The Master and His Emissary

This has the profoundest consequences for the way it sees the world, when contrasted with the take of the right hemisphere, which sees things as a whole, never as isolated particles independent of a context.

We need to do nothing less than reconceive our world, our reality in a way that, far from subordinating the right hemisphere, acknowledges that it alone has access to the world beyond us, ‘out there’. We need to learn again to look, to see. That’s to say, we need to redirect our attention to what-out-there-is-not-us in a way that rebalances the con

Like the Taoists, McGilchrist looks all the way back to prehistory, before even the emergence of language, for the earliest signs of this imbalance. ‘Was it the drive for power, embodied in the will to control the environment,’ he asks, ‘which accelerated symbol manipulation and the extension of conceptual thought?’ He notes that our mostly dominan

drew this theory from Iain McGilchrist’s epic book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. McGilchrist, a Scottish psychiatrist, believes the modern brain is dangerously out of balance. Over the past two hundred years, our analytical left hemispheres have reshaped the world in ways that threaten our well-

it is the left hemisphere’s process of apprehending the world that gives rise to the very idea of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ – a false dichotomy. As I suggested in Part I, there is, rather, as disclosed by the mode of the right hemisphere, a ‘betweenness’ to reality; a world that comes into being for us, which, to paraphrase Wordsworth, we ha