A Lecture by Iain McGilchrist on the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western W0rld
April 7 2011, 6.30 pm, Swedenborg Hall London
£5.00/£3.00 concessions For details and booking email nora@swedenborg.org.uk or tel. 02074057986
On 7th April 2011, the Swedenborg Society will be proud to present a lecture by Iain McGilchrist, a doctor, psychiatrist and writer. His recent book, on the brain and our divided nature, has been described as ‘remarkable’: ‘clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating’; AC Grayling enthuses that it is ‘beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous.’ In The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist explains how differing world views of the right and left brain (the ‘Master’ and ’emissary’ in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of Plato; he argues that an Enlightenment cultural prejudice against the right brain has implications for the way the modern world is changing.
Swedenborg was noted as a scientist until his religious crisis during the mid-1740s. Swedenborg wrote two books about the workings of the brain, The Brain and The Cerebrum, which were unpublished in his lifetime and only published and then translated into English in the latter part of the 19th century. Swedenborg’s study of anatomy divided the faculties of the brain into the ‘will’ and the ‘understanding’; just as the heart and lungs are at once independent and necessarily conjoined, the will and understanding ‘are distinct from one another, but so created to be as one, and when they are one they are called the mind’. In his exhaustive exploration of the anatomical structures of the brain, Swedenborg’s remarkable visions of 250 years ago also foresaw, with amazing accuracy, the parts of the brain responsible for the emotions.
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