Iain McGilchrist

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn…

— Iain McGilchrist

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in…

— Iain McGilchrist

Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap…

— Iain McGilchrist

To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we…

— Iain McGilchrist

I trained in medicine after pursuing an academic career in the humanities, mainly because of my interest in the relationship between mind…

— Iain McGilchrist

We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.

— Iain McGilchrist

“When Lear cries, ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’, we could reply, on one level, yes –…

— Iain McGilchrist

The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for…

— Iain McGilchrist

“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from…

— Iain McGilchrist

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated…

— Iain McGilchrist

“Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are,…

— Iain McGilchrist

Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness…

— Iain McGilchrist

“If there is a tendency for the right hemisphere to be more sorrowful and prone to depression, this can, in my view,…

— Iain McGilchrist

In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be…

— Iain McGilchrist

The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

— Iain McGilchrist

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into…

— Iain McGilchrist

Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their…

— Iain McGilchrist

The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans.

— Iain McGilchrist

“None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging…

— Iain McGilchrist

“Although relatively speaking the right hemisphere takes a more pessimistic view of the self, it is also more realistic about it.457 There…

— Iain McGilchrist

“The really interesting finding here, as the authors themselves put it, is that ‘without batting an eye’ the left hemisphere draws mistaken…

— Iain McGilchrist

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

— Iain McGilchrist

“It is rather odd to find Dunbar referring to dance as useless: ‘dancing, a phenomenon that probably ranks, along with smiling and…

— Iain McGilchrist

The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.

— Iain McGilchrist

The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.

— Iain McGilchrist