In this episode, Greg and Dr. Iain McGilchrist discuss the left and right brain hemispheres, attention, meaning, and the necessity of intuition and science, reason and imagination, as well as Dr. McGilchrist’s new book: The Matter with Things. #therespondent 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 a 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). His new seminal book, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, published in November 2021, and described by Professor Charles Foster as ‘the most important book you will ever read’ has already received international acclaim.Show Notes: [0:00] Respondent introduction[1:00] Welcome back to The Respondent with Greg Ellis. Greg introduces Dr. Iain McGilchrist to the listeners[1:10] Question: Greg asks Dr. Iain McGilchrist if it’s fair to label him as a science heretic because he “dared to question” commonly held beliefs by testing and retesting the emergent truths[2:50] Greg recounts how he shared his poem “Our Pharma” with Matt Ridley https://youtu.be/vtcXBjuXGUI[5:10] Question: How do human beings uncover, discover, or rediscover meaning?[8:10] Question: How do we know who we are? The fundamental question in Dr. McGilchrist’’s new book, The Matter with Things [11:00] Greg recalls Dr. McGilchrist’s conversation with Dr. Jordan Peterson regarding the left and right brain[12:00] Greg describes how the works of Brené Brown and Esther Perel influenced the model he built comparing the functions between the left and right hemispheres [12:30] Question: Where are you at about the left brain hemisphere and the right brain hemisphere? [13:00] “...attention changes the world, it also changes ourselves who do the attending.” Dr. Iain McGilchrist[18:35] Exploring the relationship between the right versus left brain and the emotion of feelings with memories [24:10] “...the left hemisphere is a very important servant, but a very bad master.” Dr. Iain McGilchrist[30:10] Dr. McGilchrist discusses how the emotional intuitive side of the brain no longer works as a guide to rationalizing for those who have schizophrenia[35:05] “The modern disease is our need to control. It’s through trying to control that we have destroyed the world, and we are destroying society through this passion for, ‘I know how it should be, and this is how it must be’.” Dr. Iain McGilchrist[38:25] Greg discusses the subheader: “truth as a thing or a process” in Dr. McGilchrist’s book: The Matter with Things [40:00] Dr. McGilchrist suggests that “time is a core reality of the cosmos” and that philosopher Timothy E. Eastman and physicist Lee Smolin would agree that “time is absolutely fundamental.” [41:55] Dr. McGilchrist discusses the influence Alfred North Whitehead had on him, and his idea “that all the things that we call things and therefore make them sound static and material are, in fact, processes.”[43:30] In Greg’s second book NoThing in Between, he asks, “What is the thing? How do we define the thing?”[45:45] Question: How do we develop emotional logic?[46:20] “A gardener cannot make a plant, can’t make a plant grow. What a gardener does is to create the circumstances in which a plant will flourish…” Dr. Iain McGilchrist [47:30] Dr. McGilchrist discusses in