The Cult of Meaning-Making: When Thinking Hijacks Feeling

In our fast-paced culture, thinking is often elevated as the highest human function—our prized problem-solver, meaning-maker, and escape hatch. But thinking, as necessary as it is, can become a trap. Especially when it overrides our capacity to feel.

Neuroscience tells us that emotions come first. Literally. We feel before we think. Research by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (2012) demonstrates that emotional experience arises from deep subcortical structures in the brain—what they call the “core self”—before the neocortex (the seat of conscious thought) even gets involved.

Yet when we feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, or dysregulated, we often reach for thinking as a shield. We lean into analysis, planning, interpreting—often without realizing we're doing it to avoid the raw intensity of emotion. This pattern shows up neurologically in the dominance of the left prefrontal cortex—what psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (2010) describes as the left hemisphere’s narrow, detail-focused grasp on the world.

McGilchrist’s work reveals that the left hemisphere, especially the top-left-frontal region, tends to "make meaning" even when it lacks full data. It creates interpretations to soothe uncertainty—even if the result is distorted, fragmented, or, frankly, wrong. It favors coherence over truth. It would rather invent an answer than admit it doesn't know.

And here’s the rub: the left brain doesn’t have direct access to the richness of lived experience. It depends on the right hemisphere—our embodied, relational, and emotionally attuned brain—for that. The left side is secondary. A translator. A map-maker, not a navigator. As McGilchrist puts it, “The right hemisphere sees the whole, the left sees the parts and confuses the map for the territory” (McGilchrist, 2010).

The danger is cultural as well as personal. A society dominated by left-brain modes of thought can become obsessed with control, explanation, and certainty. Feeling is dismissed as irrational. Intuition is sidelined. Opinion replaces embodied knowing. As a result, we become more reactive, less reflective—and more cut off from ourselves.

But there’s another way.

Like many in the fields of affective neuroscience and psychotherapy, I invite a return to the wisdom of the body. As developmental neuropsychologist Allan Schore (2012) suggests, we can "shift down and to the right"—from the high-speed highways of left-brain cognition to the slower, more relational terrain of the right hemisphere and subcortical brain.

This shift asks us to pause. To feel. To listen to our body’s signals—its tension, breath, heart rate, gut response—before rushing to interpret or explain. It’s in this space, Schore says, that self-regulation becomes possible. And once we’re regulated, the deeper wisdom stored in our emotional and somatic systems begins to rise.

Our nervous systems are not just reactive—they're adaptive. But they need time. Time to feel before we think. Time to notice before we narrate. Time to allow the truth of our experience to emerge from the inside out—not be forced from the top down.

So let’s resist the cult of premature meaning-making. Let’s be willing to not know for a little while longer. In that not-knowing, something truer may take shape.

References

• Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. W. W. Norton & Company.

• McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

• Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.