Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist (born 1953 ) is a British psychiatrist, literary scholar, philosopher and neuroscientist who wrote the 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

He is a Quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; a former associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford; an emeritus consultant at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital in south London, a former research fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and a former fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. McGilchrist is retired, though he continues to work as an independent scholar from his home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

In 2021, McGilchrist published a new book of neuroscience, epistemology and metaphysics called The Matter with Things.

Life and education
A polymath, McGilchrist was awarded a scholarship in the 1960s to Winchester College in the UK, soon followed by a scholarship to New College, Oxford. There he read English, winning the English Chancellor's Prize and the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize in 1974, and subsequently was admitted to All Souls College, Oxford in 1975 as a Prize Fellow. During this time, he taught English Literature while continuing research into philosophy and psychiatry, investigating specifically the mind-body relation. After this, he decided to pursue medicine and to train as a psychiatrist.

Medical career
In his capacity as a consultant psychiatrist at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, McGilchrist worked in several specialist areas including the Epilepsy Unit, the National Psychosis Referral Unit and the National Eating Disorder Unit, where he ultimately became the clinical director of their southern sector Acute Mental Health Services.

Alongside his role as a physician, McGilchrist also contributed as a medical researcher. He produced original work on neuroimaging in schizophrenia and on the philosophical phenomenology of that disorder, publishing articles in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, and the British Medical Journal.

He maintained academic contributions in the humanities as well, featuring work in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Times.

Since the publication of The Master and His Emissary in 2009, McGilchrist has had a growing public profile. He has taken part in radio sessions, television programmes, numerous podcasts and interviews via YouTube with notable figures such as Sam Harris, Rowan Williams and John Cleese. There has been a Canadian feature film made about his second book, The Master and his Emissary, titled the Divided Brain.

The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
McGilchrist's 2009 work, The Master and His Emissary has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. In very basic terms, it sought to consolidate research in brain lateralisation and to insist on the individual and cultural importance of the bi-hemisphere structure of the brain.

In place of the conventional view which concluded that there were no significant differences between the hemispheres because they were both involved in everything we do, McGilchrist argues that the manner in which they operate is substantially different. It is not that the hemispheres perform different functions, but that they perform these functions in a different way. Drawing on extensive neuroscientific research from the last one-hundred years, McGilchrist argues that each hemisphere offers a unique kind of attention to the world, an attention which brings a certain version of the world into being. According to McGilchrist, we have become entranced by the version of the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and forgotten the insights produced by the right. We need both hemispheres, he concludes, but we need the left hemisphere to operate in the service of the right, we need the "emissary" left hemisphere to serve the "master" right hemisphere. The periods where the proper hemispheric balance has gone awry, McGilchrist documents in the second half of the book where he offers a history of ideas seen through the lens of the hemisphere hypothesis.

The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World
McGilchrist's most recent work is the 2021 The Matter with Things, published by Perspectiva Press, which explores the metaphysical implications of the "hemisphere hypothesis". In this book he consolidates the latest neuroscientific evidence concerning (1) our means to truth (perception, attention, judgement, apprehension, among others); (2) the paths that we ordinarily take to truth (reason, science, logic) and other equally important paths such as intuition and imagination, and (3) the implications of this for the reality that is revealed. In the final sections, he attempts to make some headway in answering such fundamental questions as: What is space and time? What is matter and consciousness? What is value? Is a sense of the sacred baked into the world?

His main target in this book is scientific materialism: the view that the world is nothing but inert atoms, blankly colliding against one another in a predictable pattern. In place of this, McGilchrist seeks to reawaken a richer conception of reality, a conception revealed when our hemispheres return to their proper asymmetric relation.

Future work
In addition to lecturing worldwide, McGilchrist has also been commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a book of reflections on the humanities and sciences, to offer a critique of contemporary culture from the standpoint of neuropsychiatry, and to deliver an investigation into what is revealed by the paintings of those with psychotic illnesses.

Selected works

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