Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, discusses the practical implications of his work on brain hemispheres, consciousness, and wisdom, exploring how Eastern and Western philosophies intersect with his insights and how his views have evolved over decades of thinking about the nature of reality, attention, and meaning.
The Evolution from The Master and His Emissary to The Matter with Things
The Matter with Things began as a planned shorter version of The Master and His Emissary but grew into a much larger work—roughly double the length—because McGilchrist realized he had only scratched the surface of the philosophical implications of hemispheric differences.
The title operates on three levels:
The colloquial expression “the matter with things”—something is wrong, and he wants to diagnose what.
A critique of materialism: materialists don’t overvalue matter but undervalue it, because matter is far more extraordinary than “lumpen” inert stuff.
A critique of reification: we see the world as made of discrete “things,” but reality is a seamless, vastly differentiated whole, not composed of separable bits.
The book’s bibliography contains roughly 6,000 references, reflecting the breadth of evidence McGilchrist marshals from neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and other fields.
The Two Hemispheres: Not Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Pop Science
The left hemisphere pays piecemeal, highly focused, targeted attention—it is designed for grasping, getting, and manipulating. It sees the world as made up of decontextualized, abstracted, general, explicit, familiar, and effectively inanimate bits. It controls the right hand and the semantic/syntactic precision of language.
The right hemisphere pays broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention—it is designed for understanding the whole, watching for predators, and maintaining awareness of context. It sees everything as connected, flowing, unique, implicit, embodied, and animate.
The left hemisphere’s world is like a map: useful, diagrammatic, purely for utility. The right hemisphere’s world is the full experiential picture: complex, alive, morally and aesthetically rich.
Nothing is done by only one hemisphere; both contribute, but in fundamentally different ways with different kinds of attention.
The left hemisphere is the emissary—sent to do the detailed, technical work. The right hemisphere is the master—it holds the broader understanding. The problem arises when the emissary thinks it is the master.
Oneness vs. Connectedness: A Critical Distinction
McGilchrist rejects the popular notion that “all is one” in a simple, undifferentiated sense. Instead, he argues for a both/and position: all is one and all is many.
The cosmos unfolds from relative simplicity into ever-greater complexity without destroying its wholeness—like a bud unfolding into a flower. The bud is not destroyed but fulfilled; differentiation is a fulfillment of unity, not a denial of it.
People who become suddenly certain about oneness are likely operating from the left hemisphere, which craves certainty. True insight involves holding multiple perspectives without collapsing them.
The right hemisphere sees unity-in-differentiation; the left hemisphere tends toward either undifferentiated abstraction (everything is the same) or fragmented reductionism (everything is separate parts).
Westerners often misinterpret Eastern philosophy through a left-brain lens, adopting the rhetoric of oneness and emptiness without the embodied, dispositional understanding that Eastern traditions actually emphasize.
Matter, Consciousness, and Creation
Matter provides two things: a degree of permanence and a degree of resistance. Thoughts disappear almost instantly; a table endures. This resistance is not merely limiting—it is creative.
Friction stops motion but also enables motion; without it, nothing could begin to move. Similarly, matter’s resistance enables things to come into being rather than remaining an undifferentiated “big thought.”
McGilchrist proposes that matter is a phase of consciousness—not in the sense of Berkeleyan idealism or Donald Hoffman’s straightforward idealism, but as a phase that offers permanence and resistance, making experience and creation possible.
The imaginative realm is fast, far-reaching, and impermanent; the material realm is solid, resistant, and enduring. The material world’s laws appear timeless, which is why analytical minds are drawn to the idea that time is an illusion, while spiritual minds emphasize the flow and realness of time.
Analysis, Reductionism, and the Need for Reintegration
Analysis means breaking things apart. It can reveal what parts make up a whole, but in doing so it inevitably destroys the relationships between those parts—and those relationships are crucial to understanding both the whole and the parts themselves.
Context is everything. Changing the context changes the meaning of what you’re looking at. Reducing discourse to soundbites is pernicious because the bite means nothing on its own.
The proper use of analysis is as an intermediary phase: you take something apart to understand its parts, then reintegrate that enriched understanding back into the whole. This is like learning a piece of music—you practice individual bars, but the goal is to play the whole piece with deeper meaning.
McGilchrist is not against analysis per se, but against the tyranny of the analytic frame of mind at the expense of the synthetic frame of mind that sees how things fit together.
In complex systems (organic structures), you can find little linear chains where mechanism works, but the whole is organic, not mechanical. Focusing only on those linear chains leads to the mistaken belief that the entire structure is mechanical.
Truth, Certainty, and Objectivity
There is no single, simple truth about the most important questions. If there were, humanity would have discovered it long ago. The wise person does not pronounce dogmatically.
Truth is not an object to be captured; it is a process of unconcealing, like a sculpture emerging from a block of stone by removing what doesn’t belong.
Certainty is a warning sign: “There is only one certainty, and that is that anyone who is completely certain is certainly wrong.”
This does not mean all perspectives are equally valid. A play like King Lear cannot be about anything—it has a limited range of meaningful interpretations. Relativism that says “anything goes” is postmodernism and is destructive.
McGilchrist reinterprets objectivity: it is not a “view from nowhere” achieved by removing the human being. Instead, it requires taking in multiple aspects of what one is seeing and giving them each due voice, building a three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional understanding.
John Stuart Mill (and earlier Leibniz) observed that when humans disagree over philosophical points, they are usually right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.
Dogma, Ritual, and Faith
McGilchrist draws a sharp distinction between dogma (conceptual, fixed propositions) and ritual (embodied practices, even verbal ones that emanate from embodied being).
He sees no upside to dogma, especially regarding God or ultimate reality. Any fixity about the divine is problematic because whatever God is, it exceeds our normal ways of conceiving.
Wisdom leads to seeing the importance of not knowing. The Buddha, Christ, St. Paul, Montaigne, and Thomas Aquinas (who after a mystical experience said all his work was “chaff” and never wrote again) all ended with non-certainties.
Zen and Chinese philosophy deliberately disconcert the conceptual mind to prevent it from covering the world with ready-made concepts, allowing something genuine to break through.
Faith is different from dogma: it is a disposition, a commitment to a way of being, not a set of propositions. Christianity is better understood as a disposition to believe in a mythos than as a network of propositions.
There is value in principles held sacred (e.g., Scott Aaronson’s refusal to abandon nonviolence even under utilitarian calculation), but these are better understood as deep commitments than as dogmatic propositions.
Language and the Brain
Language evolved out of music—the intonation of sounds was initially more important than individual words.
Both hemispheres use language, but differently:
The left hemisphere handles semantics and syntax with greater precision—it is better at rote procedures with numbers and pinning things down.
The right hemisphere better understands the overall meaning of an utterance. It handles prosody (intonation), pragmatics (what the speaker really means in context), and metaphor.
All language is metaphorical in nature. Even the most abstract words are drawn from embodied experience (e.g., “abstract” means dragging something away from its context; “immaterial” traces back to matter meaning wood).
William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity illustrates that ambiguity is not confusion but richness—truth is often multiple and complex, requiring things to be held in the mind together even if they seem contrary.
The left hemisphere’s desire for explicit clarity at an early stage of inquiry leads it astray, preempting what something is before it is understood.
Hemispheric Roles in Mental Health
Schizophrenia involves, at its core, an overactive left hemisphere compensating for a hypo-functioning right hemisphere. The left hemisphere tries to do all the understanding, taking metaphorical things literally, building rationalistic but unreasonable explanations (e.g., neighbors speaking through electrical sockets).
There is a difference between being rationalistic (mechanically following logic) and being reasonable (allowing rational mind to operate with experience and intuition).
People with schizophrenia tend to talk about their brain as a mechanism (“something wrong with my brain”); people with depression tend to say “something wrong with my mind.”
McGilchrist’s research at the Maudsley Hospital found that people who became schizophrenic were overwhelmingly studying engineering or analytical philosophy; those with affective psychotic illnesses (bipolar disorder) were studying history, literature, or music.
Psychedelics are often described as “liberating the right hemisphere,” but McGilchrist is skeptical. Evidence from 1960s experiments suggests hallucinations and delusions may actually arise from disinhibition of the left hemisphere. People remember good trips but often have bad ones too.
Personal Practices and Practical Implications
McGilchrist is candid about not being good at following his own advice. He prays and meditates regularly, spends time in literature, music, and poetry, but is also caught up in philosophical abstractions.
The first practical step is to stop doing things that are not working—a basic psychiatric principle. Much of modern life stultifies and stunts growth.
Monitor how much of your day is spent paying attention to what you choose versus being distracted. The modern world is built to fragment attention.
Adopt a humbler approach: be present, allow things to speak to you in their richness, rather than grasping for pleasure and utility.
McGilchrist resists giving a numbered list of rules because that would be speaking to the left hemisphere’s desire for quick fixes. What is needed is a whole shift in how one understands what a human being is, what the world is, and what we are doing here.
Once you see something differently, everything falls into place—this is what readers of his books consistently report.
Moral Intelligence and Wisdom
Moral intelligence is not about following rules or calculating outcomes. It is about the disposition of the mind behind the action.
You can have people who hold worthy abstract sentiments but are not kind, and people who might say questionable things but are astonishingly generous. What matters is the cast of mind.
Utilitarianism is quintessentially immoral because the calculating cast of mind is exactly what is wrong. Psychopaths think in this calculating way.
The wisdom traditions and religions say you should act from the heart, not from calculation. In Chinese, the word for thinking involves the concept of the heart. Virtue ethics is preferable to utilitarianism or deontology.
Wisdom is not the same as knowledge. It cannot be pinned down or reduced to concepts. It is best recognized when encountered and often defined apophatically—by what it is not.
Love, like wisdom, cannot be put into words without vanishing into banality, yet it is enormously important.
Eastern Philosophy and Emptiness
The Eastern concept of emptiness (sunyata in Sanskrit) does not mean a void or nothingness. It means a potential space in which something can grow—clearing away obstacles so something has a chance to emerge.
Westerners often adopt a left-brain interpretation of Eastern emptiness, experiencing “nothingness” and proclaiming oneness, when the actual Eastern teaching is about disposition and embodied practice, not abstract propositions.
Buddhism is widely misunderstood in the West as a benign “whatever-ism” that allows atheists to preserve a vague sense of spirituality. True Buddhism is a disposition, not a formula.
There are many forms of Buddhism and many Buddhas, just as there are many interpretations within Christianity and the Vedic tradition. The Indian government in the mid-20th century marketed “non-dualism” as India’s brand, but there are at least five different flavors of non-dualism (e.g., Advaita Vedanta, union with God, subject-object identity).
Wolfgang Smith and Jonathan Pazol argue that the Eastern solution to existence is self-obliteration into an undifferentiated void, while the Christian solution is unity-in-multiplicity through Christ—though McGilchrist acknowledges this is something he intuits more than understands propositionally.
Prayer and Listening to the Divine
McGilchrist prays regularly, using both formulaic prayers (collected from various traditions) and open, listening prayer.
A favorite prayer is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written before his execution by the Nazis: it asks without making specific demands, acknowledges darkness and weakness, places faith in God, and gives thanks for whatever comes.
Prayer is more about listening than speaking. The apophatic tradition emphasizes clearing away preconceptions so something genuine can emerge.
Conventional prayer has four species: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (ACTS). McGilchrist once thought supplication was primary; now he thinks it is mainly adoration.
Differentiating genuine spiritual insight from internal noise or pathology is difficult. McGilchrist suggests asking whether what you’re hearing is something you’d say to yourself anyway, or whether it challenges you toward things you tend to duck away from but know are good.
He is cautious about psychedelics even in clinical settings, noting that the pharmaceutical industry stands to profit enormously and that these substances can be very damaging.
Death and the Importance of Endings
McGilchrist views death as a blessing and a natural outcome of life, not its antithesis. The antithesis of life is the machine.
If there were no death, existence would go on forever—an awful thought. Death gives life its shape and value.
The Japanese understanding of transience (mono no aware) recognizes that things are precious precisely because they don’t last.
Great art and great institutions benefit from having their ending “baked in.” Breaking Bad is great because Vince Gilligan conceived it with a fixed ending from the start. Apple was at its best with Steve Jobs because it had a finite vision.
McGilchrist is ready for death: “When the Grim Reaper knocks on my door, I’ll probably say, where have you been?”
If there is something after death, he will be fascinated; if there is nothing, he won’t be there to be disappointed.
What Makes a Good Life
McGilchrist agrees with Jung’s five contributors to a happy life: good physical and mental health, intimate relationships, the faculty of perceiving beauty in art and nature, reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work, and a philosophical/religious viewpoint for coping with life’s vicissitudes.
He reframes the fifth point: it is not merely a coping mechanism but a genuine communion with something more real than superficial material things.
The three things that lead to a fulfilling life, supported by vast research, are:
Relationship with other people (family, friends, community)
Relationship with the natural world
Relationship with the sacred or divine
These are not invented or made up—they are discovered, and they are more real than anything else that can be named.
