Ian McGilchrist
speaker
553 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2010
last heard Jan 2011
Ian McGilchrist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes.
Uh one of the fascinating things is that if you look at what happens to people when they have a stroke in the right hemisphere, a very, very usual phenomenon is that people
underestimate or even deny the extent of their disability.
As I say in the book, the left hemisphere is an eternal optimist.
It's constantly believes in itself to a degree which is unsound.
And that means in terms of the patient that they may deny that they've got a a paralysis altogether.
There's a nice little bit of research looking at people who again you can isolate the left or right hemisphere experimentally and ask questions and
When people estimate themselves.
with their right hemisphere, they're more realistic about themselves when they estimate themselves
With the left hemisphere, they give an unrealistically optimistic assessment of their own skills and abilities compared with what other people would say of
Indeed.
The idea was that, you know, the brain was like a machine that carried out certain functions and because there were two hemispheres there was twice as much computing power as it were and but we would compartmentalize uh things so that, you know, there was a story that language was in the left hemisphere, reason was in the left hemisphere.
and something like creativity and emotion were in the right hemisphere.
That's complete and utter.
this conception of things, every single brain function is carried out by both hemispheres.
Reason and emotion and imagination depend on the coming together of what both hemispheres contribute.
So that particular dichotomy is incredibly unhelpful and misleading and I keep trying to steer away from it.
But there is still nonetheless fairly obviously a dichotomy.
I mean I begin by asking the rather simple question.
Which I'm not aware really that has ever been properly addressed, which is, you know, if the brain is all about making connections, why is it that it's evolved with this whopping divide down the middle?
Showing 81–100 of 553 · page 5 of 28
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