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The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world, by Iain McGilchrist, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010, reprint 2012, 544 pp., £11.99 (paperback)
McGilchrist's book was published in 2010 but continues to gain plaudits and influence. It sets out an important thesis about the relationship between the left and right hemispheres of our brains, exploring how the balance between these is currently shifting and considering the implications of this. It also has important points to make to psychotherapists as, at least indirectly, it provides a challenge to particular forms of therapy, suggesting serious limitations with the evidence-based ‘protocol’ driven culture, with its reliance on certainty, clarity and known formulae, in which we increasingly find ourselves. McGilchrist's thesis is in fact a very wide ranging one, suggesting that the way in which contemporary lives are being lived is affecting how our very brains function, leading to greater reliance on rationality, logic, certainty and control at the expense of emotionality, intuition, empathy and curiosity. It ultimately fires a desperate warning shot, cautioning us that the world we are creating is a diminished one, lacking in emotionality, creativity and openness, where feeling is shallow, happiness hedonistic, relationships superficial; a dystopian world in which nature is feared, intuition distrusted and love suspected.
His thesis is of course not entirely new. We first learnt about the different functions of our two cerebral hemispheres when Roger Sperry introduced an experimental treatment for epilepsy in the 1960s, which entailed severing left and right hemispheres. This was successful in treating epilepsy but had other dramatic repercussions. One patient was found doing up her blouse with one hand while simultaneously attempting to undo it with the other; another shook his wife with his left hand while his right tried to come to her rescue (Funnell et al., 2