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

The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.

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.

With the expansion of the frontal lobes and the invention of language, the need to pay the greatest possible attention to the world, on the one hand, and yet at the same time ‘go offline’ to manipulate symbols and data in a virtual world, on the other, has resulted in divergence of the hemispheres.

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 gestatio

The proper response to the news that we share 98–99% of our genes with a chimpanzee, or 50% with a banana, is not that we must be barely distinguishable from chimps and not far from being bananas, but that the determining role of genes as such is more limited than we thought.

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

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

one of the many themes of this book is the role of resistance in creation; and the working together of opposites.