Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Attention as a civic commons
Nate and Iain discuss how fragmented attention misses environmental and value 'gorillas' in plain sight.
For many of us, our instinctual response to rising conflict and instability might be to recede further into pragmatism as a way to survive. Yet, if our cultural values and ways of life are what got us here, rooted in narrow-boundary, cold, and logical thinking – then perhaps moments of turbulence like these actually call on us to change our way of thinking entirely. Is this moment our opportunity to pivot toward worldviews that emphasize the intangible qualities of life, and could that shift cause a cascade through our actions and decisions, leading to more balanced decision-making for the betterment of everyone?
In this episode, Nate is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist for discussion on how our left-brain dominance obscures our sense of value, especially for abstract qualities such as truth, goodness, and beauty. As a way to reclaim an appreciation for these things, he urges us to slow down, create spaciousness, embrace silence and deep listening, and resist the mania for productivity in our modern culture. Nate and Iain also discuss consciousness, panpsychism, and panentheism, exploring the thread that there might be some form of universal current running through everything, uniting us all. Bringing everything together, Iain calls for a recovery of humility, compassion, awe, and wonder and insists that even a small percentage of people genuinely living differently could begin to shift cultural consciousness.
How do the things we choose to pay attention to affect our ability to see what's important in the world – and subsequently what we value and prioritize? What would it feel like to treat each day as a gift rather than a problem to solve, and how might that shift our relationship with time, mortality, and meaning? Most of all, is it possible for some subset of humans to reground ourselves and our behavior in the interconnectedness of life, and could those small changes add up to meaningfully alter humanity's current trajectory?
(Conversation recorded on March 24th, 2026)
About Iain McGilchrist:
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.
Iain has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
Iain is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology, and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).
Watch this video episode on YouTube
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
---
Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
The AI-powered Podcast Player
