THE DIVIDED BRAIN is a mind-altering odyssey about one man’s quest to prove a growing imbalance in our brains, and to help us understand how this makes us increasingly unable to grapple with critical economic, environmental and social issues ones that shape our very future as a species. Always remember to think for yourself and question where the author might be coming from.Iain McGilchrist and Jill Bolte Taylor with Jill’s collection of brain sculptures. A great book in the first half, where it bases its reasoning in science, but weaker in the second, where the author goes into history and philosophy.

There were other philosophical arguments in the second half of the book which I personally found disagreeable but were less egregious. One gets the feeling that the author has ulterior motives for disagreeing with what he calls 'the Dawkins Delusion' - I suspect McGilchrist is a theist and for some reason chooses to hide this from the reader. Also, he fails to properly understand Dawkins, offering a truncated and dismissive recounting of memetic theory, without properly engaging with it - save to decry it as being based on Left- hemisphere reasoning, which isn't really an argument. Pretty disgusting excusing of threats of torture, for the 'crime' of publicising evidence that went against the Church's dogma. I rate it less than five stars because it engages in victim-blaming of Galileo, in the way that many Catholics do 'it was his own fault for having a prickly personality'. Clearly narrated (though some pronunciations seemed a little odd at times), this is a book of huge importance for western culture at this time, and the future of our planet.įascinating book - some flawed philosophyĮxcellent and rigorously scientific exploration of hemisphere differences. As an aside, this is one of the best explications of the Phenomenology of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others I know. The verbose Emissary, has subverted the ineffable vision of the Master. This is therefore a highly intellectual and intelligent book, charting the modern cultural takeover of “left hemisphere” atomistic conceptual thinking, and the suppression of “right hemisphere” holistic perception. Welcome instead to the machine! McGilchrist is something of a polymath, a neuropsychiatrist with expertise spanning neuroscience, philosophy, phenomenology, biology, art history, music and literature.

We are half losing our minds, or at least the hemisphere that silently sees reality as a whole. If, like me, you despair of reductionism, over-simplification, the disenchantment and commodification of animals and the living world which allows the ruthless exploitation of the planet, this book explains why it is happening.

The master and the emissary