Articles by Others

Interesting and relevant articles by other authors past and present selected by

Dr Iain McGilchrist. For articles written by Iain, click here.

The Divided Brain And Religion: Left Brain Angels And Right Brain Gods

The Divided Brain And Religion: Left Brain Angels And Right Brain Gods

Why do we think of our own brains, our own beings, as machines? As McGilchrist compellingly suggests in his groundbreaking work on the hemispheres, “the whole problem is that we are obsessed, because of what I argue is our affiliation to left-hemisphere modes of thought, with ‘what’ the brain does rather than the ‘how’ – ‘the manner in which’, something no one ever asked a machine.”

read more
Freud And The Divided Brain: The Therapy Of Attention

Freud And The Divided Brain: The Therapy Of Attention

Central to McGilchrist’s exploration of the difference between the hemispheres is the notion of attention. As he suggests, “attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions”. Rather, the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world actually alters the nature of the world we attend to: “Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world”

read more
Crossing The STEM Divide

Crossing The STEM Divide

Thinking hard about soft skills and how they’re developed. This is a guest post, originally published at the American Enterprise Institute by Brent Orrell.

read more
How Puritanism Works

How Puritanism Works

We have had here this night past a marvellous stir, – all the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of things left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed; being done after such order and with so few folks that it is to be...

read more
Attention Is Not A Resource But A Way Of Being Alive To The World

Attention Is Not A Resource But A Way Of Being Alive To The World

This article was originally published at Aeon. Dan Nixon is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Economist and The Guardian, among others. He also leads Perspectiva’s initiative into the workings of the attention economy and is a senior researcher at The Mindfulness Initiative. He lives in London. ‘We are […]

read more