According to Wikipedia “Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 work, The Master and His Emissary has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. It sought to consolidate research in brain lateralisation and to insist on the individual and cultural importance of the bi-hemisphere structure of the brain”. McGilchrist suggests that “we have become entranced by the version of the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and forgotten the insights produced by the right”.
His publishers persuaded him to write a very short book, Ways of Attending, which took the main arguments of his larger, more complex and more technical work, and rewrote them as an extended essay for interested lay-people.
In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some of these arguments, quoting from Ways of Attending and McGilchrist’s other published extended essay, The Divided Brain.
