Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because if your left brain and your right brain can have independent sort of centers of awareness, and yet somehow are also part of this one connective thing, I think that has some profound implications for the fact that I've got a brain and you've got a brain.
But there are a great many philosophical traditions who think that we're all sort of part of one great big thing.
It at least opens the door to all kinds of interesting... And it's sort of like when I tell people this, if they haven't heard about split brain patients, they're sort of like, what?
Really?
I'm like, yeah, like this stuff is way more complicated and way more weird than I think a lot of people realize.
That's a question for Ian McGilchrist.
But I mean, I don't know, but I would guess that like tuning in to the way that the right brain is supposed to attend to the world and read McGilchrist on this and just try to tune into that part of yourself to try to recognize that.
that there is a part of reality that consists in that kind of stuff that escapes the sort of hyper-rationalization of left-brain ways of thinking.
And I think a lot of that comes through.
People are said to be a bit more left-brained or a bit more right-brained.
And in culture, that tends to manifest as like, if you're right-brained, you like sort of music and art and poetry.
Left-handedness was associated with creativity for a long time, although that would be quite a fun fact.
I think that's actually not
that's not connected in that way.
But like culturally, we have these sort of associations and I think that they don't give you at all a very good picture of what's actually happening with the brain.
But I think it can be a sort of good way of thinking about the kinds of practices and ways of thinking that you might want to engage with to stop being so hyper-rational.
And also, pay attention when you are convinced that you know why you're doing something.
Just...
step back and really think about what might be going into it.
It's literally what I said at the beginning of this conversation when I said, you know, why are you an atheist?
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