The Divided Brain with Iain McGilchrist, MD
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Who is Iain McGilchrist and what inspired Emily to invite him on the show?
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You're listening to the Nocturneist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. In the summer of 2021, I was invited to Galway, Ireland to speak at a conference called .md, a festival of medical curiosity. And I was sitting in the audience at this conference and on stage appeared this man in I think a Tweed Blazer. It may not actually have been a Tweed Blazer, but I feel like spiritually it might have been. But there was this man, Ian McGillchrist, who delivered this interview about the brain and the nature of reality that just kind of blew my mind. And so after I saw him speak, I rushed up to him and invited him onto the podcast, and he was kind enough to agree. Several weeks later, we did the interview. In my mind, I like to imagine Ian sitting by the fire.
His home in the Isle of Skye and toiling over his manuscripts. Dr. Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a Quandam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlehem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London. His two books. The master and his emissary and the matter with things are very, very well researched, very dense, but also completely and utterly fascinating. And a lot of his work recently has been looking at the functional asymmetry of the human brain. So, in other words, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. How are they different?
How do they see and process the world differently and how do they work together? And the thesis of his argument is that the right hemisphere, which is the one that sees things as alive and whole, is the master. And the left hemisphere is really just kind of like the computer or the emissary of the right. But we in society have become confused and started to think that the left is the master, and that that very fact is what leads to the downfall of civilizations, including the one we live in today. Not to get too grim. Um and I think as you'll listen, you'll see that the interview ends on a hopeful note, but just such an incredible body of work. I love this conversation. Conversation. So before I sat down to chat with Ian, I asked him to read an excerpt.
Here's Ian.
This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different. from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years. Some would say as long as two thousand years. I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality and chosen to ignore or silence the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we've reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves. Attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book. We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes.
The brain is importantly divided into two hemispheres. You could say to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend the And thus manipulate the world. The right hemisphere to comprehend it, see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it. But that is a logical error. To exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who is Iain McGilchrist and what inspired Emily to invite him on the show?
0:00–10:14
2
What does the right‑hand hemisphere do that the left‑hand hemisphere doesn’t?
10:14–17:04
3
Why does McGilchrist argue that the right hemisphere is the true ‘master’ of the brain?
17:04–23:37
4
How do physical asymmetries between the brain’s hemispheres shape perception and attention?
23:37–30:11
5
What metaphors does McGilchrist use to illustrate the left‑right brain relationship?
30:11–37:33
6
How do left‑ and right‑hemisphere strokes reveal the different roles of each side?
37:33–41:54