Know your left from your right: the brain’s divided hemispheres

The dust jacket of The Matter With Things quotes a large statement from an Oxford professor: ‘This is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever.’ Can any contemporary work withstand such praise? The ‘intelligent general reader’ (the book’s target audience) should, however, not be discouraged, for Iain McGilchrist has to be taken seriously: a Fellow of All Souls, eminent in neurology, psychiatry and literary criticism, a thinker and — it’s impossible to avoid the term —a sage. His previous book, The Master and His Emissary, was admired by public figures from Rowan Williams to Philip Pullman. Some consider McGilchrist the most important non-fiction writer of our time.

Such enthusiasm is unusual for the narrow subject of our divided brains. But the neglected science of hemisphere difference, returned to centre stage by McGilchrist, provides the key to larger issues. Moreover, the earlier work, substantial as it is, seems to have been a preparation for The Matter With Things, whose two handsomely produced volumes contain the entire corpus of McGilchrist’s thought. Initially unreviewed, and undeniably long and expensive, its first print run nonetheless sold out quickly, and readers reported becoming completely immersed. It is now once more available.

Western civilisation is in a predicament exemplified by alienation, environmental despoliation, the atrophy of value, the sterility of contemporary art, the increasing prevalence of rectilinear, bureaucratised thinking and the triumph of procedure over substance. The lesser aim of The Matter With Things is to identify the common basis of those conditions, and to understand and perhaps improve them. But its greater purpose is to enable us to know the world we inhabit.

The world only exists for us inasmuch as we perceive it. We do so as embodied human beings, in particular through our minds.