Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a former consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London. He has written widely on topics in medicine, psychiatry, philosophy, and the history of ideas.

"We have seen that thought probably originates in the right hemisphere, but the left hemisphere has most syntax and most of the lexicon, which makes it very much the controller of the 'word' in general. Coupled with its preference for classification, analysis and sequential thinking, this makes it very powerful in constructing an argument. By contrast it is hard for the right hemisphere to be heard at all: what it knows is too complex, hasn't the advantage of having been carved up into pieces that can be neatly strung together, and hasn't got a voice anyway."

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

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