RSA ANIMATE: The Divided Brain
Iain McGilchrist
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains how the two hemispheres of the brain have profoundly shaped human behavior, culture, and civilization.
Why we picked this
Forget everything you think you know about left-brain vs. right-brain. McGilchrist's real argument is far more interesting and far more consequential.
The popular left-brain/right-brain narrative is mostly myth — but McGilchrist isn’t debunking it so much as replacing it with something more profound. The hemispheres do process the world differently, and those differences have shaped not just individual cognition but entire civilizations.
The left hemisphere is a specialist: it narrows attention, categorizes, controls. The right hemisphere sees the whole picture, understands context, and processes novelty. McGilchrist’s argument is that Western culture has become dangerously dominated by left-hemisphere thinking — reducing everything to metrics, mechanisms, and abstractions at the expense of meaning.
This is a 12-minute distillation of his 600-page book “The Master and His Emissary,” and it’s one of the best-argued RSA Animates in the series.