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

by Iain McGilchrist

etc, etc, etc. That fires up my soul, and as long as I am not distracted, the work grows; I expand it, and it becomes clearer, until I have the thing pretty much finished in my head, even if it’s long; so that from then on I see it all in my mind’s eye at a glance, much as one sees a beautiful picture or a pretty woman, and I don’t hear it sequentially in my imagination, as it will have to be later on, but, as it were, all at once … When I later come to write it down, I just take, straight out of my brain box, what’s already assembled there, as I’ve explained. For that reason it goes down on paper pretty quickly, since, as I say, it’s really already finished, and rarely turns out much different from what was in my head all along. That’s why I don’t mind being disturbed while writing; and I quite like all sorts of things going on around me; I carry on writing just the same; and can even chat away at the same time about hens and geese, or Jack and Jill, or whatever … As to how it is that during the process my pieces come to take on a Mozartian form or style, one not like anybody else’s, it’s like asking why my nose is big and curved – it’s Mozartian, and not like other people’s! I don’t aim for distinctiveness and I can’t really describe what’s different about my style. But it’s obvious that people who really have something particular about them will be different from each other on the inside as well as on the outside. All I know is that I am not the author of either kind of...