The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space, eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate. It is a profoundly moral act.

the world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be known.

One cannot explain a changing process by unchanging elements, though our extraordinary bias towards ‘thingness’, rather than forms or processes, encourages us to think that we could.

Intelligence is revealed in seeing how to use what one knows already to tackle a problem never, in that precise form, seen before – it is creative

What I think I have shown in these chapters is that the left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters. In terms of attention to the world, and its role in thereby constructing, and understanding, experience; in its inability to comprehend time, space and motion; in its lack of skill in conve

And Toynbee continues, later, specialisation has become an indispensable intellectual tool. But being indispensable is not the same thing as being all-sufficient … the farther that specialization is carried, the more of the meaning of the phenomena is left unplumbed in the unexplored gaps between the specialists’ deep but narrowly constricted borin

People who ignore science are either afraid of it, because they don’t understand it, or find its truths inconvenient. Science is a guiding light: if we put it out, we are in the dark. And precisely because it is so precious, we should be careful to guard it from ever-present dangers – exaggerated claims, models that distort, and institutional press

asymmetry of the nervous system has been universally conserved as a means of addressing the problem of how to ‘get’ without being ‘got’.

Employing analysis, which works from the outside of its object, without listening to intuition, which inhabits the matter at hand from the inside, is like looking for the power of a poem in the translation, where it cannot be found, and then when one cannot find it, denying it was there in the original.

In Part I, I address the means to truth, in the sense of the faculties with which we are endowed for this task. I take these to be: attention, perception, judgment, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and creativity (what I mean by each term will become clearer in the appropriate chapter). In each case I look at