Show Notes
As many of us move into the holiday season and slower days, I wanted to reshare this conversation with Iain McGilchrist. It’s a spacious, illuminating exploration of how we’ve come to live as we do — and a reminder that meaning and beauty are still available to us, even when solutions feel out of reach.
Dr Iain McGilchrist (neuroscientist, psychiatrist, polymath, author of The Master and His Emissary) devised a thesis that sets out how the two sides of our brains can affect the way we both interact and create the world. The left hemisphere is a narrow, extractive, problem-solving “machine” that divides and conquers things, fails to see our part in the world and to fathom beauty, awe and responsibility. Our civilisation, Iain says, has become ruled by a left-brain mentality, which is killing us and leaving us “wretched”; we need to put the right side back in charge!
Iain is an associate of Green Templeton College in Oxford and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal Society of Arts. His 2009 book Master and his Emissary became a cult read and the recent follow-up, The Matter with Things took him 12 years to write (and is 600,000 words long!).
In this chat, we cover why societies start out creative, happy and flourishing (right-brained!) but switch left and destructive as they expand; the secret to living a well and happy life and how to find meaning and beauty in a world we possibly can’t “fix” (in the left-brain sense of the word).
SHOW NOTES Learn more about Iain's work via his website and watch his videos here. Buy Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things here. Listen to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's Wild episode.
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If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most! Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life Let’s connect on Instagram and WeAre8
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Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.
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