Mind and body – Our biological inheritance should be celebrated by Iain Mcgilchrist

This is a curiously old-fashioned book. It is genial in tone and aimed at the general reader, and the territory it covers is familiar, even ancient: the conflict between the “animal” in us, represented by our instincts and drives, and the acquired superstructure of rationality that sits, at times uneasily, on top of it. John Duncan refers to these respectively as “Pan” and “Spock” (as in Star Trek, not Dr Benjamin) throughout. The reader gradually reconciles himself to these cheery conflations. Duncan draws attention to many situations, such that every reader will be familiar with from experience, in which these dancing partners appear to nudge us in different directions: for instance, wanting a drink at a party while being aware that one has to drive.

This has echoes of Paul D. Maclean’s theory of the “triune brain”, which advocated that the brain was composed of three hierarchical layers – the brainstem, limbic system and cortex, which dealt with vital functions, emotions and memory, and rational thought respectively – and briefly flourished in the 1960s before it was discovered to be simplistic and inaccurate. Except here, Maclean’s three parts have been reduced to two and removed from a physical context. Admittedly, how you decide to carve up a unified system into parts is to some extent arbitrary, and there is certainly no one right way of doing it. The question is, however, what does your chosen way illuminate and, as important, what does it conceal?

I fear that Duncan’s dichotomy reveals little that was not already obvious, while conflating several important distinctions and at the same time making some that are hard to sustain. Emotion and reason are not independent, but work together, at all levels, as parts of a complex system; areas of the brain that were thought too “primitive” to take part in cognition do so. A good example is the cerebellum, which when I trained in the 1980s was more or less confined to matters of balance and motor co-ordination, but is now known to play an important role in the acquisition of higher-order cognitive, affective and social skills: abnormalities here are known to be involved in schizophrenia and autism. Indeed, the body itself is a crucial part of how we think about and understand the world, not just how we perceive it. As the French essayist Vauvenargues observed during what is often called the Age of…