The Importance of Reflective Thinking and Slowing Down in a Fast-Paced Society

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Society has lost the art of thinking deeply, pondering and embracing silence. We are too committed to a narrow point of view and lack the ability to challenge it. Reflective reading and proper acquaintance with history are crucial in understanding the wisdom of the past. Slowing down and thinking on two sides of a question would help improve the quality of most things we do. The world's constant demand for speed has led to less reflection and the need to use haste in tasks that require careful consideration.

On this episode, literary scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist joins Nate to discuss the way modern culture teaches and encourages us to use - and not use - the two lobes of our brains. While most functions require the use of both sides of our brains, each side is specially attuned to see and interact with the world in certain ways: the left side acts as a narrow problem solving executor, while the right side is a broadly open contextualizer. What happens when we humans - in aggregate - become imbalanced in our use of these two critical functions? Have we divided the Earth into pieces to be optimized rather than a whole (which we’re a part of) to be stewarded? Can we learn to bring these two components of our brains back into balance and in turn heal fractures in ourselves, and ultimately in our communities, Earth, and her ecosystems?

About Iain McGilchrist

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dogVQDydRGQ

More information, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/85-iain-mcgilchrist