How Prayer Deepens Consciousness with Iain McGilchrist (Part 2)

In this continuation of their rich exchange, Sr. Ilia Delio and Dr. Iain McGilchrist explore the deeper dimensions of consciousness—and how our overreliance on the left hemisphere of the brain distorts our understanding of reality, relationships, and even God.

Together, they reflect on:

• How attentiveness shapes the way we relate to the world
• The role of environment in forming perception and meaning
• Why prayer, nature, and human relationships are vital to human flourishing
• The distinction between brain and mind—and the mystery of consciousness itself
• Why the future depends not just on new tools, but on a renewed inner life

With clarity and conviction, Iain invites us to recover the neglected right brain, embrace relational knowing, and remember the divine ground that holds us. In a culture driven by certainty and efficiency, this episode points gently back toward wonder, prayer, and possibility.

ABOUT IAIN MCGILCHRIST

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press. www.channelmcgilchrist.com