The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning Quotes

“Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“the left hemisphere sees truth as internal coherence of the system, not correspondence with the reality we experience.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“Of course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“such answer would be bound to be wrong. Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“sometimes think of the right hemisphere as what enables Schrödinger's cat to remain on reprieve, and the left hemisphere as what makes it either alive or dead when you open the box. It collapses the infinite web of interconnected possibilities into a point-like certainty for the purposes of our interaction with the world.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“The arts and humanities need to remember this: they don't have to feel inferior to science, and try to model themselves on them. Like physicists, but in a quite different way, they are in the ultimately important business of understanding the world and making sense of it, not just learning how to manipulate it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“It would be crazy to suppose that our brains were so perfectly constructed that they could understand and make us aware of everything in the universe. Such a belief (though it is implied by scientism, with its dogma that we can in principle understand everything, given time and a bit more research) is irrational.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“Some people have thought I might be subtly decrying reason or exalting emotion. But I should remind you that both hemispheres are involved in reasoning and in emotion. The left hemisphere is especially good at voluntary and social expressions of emotion and one of the most clearly lateralised emotional registers is that of anger, which lateralises to the left hemisphere. Deeper and more complex expressions of emotion, and the reading of faces, are best dealt with, however, by the right hemisphere. As far as reason goes, the left hemisphere is better at carrying out certain procedures that involve manipulating numbers, but has less of a grasp than the right hemisphere of what those numbers mean. Much of mathematics is dependent on the right hemisphere: most of its great discoveries were perceived as complex patterns of relationships, and only later, often much later, translated painstakingly into linear sets of propositions. Deductive logic, it turns out, depends on the right hemisphere.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“Ultimately, we have come to believe that, whatever I or anyone else may say – really – when the chips are down, when the rhetoric fades, and we have stopped trying to cheer ourselves up by believing in sentimental ideas such as virtue, love and courage, the possibility of truly unselfish behaviour, or a realm of spiritual value – really, we are nothing but blind mechanisms, the dupes of our equally blind genes, with no choice but to play out the sorry farce that the force of evolution, so much bigger and greater than we are, dictates. But at least now we have the dignity of knowing that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“metaphor is not a decorative turn, applied on top of the serious business of language in order to entertain:”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it?”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

“we are nothing but blind mechanisms, the dupes of our equally blind genes, with no choice but to play out the sorry farce that the force of evolution, so much bigger and greater than we are, dictates.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning