The Infinite Brain & the Narrow Circle

Is the brain infinite? If so, how is it that, as Blake puts it, ‘they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle’? Evidence is gathering that the structure of the brain, in particular its asymmetrical nature, may explain the increasing narrowness of the circle of our experience in the present day, awareness of which may be the first step in reversing the process.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls 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. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. McGilchrist is the author of Against Criticism (Faber 1982), The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning; Why Are We So Unhappy? (e-book short) and is currently working on a project entitled When The Porcupine is a Monkey, to be published by Penguin Press. He lives on the Isle of Skye.