“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
The two hemispheres of our brain collaborate to produce a coherent understanding of the world—at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. In his groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, neuro-philosopher and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, proposed that our culture has been captured by the left hemisphere, whose dogmatic, technical and irrational way of processing information leads it to manifestly dangerous conclusions about the way the world works. Importantly, the left hemisphere never changes its mind.
In one of the widest-ranging conversations on Planet: Critical to date, Iain explains how we came to lose sight of the bigger picture by forsaking the intuition, creativity and intelligence of the right hemisphere. We discuss how our relationship to language makes and unmakes the world, the search for meaning, human agency, relationality, morality, art and the divine, with Iain clearly spelling out a path to human fulfilment—which may very well be the only thing which can save Earth from the worst of us.
