Essential McLuhan 364 sequence, stimulates dominance of this area of the brain in cultural patterns. Luria’s observations provide an understanding of how the written alphabet, with its lineal structure, was able to create conditions conducive to the development of Western science, technology, and rationality. Many left-hemisphere stroke patients become aphasic, losing some or all of their ability to speak or to write, in some cases also losing the capacity for sustained (sequential) thought. They seem to become “astonied” (fifteenth-century English), or “stunned”—the experience is not unlike being “stoned” on drugs. In part, this may be the result of a loss of muscular motor control. But much of it is directly related to the inner- outer split between the hemispheres and to linearity as a feature of the left side of the brain. Speech and writing have to be uttered in a sequence. Just as all forms of sequential activity (as contrasted to configuration or pattern) are functions of the left hemisphere, so too all forms of utterances (and artefacts), whether technological or verbal or written, are functions of the left hemisphere. This extends to private identity—and to entrepreneurial aggression of all kinds. Conversely, all technologies that emphasize the outer or the abstract or sequentiality in organizing experience, contribute to left-hemisphere dominance in a culture. Harold Innis remarked on the Oriental (right-hemisphere) antipathy to sequence and abstraction and our sort of precision: Social time, for example, has been described as qualitatively differentiated according to the beliefs and customs common to a group and as not continuous but as subject to interruption of actual dates. It is influenced by language which constrains and fixes prevalent concepts and modes of thought. It has been argued by Marcel Granet that the Chinese are not equipped to note concepts or to present doctrines discursively. The Word does not fix a notion with a definite degree of abstraction or generality but evokes an indefinite complex of particular images. It is completely unsuited to formal precision. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived: time proceeds by cycles and is round. (The Bias of Communication, 62) Dr. Bogen noted, appositely, “what may well be the most important distinction between the left and right hemisphere modes is the extent to which a linear concept of time participates in the ordering of thought” (The Human Brain, 141). The visual power of the phonetic alphabet to translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right-hemisphere (oral) cultures.