Iain McGilchrist is a leading psychiatrist with a vast body of work and connections around the world. He is a pioneer in the way we think, why we think, who we are and how we understand our place in the world. In his latest book The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Iain asks blunt questions that rattle around in many of our minds. What is the world? How can we understand things like our consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

He knows how different sides of our brain work to feed into our character, our emotions and each of us as a person. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.

And the questions keep coming: Is the world essentially inert and mechanical – nothing but a collection of things for us to use?Are we ourselves nothing but the playthings of chance, embroiled in a war of all against all? Why, indeed, are we engaged in destroying everything that is valuable to us?

Join Iain in a fascinating and live online Goldster Magazine Show event with Humphrey Hawksley March 16th 2025.

Iain McGilchrist

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 the Royal Society of Arts, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write, and lectures worldwide. Iain has written for most mainstream media and taken part in many radio and TV programmes and documentaries, including the BBC’s The Moral Maze, Start the Week, and Today.

Humphrey Hawksley

Humphrey Hawksley, an award-winning author and journalist, hosts the weekly Goldster Magazine Show with engaging guests from the worlds of health, culture, travel and adventure. Humphrey was a long-time BBC foreign correspondent covering crises all around the world and specialising in Asia where he opened the BBC first television bureau in  Beijing. He also hosts the monthly Democracy Forum Debates. He is the creator of the Rake Ozenna political thriller series, and his latest non-fiction book is Asian Waters: The Struggle over the Indo-Pacific and the Challenge to American Power. Humphrey has been guest lecturer at universities and think tanks such as the RAND Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and MENSA Cambridge.