The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Written by Iain McGilchrist

Narrated by Dennis Kleinman

This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain—the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true?



Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master. As he shows, it is the right side which is the more reliable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic—stripped of depth, color and value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515942078

Reviews for The Master and His Emissary

[Signme Uplease · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Life-changing.

(I can't post until I add this extra sentence. ?)

[Stan Richardson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'd heard so many great things about this book. And after so many people talked about it, I felt there was nothing for me to discover. I was wrong. There is an abundance of inspiration and a great soul in this book of science.

[Ed · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

ThIs is a brilliant book of enormous breadth and depth. The author is engaging from start to finish. I am amazed at the scope of his knowledge and his ability to clearly articulate the many connections he sees between brain hemisphere tendencies and history, culture, art and technology. I fully intend to listen to it again.

[Claudia Vivanco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent and interesting. A very thorough discussion of the two lobes of the human brain. How this affects human thought and culture which influences society. I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about our world and humanity.

[JoelHFX · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely brilliant! Get ready, this is long even for an audio book! A very good analysis of the hemispheres of the brain and it's influence on how we see the world.

[Will Alston · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some gems in here. I feel a little closer to wisdom, but still very far. Stepping stones forward in here. Some ideas he assented to were taken too quickly, but those were far fewer than those he gave us to ascend to. Since I work remotely, I was able to play it while working and finished it in two days. Totally recommend.

[tytania-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[snash_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very thought provoking view of the workings of the human brain. He uses neuroscience, philosophy, and art to ascribe differing ways of looking at the world to the two hemispheres of the brain and then to view the progression of Western thought from this perspective. His thesis that modern Western society has been absconded by the left brain. My primary difficulty with the book was that in making his point he seemed to repeat himself many times.

[vguy_6 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Seemed promising: an update on the L/R Brain, including a survey of how it worked out across Western cultural history. Granted he's well-read, but almost every point is made in a binary way, asserted rather than demonstrated or evidenced, in a language so abstract that I got lost. On top of that the Audible version is full of mispronunciations, e.g. panlopy, Hussrel, etc, lack of right emphasis in words and sentences, distortions of foreign names and terms (the German is incomprehensible to me , a fluent German speaker). I gave up.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Starts off very promising but then abandons all pretence of science and just discusses poetry. I understand the book is more about philosophy in its old meaning but I just wasn't persuaded because there weren't any concrete points just vague insinuations and attempts to redress what the author sees as the left side trashing the right for too long now.

[stevetempo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This work is not for everyone, but I give my highest recommendation. If you have ever had an interest in the brain, consciousness, or how we all perceive and engage the world, this might your cup of tea. Iain McGilchrist does an incredible job with developing our current understanding of the brain from a hemispheric point of view. The work completely altered my understanding of the right and left hemispheres. The way the right and left sides work are not what you may think. The book then takes you on a trip through time and suggests how our hemispheric balance as a civilization may have have changed over history. He also looks at current cultures and suggests different balances due cultural behaviors, etc. He also gives ideas on how our current hemispheric unbalance might be brought into a more fruitful alignment. So much food for thought here. It took me a while to work my way through and there is some technical jargon, but so well worth it. One of the most significant non-fiction books I've ever read.

[albertogiuseppe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A marvelous, herculean tome which points in the direction of how and where multidisciplinary studies could and should be heading in cogsci. and elsewhere. Even just the footnotes are a fountain of material, a meta-study in themselves. McGhilchrist's fundamental thesis, that the left hemisphere, (perhaps moreso the prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral and dorsomedial, in terms of extrinsic processing) operates more in abstraction and inhibits our more contextual right-side processing is largely well-supported, though he does rely, I think, too much on modularity and not enough on networks. Which is to be expected, given the rapidity of change in and arrival of new data in the field. The book does, however, pretty much require at least a general familiarity of the brain and a fair amount of general cultural to read comfortably, being more than a mouthful. Hell, it's a truckload.

[teunduynstee · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is book is on a fascinating subject. Why is our brain split in two halves and how is it that when the corpus callosum (that joins the parts) is cut, patients can still function more or less normally? Are the two halves like separate personas that have to work together to form our mind.

McGilchrist presents an overwhelming amount of material on an incredible width of subjects. He is clearly well-read on many of them. His thesis is (very condensed) that much of the history of Western civilization and the current organisation of our society can be explained by the fact that the balance between right and left hemispheres is disturbed. The left hemisphere has become too dominant, resulting in a bureaucratic, reductionist worldview, where problems can always be fixed by optimizing the parts and not looking at the whole.

To be honest: I didn't finish the book. I regard myself as a reader who can deal with voluminous treatises. I can force myself through dry reading if the subject is interesting enough. I'm not easily scared away by obscure vocabulary (although I'm not a native English reader, so my vocabulary is not very broad). For about 300 pages, I learned enough interesting facts to keep up with the rather dry read. However, I remained very unconvinced by the main thesis and the mountain of circumstantial evidence presented. Also, the presentation was just not accessible enough for me. Call me stupid, but if you casually use words like 'apophthegmatic', I have to look them up. The author may be very erudite, but please try to bring your message to me in an understandable way. I'm sure that this book could be done in simpler language and in half the word count. After 300 pages, I gave up.

[rabindranath_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A psychiatrist explains how our cognitive preferences determined the way our cultures evolved. Classic!