think the Phoenicians were the ones who invented the alphabet, because the Phoenicians taught it to the Greeks. But if the Phoenicians invented the alphabet, what did they write in it? I mean, when somebody invents a new form of communication, they leave you a written record.  Was there any books written by Phoenicians? Is there a single anything left that they wrote? Is there anything ancient documents written in Punic, the language of the Phoenicians?  Did they leave any significant documentation in writing?  If they invented something as significant as an alphabet who was their law giver, what major religious reforms did they initiate, what was their artistic contribution?  Compared to Hammurabi, Akhenaten, Moses, Plato, and Sophocles it seems highly improbable that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet and failed to have been transformed as a society by their discovery.

The first book of any consequence written in the alphabet is the Old Testament, 900 BC. And the Iliad follows closely in 800 BC. The Jews and Greeks —Jerusalem and Athens —form the two major currents whose confluence is the basis of Western culture. Our law, morality, philosophy, and our science can be traced back to those two entirely different streams. Yet both societies were firmly rooted in the alphabetic word.

David Boulton: The story of Moses is of somebody learned in the Egyptian system moving on to become a man of significant influence in a Jewish tribe.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Right. What's interesting is that when he leaves Egypt, he travels to a strange land and marries Zipporah who was the daughter of Jethro, a Midianite priest.   The Midianites lived east of the Nile. An intriguing clue is that the Old Testament tells us that  Moses had a speech defect. The Bible tells us, Moses says, "I am not swift of speech." So, we think that he had a stammer or some stutter. When somebody has a speech defect, they're looking for a better way to communicate. And he would be the ideal person to be the one to have first introduced a simpler way to read and write

But you have to understand that there were other people that were experimenting. The Canaanites and the Midianites and others must have been experimenting with ways to simplify cuneiform and hieroglyphics because these older two systems were too complex. I believe it was probably some collaborative organic effort. But it always takes one genius to crystallize an idea, and what better way to inspire people to learn how to read and write this new form of communication than to say that these tablets were originally written by the moving finger of God?

David Boulton: So you're suggesting that the alphabet has had a significant influence on consciousness, on the brain, on the way people think—how we dice up and process reality. And that this is somehow underlying the emergence of a kind of artificial abstraction processing that led to the codification of legal systems, the development of complex, organized civilization systems and so forth and that led to our world today. Can you speak to the relationship between how the alphabet changes the brain and how that relates to the start of these different components of civilization?

Dr. Leonard Shlain: I find it to be an extraordinary coincidence that the concept of a written law, contained in written codes of law, only developed in alphabet nations. The Israelites introduced the Ten Commandments. Aeschylus in his trilogy about the fall of the House of Atreus tells how the Greeks came to be ruled by laws.   Roman common law became the foundation of English common law. leading to the Magna Carta.  The U. S. Constitution and.the Miranda rights have their roots in these traditions.  Egypt and China, both of which made enormous contributions to the storehouse of human civilization, did not use  written codes of law and both empires were based on a non-alphabetic writing system.  When American administrators went into Japan after World War II, they had to help the Japanese write a constitution because the Japanese did not have the concept of a society ruled by law.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Learning how to speak is a skill that, as linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is derived from what he called the  “deep structure” in the brain.  We're born with the ability to pick up any grammar that we first hear. Every child can learn the language of whichever culture they're born into. But no child is born with the ability to learn how to read and write. This is a process that's extraordinarily complicated, and much different than listening and speaking. So, what has to happen is this change over, and the brain has to be reconfigured.

Now, there is a remote fishing village in northern Portugal, where the older generation were non-literate. And then the government opened up public schools, and the younger generation became literate. A group of neuroscientists from Portugal and Sweden did brain scans on the two different groups.. As you would anticipate, the brain scan of somebody who learns literacy is markedly different than the brain scan of somebody who is non-literate, because if you're living in an auditory world as opposed to a visual world, where you're reducing sound to visual marks on a piece of paper, it requires a whole different set of connections.

What most people in the literate world have failed to notice is that you trade an ear for an eye. Vision becomes crucial in reading and writing, as opposed to your ear, which is listening. So as a result, there has to be a shift in the neurocircuitry of the brain. Until recently, no one has examined what effect does this reconfiguration of the brain have on the wider issues of history, culture, religion, and gender relationships. I am convinced that it affects all of them.

David Boulton: I'm going to come back to the neurocircuitry question. It's very important to what we're doing. But before I do I want to go back to explore a couple more historical pieces. There are a number of scholars, McLuhan and his group, David Abram, yourself and others as you indicate in your book, who seem to be saying that the explosion of Western civilization, which we often attribute to the emergence of Greek civilization, is really connected to the alphabet. In the case of the Greeks, it’s almost as if the Phoenicians inseminated them with this viral alphabetic mind germ.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Well, I'm intrigued by the fact that in the English language there are only two common uses of the word "hemisphere." If you're speaking and you want to use the word hemisphere in a sentence, you're either talking about the hemispheres of the planet or the hemispheres of the brain. And isn't it interesting that the planet has two very distinctive cultures, Eastern and Western, and the brain has two functionally lateralized hemispheres, right and left? If you look at these differences, you'll notice that the religion, the art, the language, the writing systems and the kind of philosophy that exists in the East are primarily the kind of thinking processes that go on in the right hemisphere. And the processes that go on in the left hemisphere correlate to all those things that I talked about in Western culture.

So, for example, our religions in the West are all rooted in alphabetic sacred texts, whether it's the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Koran. It's basically, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was of God, and the Word is God." And then in the East you have Lao Tzu  "The way that can be spoken is not the way. He who knows does not speak, and he who speaks does not know." So, it's sort of this intuitive, nonverbal knowledge that the right hemisphere is an expert in, compared to the kind of linear, sequential, black-and-white, written-in-a-book kind of information that the West has. I think the reason that the East and the West developed in such extraordinarily different ways is our writing systems. I mean, if a Chinese ideograph, for example, can have up to eight different concepts within one image, and when you see this image, you see it all at once as a gestalt—if you were to write on a piece of paper all of those images in an alphabetic language, it'd take you pages. You’d have to do it in a linear, sequential fashion.

They did a fascinating study on Chinese-Americans who were born in this country and learned how to speak and write both English and Chinese as small children. Among them, this select group either had a brain tumor, a stroke or some damage to one hemisphere or the other later in their lives. Somebody examined these people, and this was what they found:

If a right-handed Chinese American, who has their speech centers primarily in their left hemisphere, had a stroke in their left hemisphere, they lost the ability to speak English, they lost the ability to speak English, the ability to speak Chinese and couldn't write English; but he could still write Chinese, because Chinese ideographic writing is an image gestalt-based form of writing primarily processed by the right hemisphere.

If, in that same group of people, somebody had a stroke in the right hemisphere, he could speak English and Chinese, he could write English, but he could no longer write Chinese. So it's clear that the writing systems of the world have layered out into different hemispheres. The implications for understanding history and understanding these cultures are profound, because if the brain is actually structured differently, then communication between people of these different cultures is going to be different.

David Boulton: Just as David Abram's suggests when discussing self-reflection and generalization, it seems as if there's a point at which literacy folds back on consciousness and culture — even on the people who don't become literate—because it changes the vocabulary and structures of the oral language used in literate cultures.

Dr. Leonard Shlain: Well, the story in Genesis about the fall is really about our fall into consciousness. You know, we humans developed this ego consciousness that allowed us to come out of nature and look back at nature. We developed this dualistic, objectified reflexivity, so we're able to look back on things. And that was a big plus. But it also meant that we no longer saw ourselves within the matrix of nature. Now, if you add on to that layer learning how to read and write, it creates even another filter—that people become so divorced from nature that they can treat nature as if it were an object.

And our current despoiling of our environment, would be alien to people who are non-literate. I wish to emphasize that I don't want to seem like I am telling people that they shouldn't read and write anymore Reading and writing are incredible skills that give you access to information you wouldn't be able to get any other way. But I think that we in the West, in particular, have been stuck for too long using primarily one hemisphere.