The Matter With Things Quotes

“quite match the beginning. And so we have, suddenly, because of this symmetry-breaking ‘mis-step’, something that is mobile, three-dimensional, endlessly generative, while never being wholly predictable (because always moving onward into a new realm of space, not residing always in the old one). It replaces something atemporal, two-dimensional, repetitive, and entirely regular, namely a circle. All the same, viewed down the axis of the spiral it still has the eternally unchanging quality of the circle – particle-like: though viewed from the side it has an oscillatory or vibratory movement, wave-like, changing, progressing and alive. Fractals, though quite different in nature, have this in common with spirals, that they generate difference that is also a kind of sameness.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures. The great biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson saw form as inseparable from the energy involved in the processes which generate it.16 We have already seen that many flows in Nature are vortices, and that self-organising and self-promulgating patterns of complexity and beauty – fractals, spirals, lǐ-formations – are everywhere in the world, both organic and inorganic. The spiral is an expression of dynamism (DNA is the ‘betweenness’ of two spirals), where the circle is an expression of stasis.17 In the spiral, the end point of each turn does not”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures. The great biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson saw form as inseparable from the energy involved in the processes which generate it.16 We have already seen that many flows in Nature are vortices, and that self-organising and self-promulgating patterns of complexity and beauty – fractals, spirals, lǐ-formations – are everywhere in the world, both organic and inorganic. The spiral is an expression of dynamism (DNA is the ‘betweenness”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“According to Matthew Fisher, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the nuclear spin of phosphate atoms could serve as rudimentary quantum bits (so-called ‘qubits’) of information in the brain, since such phosphate atoms, bonded with calcium in Posner molecules (clusters of nine calcium atoms and six phosphorus atoms), can prevent coherent neural ‘qubits’ from collapsing into decoherence (non-quantum states) for long enough to enable the brain to function somewhat like a quantum computer.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“misconceptions of both science and philosophy. I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“The problem arises because we jump from an awareness of a distinction to the assumption of a division.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“There are at least two kinds of games’, he writes. ‘One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’23 The first emphasises an outcome that closes down the process. The second emphasises the process, which is itself the desired outcome.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“the foundational difference between the hemispheres lies in the way they attend – and how you attend changes the world.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“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.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. We privilege autonomy, and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology, and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get value for money, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resource. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we make drugs illegal to protect society, and, while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs, create a fertile field for crime; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with – let alone relish – uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Against the view that whatever we have come to love, celebrate and honour is ‘nothing but’ something else, I suggest a different view: nothing can ever be ‘nothing but’ something else, because nothing whatever is ever the same as something else; that all that exists is more than we could ever be in a position fully to understand; that, far from being much less than we imagine, we are almost certainly far more than we can imagine.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“The so-called perceptual ‘stimulus’ and motor ‘response’ cannot be considered separately, outside the context of their interaction, though Dewey hints that indeed the motor element – normally seen as the response – may be primary. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process. Movement lies behind, and in, every one of our senses. This idea has gathered further scientific backing in recent years. The Colombian neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás has argued, starting from the examination of simple marine invertebrates such as the sea squirt, that the capacity for motion underlies all knowledge: What I must stress here is that the brain’s understanding of anything, whether factual or abstract, arises from our manipulations of the external world, by our moving within the world and thus from our sensory-derived experience of it.230 Similarly neuroscientist György Buzsáki claims that perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception. He regards activity ‘as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes within and outside the organism that result in the organism’s perceiving.’231 In relation to the evolutionary claim, he points to some primitive sea animals that are capable only of a rhythmic movement of cilia to bring in nutrients, with no (presumed) perceptual abilities at all.232”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being. One of the few occasions on which at last modern man might be able to grasp the enormity of existence is in the contemplation of death. Yet this is just what we ignore. It is a commonplace that while the Victorians did not talk about sex, they were open about death; we do not talk about death, but are clinically explicit about sex. Unfortunately for us, being open about something robs it of its power, while hiding increases it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Pride and arrogance, believing we know it all, are the opposite of the religious disposition of humility, reverence and compassion. And without them, neither we, nor the whole far greater, astonishing, living world, over which for better or worse we now have the power we so much craved, can thrive. It is pride that will destroy us, and quickly. With so much going for us, rising educational standards, better healthcare, public welfare and humane and stable government, what could be against us? We ourselves. Pride was always considered the greatest of the 'seven deadly sins', and it may in the past have proved difficult for many to see why. But the evidence is all around us now; and it is there in the epic narrative of one of the greatest poems of our Language, Paradise Lost, for all to read.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged - even admired - in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame. And that can't help but make a difference to how we behave.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new 'improvements' in order to fuel demand. it is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society's survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Wittgenstein wrote: 'To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.' And he continued: 'To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that the life has a meaning.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“To Heraclitus it was the logos; to Lao Tzu the tao; to Confucius lǐ; in Hinduism Brahman, and to the Vedic tradition Ṛta; in Zen ri; o Arabic peoples, since pre-Islamic times, Allah; to Hebrews YHWH. And in the Western tradition it is known as God.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“This was de Broglie's great insight', writes Brooks: 'if the electron in an atom is made of waves then the number of waves must be an integer, and the corresponding frequencies must be discrete. And since the frequency of oscillation is related to the energy of the electron field, the energy states must be discrete. What this implies is that the waveform, while wholly continuous, incorporates necessary discreteness - seamlessly. This is beautiful.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Interestingly, much as the happiest people don’t seek happiness, the wealthiest people are not those who most ruthlessly pursue wealth.101 John Kay cites a number of cases of global giants, household names such as ICI, Boeing, Merck, Pfizer and Citigroup, which were once highly profitable organisations while they focussed on delivering a good product, but which nosedived as soon as the bean-counters took over, and told people to focus on the bottom line – making money. Greed doesn’t pay (although abjuring greed because it pays better to do so is to thwart oneself, since it is the attitude of mind, not a certain action or set of actions, that is both in itself to be desired and goes to create prosperity). Success in business comes, bizarrely enough, as a by-product of running a good business.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“For hundreds of years during the great age of Western science, papers were reviewed by the editor or editors alone. Early attempts at a form of peer review in the nineteenth century already found that referees were soon overwhelmed, that the problem of bias was intractable, and that it had become an obstacle to scientific progress, because it made it almost impossible to say something not already accepted by the establishment. Outside Britain and America it was therefore not widely accepted till relatively recently. Indeed even there: Nature did not establish a formal peer review process until 1967. Of Albert Einstein’s 301 publications there is evidence that only one underwent peer review (in 1932): ‘interestingly, he told the editor of that journal that he would take his study elsewhere!’88”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Several studies report impairment in reasoning accuracy as a consequence of lesions in the left hemisphere,237 but others report impairments in reasoning following right hemisphere damage that are in reality more of a handicap. That’s because they involve not just hypothetical logical problems, but inferring complex and ambivalent or implicit meaning, inferring what is going on in another person’s mind and knowing how to understand the situation as a whole. As I have repeatedly emphasised, the old dichotomy – left hemisphere rational, right hemisphere emotional – is profoundly mistaken, on both counts; not to mention the fact that reason and emotion are never entirely separable. Knowing the limits to reason is essential to understanding. If not coupled with contextual, implicit and intuitive understanding (in none of which the left hemisphere excels), it can magnify error. As Sass and Pienkos point out: ‘The most deluded patients with schizophrenia tend to be those whose thinking is more logical.’238 This is in line with Eugène Minkowski’s insight that the problem in psychosis is not loss of reason, but its hypertrophy: ‘The mad person is much less frequently “irrational” than is believed: perhaps, indeed, he is never irrational at all.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“But I think it is important that people should be aware of the degree to which the institution of science may fall short of the ideal in its pursuit of truth, without also having to be too concerned with the question of how much this can be attributed to the behaviour of our brain hemispheres.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“In fact every published paper is an instance of taking something on someone else’s authority, on the understanding that peer review can vouch for its validity. In answer to the all-important question at the core of this part of the book, ‘Where should we go for truth?’, the limitations imposed by the institution of science, are, whether we like it or not, almost as important as the limitations imposed by the nature of science itself.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“In 1991 Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said: ‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.14”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“This shape – to put it in banal terms, trying, failing, relaxing and then succeeding – is a fairly good way of understanding the creative process.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“The Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Wordsworth describes how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits [the poet] to receive it, when unsought’. An effort must be made at first, but, despite the effort, inspiration still only comes unsought.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“so-called ‘light bulb’ moment. As we saw in Chapter 4, such moments are robustly associated with activity in the right amygdala and right superior temporal sulcus.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World