Embracing Complexity in Art and Life

The second part of a conversation between the renowned literary scholar and psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist and Ralston College president Dr Stephen Blackwood about Dr McGilchrist’s remarkable educational trajectory.

In this episode, Dr Iain McGilchrist explains how he left his successful career as a literary scholar to pursue training as a psychiatrist and how his combined study of literature, philosophy, and neuroscience informed his later academic work, including his books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva, 2021).

List of people referenced in this episode:

• Ted Hughes
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Johnson
• John Boswell
• Laurence Sterne
• William Shakespeare
• Oliver Sacks
• John Cutting
• Louis Sass
• Jan Zwicky
• Robert Bringhurst
• Erwin Schrödinger
• Martin Heidegger
• Max Planck
• Niels Bohr
• Michael Levin