‘HowTheLightGetsIn’ HAY 2023

26th May 2023 to 29th May 2023 

Event description.

Debate is the beating heart of HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2023. From Nobel Laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners, HowTheLightGetsIn is home to world-leading thinkers pushing their disciplines forward.

Explore our wide-ranging debates panel for this year’s festival below and stay tuned for further lineup announcements. View our expansive speaker lineup here.

Iain’s Talk

Appearing in: Imagining the Universe

“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”

A truly groundbreaking psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar, Iain McGilchrist is a polymath whose ‘clarity, lucidity and almost hypnotically compelling styl’e has seen him rise to prominence as a world-wide lecturer and public intellectual.  His book  ‘The Master and his Emissary’,  of ‘unprecedented scope’ draws on a vast body of recent brain research and demonstrates the profound differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, casting new light on the origins of music, language, philosophy and meaning in the Western world.

McGilchrist’s most recent book of a similar scope ‘The Matter with Things’ written ‘with the soul and subtlety of a poet, the precision of a philosopher, and the no nonsense grounding of a true scientist’ calls for us to move beyond the assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’.

‘Iain McGilchrist can rightly be called a renaissance man, both metaphorically and literally’ Beshara Magazine

 You can book your ticket here