Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Yale University Press (2019), Edition: Second Edition, New Expanded, 616 pages
Description
A new edition of the bestselling classic - published with a special introduction to mark its 10th anniversary This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the 'rational' side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master. As he shows, it is the right side which is the more reliable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic - stripped of depth, colour and value.
User reviews
LibraryThing member teunduynstee
This is book is on a fascinating subject. Why is our brain split in two halves and how is it that when the corpus callosum (that joins the parts) is cut, patients can still function more or less normally? Are the two halves like separate personas that have to work together to form our mind.
McGilchrist presents an overwhelming amount of material on an incredible width of subjects. He is clearly well-read on many of them. His thesis is (very condensed) that much of the history of Western civilization and the current organisation of our society can be explained by the fact that the balance between right and left hemispheres is disturbed. The left hemisphere has become too dominant, resulting in a bureaucratic, reductionist worldview, where problems can always be fixed by optimizing the parts and not looking at the whole.
To be honest: I didn't finish the book. I regard myself as a reader who can deal with voluminous treatises. I can force myself through dry reading if the subject is interesting enough. I'm not easily scared away by obscure vocabulary (although I'm not a native English reader, so my vocabulary is not very broad). For about 300 pages, I learned enough interesting facts to keep up with the rather dry read. However, I remained very unconvinced by the main thesis and the mountain of circumstantial evidence presented. Also, the presentation was just not accessible enough for me. Call me stupid, but if you casually use words like 'apophthegmatic', I have to look them up. The author may be very erudite, but please try to bring your message to me in an understandable way. I'm sure that this book could be done in simpler language and in half the word count. After 300 pages, I gave up.
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McGilchrist presents an overwhelming amount of material on an incredible width of subjects. He is clearly well-read on many of them. His thesis is (very condensed) that much of the history of Western civilization and the current organisation of our society can be explained by the fact that the balance between right and left hemispheres is disturbed. The left hemisphere has become too dominant, resulting in a bureaucratic, reductionist worldview, where problems can always be fixed by optimizing the parts and not looking at the whole.
To be honest: I didn't finish the book. I regard myself as a reader who can deal with voluminous treatises. I can force myself through dry reading if the subject is interesting enough. I'm not easily scared away by obscure vocabulary (although I'm not a native English reader, so my vocabulary is not very broad). For about 300 pages, I learned enough interesting facts to keep up with the rather dry read. However, I remained very unconvinced by the main thesis and the mountain of circumstantial evidence presented. Also, the presentation was just not accessible enough for me. Call me stupid, but if you casually use words like 'apophthegmatic', I have to look them up. The author may be very erudite, but please try to bring your message to me in an understandable way. I'm sure that this book could be done in simpler language and in half the word count. After 300 pages, I gave up.
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LibraryThing member stevetempo
This work is not for everyone, but I give my highest recommendation. If you have ever had an interest in the brain, consciousness, or how we all perceive and engage the world, this might your cup of tea. Iain McGilchrist does an incredible job with developing our current understanding of the brain
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from a hemispheric point of view. The work completely altered my understanding of the right and left hemispheres. The way the right and left sides work are not what you may think. The book then takes you on a trip through time and suggests how our hemispheric balance as a civilization may have have changed over history. He also looks at current cultures and suggests different balances due cultural behaviors, etc. He also gives ideas on how our current hemispheric unbalance might be brought into a more fruitful alignment. So much food for thought here. It took me a while to work my way through and there is some technical jargon, but so well worth it. One of the most significant non-fiction books I've ever read. Show Less
LibraryThing member rabindranath
A psychiatrist explains how our cognitive preferences determined the way our cultures evolved. Classic!
LibraryThing member AlbertoGiuseppe
A marvelous, herculean tome which points in the direction of how and where multidisciplinary studies could and should be heading in cogsci. and elsewhere. Even just the footnotes are a fountain of material, a meta-study in themselves. McGhilchrist's fundamental thesis, that the left hemisphere,
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(perhaps moreso the prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral and dorsomedial, in terms of extrinsic processing) operates more in abstraction and inhibits our more contextual right-side processing is largely well-supported, though he does rely, I think, too much on modularity and not enough on networks. Which is to be expected, given the rapidity of change in and arrival of new data in the field. The book does, however, pretty much require at least a general familiarity of the brain and a fair amount of general cultural to read comfortably, being more than a mouthful. Hell, it's a truckload. Show Less
LibraryThing member b.masonjudy
McGilchrist's argument in The Master and His Emissary is expansive and well wrought. I was particularly impressed with his interdisciplinary heft, and it's helped me pull together historical and philosophical concepts, particularly from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and really capture some excellent
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language around epistemology that I've been trying in vain to articulate for a few years. He lost me for a while in his discourse on art, but overall the his attention to style and tone makes the text is eminently readable and not at all daunting as it may seem from the outset. Show Less
LibraryThing member Paul_S
Starts off very promising but then abandons all pretence of science and just discusses poetry. I understand the book is more about philosophy in its old meaning but I just wasn't persuaded because there weren't any concrete points just vague insinuations and attempts to redress what the author sees
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as the left side trashing the right for too long now. Show Less
LibraryThing member vguy
Seemed promising: an update on the L/R Brain, including a survey of how it worked out across Western cultural history. Granted he's well-read, but almost every point is made in a binary way, asserted rather than demonstrated or evidenced, in a language so abstract that I got lost. On top of that
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the Audible version is full of mispronunciations, e.g. panlopy, Hussrel, etc, lack of right emphasis in words and sentences, distortions of foreign names and terms (the German is incomprehensible to me , a fluent German speaker). I gave up. Show Less
LibraryThing member snash
A very thought provoking view of the workings of the human brain. He uses neuroscience, philosophy, and art to ascribe differing ways of looking at the world to the two hemispheres of the brain and then to view the progression of Western thought from this perspective. His thesis that modern Western
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society has been absconded by the left brain. My primary difficulty with the book was that in making his point he seemed to repeat himself many times. Show Less
LibraryThing member fxm65
Great book. He talks of the hemispher of the brain. he uses emissary because its similar to slave. So you cant say that today. Great read..
LibraryThing member willszal
I'm amazed that I didn't learn of this book sooner! It came out in 2009, and I just got around to it in 2022. I picked it up because I was reading McGilchrist's new text, "The Matter with Things," and he said it picked up where his last book left off, so I thought it a good idea to pick up this
I'm generally hesitant to pick up literature written by neuroscientists. This is because much of what is available out there looks at the brain as a machine. I was relieved to find that McGilchrist has none of this tenor, and one of the points of this book is to establish that neuroscience that looks at the brain as a machine is bad science!
The basic premise of the book is that the left and right hemispheres of our brain each inhabit a coherent paradigm, but that these two perspectives can often be at odds with one another, and which hemisphere gets priority has a huge bearing not just on our lives, but on the future of civilization and the planet.
All known organisms with brains have two hemispheres. Generally speaking the left hemisphere of our brain is concerned with instrumentalism and control, and the right hemisphere is concerned with relationship and animism. To speak to McGilchrist' philosophical argument, he posits that much of the arc of Western Civilization has given priority to the left hemisphere. He tracks the work of philosophers going back centuries that intuits hemispheric difference.
During and since reading the book, I've been applying McGilchrist's theory in other fields. How does hemispheric difference help to structure and inform different spiritual traditions, educational epistemologies, and schools of thought. This is a very rich field, and I hope that McGilchrist and others apply these theories broadly, as I think they have a lot to offer us in a wide range of different fields.
If you are going to read both books, at least in the science half (the first half) of each book, there is a lot of repetition.
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earlier work.I'm generally hesitant to pick up literature written by neuroscientists. This is because much of what is available out there looks at the brain as a machine. I was relieved to find that McGilchrist has none of this tenor, and one of the points of this book is to establish that neuroscience that looks at the brain as a machine is bad science!
The basic premise of the book is that the left and right hemispheres of our brain each inhabit a coherent paradigm, but that these two perspectives can often be at odds with one another, and which hemisphere gets priority has a huge bearing not just on our lives, but on the future of civilization and the planet.
All known organisms with brains have two hemispheres. Generally speaking the left hemisphere of our brain is concerned with instrumentalism and control, and the right hemisphere is concerned with relationship and animism. To speak to McGilchrist' philosophical argument, he posits that much of the arc of Western Civilization has given priority to the left hemisphere. He tracks the work of philosophers going back centuries that intuits hemispheric difference.
During and since reading the book, I've been applying McGilchrist's theory in other fields. How does hemispheric difference help to structure and inform different spiritual traditions, educational epistemologies, and schools of thought. This is a very rich field, and I hope that McGilchrist and others apply these theories broadly, as I think they have a lot to offer us in a wide range of different fields.
If you are going to read both books, at least in the science half (the first half) of each book, there is a lot of repetition.
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Awards
Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize (Longlist — 2010)
Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize (Nominee — 2010)
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
616 p.; 8.5 x 1.6 inches
ISBN
0300245920 / 9780300245929