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

I just purchased the kindle and have watched many of the author's videos on YT. First, I want to call out some of the reviewers that I see below. McGilchrist is an extraordinary humanitarian, philosopher, scientist and healer. Of course, he is a doctor, but here, by healer I mean in the more spiritual broad sense as in Jesus or Quan Yin. He can heal society by bringing forth critical discoveries that will prevent social epidemics brought about by ignorance and corruption. Second, his writing is very clear and so far easy to follow. I have no problem with constructive criticism, but to outright insult someone who has put this much time, energy, thought, emotion, empathy, patience, skill and soul into a brilliant body of work is, frankly, UTTER CRAP on the part of the reviewer. Dr. McGilchrist need not pay any heed to this crap. I'm enjoying this book on many levels: for research for my own book (a holistic approach to economy), as an intellectually curious sort, and as a regular human being who strives to heal herself, loved ones, community and world. The world is simply blessed to have been gifted such a powerful healer. Thank you Doc for this great great gift. ***updated after further contemplation --adding ten more stars and a personal reflection! Regarding McGilchrist’s Master and his Emissary: While it indeed appears that McGilchrist is, overall, correct in his assessment of right brain left brain dynamics as they pertain to the psychology and behavior of both individuals and the collective, my intuition and experience caution me—as I believe McGilchrist would also advise and does point to throughout his brilliant work— to avoid overgeneralizing the idea that “the medium is (necessarily) the message.” Every action a person chooses to execute is motivated by a personal intention, or motivation, attended to in a particular fashion as learned or innovated, and retained in the memory as a potential “habitual” course of action for future similar circumstances. While the artist may be working in right brain spacial mediums such as sculpting or painting, the left brain may be in the drivers seat, motivated by a need for “certainty” to create a piece of artwork that reflects not what truly is, but what he instead wants to represent—his left brained reductionistic ideal world view of what should be. More tragically, a priest may entrance his practitioners with “right brain unifying rituals,” but himself be motivated by a left brain targeted quest for monetary donations and prestige building. It is, then, wise to recognize that each stage of the intention-attention-retention progression of “thinking and doing” can be left-, right-, or whole- brain driven and dominated. Here, we may have to travel below the brain down into the lower regions of the body and assess how—both right and left brain hemispheres—separately or in cahoots—use images, words, rituals, art, music, and other devices to harness the purely bodily sensations into a transfiguration, or mystification, of their ideas and sentiments to their own ends. Here, we arrive at Wilhelm Reich’s wisdom who illustrated just that. If the right brain hemisphere is the Master of its left brain emissary—perhaps it is the body below the brain that should resume its rightful position of the Master of the Master of the Emissary. Plato may have set into motion a left brained dominated world view, but even he encouraged his beloved gymnastics, as the modern Californian, his yoga!

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.

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.

Uma maestria para os estudiosos de neuropsicologia

No pude esperar a la traducción. Sorprende lo entretenido y fácil de su lectura. Adentrarse en la estructura del cerebro es adentrase en uno mismo y en la historia. Esto, más que una metáfora creíble, es una sensiblemente cambia-vidas. Fascinante y revelador contenido.

Buona lettura

I selected this book after reading Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, which was a breeze compared to this monster. This book needs a lot of referencing and the reader must commit their full attention at all times, I held this book and revisited narrations at the same time I was listening to the audiobook, emptied a highlighter marking important passages and references from beginning to the end. The author could have expanded on Upanishads which he only mentioned in passing as tertiary reference, the ancient Upanishads cover a great deal of what he was trying to explain. Maybe another left brain rejection? Another case of Gödel’s incompleteness!