Iain McGilchrist
About
Author of The Master and His Emissary
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Claims by Iain McGilchrist (20 of 25)
Brain Is Not a Machine or Computer
The brain is nothing like a computer or any kind of mechanism; treating ourselves and the world as machines is scientifically inaccurate and socially, psychologically, and emotionally destructive, leading us to false beliefs about our duties to the planet and to one another, so we must stop thinking of ourselves and the world as machines.
Mistaking the Model for Reality
A huge problem in science and economics is confusing reality with the model—the left hemisphere has a model and mistakes it for reality; economists and finance professors spend too much time thinking of human beings as maximizing machines, and the danger is that when you describe people a certain way, you start to think it is actually true and that it is rational to act that way, which is extremely destructive.
Betweenness Creates Emergent Wholes
Betweenness is not merely the gap between two things but the irreducible relationship in which the parties become something new; a relationship constitutes who we are, and the meaning resides not in the isolated parts nor in the gaps but in the entire indecomposable whole—just as individually meaningless musical notes combine into music that means everything, or sodium and chlorine combine into salt, demonstrating that something genuinely new arises from relationship.
Two Hemispheres Serve Two Evolutionary Attentional Needs
The divided brain exists for Darwinian survival reasons because every creature must do two incompatible things at once: use a narrow, targeted, focal attention to manipulate the world (grab food, build a nest, catch prey) and simultaneously maintain a broad, sustained, vigilant attention to understand its surroundings and relationships; the left hemisphere is good at helping us manipulate the world but not understand it, while the right hemisphere sustains the broad vigilant attention and a continuous sense of being in the world.
Meaningfulness Requires No Instrumental Purpose
Humans require a sense of belonging and purpose, and there is a teleology in living beings, but the meaningfulness of life comes precisely from not having an explicit instrumental purpose—it exists not 'in order that' something else happen; satisfaction comes from letting go, not from controlling or indulging in pleasure, and happiness famously runs away when pursued and arrives only when we forget ourselves.
Nature Progresses Through Collaboration Not Just Competition
Nature involves competition, but that is only half the story—it at least as importantly involves cooperation; the 37.2 trillion cells in the human body at some point pooled resources to make something better, and the story of evolution is partly competition but at least as much cooperation, the combination of which is collaboration.
Reductive Criticism Inverts the Work of Art
Literary criticism in the seminar room works in exactly the opposite direction from the way a work of art works: a poem is unique, implicit, and embodied—affecting breathing, muscle tension, blood pressure, and making hair stand on end—whereas criticism extracts something general, abstract, and completely explicit, which is why poetry is so difficult to translate and why telling someone a poem's 'meaning' conveys nothing of the poem.
Different Attention Produces Different Worlds
Because there is no dispute that the two hemispheres attend in different ways, and because (as most philosophers would agree) attending to something differently makes you see something quite different, it follows logically that the two hemispheres produce different versions of the world; the cultural claim is not that brains changed over history but that culture and custom can blind us to things our brains are fully equipped to perceive.
Civilizations Flourish Fast Then Degenerate
Three times in the West a civilization has flourished—Greece in the 5th-6th century BC, Rome from the late Republic, and the Renaissance—each arising rapidly with a great efflorescence of science, art, and philosophy, then degenerating over time into something more rule-bound, rigid, hubristic, and certain it knows things, often after overstretching itself through empire; our own civilization is now at a point ready to collapse.
Two Kinds of Whole: Pattern vs System
There are two kinds of systematizing: a left-hemisphere system—explicit, like a flow diagram assembled with a screwdriver—and a right-hemisphere whole that is a rich imaginative pattern allowed to come into being, in which people recognize their own lived experience; good understanding uses the analytic tools to take people to a place where they can let them go, like climbing a ladder and then kicking it away.
Corpus Callosum Mostly Inhibits, Not Connects
Although the corpus callosum is a band of fibers connecting the hemispheres, only about 2% of neurons actually cross it, and the upshot of their function is often to inhibit the other hemisphere—saying 'keep out of this'—so the hemispheres are carefully inhibiting one another rather than simply recruiting each other.
Brain Asymmetry Is Ancient and Universal
There is a massive, real, physically measurable difference between the two hemispheres of the brain that is not pop psychology but is found across the animal kingdom—mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, worms, mollusks, insects, and even a 700-million-year-old sea creature with a lateralized neural network—indicating lateralization is extremely basic to all living beings.
Both-And Right vs Either-Or Left Asymmetry
The right hemisphere works in a both-and style and sees more, so it knows what it does not know, whereas the left hemisphere works in an either-or style and, seeing less, thinks it knows everything and does not know what it does not know; moreover the right communicates more, and more quickly, to the left than the left reciprocally does to the right.
Left Hemisphere Cannot Grasp Implicit Meaning
The left hemisphere is expert at familiar, routine procedures—looking words up in the dictionary and stringing them together by pre-arranged rules—but it cannot grasp the overall picture: it doesn't understand humor, metaphor, embodied meaning, can't read faces or body language, doesn't know that what is unsaid and the tone of voice matter, so all interpretation of implicit meaning depends on the right hemisphere; if anything is new, it is at a loss.
Left Sees a Map, Right Sees the Terrain
The left hemisphere has a map of the world—seeing things as clear, sharp, distinct, dead, decontextualized, abstract, and disembodied, which then have to be assembled like building a machine—while the right hemisphere sees the actual terrain that is mapped: an immensely complex, nonlinear, embedded, changing, flowing, never-constant, ramifying world.
Right Frontal Lobe Enables Social Animal
The largest and most lately-evolved asymmetry in the brain is the right hemisphere's frontal lobe expansion (larger than the left's language area expansion), and this is what gives humans the capacity to be Aristotle's 'social animal'—to read others' minds, understand nuances of complex situations, and detect tiny facial changes lasting hundredths of a second—making the right hemisphere central to socializing, humor, and relationship.
There Are No Things, Only Patterns and Flows
The deeply entrenched idea that the world consists of isolated entities that must be constructed is wrong; the world is a seamless whole, and the things we identify are merely events that stand out against the background—what truly exists and where all meaning resides are patterns, flows, and relationships, a view found in ancient oriental cultures and increasingly confirmed by current physics and biology.
Humility Is What Crasser Science Lacks
It is not what you think but how you think it—the manner, reasons, and mentality—that matters; the degree of humility is what is missing from many of the crasser areas of physical and social science, as shown by Nobel Prize-winning economists who declared they knew how to prevent crashes just before everything crashed.
Higher Living Standards Have Not Made Us Happier
The evidence shows we are not happier—indeed there is a stronger case that we are less happy than in the 1950s or 1960s despite material comfort—and people leading lives we patronizingly regard as basic may have more stable existences and feel more fulfilled; the 'washing machine' defense of progress misses that there is more to a fulfilling life than possessions and longevity.
Technology Cannot Solve the Resource Problem
Because technology consumes resources, the resource problem created by the very benefits of modernity (medicine, nutrition, longevity) will not be solved by technology; humans fail to understand exponential growth, so like a bacterium doubling in a jar that is only a quarter full four minutes before being completely full, we will exhaust resources we use exponentially very soon, and it is a matter of when, not if.
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