Dr Iain McGilchrist: We are living in a deluded world

Women are imperamently necessary to join the decision making at top level. It will be a work of the decennia to come, worldwide.

Essential viewing for all the world's main decision-makers. Chair was excellent,speaker brilliant (shining).

did you see the german girl at the end?

incredible talk—thanks to you both

Interested in his thoughts on the Renaissance as a "flowering" and therefore a phase of balance before the emergence of the scientific Enlightenment world view. The visual art of the Renaissance is characterised by the "discovery" of linear perspective, which creates for the viewer a focussed point of view. This is essentially a left hemisphere reductionist view. Contrast this with the reverse perspective in Byzantine and other Eastern Orthodox devotional art. Icons foster a completely different mode of attentiveness. It is an attentiveness or awareness that is aligned to the different theological perspective of the Eastern Church with greater emphasis on the immanence of God and the sacredness and connectedness of all creation. The left hand path of Western civilization may ultimately proceed from the schism with the Eastern Church in the 11th century.

Nearly everything he says (philosophically) has already been said by Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger and even Merleau-Ponty. His views on modernism are dealt with more interestingly by Latour. His failure to address the death of democracy by agents of capital is painful.

Why beat around the bush and keep saying " i think you know what/who i mean"? Why not call out the dogmatist by name?

It is such priveleg for our world to have people like Dr Iain McGilchrist! What a mind, heart and inner space of perception of things and mysteries. I am so inspired! Thank you! I wish your books will be translated into Polish, because I wanted to send them to my family.

Very interesting about male and female and how qualities of the hemispheres are distributed between the sexes...but the dominance of the left hemisphere seems to accompany male domination so do you have ideas about how patriarchy got such a hold and men became so exploitative of and violent towards women?

Yeah living the consequences of behavior created of ignorance is so unnecessary and unacceptable. Who is going to tell the truth. I will. Such foolishness. 7 million years and we are still peeing on property. Still the animal stink is getting worse and our habitat declining. Property has more value than the life upon it. WOW

Science will answer all the questions except for the question of who it is that is asking questions

Reason is reductive. Non-duality is the ultimate logical conclusion, at no way at odds with reason.

Outstanding.

Wants us to pray? It seems that he himself is deficient in some of those all-important, inhibitory neurons. To proceed toward understanding of anything, it is as necessary to to recognize false paths to understanding as it is to seek new ones. If one clutter one's mind indiscriminately with all the wisdom nonsense that mankind has ever come up with, well, one is a madman who never advances toward truth. No, none of us knows what is the ultimate source and nature of the universe and being. But it take a madman to drop to his knees and try to hold a conversation with god, at least any god about which one knows or understands nothing at all. And that would certainly include the Judeo-Christian god, who has been built up from three thousand years of myth, rumor, hysteria, and irrational certitude. One can't be sure that there is ~nothing~ out there beyond our understanding. Humility must grant that. But there is nothing remotely humble in accepting all the dogma built up about this elemental force and imagining his purposes and reasoning and declaring one's love and devotion to Him, especially when doing so following a strict pattern of traditional forms.

The fact the science can't fully explain everything absolutely does not mean there's any other realm that does. It simply means our understanding is limited. Keep in mind Ambrose Bierce's observation that religion is the daughter of hope and fear explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.

Not bad for a Zoom recording.

Fantastic talk. Thank you.

“We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery”
- Bishop Kallistos Ware of Oxford

His observation that modern music has progressed largely towards just rhythm (think of most pop music these days) while gradually dropping melody and harmony is spot on and makes absolute sense in the context of an increasingly left brain dominated world.

What a gem ❤

Absolutely fascinating, so glad I watched this.

sometimes intelligent people are so very stupid. not because of what they know, but how rigid their thinking is - they have no appreciation for other opinions or ideas

I've listened to this many times and it all sounds like stuff I learned in the 1970s but delivered in far too many words.

Joy. Thanks so much I never get tired of listening to Iain's very grounded philosophy / research / conversations. (Particularly enjoyed the Isle of White Joke early in this talk!) Stand up comedians would be really interesting to study in terms of the two ways of attending. My instinct is that they dance continually between the two in a limber way and that might be part of what makes us laugh.

As an artist - sort of - what can I do except wholeheartedly agree. And for all I can see - things are getting worse day by day.

Absolutely fascinating. Finally a great mind who is helping me understand better how my mind works . Thank you Freddie !

Interesting perspective if you can get past his patronizing attitude. Other philosophers and scientists make the same points more powerfully without being locked into brain anatomy binaries or defining “we” strictly in terms of the UK/Eurowestern world. Karen Barad, Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Nora Bateson, Andreas Weber, Silvia Federici, Bayo Akomolafe, Donna Haraway, Tyson Yunkaporta (and others!) all take on the problems McGilchrist ascribes to the left brain imbalance.

A rediscovery of Iain McGilchrist. I really enjoyed this talk, I am left inspired, excited, reassured. He is a voice of sanity in very difficult times. I only wish he had said what he meant at 26 minutes 20 seconds. I have a guess but I'm not sure.

Yeah. I think people who are wise think like I do, too. Everyone who thinks anything thinks this. People do not continue to think things they find unwise.

What can answer the questions that science can not?

How will you measure the effectiveness of this non-science question answering?

How is stating unequivocally what science can not answer any less dogmatic than assuming what it can?

How is the amount of unwise thinking being measured, when it is stated that it is worse than ever? These are quantifiable statements. Unsupported they are more akin to hyperbole.

It is difficult for me to see the prescription in the observation that we aren't thinking wisely or correctly. A particularly acute diagnosis with a quite vacuous prescription.

I disagree that this should not be considered woo.

This is such an eye-opening interview for me! Thank you so very much!

Would like to comment. Dr McGilchrist is very accurate in his views of left and right hemispheres. He has expanded and specified this view. But I would like him to pay credit to the much neglected scholar Julian Jaynes, of whom I have heard rejections from mr McGilchrist that Jaynes' theories has not influenced him at all. I beg you pardon. McGilchrists' veiws are a continuation and expansion of Jaynes' theories, but to state that Jaynes' theories have nothing to do with his own claimes is a downright dismissal of the heretidge of Jaynes' thinking. Admitt you are standing on the shoulders of a giant, namely Julian Jaynes.

Fantastic talk, excited to learn more about Iain's ideas.

How does our world actualize this information? Humanity is better, how? Gibberish for the masses.

The whole edifice of this corrupt empire must run its course toward the inevitable brick wall.
In the meantime take care of each other.

Synthetic food and ingredients, as well as receptor medicine, the one manipulating receptors in order to suppress symptoms and we call it “medication,” are examples of extreme left-hemisphere science. Which in itself is incomplete because it lacks the holistic understanding of the human body and the causes of disease. Humans as biological organisms, rather than machines, respond naturally and a lot better to other naturally created biological substances like vitamins, supplements, and minerals. This is a real branch in science our modern world is pretending does not exist. This is nutrition science and our body will atrophy if we continue with synthetic food and the search for cures of disease will never end.
Genetics is more a product of a left-hemisphere thinking. No different from the separating, super concentrated attention to visual and disconnected parts as any other receptor based treatment rather than a holistic attention to processes and causes as a whole.

Truly an amazing talk. Thank you.

The left/right divide and IM's explanation of their complementary relationship is almost a precise mirror of how Carl Jung depicted the human psyche. He postulated 4 basic functions of the psyche in two polarities: sensation/ intuition, and thinking/feeling. As he applied this to a societal analysis, he regarded western man as being too one-sided, meaning much more prone to valuing thinking and sensation over intuition and feeling in a way which is remarkably similar to IM's analysis from a neuroscientific perspective. I would be fascinated by a discussion in which IM addressed the relevance or influence of Jung on his thinking, if any. I suspect he would be aware of the parallelism. Jung is overshadowed by Freud, and both are now generally regarded as relics of the past. But Jung was unbelievably prescient in his thinking and is more relevant now than ever imo.

We are locked into our own individual phanerons, and all of us have been influenced and oftentimes manipulated by others.
What the Greeks called 'Koinos Kosmos' modern people today call 'Consensual Reality', physicists call this 'Non-local Realism. Last year the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Aspect et al for proving its illusionary. This is what Kant meant when he said you can never know the ding an sich.
Objects we see are illusionary that does not mean they are not real, it means we never see any object in its true essence a dip into the thanatology literature will help you understand why. This is a dream world and death is not the end. We are Alters in Mind at Large.

Wouldn't the concepts on the brain hemisphere differences be vastly different dependig on biological sex & genetics? Physiologically women have hundreds to thousands of more connections between the two hemispheres than men. Nearly 50% of all individuals have an IQ of 100 or less & according to statistics the average IQ has been declining every year for over 25-30 years. How does endocrine disrupting chemicals affect the development of the brain in utero?

Doctor has access to some seriously mystical insights!

Who is the guy interviewing him?

free association, TM meditation, stream of consciousness writing, playing music improvisations, lateral thinking brainstorming,,,Mindfulness is to structured it is too left brain dominated! Nope

There are "imaginary" numbers and "irrational" numbers in MATH our imagination and our irrationality is very powerful and necessary in a healthy balanced human mind/Life

Female Genital Mutilation does not prevent rape however tightly sewn up... Gang rape. Drug rape.. Date rape Child rape Marital rape... CASTRATION SOLUTION works better Prevention is better than cure

Scrotums appendix and tumours removal. As in Castration solution....

The Testostrrone Curse stands in the way of reason... Left brain..
CASTRATION SOLUTION lessen the hormonal build up