Stereo perception: an essential life force

Seeing with two eyes imparts depth to our vision. Hearing with two ears imparts depth to our hearing. The slightly different positions of the pair of eyes and the pair of ears from each other gives each ear and each eye a unique perspective that combines with its mate.

Mated but unique pairs provide a fulness to perception, both visual and aural. With it, we can locate the object or sound in relation to ourselves. Without it, we’re missing the essential triangulation that is essential for precise location. With it, we have higher success rates in our hunting; without it, lower success.

Yes. But so what? It’s just the most obvious analog of a principle that extends everywhere in life and relationship. Culture is based on this principle. Its negation is this: uniformity is sterile. One version of the principle is this: higher forms of life require at least bi- or multi-form expressions. It takes two to tango. It takes two (at least) to negotiate. It takes two (at least) to have a conversation.

A conversation is a metaphor for community and culture. 100% agreement quenches a conversation; there’s nothing to talk about. Zero percent agreement does the same. What’s necessary is enough agreement to have a foundation that hints at a common vision, but enough disagreement to bring energy for refining the goal and maybe accomplishing more than what either or both parties started with. Conversations always include ‘what ifs’, both positive and negative. The positives spring from ideas that come up to creatively expand the simpler starting point. The negatives anticipate challenges or problems that the original hadn’t considered, and should for sustainability and effectiveness.

This creative tension isn’t only external. The brain is another example of duality that is essential for higher levels of success. Our brains have right and left hemispheres, and they are different in essence to accomplish the same benefits that our two eyes and two ears provide: a unique perspective from a mated pair that gives stereo perception. Without their diverse points of view, we couldn’t have the richness of experience and understanding that is available to us.

Do we need to understand the differences to enjoy their benefits? No. But that doesn’t stop us from investigating and enriching our understandings. In the most simplistic analysis, the right brain is emotive and the left brain is logical. However, the author Iain McGilchrist asserts in his book The Master and His Emissary that the two hemispheres “pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. These two modes of perception cascade into wildly different hemispheric personalities, and in fact reflect yet a further asymmetry in their status, that of the right's more immediate relationship with physical bodies (our own as well as others’) and external reality as represented by the senses, a relationship that makes it the mediator, the first and last stop, of all experience.”

Where do we go with this information? It is all a conversation, both internal and external. Without the dialectic, we have the sterility that ideological echo chambers foster. Such unanimity triggers hostility toward any other interpretations of reality that are contrary to it because the absence of tension is intolerable. Some conflict is essential for life.