Praise for The Matter With Things
This is the most extraordinary book. It’s got evidence on every page of a mind that is stocked so richly and has meditated so long and so clearly on the most important subject we can face. I can’t recommend it enough: it’s an astonishing book, that will change many, many people’s lives.
‘McGilchrist builds on his previous work The Master and his Emissary and he shows again and again that the left hemisphere focuses on details and is overconfident, thereby missing the big picture (which the right hemisphere is much better at understanding) and the uncertainty that is inherent in life. Reading more than twenty chapters in which this message is proven through referencing the breadth and depth of research leaves no doubt that this thesis is correct. Even my left hemisphere was convinced … I salute Iain McGilchrist for his courage in writing this major work … I am glad that I read these books and I would recommend that everyone does. I believe that I have learnt a great deal from reading his work and that it will continue to have a positive impact on my life and that the same will be true for you, whether you agree with what he has said or not.’
It’s very simple: this is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever. It is a thrilling exposition of the nature of reality, and a devastating repudiation of the strident, banal orthodoxy that says it is childish and disreputable to believe that the world is alive with wonder and mystery. For McGilchrist the universe is a constantly evolving symphony – a gradual unfolding of an epic story. We urgently need to attune our ears to this music – to re-enchant the world and ourselves, and to confound those who say that there is only noise.
No one else could have written this book. McGilchrist’s range is as vast as the subject – which is everything – demands. He is impeccably rigorous, fearlessly honest, and compellingly readable. Put everything else aside. Read this now to know what sort of creature you are and what sort of place you inhabit.
‘I loved The Master and his Emissary: this is even deeper.‘
‘This is not a book that can be read quickly. There are too many thoughts, insights and often startling perspectives in it …There’s no idle talk; it’s so chock full of ideas that as a reader I simply need the time to digest every word and sentence. A good thing, too, that the book has such wide margins. I use them to take notes and add comments of my own, engaging in a kind of asynchronous dialogue with you. Thank you for this book, from the bottom of my heart. It opened ways of seeing and thinking about issues that go far beyond what’s covered in The Master and his Emissary, although they still build on it and anchor a lot of the arguments in neuropsychology …Your work permeates my thinking and grounds it in a way of feeling and being in the world that is authentic and true and helpful when it comes to positioning myself vis-à-vis my fellow human beings in a very humane manner … It has changed my style of talking to and relating to my students, too. I am trying to pass on to them the insights I have gained from your work at every turn. … The Matter with Things is a book for the ages.’
The Matter with Things is a work of remarkable inspiration and erudition, written with the soul and subtlety of a poet, the precision of a philosopher, and the no- nonsense grounding of a true scientist. In its pages, neuropsychology comes into conversation with philosophy, physics with poetry. Its author shows not just how our divided mind and brain makes us human, but how this gives us the potential both to understand and to misunderstand the world.
Iain McGilchrist’s book considers both great sources of awe and admiration: the starry heavens above as well as the mental life within. The author first offers intertwined analyses of brain function, cognition, and the structure of knowledge. Then he climbs his three-fold cord to a place from which one can survey the ultimate mysteries—the relationship of mind to matter, the concept of life, the contested role of purpose in the universe, and the nature of the sacred. McGilchrist is the most generous and talented of writers: his fluid account, brilliantly and beautifully argued—and meticulously researched—brings us along with him, step by step, until we too can discern the horizons of a reconfigured world.
McGilchrist’s appreciation of ambiguity and paradox only enhances the clarity and vitality of his thought. This is a book of surpassing, even world-historical ambition, and—still more rare—one that delivers on its promise.’
A magnificent achievement. The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist’s earlier tour de force, ranks as a game-changer. It doesn’t so much undermine common understandings of rationality as reframe them. The Matter with Things builds on that foundation, confirming the author’s status as a leading contemporary polymath. With rarely matched clarity as well as deep learning, McGilchrist demonstrates not just that there is more to the world than matter, but also that there is more to matter itself than grasped by the shallow materialisms of our age.
In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist confirms his place among the rare voices of sanity with whom we are blessed. For me, that puts him in the company of Gregory Bateson, Mary Midgley, Paul Feyerabend, Jan Zwicky, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Val Plumwood, D.W. Winnicott and Michel de Montaigne. I hope the world will listen.
‘If we draw only on the left side of the brain, our culture paints a narrow picture composed via the hyper-specialism which bedevils contemporary intellectual life. In this sorry state, we badly need that now-almost-vanishingly rare personage, the true polymath. In Iain McGilchrist, in the nick of time, we have one. In this book, he draws quite magnificently on his post-disciplinary erudition precisely to explain how very much we lose when we draw only on the left hemisphere.
If you want to understand why curiosity is in vogue but wonder is not; or why we aim directly at happiness and in doing so ineluctably become less happy; or why we like to talk about ‘the environment’ while Nature, upon which we utterly depend, we quietly desecrate; if you yearn to comprehend and question the rise of a desperate clinging to ‘identity’ within both the Left and the Right of politics; or if the way our civilisation tends to model human beings as machines disturbs or hurts you, then please read this book; for it sheds a profound light on these and so many other literally vital questions. If it were widely heeded, then perhaps, even at this late hour, our civilisation’s merry march to a slow and brutal suicide might be halted. For this book is that most valuable of possible books: The Matter With Things is nothing less than a work of genius, diagnosing our dire predicament in full, and offering a way, instead.’
Occasionally a book of astonishing depth and breadth emerges to surprise the world. “The Matter with Things” is one of those books. It is a work of profound insights bridging the gap between science and philosophy, between pragmatism and idealism, between matter and consciousness and of course between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain!
“The Matter with Things” is a magnum opus of Iain McGilchrist. He has built his case with amazing scholarship, drawing together the latest science, ancient wisdom and poetry. In two volumes he weaves a tapestry of spirituality, psychology and neurology. The chapter on A Sense of the Sacred is the jewel in the crown of this encyclopaedic book. The entire work is a synthesis of intuition and intellect, honouring the appropriate roles of the two hemispheres of the brain.
Reading “The Matter with Things” has nourished my soul. I wholeheartedly recommend this masterpiece to all those who are looking for a way out of the modern malaise
Network Book Prize 2021
David Lorimer writes:
The Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the most significant book or books published by Members during the year. Over fifty books have been singled out during that period.
The quality and number of significant books published by Members in 2021 is unprecedented since the inauguration of the Prize. The outstanding book of the year is undoubtedly The Matter with Things by Dr Iain McGilchrist, who also received the 2009 Prize for The Master and his Emissary. In view of this Iain is awarded the Grand Prize for his Herculean achievement running to 1,600 pages and based on 5,700 references. See www.channelmcgilchrist.com
In 1890, William James published his ground-breaking Principles of Psychology in two volumes amounting to nearly 1,400 pages. 130 years later comes a work of comparable magnitude and genius, Iain McGilchrist’s Magnum Opus The Matter with Things, also in two volumes and based on a staggering 5,700 references. This makes Iain the William James of our time, and indeed he quotes extensively from many of his books. In Iain’s case, his work might have been entitled Hemispheric Principles/Foundations of Neuropsychology and Philosophy: it represents a Principia in the field and is in my view the most important seminal work of philosophy in the broadest sense since the publication of Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead in 1929.
We would also like to recognise other 2021 Members’ books with a share of the prize – each of these would have been a winner in an ordinary year!
- Federico Faggin – Silicon
- Prof Bruce Greyson – After
- Prof Neal Grossman – Conversations with Socrates and Plato
- Dr Bill Plotkin – The Journey of Soul Initiation
- Prof Rolf Sattler – Science and Beyond
- Dr Steve Taylor – Extraordinary Awakenings (also recognising his Spiritual Science from 2018)
- Rev Prof Stephen Wright – Heartfullness
Other books of similar depth and scope were published earlier but reviewed this year and we’d like to single out:
- Richard Grossinger – Bottoming out the Universe
- Yvonne Kason MD – Touched by the Light
When pointing towards inanimate objects, chimpanzees use their right hand, whereas when pointing towards living creatures, they do it with their left. Such a striking difference can, to some extent, also be noticeable in humans: for grasping things, we mainly use our right hand, while exploration is instinctually done with the left hand. What does this have to say about the nature of truth, the hard problem of consciousness, or the existence of God? Quite a lot, according to Iain McGilchrist’s recent magnum opus, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.
Iain McGilchrist can rightly be called a renaissance man, both metaphorically and literally. His range of knowledge and professional interests are exceptional. Is there another neuroscientist who has also been a literary scholar, or philosopher who has worked as a consultant psychiatrist? This gifted man now strives to bring about a ‘rebirth’ of the proper way to understand ourselves, the world and our relationship to it and one another.
In a new book of remarkable inspiration and erudition, a retired consultant psychiatrist who lives on the Isle of Skye argues that we have become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us.
Psychiatrist and researcher, Dr Iain McGilchrist is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking book, The Master and his Emissary, which received international acclaim. His new magnum opus has recently been published and here he discusses what he aimed to achieve in writing it.
The dust jacket of The Matter With Things quotes a large statement from an Oxford professor:
This is one of the most important books ever published.
And, yes, I do mean ever.
Can any contemporary work withstand such praise?
Genius from Skye who’s written one of the most important books EVER published.
…so say critics of Dr Iain McGilchrist’s brilliant new book, in which he sets out to explain what’s gone wrong with the modern world. And importantly, how we can actually do something about it.
What is the matter with things? There may be as many short answers to the question as there are people in the world lamenting its many failings.
McGilchrist rose to intellectual fame with his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Across 600 or so pages, he argued that there was a significant difference between the brain’s left and right hemispheres—a difference so important it could help to explain the history of western civilisation…