Neurological Notes: The Alphabet Changed the Sex of God

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SOPHOCLES ONCE warned, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.' The invention of literacy was certainly vast. So what was its curse? In The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, I propose that the process of learning alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain, with profound consequences for culture. As a surgeon operating on carotid arteries carrying blood to the brain, I have long been intrigued by the very different functions performed by the two hemispheres. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" provides the book's leitmotif. McLuhan proposed that the method by which we perceive information is actually more important than …