Does Iain McGlichrists's work on the brain's hemispheres explain why the Scientific Revolution didn't happen first in China? A guest post by Heidi Berg
"the essential problem [is] why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilization but only in Europe."
I honestly don't buy neuroscience-based explanations, unfortunately. To make them stick, you have to assume people are inherently different. Given China's transcendence in science at the moment, while the US is busy immolating its own scientific infrastructure, adds strong support to the notion that there's no difference between Chinese and Americans en masse, but that politics plays a critical role.
But there is a deeper question: why wasn't there a Song industrial revolution, or a Ming industrial revolution? Why did western Europe only surpass China around 1800? An abstract "dictatorial politics" only goes so far, because Europe was full of kings and emperors too. By 1800 though, Europe had a critical advantage: not manpower, but all the resources being looted from the New World. China could, I suppose, have looted...Australia, but that wouldn't have added noticeably to manpower, new crops, precious metals, plantation land, slaves, or all the rest.
Why didn't China didn't reach the Americas before the Europeans? Basically it's because it's really hard to sail east across the Pacific, but really easy to sail west. Yes, the Polynesians made it to South America, but it took them about 1,000 years of settling really tiny islands to do so. The first Europeans sailing out into the Pacific got a cheat from the trade winds that took them to Asia. It took them awhile to figure out how to get back, along with a safe port (Acapulco) for the Manila galleons. So Chinese explorers would have had to spend decades figuring out how to get across the Pacific with no evidence that there was anything out there worth the trouble. Columbus, at least, knew east Asia existed.
But that's not all of it. Why no Song or Ming industrial revolution with indigenous Chinese resources. It certainly looks like China had, within its borders, all the resources for an industrial revolution. Why didn't they? I'd suggest that China has two or three sorts of nomad problems. One is that both the Song and the Ming dynasties fell to nomads coming in off the steppes. That's not a problem WESTERN Europe ever faced, although EASTERN Europe and Russia certainly suffered enormously with nomad invasions. As the US is learning now, hostile takeovers by nomadic overlords with some technological superiority doesn't seem to be good for an innovation economy.
The second nomadic problem for China is that malcontents and innovators, such as the fabled Taoist sages who created gunpowder, had mountains they could disappear into, something Europe didn't have. These include, of course, the eastern Himalaya, Kunlun Mountains, and all of montane southeast Asia, as detailed in Scott's *The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia*. Basically, people who wanted to get away from China imperial politics at any level could go out onto the steppes and join the nomads, go north into the taiga (a few did) to hunt ginseng and tigers, go south and west and end up in the mountains as hermits or "barbarian tribal folk", or go south on the coast and end up in southeast Asia as merchantss. And if they left, the Chinese had little luck getting them back.
Having the world's most rugged mountains, greatest plain, and biggest forest to escape into was a release valve that western Europe simply didn't have. The problem was that Chinese expats often couldn't take their lab with them. If they headed for the mountains, it was for a life as a subsistence farmer or hermit. This might have favored the development of body and mind skills, because they required little equipment.
Fortunately for some crazy geniuses, western Europe was full of little kingdoms fighting each other, so a scientist or artist could quite conceivably find refuge in another country if they became unpopular, and with some luck, they might be able to continue their projects in a place more favorable to them. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, they had fewer places to go and be free, but they also had the ability to take (or reconstruct) scientific labs, artists' studios, or workshops in their new homes.
Perhaps this answers Needham's question a little?
So I'd suggest that geography played a role. People could leave China
McGilchrist in fact references Stephen Gaukroger who thinks one should turn the Needham Question around: Not focus on why the scientific revolution did NOT happen in China - but why it DID happen in Europe. He refers to Gaukrogers book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 on this (which I have not read myself yet).
For neuroscience, there is an increasing body of work available on studies of brain activity of both "westerners" and Chinese - and comparisons. I have seen some that do indicate different patterns of activation of the two hemispheres and plan to write a follow up based on this.
Surly the development of science and technology will also have been impacted by a host of factors, including geography as you point to.
The thing to be careful about with neuroscience is that there are eight billion people in the world. We're a diverse group. The question therefore becomes, who is "Chinese," who is "Western," how many were sampled, how was the sampling done, what is the range of variation relative to the means (or other stats) and critically, do the patterns have any relevance to the question at hand?
Then you have to test the default hypothesis, which is that "Chinese" and "Westerners" have no differences in aggregate with regards to the ranges of abilities. Basically this means that both groups occasionally produce weird geniuses (who, importantly, are NOT AVERAGE PEOPLE, so you have to look at range of variation, not just summary stats). If this is the case, can the patterns you're seeing be explained by opportunity, chance, or something else, not inherent biological differences?
I'm pretty sure it's the former.
The quotes are there are problems defining the populations. Does "Chinese" mean Han, or citizen of China? Within China, when minority groups were/are being persecuted, those who can claim to be Han often emphasize that they are Han. When there's an advantage to being part of a minority group like the Miao, as under China's One Child policy, suddenly those same people may identify as minority. Saying "Chinese think differently" thus becomes a political question, even before one factors in the small problem that diet and upbringing necessarily affect brain physical structure.
Similarly, "westerner" gets quotes because white supremacy is a HUGE problem, both politically and scientifically, and you have to be very thoughtful about whether westerner has a definition that is inherently racist and political. Scientific racism has a really nasty history that goes back to the start of colonialist exploitation. Who gets to be "western" for this study? Are they white, and if so, how is that assessed? Does "one drop of blood" disqualify them? And so forth. "White" gets interesting, when you realize that "swarthy Mediterraneans," meaning people whose ancestors were in the Muslim Caliphate, Roman Empire, Greek democracies, and so forth--the people who invented western civilization, in other words--were considered to be inferior races a century ago.
Einstein expressed concern for all the geniuses who died, not even knowing that they were talented. Decades ago, Wired even documented someone like that. She is (was) a girl growing up in extreme poverty in Tijuana, and she ended up taking second place in Mexico's national student math exams. By sheer chance, she'd ended up in an experimental education program, where her talents were spotted and nurtured by a teacher. Prior to that, she'd been an indifferent math student, because the rudimentary teaching available in her slum bored her silly. That's the kind of thing we're likely arguing about here: where did a critical mass of oddly gifted people get to express talents that normally were left undeveloped?
I don't know if this is addressed in the book, but the differences between Western and Asian languages may play a role in all this. I tried to learn Mandarin a few years ago, worked on it for about a year and managed to get through level 1 of HSK. Early on I had the distinct feeling that I was using different parts of my brain than when learning European languages. Lo and behold there is some research that confirms this. https://theconversation.com/if-you-speak-mandarin-your-brain-is-different-37993 There is definitely more right brain activity involved in speaking and writing Mandarin compared to English. Of course it is more complex than a simple left brain/right brain dichotomy, but the differences appear to be real, and the neuroscience approach does appear to have some merit. China has by necessity adopted Western science and technology pretty recently in historical terms, and it will be quite interesting to see how this plays out and develops over time as different ways of thinking blend and where it will all lead.
I indeed had the same feeling when I started learning Chinese! "People with Chinese as main written language" might be a good way of defining who are Chinese, as Frank L above points to as a necessity.
Thanks for the nudge Heidi to finally read McGilchrist’s book – considered it after Sam Harris spoke with him a few year ago on his Making Sense podcast. I can appreciate why you tried to leverage The Master and His Emissary as a possible answer to the Needham Question. For that matter, Frank’s responses offer a thoughtful counter perspective. I would add that your post seems to accurately capture McGilchrist's basic distinction between the left hemisphere's preference for abstraction and reductionist thinking, and the right’s more holistic and pragmatic orientation.
Somewhat ironically, you posted on Sinica so it seems appropriate to point out that Kaiser and Yasheng Huang unpacked the Needham Question a year or two ago in their discussion of his book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST. Among other things, interesting points about Huang’s data showing China’s technological decline beginning after the Sui Dynasty (6th century CE) which is much earlier than the 16th to 17th centuries usually described.
Perhaps another useful application of McGilchrist's book, especially given your cross-cultural business development and tech interests, could be directing it towards the kind of topics at events like the World AI Conference (WAIC 2025) which just ended in Shanghai as you’re probably aware. I mention this because near the end of your post you ask: ‘Maybe a culture where the right hemisphere stands stronger is better positioned to work alongside the left hemisphere-based AI?’
Whether that’s the right question to ask given the nuanced arguments of The Master and His Emissary is not so much the point, rather, it’s your post’s last line: ‘one might well consider adding some neuroscience to the agenda.’ It brings to mind the WAIC 2025 conference topics – the ‘agenda’ so to speak, was extensive, and McGilchrist’s ideas might be challenging to apply but certainly relevant neuroscience.
For instance, his notions on the brain's two modes of attention could speak to conference topics such as the development of ‘Embodied intelligence’ or ‘AI-powered BCI technologies’ by encouraging these advancements to foster a more holistic and integrated human experience. Easier said than done no doubt. Still, another example channeling more of your ideas might be questions like: Do you think AI developed primarily in the West reflects values or assumptions different from those here in China? How might those differences manifest themselves practically?
Just a few thoughts Heidi – appreciate the post, and look forward to your next.
It’s an expensive academic book, but its thesis appears to be that data, science, resources, and taxes provided to Britain by the East India Company helped fuel the 19th century scientific revolution in Britain. If this is correct, the answer to Needham’s question may be that China never colonized India, and that made all the difference…
"the essential problem [is] why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilization but only in Europe."
I honestly don't buy neuroscience-based explanations, unfortunately. To make them stick, you have to assume people are inherently different. Given China's transcendence in science at the moment, while the US is busy immolating its own scientific infrastructure, adds strong support to the notion that there's no difference between Chinese and Americans en masse, but that politics plays a critical role.
But there is a deeper question: why wasn't there a Song industrial revolution, or a Ming industrial revolution? Why did western Europe only surpass China around 1800? An abstract "dictatorial politics" only goes so far, because Europe was full of kings and emperors too. By 1800 though, Europe had a critical advantage: not manpower, but all the resources being looted from the New World. China could, I suppose, have looted...Australia, but that wouldn't have added noticeably to manpower, new crops, precious metals, plantation land, slaves, or all the rest.
Why didn't China didn't reach the Americas before the Europeans? Basically it's because it's really hard to sail east across the Pacific, but really easy to sail west. Yes, the Polynesians made it to South America, but it took them about 1,000 years of settling really tiny islands to do so. The first Europeans sailing out into the Pacific got a cheat from the trade winds that took them to Asia. It took them awhile to figure out how to get back, along with a safe port (Acapulco) for the Manila galleons. So Chinese explorers would have had to spend decades figuring out how to get across the Pacific with no evidence that there was anything out there worth the trouble. Columbus, at least, knew east Asia existed.
But that's not all of it. Why no Song or Ming industrial revolution with indigenous Chinese resources. It certainly looks like China had, within its borders, all the resources for an industrial revolution. Why didn't they? I'd suggest that China has two or three sorts of nomad problems. One is that both the Song and the Ming dynasties fell to nomads coming in off the steppes. That's not a problem WESTERN Europe ever faced, although EASTERN Europe and Russia certainly suffered enormously with nomad invasions. As the US is learning now, hostile takeovers by nomadic overlords with some technological superiority doesn't seem to be good for an innovation economy.
The second nomadic problem for China is that malcontents and innovators, such as the fabled Taoist sages who created gunpowder, had mountains they could disappear into, something Europe didn't have. These include, of course, the eastern Himalaya, Kunlun Mountains, and all of montane southeast Asia, as detailed in Scott's *The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia*. Basically, people who wanted to get away from China imperial politics at any level could go out onto the steppes and join the nomads, go north into the taiga (a few did) to hunt ginseng and tigers, go south and west and end up in the mountains as hermits or "barbarian tribal folk", or go south on the coast and end up in southeast Asia as merchantss. And if they left, the Chinese had little luck getting them back.
Having the world's most rugged mountains, greatest plain, and biggest forest to escape into was a release valve that western Europe simply didn't have. The problem was that Chinese expats often couldn't take their lab with them. If they headed for the mountains, it was for a life as a subsistence farmer or hermit. This might have favored the development of body and mind skills, because they required little equipment.
Fortunately for some crazy geniuses, western Europe was full of little kingdoms fighting each other, so a scientist or artist could quite conceivably find refuge in another country if they became unpopular, and with some luck, they might be able to continue their projects in a place more favorable to them. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, they had fewer places to go and be free, but they also had the ability to take (or reconstruct) scientific labs, artists' studios, or workshops in their new homes.
Perhaps this answers Needham's question a little?
So I'd suggest that geography played a role. People could leave China
McGilchrist in fact references Stephen Gaukroger who thinks one should turn the Needham Question around: Not focus on why the scientific revolution did NOT happen in China - but why it DID happen in Europe. He refers to Gaukrogers book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 on this (which I have not read myself yet).
For neuroscience, there is an increasing body of work available on studies of brain activity of both "westerners" and Chinese - and comparisons. I have seen some that do indicate different patterns of activation of the two hemispheres and plan to write a follow up based on this.
Surly the development of science and technology will also have been impacted by a host of factors, including geography as you point to.
The thing to be careful about with neuroscience is that there are eight billion people in the world. We're a diverse group. The question therefore becomes, who is "Chinese," who is "Western," how many were sampled, how was the sampling done, what is the range of variation relative to the means (or other stats) and critically, do the patterns have any relevance to the question at hand?
Then you have to test the default hypothesis, which is that "Chinese" and "Westerners" have no differences in aggregate with regards to the ranges of abilities. Basically this means that both groups occasionally produce weird geniuses (who, importantly, are NOT AVERAGE PEOPLE, so you have to look at range of variation, not just summary stats). If this is the case, can the patterns you're seeing be explained by opportunity, chance, or something else, not inherent biological differences?
I'm pretty sure it's the former.
The quotes are there are problems defining the populations. Does "Chinese" mean Han, or citizen of China? Within China, when minority groups were/are being persecuted, those who can claim to be Han often emphasize that they are Han. When there's an advantage to being part of a minority group like the Miao, as under China's One Child policy, suddenly those same people may identify as minority. Saying "Chinese think differently" thus becomes a political question, even before one factors in the small problem that diet and upbringing necessarily affect brain physical structure.
Similarly, "westerner" gets quotes because white supremacy is a HUGE problem, both politically and scientifically, and you have to be very thoughtful about whether westerner has a definition that is inherently racist and political. Scientific racism has a really nasty history that goes back to the start of colonialist exploitation. Who gets to be "western" for this study? Are they white, and if so, how is that assessed? Does "one drop of blood" disqualify them? And so forth. "White" gets interesting, when you realize that "swarthy Mediterraneans," meaning people whose ancestors were in the Muslim Caliphate, Roman Empire, Greek democracies, and so forth--the people who invented western civilization, in other words--were considered to be inferior races a century ago.
Einstein expressed concern for all the geniuses who died, not even knowing that they were talented. Decades ago, Wired even documented someone like that. She is (was) a girl growing up in extreme poverty in Tijuana, and she ended up taking second place in Mexico's national student math exams. By sheer chance, she'd ended up in an experimental education program, where her talents were spotted and nurtured by a teacher. Prior to that, she'd been an indifferent math student, because the rudimentary teaching available in her slum bored her silly. That's the kind of thing we're likely arguing about here: where did a critical mass of oddly gifted people get to express talents that normally were left undeveloped?
I don't know if this is addressed in the book, but the differences between Western and Asian languages may play a role in all this. I tried to learn Mandarin a few years ago, worked on it for about a year and managed to get through level 1 of HSK. Early on I had the distinct feeling that I was using different parts of my brain than when learning European languages. Lo and behold there is some research that confirms this. https://theconversation.com/if-you-speak-mandarin-your-brain-is-different-37993 There is definitely more right brain activity involved in speaking and writing Mandarin compared to English. Of course it is more complex than a simple left brain/right brain dichotomy, but the differences appear to be real, and the neuroscience approach does appear to have some merit. China has by necessity adopted Western science and technology pretty recently in historical terms, and it will be quite interesting to see how this plays out and develops over time as different ways of thinking blend and where it will all lead.
I indeed had the same feeling when I started learning Chinese! "People with Chinese as main written language" might be a good way of defining who are Chinese, as Frank L above points to as a necessity.
Thanks for the nudge Heidi to finally read McGilchrist’s book – considered it after Sam Harris spoke with him a few year ago on his Making Sense podcast. I can appreciate why you tried to leverage The Master and His Emissary as a possible answer to the Needham Question. For that matter, Frank’s responses offer a thoughtful counter perspective. I would add that your post seems to accurately capture McGilchrist's basic distinction between the left hemisphere's preference for abstraction and reductionist thinking, and the right’s more holistic and pragmatic orientation.
Somewhat ironically, you posted on Sinica so it seems appropriate to point out that Kaiser and Yasheng Huang unpacked the Needham Question a year or two ago in their discussion of his book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST. Among other things, interesting points about Huang’s data showing China’s technological decline beginning after the Sui Dynasty (6th century CE) which is much earlier than the 16th to 17th centuries usually described.
Perhaps another useful application of McGilchrist's book, especially given your cross-cultural business development and tech interests, could be directing it towards the kind of topics at events like the World AI Conference (WAIC 2025) which just ended in Shanghai as you’re probably aware. I mention this because near the end of your post you ask: ‘Maybe a culture where the right hemisphere stands stronger is better positioned to work alongside the left hemisphere-based AI?’
Whether that’s the right question to ask given the nuanced arguments of The Master and His Emissary is not so much the point, rather, it’s your post’s last line: ‘one might well consider adding some neuroscience to the agenda.’ It brings to mind the WAIC 2025 conference topics – the ‘agenda’ so to speak, was extensive, and McGilchrist’s ideas might be challenging to apply but certainly relevant neuroscience.
For instance, his notions on the brain's two modes of attention could speak to conference topics such as the development of ‘Embodied intelligence’ or ‘AI-powered BCI technologies’ by encouraging these advancements to foster a more holistic and integrated human experience. Easier said than done no doubt. Still, another example channeling more of your ideas might be questions like: Do you think AI developed primarily in the West reflects values or assumptions different from those here in China? How might those differences manifest themselves practically?
Just a few thoughts Heidi – appreciate the post, and look forward to your next.
Apologies for adding another comment to this post. I just wanted to point to another book published this year that provides yet another take: https://www.scribd.com/document/876058883/Monopolizing-Knowledge-The-East-India-Company-and-Britain-s-Second-Scientific-Revolution-Jessica-Ratcliff-Cambridge-University-Press-2025
It’s an expensive academic book, but its thesis appears to be that data, science, resources, and taxes provided to Britain by the East India Company helped fuel the 19th century scientific revolution in Britain. If this is correct, the answer to Needham’s question may be that China never colonized India, and that made all the difference…