Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, scholar, and philosopher. He is known for his book The Master and His Emissary (2009), which explores brain lateralization. He looks at how the brain affects culture and society. McGilchrist's writing shows how important it is to understand the mind and brain in a cultural and existential context.

McGilchrist was born in 1953 and received a scholarship to Winchester College. He then went to New College, Oxford, where he won two prizes for English. After getting his English degree, he got a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He researched the mind-body relationship while teaching literature. He became a psychiatrist after studying psychology and philosophy.

McGilchrist trained as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, working in various units, including the National Psychosis Referral Unit and the Epilepsy Unit. He also worked as a research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, focusing on schizophrenia. McGilchrist used his experience in psychiatry to inform his research and writing.

McGilchrist's first notable publication, Against Criticism (1982), explored the limits of literary criticism and signalled the beginning of his long engagement with philosophical and psychological issues. His best-known work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), cemented his reputation as a scholar at the intersection of neuroscience and culture.

The book says that the left and right sides of the brain see and understand the world differently. It says that Western society has been dominated by the analytical and reductionist thinking of the left side of the brain. McGilchrist argues that this imbalance has had profound consequences for culture, art and human relationships and calls for a reintegration of the holistic perspective of the right hemisphere.

In The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (2012), McGilchrist expanded on these ideas, exploring how brain lateralisation affects our understanding of meaning, purpose and human existence. His continuing interest in the mind's relationship to culture and perception culminated in Ways of Attending (2018), which examines how attention shapes our perception and how the divided brain constructs reality.

McGilchrist's latest work, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021), is a two-volume study of epistemology and metaphysics. It challenges reductive materialism and explores fundamental questions about reality, consciousness and value.

Iain McGilchrist currently lives on the Isle of Skye.

Photo credit: channelmcgilchrist.com