The Weekend University

Dr Iain McGilchrist - A Divided Brain and an Addicted World: The Missing Link?

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Jun 6, 2024
Dr Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and writer, delves into his hemispheric hypothesis explaining societal addiction. Topics include the decline of Western civilization, left hemisphere dominance, ingredients for human flourishing, and the concept of the sacred and embedded values in being.
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INSIGHT

Why The Human Brain Is Divided

  • The brain split into asymmetric hemispheres solves the tradeoff between focused manipulation and broad vigilance.
  • The left hemisphere narrows attention to known, graspable bits while the right sustains open, contextual understanding of wholes and novelty.
INSIGHT

How Civilisations Fall From A Divided Brain

  • Civilisations flourish when right-hemisphere depth and left-hemisphere focused skill balance each other, then decay when the left mode dominates.
  • McGilchrist traces Greek and Roman rises and falls to this shift from lived richness to abstract rule-following.
INSIGHT

Signs Of A Left Hemisphere Society

  • A left-hemisphere dominated society loses wisdom, nuance and embodied skill, replacing them with bureaucratic rules and measurable data.
  • This produces paranoia, factionalism, de-skilling of professionals, and a spectator rather than actor relationship to life.
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