26 Quotes by Iain McGilchrist

Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.

If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’377.

Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and.

So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.

Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.

Of course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.

There is always a model by which we are understanding, an exemplar with which we are comparing, what we see, and where it is not identified it usually means that we have tacitly adopted the model of the machine.

Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time.