Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist (born 1953) is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
McGilchrist read English at New College, Oxford, but having published Against Criticism in 1982, he later retrained in medicine and has been a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London. McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
According to his web site in 2009, at the time The Master and His Emissary was published, McGilchrist worked privately as a consultant psychiatrist in London. He still lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland and continues to write, and to deliver many lectures and interviews.
In 2019 it was reported that McGilchrist has been working on a new book of epistemology and metaphysics, The Matter With Things, which is due for publication on 9 November 2021 by Perspectiva Publishing, London.
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
We are all familiar with the pop psychology mainstay of left-brained and right-brained thinking. The conventional breakdown posed the left side as rational and the right side as emotional. Psychiatrist and former Oxford literary scholar Iain McGilchrist argues that pop psychologists and even many neuroscientists have failed to pull back the veil and help us see the hemispheric brain for what it is and how it helps us come to know. After 20 years of brain research and combing through thousands of relevant research articles, McGilchrist shows us what the relationship is between the right hemisphere (the “master”) and the left hemisphere (the “emissary”). He also shows us what it reveals about who we are, and how the hemispheric relationship has shaped the course of Western history.
Bio information sourced from Wikipedia
