"After poring over more than a century of evidence on progress, cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt observed a fascinating arc. When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines. When people’s skills stalled in tasks ranging from Tetris to golf to memorizing facts, they didn’t usually ascend again until after they had deteriorated. Performance suffers as new methods are being invented, tested, rejected, or accepted. And when we discover a better method, our inexperience with it will usually make us worse at first. Those backsteps aren’t only normal — in many situations they’re necessary if we're going to surpass prior levels of achievement.
In typing, if you hunt and peck, you'll probably level off around 30 to 40 words per minute. No matter how hard you practice, you'll hit that wall. If you want to double your pace to 60 to 70 words a minute, you have to try a new method: typing by touch instead of sight. But before you can speed up, you have to slow down. It takes time to learn the keys by heart. We're often afraid to go backward. We see slowing down as losing ground, backing up as giving up, and rerouting as veering off course. We worry that when we step back, we'll lose our footing altogether. This means we stay exactly where we are - steady but stuck."
Grant noted that learning how to type on a keyboard involves a temporary dip in performance before realizing later gains. But he should try learning how to speak in a new language. This can often involve accepting still deeper levels of temporary discomfort. However, this discomfort may be easier to accept if we recognize that we've reached a plateau with our current language and knowledge base and can't continue to improve if we remain on our current course. There's only one way to improve!
And why not? It's entirely possible after all. Recall that McGilchrist wrote in The Matter with Things, "Experiments performed by Lionel Standing found that recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless. He was referring here to both accuracy and capacity. The unconscious memory can work on shapes, pictures and images, juggling many factors, in very short periods. Standing reckoned that the mind could search over 50,000 pictures in unconscious memory." But there's only 2,136 jōyō kanji (composed of 214 radicals). So this is emminently possible, as long as the discomfort can be endured. And interestingly, pictograms (icons and indexes) are less strongly lateralised to the left hemisphere than phonograms (symbols).
The primary relevance of McGilchrist's thought might be in serving as a bulwark against colonialism, homogenization, and assimilation by an increasingly globalized Western worldview. In short, in the context of a healthy culture, the hemisphere hypothesis can serve as an evidence-based defense for non-Western ways of being, an important part of any cultural "immune system". Cross-cultural studies could help to identify local analogues of the hypothesis, as well as how those analogues might have influenced how people understand themselves, their place in the world, and their future. I recently found a book review of The Matter with Things by Takashi Baba, which is quite good (he notes the Gestalt, Carlo Rovelli, and much more). He wrote:
ヒトの脳の左半球と右半球がそれぞれ固有の性格を持つほどまでに分離し、世界を2つの大きく異なった方法で見ている。近代以降の西洋文明（西洋に限らず先進国共通だと思うが）は左半球に偏った世界観に支配されており、このことが環境破壊、疎外感、極端な立場同士の深刻な対立など現代の文明の危機の根底にある。マギルクリストは2009年出版の「The Master and His Emissary」において、すでにこの説を展開していたが、本書「The Matter with Things」ではこの脳半球に関する仮説をベースに、人間はどのようにして物事を正しく知ることができるのか（哲学の認識論の問題）、さらには、空間、時間、意識、物質など世界の基本的な構成要素の本質にまで深い考察を展開している。… 私たちには世界を直接経験する力があるが、一度に見えるものは部分的でしかありえない。
I can't read that right now. But it's not impossible!
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