our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed The "logical left, creative right" narrative about our brains took hold in the '80s. Neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist on what actually happens in each brain hemisphere. PhilosophyMind and BehaviorNeuroscienceConsciousnessBrain Lateralization Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of[…] Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of[…] You can't explain a third dimension to someone living in a two-dimensional world.
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Neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent over three decades studying how the brain's two hemispheres shape consciousness, and says almost everything we think we know about them is wrong. The "logical left, creative right" story that took hold in the 1980s and '90s was never accurate. McGilchrist traces this back to a basic survival problem — how to eat without being eaten — and argues the right hemisphere's mode of understanding, grounded in context and nuance, gets us closer to reality than the left's ever can.
IAIN MCGILCHRIST:Everybody thinks they know what the real differences between the right and left hemisphere are. Because in the 1980s, 90s, there was a lot of loose talk about what the differences were. And you know, the left hemisphere was a little bit boring, but down-to-earth, reliable, and really intelligent.
Whereas the right hemisphere was a bit airy-fairy and sort of creative, but unreliable. Everything in that is wrong. My name's Iain McGilchrist, and I've spent the best part of 35 years studying how consciousness is structured by the brain.
The first thing that I would say about the differences between the hemispheres is that there is absolutely no question that they're there and that they're important. This is a vital thing to say because once people realized that the pop psychology on this topic emanating at the end of the 20th century was wrong, they simply gave up the topic altogether as a bad job and decided that since we knew that both hemispheres were involved in everything, there were no differences. But that's quite illogical.
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