BrAInwaves and Bookmarks19 Sep 2025

From Ancient Greece to Renaissance

In this episode, we take Iain McGilchrist's thesis out of the human skull and into the grand sweep of history. We explore his most audacious claim: that the story of our brain's two hemispheres, and the "pendulum swing" between their dominance, is the story of Western civilization.

Our historical tour begins with the Ancient Greeks, which McGilchrist sees as a rare moment of glorious balance. We witness two revolutions happening at once:

The Right Hemisphere's Reawakening: Greek sculpture blossoms from stiff, stylized forms into breathtakingly lifelike, individual, and emotional art. It's a return to the body and the unique, living world.
The Left Hemisphere's Rise: Plato's philosophy of Forms argues that the perfect, abstract idea of an object is more real than any physical object. It's a decisive tilt towards the left hemisphere's preference for the clean, abstract map over the messy, real territory.

A thousand years later, the pendulum swings back—hard.

The Renaissance is framed as a magnificent, full-throated resurgence of the right hemisphere. The rediscovery of perspective, the renewed fascination with the human body and emotion, and the ideal of the "Renaissance Man" all signal a brain in glorious balance.
The Reformation, in turn, is presented as a powerful left-hemisphere backlash. It champions the certain, literal, written word and is deeply suspicious of the ambiguous, embodied image. This culminates in the tragedy of iconoclasm, where the left hemisphere's abstract world is literally at war with the right's, smashing the art and symbols of a more integrated age.

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