Two Modes
of Attention
You've probably met the old “left-brain / right-brain” quiz — the one that sorts you into a logical type or a creative type. It's a myth. Both hemispheres are active in nearly everything you do, and no one is run by half a brain.
But the hemispheres are genuinely different — not so much in what they do as in how they attend to the world. That real difference, drawn from Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary and the neuroscience behind it, is what this inventory explores.
Seven short clusters, four questions each. After every cluster you'll see where your answers leaned — and a short explanation of the mode of attention it points to. By the end you'll have a mosaic, not a verdict: a picture of the different ways you meet the world.
Each row is a different mode of attention. Notice that you almost certainly sit at different points on different rows — that mixture is the finding. You are not one hemisphere.
McGilchrist borrows an old parable. A wise Master ruled a flourishing domain. As it grew, he trained a gifted Emissary to go out and handle the details he couldn't attend to himself. But the Emissary, clever and ambitious, mistook the Master's restraint for weakness — and came to believe that he was the master. The domain fell into ruin.
The Master is the right hemisphere's broad, living, relational attention; the Emissary is the left's brilliant, narrow, map-making grasp. We need the Emissary. McGilchrist's worry is only that, in us and in our culture, the Emissary increasingly forgets whom he serves.
A caution worth keeping: this is a portrait of preferences, not capacities. It says nothing about intelligence, worth, or your ability to care, connect, or reason — all of which draw on the whole brain. Even McGilchrist rejects the idea of a “right-hemisphere” or “left-hemisphere” person.
A question to sit with: where on your mosaic were you surprised — and is there a mode you've let the other one crowd out?
A plain-text version of your results — scores for each area, your overall lean, and a short reflection. Copy it, or download it as a text file.
