The Master and His Emissary The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

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One of my favorite heroes, along with Oliver Sacks, is Ian McGilchrist at Oxford.

I love that man.

He may wake up someday just to find me crouched on his bed watching him sleep.

He's like, he's not just a neurologist.

Ian, don't be scared.

Not in a creepy way.

Not in a creepy way, sir.

But he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain.

And it has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen, controlling them,

where the right side of the brain, and of course it's all, I'm oversimplifying massively, but functions like meaning, synthesis, combinations of different bits of knowledge, we're moving away from those.

And one of my good friends is Jill Bolte Taylor, who had, she was a Harvard neuroanatomist,

And so she suddenly, she watched her left hemisphere go off.

She had a brain bleed, and it would pulse.

So her left hemisphere would be there, and she'd see everything as solid and measurable and verbal,

and then it would go off.

And she was in a world where she was like a fluid the size of the universe.

And she would watch, she was in the shower, and she watched her hand on the tiles dissolve into fields of energy.

And you were talking about energy earlier.

She said by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, she managed to get a phone call made.

She couldn't talk by the time that phone call went through.

She got to a hospital, took her eight years to come back to full functioning.

But she said during that time, I did not know people's names.

I didn't know the word person, but boy, could I feel people's energy.

And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy.

So she's a great fan of using the whole brain.

Whole Brain Living is her latest book, and it's great.

But Ian McGilchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book The Master and His Emissary says the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master, and the data collector is just the emissary.

But the data collector has taken over in Western society, Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, if you want to get technical.

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Ian's book on this topic has been on my radar for many years. It's called The Master and His Emissary.

Ian's book has a lot of science in it but it's also a commentary on modern industrial societies.

Ian McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary, a book about the divided brain.

Ian McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

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Ian's book on this topic has been on my radar for many years. It's called The Master and His Emissary.

Ian McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary, a book about the divided brain.

Ian McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

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He's most well known for his book The Master and His Emissary and I think you have a copy of that I asked you to get that so that you could show people the Master and his Emissary the divided brain in the making of the Western world which is an analysis of hemispheric specialization and its philosophical and scientific significance

When I discovered when I was researching the master in his imagery the book that's now 10 years old I came across this fascinating thing that one of the most fundamental differences between the hemispheres is their way of attending

In the first book the master in his imagery one of the things I was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world

In the master in his imagery one of the things I was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world so the the hemispheres have evolved to two different sets of values you mentioned values and it's very germane they have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to and what I have tried to explain in that book is that this gives rise to a whole way of seeing the world in a whole world which is not just for the individual but also at times it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture

And in some ways I talk about that more in the master's his imagery but it's phenomenally it's ruling out it's ruling out everything really it's ruling out our ability to understand to see to see at all

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McGillchrist. He wrote The Master in his emissary.