Anyone else here a fan of Iain McGilchrist's writing?

[MarkD]

Whenever we have discussions here on what really matters to us, especially religion and spirituality, it seems we often reach an impasse based on the mindset we bring to it. I've also spent some time on a philosophy forum (gad, I do not recommend it) and I find the same conflict arising.

Iain McGilchrist is someone who started off studying art and literature at Oxford but became interested in the mind/body problem from sitting in on philosophy sessions. His bent toward science inclined him to want to know more about what neuroscience can contribute to the problem. Against all the advice he received he ended up revisiting brain lateralization research which had become popularized in the 70's in the most simplistic and distorted manner. There is a real question though about why the brain is so deeply divided and much more research has been done. Several brain and neurology researchers have commented that his summaries of that research in his books The Master and His Emissary (2009) and more recently, The Matter With Things (2021), is the best of which they are aware.

To answer the question of why the brain is structured the way it is he gave up teaching literature at Oxford where he has written and published Against Criticism in 1982. He later trained in medicine and has been a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London. I just watched this video of a conversation he has with a young man with a Youtube channel and probably a podcast called "heretics". It is a genuine conversation, not a debate. I've pulled out a short one minute segment that I think pertains to two dominant mindsets we bring to our challenging deeper conversations. If you like it the whole thing is good and could serve as good introduction to McGilchrist's ideas:

My own introduction was from the much cruder video made from a speech he gave (perhaps for TED) and then illustrated by RSA which is at least pretty amusing as well as thought provoking;

If you look at either and have a reaction I'd enjoy hearing about it and am happy to offer my own.

 

[Stoppelmann]

Hi Mark,
As you know, I am also a great fan of his writing, but he hasn't had much resonance here so far. We hadn't mentioned it in the past, but I, too, was attracted to his books by the RSA talk he held. Later, that RSA Animate video came out, which I thought was brilliant—as many of them are.

 

[Stoppelmann]

The thing about Iain McGilchrist's books for me was the fact that I was working with stroke patients and having some success in some cases at putting them back on their feet. There were obviously others who were not so fortunate because the symptoms were too ingrained and the damage to the brain possibly too severe. But what he was talking about, including the effects of brain tumours, corresponded with what I saw. I devoured his first book, The Master and the Emissary, which was more concentrated on the medical side, but he also touched on the humanities, which has come out far more in The Matter With Things.

The biggest criticism of his work seems to be that he dared to mix humanities with science. That seems to be due to our narrow specialist focus, which fails to look at the whole of the Gestalt that we are and assumes that the whole is just a collection of parts. Another problem is that theologians refer to his "theology," which I think he would shudder at. McGilchrist tends to look holistically at the role of the brain, which combines the attention needed for survival and investigation with the broad sphere of our senses to feel beyond what our brains allow us to see.

That is, of course, a problem for science because if you can't grasp it, measure it, or use it, it doesn't exist for many people who restrict themselves in that way.