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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

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Ian McGilchrist's thick book on the "divided brain" is the most interesting book I've read this year. I'd come to regard the fabled right brain/left brain antithesis as so much entertaining pop psychology (e.g., Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future) -- handy for provoking corporate robots, but hardly more than a convenient fiction. McGilchrist has convinced me that it's a metaphor worth taking seriously, that in fact it may be the fundamental metaphor for a scientistic age.

McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world - to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.

Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Bothits science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.

His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Re-Visioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism . Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.

At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm - but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.

This is a brilliant and staggeringly erudite book that only Iain McGilchrist could have written. Originally a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in English literature, he retrained in medicine and has brought together CP Snow's 'two cultures' in a masterly synthesis. McGilchrist overturns the commonly held view of the left hemisphere as dominant, showing conclusively that the right hemisphere is primary but that both are meant to work together. Each has a different but complementary perspective on the world: the right hemisphere apprehends the whole and mediates new experiences, while the left provides focus. The snag is that this narrow focus prefers abstraction to experience and treats living things as mechanisms. This mechanistic metaphor pervades the whole of modern science and indeed economics, with its emphasis on manipulation.

This view tends to dehumanise the world and impose a bureaucratic mentality, from whose excesses we currently suffer as we strive to eliminate all risk in favour of a certainty which does not exist outside mathematics. The second part of the book examines our cultural history in terms of a power struggle between left and right hemispheres, in which the left hemisphere is currently privileged. Here is a new take on the history of Western thought, which will radically reshape your understanding. The book is impressive not just in its scope, but is beautifully written, positively bristling with insights and creative intelligence on every page.

Iain McGilchrist `The Master and His Emissary' : For sceptics and careful investors

Recent decades constitute a golden age for brain research, using new technology and methods. However, this gold has too often been mixed with lead, and even mud. Some have clung stubbornly to quickly outdated research, while others have aimed to cash-in on the prestige and fascination of such research by exploiting (sometimes for psycho-political as well as commercial purposes) half-truths and misunderstandings. At one extreme the brain becomes a fetish, while at another extreme it seems smart to speak of the allegedly obvious as `a no-brainer'. Hence, when a new, big, brain-book attracts such enthusiastic acclaim as this one, it is only prudent to be mindful of the need for caution.

Happily, Iain McGilchrist has provided on a personal website ([...]) not only summaries of his qualifications, experience and commitments, but also his book's complete and illuminating Introduction (about 15 pages), along with his table of contents and chapters. The caution, and respect for evidence and argument - as well as for his readers, to be found in this introduction are sufficient to show that he is an outstanding thinker, as well as researcher, polymath, cultural critic and humanistic practitioner, who deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt by any prospective purchaser. He is a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker, who - just because he appreciates disciplinary boundaries - is well prepared to cross them responsibly in developing his argument and insights.

Another impressively reliable reviewer, in addition to those already available on the Amazon site, is the great moral philosopher, interpreter of life-sciences, and cultural critic Mary Midgley. (The range of her work and the general high regard for this can be seen by looking her up on Amazon). No one could ever fairly accuse Midgley of being uncritically swept along by any version of scientism (abuse of the sciences). Her review of McGilchrist appears in the Guardian (Review section) for Saturday 02/01.2010, page 6, under the title `The Music of the Hemispheres'. Midgley's review begins, `This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain. Midgely ends by welcoming the book as `...clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating. ...And I do have to say that, fat though it is, I couldn't put it down'.

I truly believe this is the most exciting book I have ever read. My copy has penciled underlinings on almost every page and manic exclamation marks in many of the margins. Iain McGilchrist's thesis, so aptly encapsulated in his title and so richly illustrated in the two halves of the book, is an extraordinarily convincing explanation for the paradox of progress - i.e. that ultimately unprovable feeling that the finding of concrete technological solutions to the problems of our lives, wonderful as these solutions undoubtedly are, is bringing with it a tragic impoverishment of life itself.
The fundamental point of the thesis is that formal logic, the engine of the Enlightenment and of the modern world, is incapable of fully describing reality, so that an entirely different kind of modelling is needed as well. This inadequacy of logic has been proved by, of all things, logic itself, in the form of Gödel's theorem, but in a softer way it is sensed by every one of us when we encounter `madness' in the well-intentioned systems which increasingly rule our lives. But at the same time logic is the only language through which we can express ourselves if we wish to be taken seriously in the official world.
By bringing two new approaches to bear McGilchrist may just have begun to change all this. In the first half of his book he uses his expertise as a psychiatrist and experimental neurophysiologist to present a vast range of fascinating evidence to show that the functions of the two cerebral hemispheres are indeed entirely different in kind. On the way he explains numerous bizarre phenomena, including the fact that an increasingly complete separation of the hemispheres has conferred an evolutionary advantage on our remote ancestors.
In the second part of the book McGilchrist displays the other side of his `Renaissance man' credentials. From his background as a lecturer in English at Oxford University (UK) and thrice-elected Fellow of All Souls College he uses his split-world thesis to cast an extraordinary clarifying light on the entire history of western culture. Even viewed simply as a metaphor this makes wonderful sense of swings in philosophy, art and science which have always seemed to me completely baffling. But the aptness of the match he makes between these swings and the characteristics of left and right brain modelling previously described suggest something much more than a metaphor to me. Something much more like the truth.
I urge anyone to read this wonderful book. But also to annotate it with a pencil. This device will not only make the book your own but the provisional nature of pencil will keep the excitement of that first encounter in your right hemisphere, and alive.

I agree with all the previous reviews of this remarkable book. As I was reading, I kept track of the specific elements of each of the hemispheres that McGilchrist cites in this well researched book. I thought I would share this with the readers:
A very partial summary of the nature of the left hemisphere could be as follows: it has an emphasis on doing, on things mechanistic, of the "whatness" of things; it is interested purely in functions and can only see things in context. The LH is not interested in living things. It does not understand metaphor and deals with pieces of information but cannot see the gestalt of situations. It recognizes the familiar and is not the hemisphere that attends to the "new", therefore it searches for what it already understands to categorize and nail down, often with (another of its characteristics) an unreasonable certainty of itself. Remember, it can't observe anything outside of its own confines. Since it prefers the known, it attempts to repackage new information (if unaided by the RH) as familiar - a kind of re-presenting the experience. It positively prefers (and defends!) what it knows! The LH tends to deny discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things. It creates "a sort of self-reflexive virtual world" according to McGilchrist. Additionally, it is "regional" and focuses narrowly. The metaphor for its structure is vertical. It brings an attention that isolates, fixes and makes things explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. It helps us to be grounded and "in life", looks for repetition and commonality between things without which we would drift and be unable to understand our experiences since all would be continuously new. It is efficient in routine situations where things are predictable. Without benefit of the RH (seen in studies of people with hemispheric damage, for example), it also renders things inert, mechanical and lifeless.. But it allows us to "know" and learn and make things.

The right hemisphere's emphasis is on process, on the "how", "the manner in which" or the "howness" as McGilchrist puts it. It is interested in "ways of being" which only living things have. I was amazed to learn that the RH does recognize one group of inanimate objects as belonging to the class of living entities, and that is musical instruments (!) It helps us resonate with other living beings and the natural world, seeing its ultimate interconnectedness. The RH can carefully see things out of their context, it is global rather than regional, is broad and flexible, and as mentioned above, understands metaphor. It sees the gestalt and the wholeness; it tolerates ambiguity and the unknown. Its structure metaphor is "horizontal"; it is spacious and helps us with enough distance so we can observe. In it, we experience the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. The RH is responsible for every kind of attention: divided, vigilant, sustained, and alertness - except for "focused", the domain of the LH. It can direct attention to what comes to us "from the edges" of our awareness regardless of the hemisphere side. It alone detects new or novel experiences. It distinguishes old information from new better than the LH. Animals, like horses, perceive new and emotionally arousing stimuli with the left eye (which is governed by the RH). It is more capable of a frame shift; think "possibility"; it has flexibility when encountering the "new" and suppresses the immediate impulse to see it as "old". It actively watches for discrepancies, more like a "devil's advocate". It approaches certainty with caution and humility. It says "I wonder" or "it might be" when confronted with information. But it also, without the LH, would create an experience that was always unique, forever in motion and unpredictable. `'If all things flow, and there is never a repeated experience, then we can never step into the same river twice, and we would never be able to `know' anything." If nothing can ever be repeated, then nothing can be known.

Is the result of this growing LH dominance over the RH an increasingly dehumanized society where mechanism, bureaucracy, obsession with structure and with "what" predominates over a concern for living things and beings and their interconnectedness? You will be immersed in this question throughout this remarkable book.

While no doubt this book deepens our understanding of the brain and has vast implications for psychotherapy and the understanding of human psychology, it is far more than this. It isn't possible to read this book without a continuing awareness of our political system, the growing dominance of our corporations, the weak assumptions of war, and the uncomfortably growing sense of the "dehumanization" of our world.

Have you ever wondered whether popular beliefs about the two sides of our brains have any truth in them? Have you wondered why our so-called civilisation developed the way it has? Are you concerned that the crises currently facing us may not resolve well, if at all? Or do you think that technology alone can save the world?
Iain McGilchrist's new book addresses, directly or by implication, aspects of these and many related questions. Through the lens of our brains' structures and functions he shows how the different and opposed ways in which we can view the world mirror what we sense the world to be, and therefore how we approach and take hold of it (or not). In an extensive review of scientific work he challenges neuroscientists' tendencies to ignore the issues of hemisphere differentiation from weariness at popular over-simplifications, because he believes in the value of that approach in revealing how we live our lives, and the second part of the book does just that by surveying the trajectories of Western history in terms of swings between left and right brain orientations, the oscillations tending towards a bias favouring the somewhat schizophrenic left brain world view.
This is an absorbing and valuable book, illustrating in the very way it is written authentic wonder, firmly embodied and securely grounded. For me it is one of those books which turn up from time to time in which the subject of one's speculative ruminations are brought into sharp focus by the extensive work and illuminative insights of the writer. It is a magisterial work which ought (I use the moral term advisedly) to be afforded a prominent place in the panoply of European thought, especially that which bridges conventional academic boundaries.

As a student of philosophy I have always been particularly interested in the contrasting attitudes of Romanticism and Rationalism, and it was an absolute revelation to me to read in this book that almost all the perceptions of Romanticism originate in the right hemisphere of the brain while the methods of Rationalism are processed by the left hemisphere. In the first half of his book, McGilchrist shows us in great detail the several ways in which neurological science can demonstrate this, for instance by describing the thought processes when one or the other side of the brain is physically damaged.

The most fundamental difference between the two hemispheres is that the origin of all experience is in the right half. That experience sees everything in its environment, is holistic, intuitive and profound, but it is unfocussed and indistinct. To focus on the details of the experience, to analyze it, is the task of the left. Ideally the detailed picture then returns to the right half, so that the details become integrated with and enrich the wider picture. The traffic between the two hemispheres is principally via the corpus callosum, the tissues which join them at their base.

The left half uses language precisely; the right can see can see layers of meaning, understands metaphors and jokes. The right is responsible for our personal and social relationship with others, for empathy and empathetic imitation, for picking up the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice, for most of our emotional life and for our response to music, poetry, the spiritual dimension of life. It is the locus of moral judgment. It experiences the past, the present and the future as a continuum. The left is instrumental; it organizes, manipulates and controls details for a purpose. It measures, classifies and creates abstractions. It aims for internal consistency. Awareness of new things in the world belong to the right; the left processes and explicates what it receives from the right, and in that sense does not create anything new itself: it only works on what is already known to it.

Without the work of the left, civilization would be impossible; but when the right is neglected, the left becomes detached from everything that is holistic and profound. The left and the right, different and even conflicting though they are, should always complement each other in a creative tension, should have a dialectical relationship with each other like that of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. They achieve this when there is "negative feedback" between them, when they check each other. But the left hemisphere is particularly prone to "positive feedback", is a "hall of mirrors" where its contents reinforce each other and produce a "virtual reality".

Philosophy itself, which is essentially concerned with analysis and close examination, has a strong predisposition to privilege the left, which it takes a stupendous effort by some philosophers like Spinoza, Nietzsche or Heidegger to overcome. Scientists run a similar danger, and even neurologists have until recently described the right hemisphere as "minor", "silent", or "coarse" and the left as "dominant" or "smart". McGilchrist is in no doubt that the right hemisphere should be the Master, the left merely its Emissary, albeit as such a valued one.

In the second half of the book McGilchrist analyzes the phases of Western civilization in terms of whether they are right- or left-hemisphere dominated. (He allows for more exceptions than my summary suggests.) He agrees with Nietzsche that left domination began with Socrates and Plato. It was intensified in the Roman Empire. Christendom began with the spiritual insights we associate with the right, but degenerated into abstract theological formulations which imposed uniformity wherever it could. The Renaissance was overwhelmingly right-hemisphere dominated; but then the Reformation reverted to left-hemisphere thought. (McGilchrist's unduly negative attitude to the Reformation strikes me as the weakest part of the book.) The Enlightenment and the French Revolution of course are massively left-oriented; and on several occasions he mentions that Descartes, the founder of the Age of Reason (or rather of the Age of Rationality) exhibited thought processes which have much in common with schizophrenics. In Romanticism we then have a brief period of right-hemisphere dominance. McGilchrist taught English Literature at Oxford before he re-trained as a neurologist; and his analysis (NB) of Romantic Literature is superb and much the best part of this second part. Then, alas, comes the Industrial Revolution with its one-sided materialism and scientism, manipulating life in a way which is the fulfilment of the left-hemisphere's ambitions. And even that was not the end: Modernism comes along, whose characteristics are fragmentation of reality (see Cubism, Surrealism, abstract art etc; dissonance without resolution into harmony in much of modern music, deconstruction in literature) in much the way in which schizophrenics experience fragmented reality, and this bring all sorts of other consequences: a loss of meaning and significance, resulting sometimes in Angst, sometimes in boredom, which in turn requires more and more strident or shocking expression. For the sanity of western civilization, we badly need to restore the primacy of the right-hemisphere, not least by looking at the more holistic attitudes McGilchrist sees in Eastern civilization.

There are suggestive sentences or brilliant formulations on almost every page, although there is also a good deal of repetition in this very long book. Despite McGilchrist's comments that, in its proper role, the left hemisphere does indispensable and valuable work, the tone is constantly negative about it. There is, for example, nothing about the left hemisphere checking rather than supplementing what the right hemisphere may be doing in the way of blind emotion. Dare I say that there is even a left-hemisphere tinge to the overall pattern of McGilchrist's analysis? I was, however, left with my view of the world having been greatly enriched by this learned and immensely stimulating book.

I have been enthralled and excited by this book. I believe it makes an important contribution to an understanding of the situation we are in now and how it has come into being. If we can understand how our view of reality has been created and controlled by an imbalance between the two hemispheres of our brain, we would be able to gain a different perspective on our predicament rather than remaining stuck, without benefit of insight, within it.

McGilchrist explains how the growing and now dangerous dissociation between the right and left hemispheres of our brain has brought into being the culture of the modern Western world as well as the mind-set of the politicians, "opinion-makers" and the media that direct and control it.

Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist but also on a long-standing interest in and knowledge of history, literature and philosophy, the author offers the reader a vitally important, even crucially important key to understanding both our own nature and the deficiencies of our present view of reality. The Master and His Emissary is grounded in a profound understanding of the neuroscience of the brain and an equally profound understanding of different historical epochs that have exhibited either a balance or a lack of balance between the left and right hemispheres. If read by enough people who are not caught in this imbalance, it could have the power to shift our culture towards a position of greater balance, thereby freeing us from the straitjacket of beliefs in which, for too long, we have been imprisoned. Altogether, a brilliant, inspiring book. Anne Baring, psychotherapist and author

Ian McGilchrist must be a real "Renaissance" man. He combines his vast knowledge of Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics and Music & Art into a very insightful and thought provoking thesis on the ongoing and "unconscious" battle in our brain (or mind? or conscience?) between the right and left hemispheres. Very interesting is that Neuroscience has revealed that only 5% of our brain activity is conscious, the other 95% is unconscious. Obviously, Freud and Jung were right. The common layman's concept that the left brain governs logic and abstract thinking and that the right brain is the "home" of creativity and emotions clearly is overly simplistic.
Most revealing to me was the notion that the left hemisphere is inward oriented and focuses on what is already observed, processed, translated into symbols and abstract relationships, or in other words "known", while the right hemisphere is outward focused on the "unknown" or perhaps even "unknowable". This can be more simply stated that the right brain hemisphere is focused on the "presence", while the left hemisphere is focused on what is "re-presented". The left hemisphere's mode of operation is reductionism, and thereby looses inescapably the capability to see the "whole". Of the senses the left brain only processes vision, while the right processes all the sensory capabilities of the body. The left brain, paying attention only to itself, ignores the body. The left hemisphere only "sees" in the sense of observing, while the right hemisphere has the capability to see "through" things and develop a holistic view of reality. Language, being symbolic and sequential is a left hemisphere activity. Music, poetry (with its metaphors), Sculpting, Painting, Architecture, etc. being holistic, contextual, ambiguous and non-sequential are right hemisphere attributes. The left brain is focused on control and power and is in general optimistic. The right hemisphere is more inclined to melancholy, for this reason it resonates with the minor key in music.
The most intriguing conclusion from this is that the logic of the left hemisphere, with language as its primary tool, in the end can only refer to itself. This could already be observed in the paradoxes of Zeno and has been further revealed by Bertrand Russell (what does the statement "I am a liar" really tell us? It cannot be true but it also cannot be not-true.) This was ultimately formally proven by Godel in his "Incompleteness" theorem. Ian McGilchrist further observes that intellectual and spiritual progress toward "wholeness" is when the hemispheres cooperate with each other. Immanuel Kant already postulated that the ideal process should be that the right hemisphere observes (the present with all the senses), the left hemisphere subsequently conceptualizes (structures what is re-presented) and that the right hemisphere ultimately synthesizes (sees "through" and ads "newness"). In an ideal situation in which "happiness" and "wholeness" are maximized the right brain should be the master and the left brain should be the emissary.
McGilchrist further demonstrates that in the Western World the "unconscious" battle between the hemispheres is extended to our cultural and societal developments. Humans could only survive by living in tribes and developing communal and social capabilities. Neuroscience has revealed that these capabilities are concentrated in the frontal lobes, where morality, empathy and connectedness reside in right frontal lobe. The left focuses on individual traits like power and control. The pendulum has been swinging between the left and right since the Greeks, with the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. Only a "somewhat perfect" balance, according to McGilchrist, has been achieved during the renaissance and the romantic eras. The periods of reformation, enlightenment (and its industrial revolution) and now modernism & post-modernism have been left hemisphere dominated, with most of the times devastating consequences for overall personal and societal "happiness". Perhaps not surprisingly in this left hemisphere dominated "individualistic" and "disconnected" era schizophrenia and autism are increasing alarmingly. This book was a difficult and very long read but (being left brain oriented) it has influenced my thinking tremendously. This book is a must read for anyone who is looking for the "truth" and the pursuit of happiness.

This is a fascinating and profoundly insightful exploration of the functions of the two hemispheres of our brain, and how they relate to one another; but it goes much further than that. From a sound background of brain research and neuro imaging covered in some considerable depth in Part One, the second Part goes on to make sense of these findings in a wider worldly context, suggesting how the balance of power may have switched between the two hemispheres over the centuries. We read how this may have influenced human behaviour and how this knowledge can be related to the history of Western culture and thought. The author is therefore able to provide convincing explanations for the present predicament the Western world finds itself in.

I love the skilful use of metaphor throughout the book and the pace with which a new and fascinating story or idea unfolds with each page turned. There is so much that resonates with our human condition and the place we find ourselves in today, and it is difficult to do justice to the sheer scope of coverage in a brief review. It certainly makes sense to me in what I see around me, for example, that Christianity is losing its spirituality to dogma, and that individual responsibility is being dulled by increasing state interference, both symptomatic of a left hemispheric world. I can relate to the idea that our loss of cultural tradition and contact with the natural world reduces our ability to counter such left hemispheric dominance, but that body, soul and art combined may be able to resist such tendencies. The book poses important questions, such as: "Is the obvious inauthenticity of the mechanistic left hemispheric world now going to lead us to seek to change it?" Or "Can we learn from the cultural qualities and values of the East before they become Westernised beyond redemption?"

Most importantly the author leaves us with a message of hope as he shows why there may still be time and opportunity for the empathic and intuitive right hemisphere to assert itself over the mechanistic and rational left hemisphere, with potentially huge significance for our future well being.

Once I began reading I could not put this book down. With his vast experience and knowledge of medicine and psychiatry, philosophy and English literature, the author is more than well qualified to write a book of this enormous scope and depth. Erudite it certainly is, and the book will surely be essential reading for anyone involved in any study of the human brain and human behaviour. But the author's style is so easy and persuasive that any intelligent reader who is concerned for the state of our world should read and truly digest this quite unique and valuable book.