The Matter With Things Part 2 with Iain McGilchrist

In Part I of “The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World” Iain McGilchrist addresses the means to truth, in the sense of the faculties with which we are endowed for this task. He takes these to be: attention, perception, judgment, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and creativity. In each case, he looks at what either hemisphere contributes to the process.

We don’t stand a hope of diving into each but I felt we should share some of your writing on attention and Perception before we focus today on some of the more philosophical chapters such as intuition.

We touched on it on the last day, but for those who know your work! We will know how we attend to the work is of utmost importance to what and how we experience the world?

“Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there.

What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future.

And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

This raises a core question then, What is attention?