Wild with Sarah Wilson30 Joulu 2025

BEST OF: IAIN MCGILCHRIST - Our “wretchedness” is a left-brain issue

As many of us move into the holiday season and slower days, I wanted to reshare this conversation with Iain McGilchrist. It’s a spacious, illuminating exploration of how we’ve come to live as we do — and a reminder that meaning and beauty are still available to us, even when solutions feel out of reach.

Dr Iain McGilchrist (neuroscientist, psychiatrist, polymath, author of The Master and His Emissary) devised a thesis that sets out how the two sides of our brains can affect the way we both interact and create the world. The left hemisphere is a narrow, extractive, problem-solving “machine” that divides and conquers things, fails to see our part in the world and to fathom beauty, awe and responsibility. Our civilisation, Iain says, has become ruled by a left-brain mentality, which is killing us and leaving us “wretched”; we need to put the right side back in charge!

Iain is an associate of Green Templeton College in Oxford and a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal Society of Arts. His 2009 book Master and his Emissary became a cult read and the recent follow-up, The Matter with Things took him 12 years to write (and is 600,000 words long!).

In this chat, we cover why societies start out creative, happy and flourishing (right-brained!) but switch left and destructive as they expand; the secret to living a well and happy life and how to find meaning and beauty in a world we possibly can’t “fix” (in the left-brain sense of the word).

SHOW NOTES

Learn more about Iain's work via his website and watch his videos here.

Buy Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things here.

Listen to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's Wild episode.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram and WeAre8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(215)

INDY JOHAR: "How do we prepare the world for what’s coming?"

Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most or...

7 Heinä 1h 17min

SARAH STEIN LUBRANO: How do we change people’s minds about what’s happening to the world?

Sarah Stein Lubrano (neuroscientist, political scientist, former obituary writer!) is an expert in how to change people’s minds most effectively and for the betterment of all beings. In this chat, we ...

30 Kesä 1h 4min

JOHN SEED: Is Deep Ecology the answer?

John Seed (Deep Ecology OG, global rainforest steward) says we can’t save the world. And that the planetary crisis is not a failure of information or awareness; it’s a failure of human identity. We ha...

23 Kesä 57min

JEREMY LENT: Can humans build a (beautiful) new civilisation?

Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He jo...

16 Kesä 56min

FRANCIS WELLER: “Grief will wake us up”…so how do we do good grief again?

Francis Weller (psychotherapist, bestselling author + “soul activist”) believes we have entered a “Long Dark”, a multi-decade (century?) period of collapse and psychological pain that will demand we l...

2 Kesä 1h 1min

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: How do we create a values-led politic from this mess?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (historian of fascism +NYT bestselling author of Strongmen) is an internationally recognised expert in how psychologically unstable men come to power and use corruption, sexual predatio...

26 Touko 59min

ZAK STEIN: How do we raise kids in a metacrisis?

Zak Stein (Harvard philosopher of education, AI + kids expert) is worried that we are not raising and educating our kids for the kind of wobbly, harsh future they will be inheriting. Zak is a Harvard ...

19 Touko 1h 11min

MICHAEL MUTHUKRISHNA: Can we cooperate our way out of this? (Warning: a tricky episode!)

Michael Muthukrishna (behavioural scientist, cultural evolution researcher) has a unified “theory of everyone” that says we evolved as a species, surviving crises and collapses, through cooperative no...

12 Touko 1h 16min