Iain McGilchrist (born 1953) is a British psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He rose to prominence with two monumental books, that weave together neuroscience and metaphysics to transform understanding of human consciousness: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).
McGilchrist’s most cited theory concerns the distinct adaptive functions of the brain’s two hemispheres, and how their different modes of attention shape the world we perceive and create*.* An imbalance between these two modes of perception gives rise to manifold dysfunctions in modern society. His ideas are influential across the Second Renaissance landscape.
Read the latest issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance for a bite-sized introduction: Seeds of a Second Renaissance Issue 8 (Sep 2025) – Iain McGilchrist’s Hemisphere Hypothesis
A couple of questions to get discussion rolling…
- Has McGilchrist’s work influenced your thinking? How?
- What’s your experience of left- and right-hemisphere consciousness?
- & please put forward your own questions and curiosities on the topic for discussion!
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I very recently completed the title above. It’s very important work, in my view. It’s been clear to me for long time that verbal/linguistic and calculation skills are not the only sort of “intelligence” worth mentioning. McGilchrist provides a large body of research to back that up.
Very recently I also completed Brendan Graham Dempsey’s work Psyche and Symbolic Learning, vol. 2 of his Evolution of Meaning series. That book is a tour de force, tracing cognitive stage theory from Piaget though Kohlberg, Kegan, Fowler, Fischer, Commons, Dawson and others. Makes a very convincing case that cognition complexifies in stages and that this process relates to more general emergent evolutionary systems theory. And yet … I felt a chill wind blowing through something unspoken in the argument. Just take a look at current political culture in the US, for example. Does that look like evolution, complexification, emergence, and higher level cognition to you? To me it smacks more of an incipient Dark Age. So the Letical Scale provides a very granular metric of the increasing sophistication of our cognitive complexity. I suppose it will be equally handy for measuring the decline of culture in retrograde as well. So what gives?
Cue McGilchrist. The left-brain overestimates itself. Theory overvalues itself. Those who talk a good game talk themselves into imagining talk is the game. John Vervaeke and others say quite a bit about embodied intelligence. McGilchrist’s work shows the key linkage between right-brain preferences and such embodiment. So without going all into it (reply below if that sort of deep dive is needed), to me McGilchrist explains quite a bit about how practical human relationships really work, in a way that linear cognitive stage theories generally fail to address.