Iain McGilchrist: We must teach our brain to listen to others

Speaker 00:00

[on-hold music] Aprendemos juntos, a BBVA initiative for a better world. Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, writer, and neuroscientist internationally recognized for his groundbreaking research on the structure and function of the human brain, particularly the differences between its hemispheres. Educated at Oxford and King's College London, he has worked as a clinical researcher, psychiatrist, and director of studies across fields including neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and psychology. His most influential work, The Master and His Emissary in 2009, established him as one of the most original voices exploring how the brain shapes culture, perception, and society.

Iain McGilchrist· Guest0:54

I believe we now live in a world in which our right hemisphere, the most important part of our brain, as I will explain, is not really contributing. Instead, we're living in a fictional world, a theoretical world, something like a make-believe world, perhaps a matrix world, in which reality does not penetrate. Instead, we have a theory of how things are, and the theory trumps experience. It trumps reality.