“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to... See more

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly... See more

“we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language’s attempt to undermine our understanding.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.

The word 'true' suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be 'true.' It is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a... See more

“Skills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture. The atomistic nature of our individuality is made clear in Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek ambition for us each to be ‘famous for fifteen minutes’. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of... See more

“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World