Our Brains and Our UnMaking of the World

Our Brains and Our UnMaking of the World

Thoughts from Ian McGilchrist’s book The Matter with Things

The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’ The left hemisphere’s experience is fragmentary and therefore taken out of the flow of experiential life, and tends towards stasis

Yesterday those who listen to our weekly CACOR zoom heard from Lalith Gunaratne who examined how we should respond to AI. In his talk he mentioned the work of that I am highlighting today, the book The Matter with Things by Ian McGilchrist. Both Lalith and McGilchrist see that our technology/control biased value culture is killing both the world and humanity. In The Matter with Things he see the underlying cause of our society’s ability to know we are destroying the world yet incapable of stopping that destruction as linked to a brain malfunction created by our culture. So, given that most of us at CACOR are searching for ways to save humanity from itself in technology both Lalith’s zoom talk [Juen 11, 2025] and this book give an alternative medicine: think and feel and live more in your right brain: live experiencing the world directly instead of through technology, see yourself and all of the human world as part of the world. Here are a few words from McGilchrist to inspire you to either read this book or change your life live less in your heard and more in your body.

Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world … world views create worlds. —Richard Tarnas

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

“I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere.”

Here is a bit of Part 1, chapter 2 entitled ATTENTION. ‘As a man is, so he sees’, wrote William Blake. 3 Who we are, then, determines how we see. And how we see determines what we find. Given that the hemispheres ‘see’ differently, how reliable is each hemisphere in its disclosing of the world? What elements does each contribute to reality? One way to get a handle on this is to take a look at what happens when there is a degree of impairment in the functioning of one hemisphere at a time – either through illness, accident or temporary experimental inactivation. Damage to which hemisphere has the more catastrophic effect on our experience of the world? In Part I, I will deal with hemisphere differences in relation to what one might call the ‘portals’ of access – ways in which we get a handle on reality. And in this chapter, I examine the all-important role of attention. Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space, eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate. It is a profoundly moral act.

Though attention and perception are importantly different, there is bound to be some overlap, since abnormal attention leads to abnormal perceptions, and vice versa. In turn perceptions inevitably involve making judgments. So this and the two succeeding chapters, on perception and judgment, should be seen not as entirely separate, but as one continuous process of helping the reader appreciate the extent and importance of hemisphere differences as they unfold before our eyes. We know that when we are highly focussed on a single aspect of a situation we can miss the most outrageously obvious events happening right under our noses. One of the most celebrated demonstrations of this is a short video clip called ‘selective attention test’, showing a basketball game in a relatively confined indoor setting. For you to truly understand the problems with excess focus of our left brain culture

Watch The selective attention test [1999] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

And research reveals that, when it comes to detecting unexpected change, the left hemisphere is relatively blind compared with the right hemisphere.

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”

So, what can you do? Want to truly smart? Kick start your imagination. Do something creative. Be weird. Work for good things. Hug your ugly neighbour. Love life. Never give up. Experience the non human world every day. Stop only living in your head. Paint. Play music.

“Cynicism appears to be a coping strategy by the cognitively less gifted to avoid being duped by others.”

“And it is one of the messages of this book that imagination is not an impediment, but, on the contrary, a necessity for true knowledge of the world, for true understanding, and for that neglected goal of human life, wisdom.”

Can we avoid total collapse? Perhaps, perhaps not. There is no point in worrying about something like that we cannot control. What Mcgilchrist recommends is actually living a rich, experiential life every day. Live every day like its your last. Life like what you could save the world – it might, it might not, but living that way makes you matter. Once you do that, you do matter.

Viriditas by Hildegaard von Bingen

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.

I adorn all the earth.

I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.

I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.

I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.

I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.

I call forth tears. I am the yearning for good.

 

References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyBXqcgLAXs Beyond Materialism