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

by Iain McGilchrist

Our current perceptions are governed by past perceptions and preconceptions; yet these too are always influenced reciprocally, if more weakly, by the new perception, the new experience. Much of what goes on seems to us pretty humdrum, largely the confirmation of our current perception (and conception) of the world. But even that is unbelievably complex and rich, and is born of embodied interaction. Clearly what we see depends on the whole context – where we are, with whom and why we are there, the mood we are in, and so on – and also on what our motivations are: are we searching for something? Bored and filling in time? Hungry? Longing for something? What we see is neither subjective nor objective: the terms are irrelevant relics of a superseded Cartesian way of thinking about experience. There is no such thing as perception without such ramifications, because we are not just creating a Cartesian representation of the world, but are involved in the process of the experiential world coming into being. One of the besetting sins of our age is the belief that sensory experience is somehow less real than our abstracted mentalisations about it.