Shrink Wrap Radio #340 (March 1, 2013) – Brain Lateralization and Western Culture:

I was talking in Canada recently and a woman came up to the microphone when I had finished speaking and said “I teach 5-7 year olds and my colleagues and I have realized that in last few years - but only in the last few years - we actually have to teach children how to read the human face.” Now I don’t know how that hits you, but that seems pretty much a terrible thing for humanity if that’s the case. Until recently only autistic children would have to be taught how to read the human face. And if you put that together with other things I’ve heard from many people; teachers saying “In the last few years people were not able to do things that, until recently, all my class could do” - often sustaining attention, and other evidence that children are less empathic nowadays. Now there are three things that the right hemisphere, compared with the left, is particularly good at: reading human faces, empathizing, and sustaining attention. So it looks like it’s literally true - which is what I’m saying - that we’re actually shifting away from understanding what our right hemispheres would tell us, into a prison constructed by the way the left hemisphere looks at the world.