The Master and his Emissary:

The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

By Iain McGilchrist

Yale University Press, 2009   ISBN 978 0 300 18837 0    534 pages About £13

 

image Appropriately, the book is in two parts. The first deals with what we know about the divided brain “the most comprehensive, and lucid, review to date of findings from research on differences in consciousness, motives and emotions in the two cerebral hemispheres … ” (Prof Trevarthen}.

Part two is a wide ranging discussion of how our brain development has shaped Western culture.

Hypnosis does not get a mention until the end of part one, when it is convincingly argued that the subject in trance is exhibiting left brain dominance.

This might not be what we thought, and I did not get a chance to discuss it with the author, but it does seem consistent with our experience of ‘trance logic’. This weighty book is well worth reading, and the subject may be a good one for one of our ‘Open’ meetings.

Elwyn Griffiths May 2017