Feldenkrais, Iain McGilchrist, and Using the Right Side of our Brain

We've all heard the old pop-psych myth that the left side of the brain handles logic and math while the right side handles emotion and art. Now, based on an enormous amount of research, Iain McGilchrist a British psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer, clarifies and vastly enriches this idea.

McGilchrist debunks the theory that the two hemispheres simply divide up tasks. Instead, he has proven that both sides of the brain are involved in almost every task, but the difference is in the type of attention each side brings. The left side reads the world with logical, decontextualized, analytical attention - the language of math and science, accounting, and hard "facts". The right brain is more big-picture, intuitive, embodied, tuned into relationships and what's living and changing.

Take Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That's left brain list — useful, reduced, enumerated, but virtually irrelevant you have a sobbing, grieving person in front of you.

Our right brain, on the other hand, would be good at comforting this person in the moment: reading their face, sensing whether they need a cup of tea or a hand to hold.

Here's how it works best: the right brain reads the big picture, the left brain brings in appropriate "facts", and the right brain intuits how they are applicable in the big picture, and so on. (All the most successful scientists work with a good dollop of right brain intuition, by the way.)

So what does Feldenkrais have to do with the right side of our brain?

McGilchrist's research shows that modern life has been increasing dominated by left brain ways of thinking — mechanistic, analytical, reductive, bureaucratic. And that the apotheosis of this is AI.

Today, we're awash in decontextualized information and and fast becoming increasingly blind to anything implicit, embodied or felt. And this left brain dominant trajectory is accelerating at machine speed and on a global scale.

It's not that AI, or analytic and reductive ways of thinking, are inherently "bad". Enumerating 5 Stages of Grief is enormously useful, but only if we understand how to use it in a right brain felt and embodied context.

The trouble is that this is all happening so fast, and we are so used to understanding this strong left brain bias as the way the world "is", that aside from a vague cultural anxiety about AI, we don't know what to do about it.

Which is where Feldenkrais comes in.

How a Feldenkrais Lesson Retrains Right-Hemisphere Attention

Of course, you can't do "reps" to strengthen your right hemisphere the way you'd train a muscle. But you can shift which mode of attention dominates your life — and Feldenkrais is built for exactly that.

A Feldenkrais lesson asks you to move slowly, in small increments, often through sequences you've never consciously done before — a hand tracing an odd path, weight shifting in a way you wouldn't normally notice. Because the movement is unfamiliar, you can't run it on autopilot. You're pulled back into the kind of fresh, present, exploratory attention the right hemisphere specializes in — attending to something new, rather than something already filed away.

The quality of attention matters as much as the movement itself. Feldenkrais explicitly discourages effort, forcing, or "getting it right." There's no single correct answer, only exploration of what's possible and what feels different. That's a receptive mode of attention rather than a grasping one — sensing and noticing, rather than manipulating your way toward a predetermined outcome. McGilchrist draws exactly this contrast: the right hemisphere's receptive, "letting be" mode versus the left hemisphere's grasping, goal-driven one. Feldenkrais trains the former.

It also works through relationship and context rather than isolated parts. A classic Feldenkrais lesson has you notice how moving one part of the body — an eye, a foot — changes sensation somewhere else entirely: the pelvis, the breath, the spine. That's training you to feel the whole in relation to itself, which is close to what McGilchrist means by right-hemisphere awareness of context and interconnection — as opposed to the left hemisphere's habit of isolating parts and treating them separately, the way conventional medicine often treats a single joint or symptom in isolation from the person as a whole.

And because Feldenkrais works through interoception — sensing from inside the body, rather than thinking about the body from the outside — it engages exactly the embodied, felt, nonverbal register McGilchrist assigns to the right hemisphere, rather than the left hemisphere's preference for abstract, symbolic representation of the body: diagrams, instructions, "correct form."

The Feldenkrais Right Brain Takeaway

None of this is mystical. Slow, novel, effortless, exploratory, whole-body, sensation-based movement is close to a direct behavioral recipe for the conditions McGilchrist says favor right-hemisphere engagement. Practiced regularly, it not only starts to counteract a life otherwise spent in narrow, automatic, goal-driven, verbally mediated attention that is characteristic of our left brain, but it gives us the the felt sense of the bigger picture and of what matters and what doesn't, when we need the AI and when we don't, which, in our fast-changing world, is worth practicing more than ever.

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