285: Iain McGilchrist: Why the World Feels Flat (The Ache, Pt. 3)
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. CampShow Notes
Modernity has helped us to use the world. We have reduced it to resources to extract, data to process, problems to solve. While it has made us powerful, it has also left the world feeling flat, and left us feeling eerily like machines ourselves.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist says this reduction is a habit of attention, and it has everything to do with the two hemispheres of the brain. One half grasps, isolates, and uses. The other holds things together, sees the whole, and senses what is alive. He argues that we've been handing the world over to the grasping side of the brain. A psychiatrist and neuroscientist who began as a literary scholar and once considered entering a monastery, Iain has spent 35 years studying how these two ways of attending shape the world we experience.
The good news is that our attention can change. From his eighteenth-century home on the Isle of Skye, he invites us to see the world anew. As something living, met in an encounter that leaves neither side unchanged.
This is part three of The Ache: The Longing Modernity Couldn't Cure, a three-part No Small Endeavor series.
This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc funder DOI 501100011730) through grant https://doi.org/10.54224/35684. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.
Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript for abridged episode with Iain McGilchrist
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