How Left and Right Brain Explain Our World with Iain McGilchrist (Part 1)

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Sr. Ilia Delio engages renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Together, they explore the profound implications of the brain’s divided hemispheres—and how our overreliance on the left brain might be shaping Western culture in unexpected ways.

What happens when we privilege abstract data over embodied experience? When mechanistic thinking crowds out emotional understanding and context? Drawing from his influential works The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, Dr. McGilchrist proposes that the right hemisphere—long neglected—holds the key to restoring balance, wisdom, and connection in our lives and societies.

Later in the episode, Sr. Ilia and Dr. McGilchrist discuss the nature of consciousness, the mystery of mind beyond brain, and the role of implicit knowing in liturgy, love, and the deepest human experiences.

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