A Revolution in Thought?
Presenter:
Dr. Iain McGilchrist
Time:
1:04:12
Summary
It is often remarked that though it may seem that we face numerous global crises of different kinds – environmental, social, political, cultural, economic, psychological, and so on – these crises are interrelated. The term ‘metacrisis’ has been invented to describe this predicament. However these crises are not merely adventitiously interrelated because each has an impact on and reinforces each of the others – though that may be true – but because they share roots at a deeper level in a way of thinking about ourselves and the world. What are these roots? Hemisphere theory, deeply grounded as it is in Darwinism and subsequent neuroscientific research, shows us that a new, far more complex, and more nuanced, appraisal of the bipartite brain – the product of the last 30 years of research – brings new insights into the human condition.
Transcript
Good evening. My name is Ian McGilchrist. I write books about neuroscience and philosophy. debase, best known to the master and his emissary and the math things. Today I'm going to be talking about the hemisphere theory as a way of understanding what we call the meta crisis, the various groups of problems of considerable severity that bedevil us these days. I believe that by understanding more about how the brain works, we can see these disparate elements of the so called meta crisis, as coherent and in some sense, as inevitable consequences of our espousal of a very strange way of thinking about and looking at ourselves, and the world to which we belong.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome, you join us, of course, for our fourth Darwin college lecture on the theme of revolution. Over the last three weeks, we've heard from a historian, a geneticist, and a political theorist, each delivering a rich but varied perspective on the historical, political, and biological revolutions. If you missed any of those, they are, of course on the Darwin college YouTube channel, along with the lectures that have been delivered, or many of them that have been delivered over the last 39 years. This year, we celebrate our 60th anniversary as the first postgraduate college here at the University of Cambridge. And in the lead up to that, our fellowship have recently adopted a 10 year strategic plan for the college, which both recognizes that the world faces a broad spectrum of interrelated global challenges. Were familiar with many of them. Perhaps you might call them meta meta crises, as we will hear more about in due course.