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

by Iain McGilchrist

The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.

each consciousness has its impact on the universe that cannot be quantified.

An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere.

What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.