The Matter with Things: A Monumental Journey of Discovery

A reflection on Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), vols I and II.

This is a book for the ages, a prophetic work. It is a massive tome, almost 1,600 pages long with over 200 pages of bibliography, indices, and credits, and it covers a vast canvas of human cognition and behaviour. Behind it all lies one clear guiding idea: McGilchrist’s belief, as he says in his opening paragraph, that humankind has ‘systematically misunderstood the nature of reality … ’. The reason for this, he argues, is that we have let the left hemisphere of the brain predominate.