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Iain McGilchrist (born 1953) is a British psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist who wrote the 2009 book .
He is a Quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; a former associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford; an emeritus consultant at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal hospitals in south London, a former research fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and a former fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.
In 2021, McGilchrist published a book of neuroscience, epistemology and metaphysics called The Matter with Things.
McGilchrist also contributed as a . He produced work on neuroimaging in schizophrenia and on the philosophical phenomenology of that disorder, and published articles in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, and the British Medical Journal.
He maintained academic contributions in the humanities, featuring work in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Times.
McGilchrist argues that the manner in which the two hemispheres operate is substantially different. It is not that the hemispheres perform different functions, but that they perform these functions in a different way. Drawing on neuroscientific research from the last one hundred years, McGilchrist argues that each hemisphere offers a unique kind of attention to the world, an attention which brings a certain version of the world into being. According to McGilchrist, we have become entranced by the version of the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and forgotten the insights produced by the right. We need both hemispheres, he concludes, but we need the left hemisphere to operate in the service of the right, we need the "emissary" left hemisphere to serve the "master" right hemisphere. The periods where the proper hemispheric balance has gone awry, McGilchrist documents in the second half of the book where he offers a history of ideas seen through the lens of the hemisphere hypothesis.
Following the publication of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist took part in radio sessions, television programmes, numerous and interviews via YouTube with figures such as Sam Harris, Rowan Williams and John Cleese. There has been a Canadian feature film made about his second book, The Master and his Emissary, titled the Divided Brain.
His main target in this book is scientific materialism: the view that the world is nothing but inert atoms, blankly colliding against one another in a predictable pattern. In place of this, McGilchrist seeks to reawaken a richer conception of reality, a conception revealed when our hemispheres return to their proper asymmetric relation.
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