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

by Iain McGilchrist

we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.

while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago, we have at the same time wrought havoc on that world precisely because we have not understood it.

We can specify what is not jazz,

the world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow

To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.

Much of what you believe you are seeing is not actually seen at all, but is filled in at a level below conscious awareness on the expectation of familiarity.

subjects with schizophrenia fail to grasp the whole for being focussed on the parts.

‘the idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted.’

One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain.72

when science is dealing with how consciousness brings the experienced world into being, it is not possible to avoid philosophy,

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

The left hemisphere is aware of much less of what surrounds it – ‘sees less’, in all senses, than the right. It is less tolerant of ambiguity and tends towards exclusive, ‘either/or’, thinking; the right hemisphere is more inclusive, inclined to ‘both/and’ thinking.

the faculties with which we are endowed for this task. I take these to be: attention, perception, judgment, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and creativity

‘The more we know’, writes astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser, ‘the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.’96

As the British nuclear physicist Emerson Pugh put it: ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t’.97

what is the frontal cortex for? Largely for stopping things happening. To members of a society in which doing things is much more highly valued than desisting from doing things this might seem paradoxical.