Much as the right hemisphere understands the need for the left, but the left does not understand the need for the right, generalists appreciate the need for specialists, while the specialist is less able to see the need for the generalist.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things … A lot of people in our industry haven’t

We should be used to this idea of truth and falsehood, because we are constantly confronting the fact that the world does not confirm our modern Western ‘take’ on it. It doesn’t respond, or correspond, to our fantasies. Yet we behave as though our theories about reality were more important than what experience keeps telling us. This is consonant

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

Think of it as like a true and close relationship between two conscious beings: neither is of course ‘made up’ by the other, but both are to some extent, perhaps to a great extent, ‘made’ what they are through their relationship.

The first of these phases, preparation, is partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly willed and partly serendipitous, and may go on for years. It is generally associated with some pretty hard work, acquiring skills and knowledge, thinking consciously and mulling things over unconsciously, so as to prepare the fertile ground in which the seed

As a result, as Scheler thought, ‘one can say that in no historical era has the human being become so much of a problem to himself as in ours.’54 An explosion of knowledge leads us only to what Bohm called ‘endarkenment’.

It is quite impossible for genes to ‘programme’ the making of an embryo. For a start, there is nowhere near enough information contained in genes. Consider the human brain, never mind the whole human body. With an estimated 100 billion neurones, a quarter of a million of them are created on average during every minute of the nine months of

The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.