Customer reviews
4 out of 5stars
(5 reviews)
Most helpful positive review
5.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
08/17/2012
This work is not for e...
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.
stevetempo
Most helpful negative review
2.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
11/12/2011
This is book is on a f...
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.
teunduynstee
14 reviews
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3.00 out of 5 stars reviewVerified Purchaser05/16/2021Starts off very promising but then…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.TeaTimeCoder
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5.00 out of 5 stars reviewVerified Purchaser08/17/2012This work is not for e...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.stevetempo
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5.00 out of 5 stars reviewVerified Purchaser03/27/2012A marvelous, herculean...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.AlbertoGiuseppe
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2.00 out of 5 stars reviewVerified Purchaser11/12/2011This is book is on a f...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.teunduynstee
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5.00 out of 5 stars reviewVerified Purchaser09/12/2011A psychiatrist explain...A psychiatrist explains how our cognitive preferences determined the way our cultures evolved. Classic!rabindranath