Easily the most important and great non-fiction book I read this year. Cannot recommend highly enough. A masterwork.

Such an incredible and dense book that I had to read it again. The most important scholarly work of the last twenty years.

You don't need to be convinced by McGilchrist's thesis to benefit immensely from reading this magnum opus (though I'd love to read a counter argument that manages to approach the same level of erudition and nuance ... I'm serious, point me to one! Is it possible?!). The back of the book contains over 150 pages of citations written in such tiny print that even my PRK-perfect eyes strained to read them, indicating not only how thoroughly researched and well-supported his arguments are, but also just how much wisdom he has to share with you from every discipline imaginable. He's the best kind of polymath: someone equally well-versed in the intuitive, implicit realm of art (he taught literature at Oxford before entering medicine) as in the more explicit realm of science.

In true right-hemisphere fashion, McGilchrist doesn't rely on his own ideas or even his current field (neuroscience) alone to arrive at a coherent picture of the Western world and its descent into unreality, but draws on thousands of voices from the annals of history, literature, philosophy, religion, ethics, physics, psychology, anthropology, etc—acknowledging the movements within each, and helping the reader discern patterns of perception encompassing them that would be difficult to even begin to notice without the depth and richness of an integrated view. Which is precisely the function the right hemisphere performs for a healthy brain: contextualization. That's what we lose, McG says, when we begin perceiving things primarily in parts rather than wholes (as is the case in our present, left-hemisphere-dominant society)—when we reduce the world and ourselves to mechanisms, rather than seeing them as living, evolving, interdependent entities that are ultimately unknowable except through an active I-thou relationship.

Among the many insights this book has gifted me, the fact that the brain reacts to a work of art the same way it reacts to seeing/hearing a living thing makes so much intuitive sense of the way in which books, music, the visual arts, etc seem to have their own ongoing life independent of their creators ... and why our experience of each work is so dependent on the unique relationship we develop with it, rather than any "objective" statement that can be made about the elements that constitute it. (This is also why lit/art theory, for all it's contributed to the academic study of these fields, is fundamentally maddening: It's an intrusion of the left hemisphere's obsession with systematic thinking on something that categorically resists it.)

Another thing I can't stop thinking about and seeing everywhere I look, now: cynicism and gullibility are close bedfellows, neurologically speaking.

I could go on. But I have 1,300 more pages of McGilchrist ([b:The Matter With Things|58955313|The Matter With Things Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World|Iain McGilchrist|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641262000l/58955313._SX50_.jpg|92917408]) to read. What can I say? In an insane world, sanity is addictive.

McGilchrist's work here is majesterial in depth and scope. I was somewhat overwhelmed by his knowledge of the classics, philosophers and poets, and his ability to synthesise them into his explanation of the how the brain's hemispheres function. There's a lot to think about, and I'll mull over it for a while. I may read this again sometime.

That said, I'll jump to the criticisms. By the end of the book I got the feeling that his hemispheres-hammer started to see hemispheres-nails everywhere. It's the theory to explain everything, and becomes somewhat unfalsifiable. I appreciate the difficulty in using the left hemisphere to explain (ie, writing an academic book) the workings of the (uncapturable world of the) right hemisphere, thus according to his theory his explanation is going to be lacking something that academic writing can never capture. I'm not sure of the solution to that. I also think his rose coloured glasses view of bygone eras is a bit myopic, and becomes a powerful narrative by which to interpret human history. Were 'humans' 'really' 'happier' 'back then'? I have to qualify every word in that sentence, because it's not straightforward - which humans? Measured by what? Starting from when?

McGilchrist mostly speaks glowingly of ancient peoples and their myths and religions, but never mentions the horrors, fears and suppression that they brought, and this is, I think, the mistake of searching for explanatory narratives. It ultimately leads to hit counting and confirmation bias.

But back to the positives.... It was really helpful to see how the different parts of the brain worked, and I was able to recognise those different patterns in myself, and the oppositie pulls of the left and right hemispheres. McGilchrist takes a somewhat negative view of scientific reductionism, yet dividing consciousness into the activities of separate brain hemispheres seems like the ultimate in reductionist thinking. Did that thought cross his mind (minds?)?

I also thought it fascinating to think about how ancient humans may not have had an inner dialogue, and when that started to develop they had no mytho-cultural norms for interpreting that, and thus there was an explosion of 'god-whisperers' - people hearing an inner dialogue, not knowing what it was, and concluding they were hearing voices from beyond. Today we have narratives and precedents for interpreting this phenomenon ("It must be me talking to myself in my head, which is what everyone else is experiencing and is totally normal, and science backs that up"). I'm not sure how we could ever 'prove' that this is the case, but it's an interesting hypothesis that has a bit of explanatory power.

Another interesting concept was the paradoxical nature of the left hemisphere's inability to articulate the right hemisphere's activity, and all the different phenomena that are 'destroyed' by the left hemisphere's attempt to codify the uncodifiable, such as 'freedom', or 'spontenaity', or 'authenticity'. I've felt this tension my whole life, and intuitively known that there's something paradoxical and unsolvable about it, but didn't have a framework by which to explain it. Now that I have a framework I wonder if my left hemisphere will simply latch onto that at every possibility....

Related to that, his description of the American Revolution and the movement toward 'small government' explains in part my general preference for conservative politics despite my sympathies with liberal issues. I think that government is not really able to legislate true freedom, but in a left-brained way tries and tries, and ties up 'freedom' in legislation and laws which are the antithesis to freedom. That's not my only reason, but it's a significant one.

I thought it was interesting that in mentioning the sensation that language is inadequate for articulating all of one's thoughts about something, he identified the three dots '...' as a marker of the right hemisphere's resistance to closure and certainty. Those dots represent the 'inexaustability' and 'unembraceability' of articulation, and I personally use them a lot when not constrained by formal writing standards.

Hyperconsciousness is something I'm curious about. I definitely have leanings toward that, and I agree that too much consciousness is a bad thing in that it ruins an experience. It's hard to have a sense of awe and wonder while having a sense of having a sense of awe and wonder. It's hard to belly laugh while 'observing' one's own response to a funny situation, analysing it, and being aware of one's own physiological response. It seems that there's a happy balance between consciousness and ignorance. IIRC, McGilchrist suggests that ancient authors rarely describe schizotypal behaviours and perhaps it's a modern phenomenon, the ultimate ascendance of the left hemisphere. This is basically the conclusion of TMAHE. There's definitely a movement toward algorithmic driven life, and according to McGilchrist, this is the left hemisphere's attempt to control the phenomena experienced through the right hemisphere. We see this even more as AI takes over more and more aspects of human life and may, according to some critics of AI, end up taking over everything - a universe of paperclips. I don't know what the solution is, because any attempt to solve it is likely to be a left hemisphere driven solution.

Anyway, great book, with lots to ponder. Almost 5 stars, but for the romanticising of history and lack of addressing relevant academic criticisms.

EDIT 2021-05-12:
Just finished reading the second time through. My impression was similar to the first. Another thing I noticed, which is hard to explain, is that I feel like McGilchrist has a kind of elitist skepticism about knowledge etc, but at the same time he has his own unchallenged assumptions underneath his ideas. It's like he's saying that obviously the world is a certain way, so let's examine the methods we use to uncover this world because those methods are problematic. But he's not really challenging his idea that there's a real way which the world is, or at least, he's not acknowledging that he's not challenging this, which reveals to me a certain blindness. The book is excellent, and I really like his thoughts. There's just this nagging feeling that it's not just incomplete, but wrongish. Not sure if I'll get to the bottom of that......

Wonderful breadth from neuro-science to literature! On the other hand, I read only 1/8 of this book, because my reading time is limited.

"Master and His Emissary" refers to an enigmatic parable Nietzsche told.

Five stars here not necessarily because I believe that every claim McGilchrist makes is literally true, nor because it's an incredibly enjoyable read, but rather because despite its flaws this must be one of the most thought-provoking works I've come across.

Others have given their observations (at length) of the not-good-nesses, and those things are probably all worth taking into account, but I think paying close attention to what this book says - without feeling compelled to take all or any of it as gospel - is a rewarding experience. You might come out of it wondering whether some claims made about your brain, its history, and how it will affect your future might not be literally true, but be nevertheless useful as metaphors or analogies that can help you think about how you think.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that what you take from McGilchrist probably depends on how you expect to listen to him. If you want hard, evidence-based, empirical and definite SCIENCE, then you'll probably read it in that way and feel a bit underwhelmed. If you're OK with something that's interesting and stimulating but doesn't necessarily get at hard facts so exclusively or neatly, then you might find it sparking some interesting thoughts.

(That said, I also don't think it makes spiritual, alternative, or pseudoscientific claims. I'm not really sure it makes many claims at all, just observes a few tidbits that have to do with neuroscience and goes 'well, wouldn't it be interesting if...?')