Iain McGilchrist
- Country : United Kingdom
- Profession :writer, lecturer
- DOB: 1953-08-20
Iain McGilchrist, born in 1953, is a psychiatrist, author, and former Oxford literary scholar. Renowned for his groundbreaking work “The Master and His Emissary,” McGilchrist delves into the human brain’s hemispheric differences and their impact on culture, art, and society. Educated at Oxford and London, his interdisciplinary approach merges neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. McGilchrist’s exploration of the brain’s hemispheric functions has garnered acclaim for its profound implications on understanding human behavior and cognition. With lectures worldwide and influential writings, he remains a significant voice at the intersection of science, culture, and the mind.
“David Levin, ‘prefers the distance of vision … even when it means dehumanisation’.149 But in this he was pursuing the belief that acknowledging our relationship with the world will make it obtrude. In reality it obtrudes more when not acknowledged. The baggage gets on board, as Dennett puts it, without being inspected. In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.150”
Author: Iain McGilchrist“And that means that we should be appropriately sceptical of the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value. This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.”
Author: Iain McGilchristThinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought … I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context … neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”
Author: Iain McGilchristSkills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture. The atomistic nature of our individuality is made clear in Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek ambition for us each to be ‘famous for fifteen minutes’. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of seeing great art as an indication of what humanity can achieve, it comes to be seen as an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and”
Author: Iain McGilchristIf the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and not later resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Hölderlin’s lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’).”
Author: Iain McGilchristSo the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.
Author: Iain McGilchristOur talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can’t, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”
Author: Iain McGilchristNone of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.
The word ‘true’ suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be ‘true.’ It is related to ‘trust,’ and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one’s trust. Such a situation is not an absolute – it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith and it involves being faithful to one’s intentions.
The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Author: Iain McGilchristThrough these assaults of the left hemisphere on the body, spirituality and art, essentially mocking, discounting or dismantling what it does not understand and cannot use, we are at risk of becoming trapped in the I–it world, with all the exits through which we might rediscover the I–thou world being progressively blocked off.
Author: Iain McGilchristThere are, it seems to me, four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination. I also believe strongly that any world view that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail. Each on its own has its virtues and its vices, its gifts and its inherent dangers: only by respecting each and all together can we learn to act wisely
Author: Iain McGilchristNietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler’.
Author: Iain McGilchristWe cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.”
Author: Iain McGilchristThese are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.
Author: Iain McGilchristMy thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“First, the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’.”
Author: Iain McGilchristIf a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise.
Author: Iain McGilchristThe cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it.
Author: Iain McGilchristWhen it is presented with evidence that what it is doing is not working, its invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it: because that’s what its theory dictates, and for the left hemisphere theory trumps reality.
Author: Iain McGilchristThrough the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world.
Author: Iain McGilchristThe right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know – only release something in us that is already there.”
Author: Iain McGilchristWhere the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out – just that. Without purpose.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ’we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’13 We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.”
Author: Iain McGilchristThere are, it seems to me, four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination.
Author: Iain McGilchristThe kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist.
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Ever more narrowly focussed attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information, and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience. Knowledge, in its turn, would seem more ‘real’ than what one might call wisdom, which would seem too nebulous, something never to be grasped.”
Author: Iain McGilchrist“An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”
Author: Iain McGilchrist“Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.”
Author: Iain McGilchristOf course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.
Author: Iain McGilchristMusic – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time.
Author: Iain McGilchristThere is always a model by which we are understanding, an exemplar with which we are comparing, what we see, and where it is not identified it usually means that we have tacitly adopted the model of the machine.
Author: Iain McGilchristIf language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’377.
Author: Iain McGilchristWhat is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
Author: Iain McGilchristSo thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.
Author: Iain McGilchristWe bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.
Author: Iain McGilchristOver recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.
Author: Iain McGilchrist