by Ian McGilchrist
And we have a winner for best non-fiction of 2024. This is really a game-changing book for me.
The right brain is primary, and the left brain merely its emissary; yet the left brain often takes over, thinks HE is the master, and becomes a bully. All these decades I’ve thought of myself as left-brained, extremely so, maybe pathologically so. Maybe I just have to get the thing back on a leash. Maybe it just went haywire in my adolescence and I let it start getting away with murder.
The book begins with neuroscience and then deep dives – deep, DEEP dives – into the history of civilization, art, and science. I had no choice but to zone out for a lot of it; artistic discussions over my head, foreign language quotes not translated until the endnotes. This was 600 pages of heavy duty. But when I could glean what he was saying, it was a fascinating perspective.
My New Year’s resolution – in addition to “stop getting mad when people call me” – is to see if I can put my left brain back in its place. You serve at my pleasure, left brain.
Tytania 