Wisdom, Nature and the Brain

The Great Simplification #85 with Iain McGilchrist

This week…

On this podcast, I share information and insights from global experts on a variety of subjects relevant to The Great Simplification - but along the way - I too am learning and growing. This was especially true in today’s episode, where literary scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist joins me to discuss the way modern culture teaches and encourages us to use - and not use - the two lobes of our brains. Each side is specially attuned to see and interact with the world in certain ways: the left side acts as a narrow problem-solving executor, while the right side is a broadly open contextualizer. While both are critical and work together, industrialized society has become more and more reliant on our clever yet myopic left-brain perspective, losing sight of the wisdom that can see and coordinate the entire picture. 

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam 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 the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).

What happens when we humans become imbalanced in our use of these two critical functions? Have we -in aggregate - divided the Earth into pieces to be optimized rather than a whole (which we’re a part of) to be stewarded?  Can we learn to bring these two components of our brains back into balance and in turn heal fractures in ourselves, and ultimately in our communities, Earth, and her ecosystems?

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In case you missed it…

In the fourth and final part of this Frankly mini-series, I suggest responses that reside in the intersection of the ‘Four Horsemen of the 2020s’ and the ongoing/accelerating risks to Earth's ecosystems, and the web of life.  What can we do? How can pro-future thinkers reconcile ‘Just Stopping Oil’ when the Superorganism dynamic of the global economy will continue trying hard to ‘Keep Pumping Oil’? Here I briefly outline 10 ‘guideposts’ that could benefit both post-growth human economies as well as protecting Earth’s biodiversity.

What we teach our 18-22 year olds around the world matters - a great deal. On the most recent Reality Roundtable, I was joined by Jon Erickson, Josh Farley, Steve Keen, and Kate Raworth - all of whom are leading thinkers and educators in the field of heterodox economics -  to discuss the fundamental aspects of what conventional economics gets wrong and how it could be improved in our education system. Who is finding the models and systems that economists have created useful - and how does economics as a discipline need to change in the face of a lower energy future?

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