I'm amazed that I didn't learn of this book sooner! It came out in 2009, and I just got around to it in 2022. I picked it up because I was reading McGilchrist's new text, "The Matter with Things," and he said it picked up where his last book left off, so I thought it a good idea to pick up this earlier work.

I'm generally hesitant to pick up literature written by neuroscientists. This is because much of what is available out there looks at the brain as a machine. I was relieved to find that McGilchrist has none of this tenor, and one of the points of this book is to establish that neuroscience that looks at the brain as a machine is bad science!

The basic premise of the book is that the left and right hemispheres of our brain each inhabit a coherent paradigm, but that these two perspectives can often be at odds with one another, and which hemisphere gets priority has a huge bearing not just on our lives, but on the future of civilization and the planet.

All known organisms with brains have two hemispheres. Generally speaking the left hemisphere of our brain is concerned with instrumentalism and control, and the right hemisphere is concerned with relationship and animism. To speak to McGilchrist' philosophical argument, he posits that much of the arc of Western Civilization has given priority to the left hemisphere. He tracks the work of philosophers going back centuries that intuits hemispheric difference.

During and since reading the book, I've been applying McGilchrist's theory in other fields. How does hemispheric difference help to structure and inform different spiritual traditions, educational epistemologies, and schools of thought. This is a very rich field, and I hope that McGilchrist and others apply these theories broadly, as I think they have a lot to offer us in a wide range of different fields.

If you are going to read both books, at least in the science half (the first half) of each book, there is a lot of repetition. ( )

Great book. He talks of the hemispher of the brain. he uses emissary because its similar to slave. So you cant say that today. Great read.. ( )

A very thought provoking view of the workings of the human brain. He uses neuroscience, philosophy, and art to ascribe differing ways of looking at the world to the two hemispheres of the brain and then to view the progression of Western thought from this perspective. His thesis that modern Western society has been absconded by the left brain. My primary difficulty with the book was that in making his point he seemed to repeat himself many times. ( )

Seemed promising: an update on the L/R Brain, including a survey of how it worked out across Western cultural history. Granted he's well-read, but almost every point is made in a binary way, asserted rather than demonstrated or evidenced, in a language so abstract that I got lost. On top of that the Audible version is full of mispronunciations, e.g. panlopy, Hussrel, etc, lack of right emphasis in words and sentences, distortions of foreign names and terms (the German is incomprehensible to me , a fluent German speaker). I gave up. ( )

Who am I kidding? I had to give up on this. Couldn't make it through the dense first third description of brain function and the existence of brain asymmetry. So I never even made it to his ground breaking idea about the world we've made and how one half of our brain is being a bully. Or whatever. May try again when I am old and unplagued by children and working and other interests. May not.