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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist
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In a book of unprecedented scope--now available in a larger format—Iain McGilchrist presents a fascinating exploration of the differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how those differences have affected society, history, and culture. McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent research in neuroscience and psychology �to reveal that the difference is profound: the left hemisphere is detail oriented, while the right has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity. McGilchrist then takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists from Aeschylus to Magritte.
"A landmark new book. . . . It tells a story you need to hear, of where we live now."—Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
"A very remarkable book. . . . McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture . . . splendidly thought-provoking. . . . I couldn't put it down."—Mary Midgley, The Guardian
Named one of the best books of 2010 by The Guardian
- Sales Rank: #32672 in Books
- Published on: 2012-10-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 5.50" w x 1.50" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 544 pages
From Publishers Weekly
A U.K. mental health consultant and clinical director with a background in literature, McGilchrist attempts to synthesize his two areas of expertise, arguing that the "divided and asymmetrical nature" of the human brain is reflected in the history of Western culture. Part I, The Divided Brain, lays the groundwork for his thesis, examining two lobes' significantly different features (structure, sensitivity to hormones, etc.) and separate functions (the left hemisphere is concerned with "what," the right with "how"). He suggests that music, "ultimately... the communication of emotion," is the "ancestor of language," arising largely in the right hemisphere while "the culture of the written word tends inevitably toward the predominantly left hemisphere." More controversially, McGilchrist argues that "there is no such thing as the brain" as such, only the brain as we perceive it; this leads him to conclude that different periods of Western civilization (from the Homeric epoch to the present), one or the other hemisphere has predominated, defining "consistent ways of being that persist" through time. This densely argued book is aimed at an academic crowd, is notable for its sweep but a stretch in terms of a uniting thesis.
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"A landmark new book... It tells a story you need to hear, of where we live now." (Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times) "A very remarkable book... McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture... splendidly thought-provoking... I couldn't put it down." (Mary Midgley, The Guardian) "A giant in his vital field shows convincingly that the degeneracy of the West springs from our failure to manage the binary division of our brains." (Book of the Year choice, David Cox, Evening Standard) "A beautifully written, erudite, fascinating, and adventurous book. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages... as if it were an adventure story." (A. C. Grayling, Literary Review) "To call Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary... an account of brain hemispheres is to woefully misrepresent its range. McGilchrist persuasively argues that our society is suffering from the consequences of an over-dominant left hemisphere losing touch with its natural regulative 'master', the right." (Salley Vicker, The Guardian) "McGilchrist, for whom certainty is the greatest of illusions, has produced an absolutely convincing narrative of who we are." (Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph) Named one of the best books of 2010 by (The Guardian)"
About the Author
Iain McGilchrist is a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he taught literature before training in medicine. He was consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London, and has researched in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He now works privately in London and otherwise lives on the Isle of Skye.
Most helpful customer reviews
209 of 215 people found the following review helpful.
Seeing through the brain
By Jim Coughenour
Ian McGilchrist's thick book on the "divided brain" is the most interesting book I've read this year. I'd come to regard the fabled right brain/left brain antithesis as so much entertaining pop psychology (e.g., Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future) -- handy for provoking corporate robots, but hardly more than a convenient fiction. McGilchrist has convinced me that it's a metaphor worth taking seriously, that in fact it may be the fundamental metaphor for a scientistic age.
McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world - to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.
Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Bothits science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.
His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Re-Visioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism . Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.
At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm - but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.
143 of 150 people found the following review helpful.
A masterly achievement
By David Lorimer
This is a brilliant and staggeringly erudite book that only Iain McGilchrist could have written. Originally a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in English literature, he retrained in medicine and has brought together CP Snow's 'two cultures' in a masterly synthesis. McGilchrist overturns the commonly held view of the left hemisphere as dominant, showing conclusively that the right hemisphere is primary but that both are meant to work together. Each has a different but complementary perspective on the world: the right hemisphere apprehends the whole and mediates new experiences, while the left provides focus. The snag is that this narrow focus prefers abstraction to experience and treats living things as mechanisms. This mechanistic metaphor pervades the whole of modern science and indeed economics, with its emphasis on manipulation.
This view tends to dehumanise the world and impose a bureaucratic mentality, from whose excesses we currently suffer as we strive to eliminate all risk in favour of a certainty which does not exist outside mathematics. The second part of the book examines our cultural history in terms of a power struggle between left and right hemispheres, in which the left hemisphere is currently privileged. Here is a new take on the history of Western thought, which will radically reshape your understanding. The book is impressive not just in its scope, but is beautifully written, positively bristling with insights and creative intelligence on every page.
60 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
A masterful work
By gypsy
I agree with all the previous reviews of this remarkable book. As I was reading, I kept track of the specific elements of each of the hemispheres that McGilchrist cites in this well researched book. I thought I would share this with the readers:
A very partial summary of the nature of the left hemisphere could be as follows: it has an emphasis on doing, on things mechanistic, of the "whatness" of things; it is interested purely in functions and can only see things in context. The LH is not interested in living things. It does not understand metaphor and deals with pieces of information but cannot see the gestalt of situations. It recognizes the familiar and is not the hemisphere that attends to the "new", therefore it searches for what it already understands to categorize and nail down, often with (another of its characteristics) an unreasonable certainty of itself. Remember, it can't observe anything outside of its own confines. Since it prefers the known, it attempts to repackage new information (if unaided by the RH) as familiar - a kind of re-presenting the experience. It positively prefers (and defends!) what it knows! The LH tends to deny discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things. It creates "a sort of self-reflexive virtual world" according to McGilchrist. Additionally, it is "regional" and focuses narrowly. The metaphor for its structure is vertical. It brings an attention that isolates, fixes and makes things explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. It helps us to be grounded and "in life", looks for repetition and commonality between things without which we would drift and be unable to understand our experiences since all would be continuously new. It is efficient in routine situations where things are predictable. Without benefit of the RH (seen in studies of people with hemispheric damage, for example), it also renders things inert, mechanical and lifeless.. But it allows us to "know" and learn and make things.
The right hemisphere's emphasis is on process, on the "how", "the manner in which" or the "howness" as McGilchrist puts it. It is interested in "ways of being" which only living things have. I was amazed to learn that the RH does recognize one group of inanimate objects as belonging to the class of living entities, and that is musical instruments (!) It helps us resonate with other living beings and the natural world, seeing its ultimate interconnectedness. The RH can carefully see things out of their context, it is global rather than regional, is broad and flexible, and as mentioned above, understands metaphor. It sees the gestalt and the wholeness; it tolerates ambiguity and the unknown. Its structure metaphor is "horizontal"; it is spacious and helps us with enough distance so we can observe. In it, we experience the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. The RH is responsible for every kind of attention: divided, vigilant, sustained, and alertness - except for "focused", the domain of the LH. It can direct attention to what comes to us "from the edges" of our awareness regardless of the hemisphere side. It alone detects new or novel experiences. It distinguishes old information from new better than the LH. Animals, like horses, perceive new and emotionally arousing stimuli with the left eye (which is governed by the RH). It is more capable of a frame shift; think "possibility"; it has flexibility when encountering the "new" and suppresses the immediate impulse to see it as "old". It actively watches for discrepancies, more like a "devil's advocate". It approaches certainty with caution and humility. It says "I wonder" or "it might be" when confronted with information. But it also, without the LH, would create an experience that was always unique, forever in motion and unpredictable. `'If all things flow, and there is never a repeated experience, then we can never step into the same river twice, and we would never be able to `know' anything." If nothing can ever be repeated, then nothing can be known.
Is the result of this growing LH dominance over the RH an increasingly dehumanized society where mechanism, bureaucracy, obsession with structure and with "what" predominates over a concern for living things and beings and their interconnectedness? You will be immersed in this question throughout this remarkable book.
While no doubt this book deepens our understanding of the brain and has vast implications for psychotherapy and the understanding of human psychology, it is far more than this. It isn't possible to read this book without a continuing awareness of our political system, the growing dominance of our corporations, the weak assumptions of war, and the uncomfortably growing sense of the "dehumanization" of our world.
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