How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy
with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain
McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book
The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of
the World (public library) -- an investigation of how "the very brain
mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to
our control militate against a true understanding of it," and what a
richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and
more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition
that "the whole is never the same as the sum of its 'parts'" and that
"there are in fact no 'parts' as such, but that they are an artefact of a
certain way of looking at the world."More in this piece from The
Marginalian
