May 23, 2023-- "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 (2144 reads)