Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist
4/22/20262 hr 8 min
For many of us, our instinctual response to rising conflict and instability might be to recede further into pragmatism as a way to survive. Yet, if our cultural values and ways of life are what got us here, rooted in narrow-boundary, cold, and logical thinking – then perhaps moments of turbulence like these actually call on us to change our way of thinking entirely. Is this moment our opportunity to pivot toward worldviews that emphasize the intangible qualities of life, and could that shift cause a cascade through our actions and decisions, leading to more balanced decision-making for the betterment of everyone?
In this episode, Nate is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist for discussion on how our left-brain dominance obscures our sense of value, especially for abstract qualities such as truth, goodness, and beauty. As a way to reclaim an appreciation for these things, he urges us to slow down, create spaciousness, embrace silence and deep listening, and resist the mania for productivity in our modern culture. Nate and Iain also discuss consciousness, panpsychism, and panentheism, exploring the thread that there might be some form of universal current running through everything, uniting us all. Bringing everything together, Iain calls for a recovery of humility, compassion, awe, and wonder and insists that even a small percentage of people genuinely living differently could begin to shift cultural consciousness.
How do the things we choose to pay attention to affect our ability to see what's important in the world – and subsequently what we value and prioritize? What would it feel like to treat each day as a gift rather than a problem to solve, and how might that shift our relationship with time, mortality, and meaning? Most of all, is it possible for some subset of humans to reground ourselves and our behavior in the interconnectedness of life, and could those small changes add up to meaningfully alter humanity's current trajectory?
(Conversation recorded on March 24th, 2026)
About Iain McGilchrist:
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton 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.
Iain has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
Iain is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology, and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).
Watch this video episode on YouTube
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
---
Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsIain McGilchrist· Guest0:00
There's much that can be said against humanity. I don't think I don't see the ways in which we have got things terribly wrong, but I think another way in which we can get them wrong is to suggest that somehow the whole thing would be better without humanity. Humanity has a very particular role to play, and the measure of its capacity to take on such an awe-inspiring role is that it can get it very badly wrong as well. Unless we consider those things and have answers that make sense, I think we're stuck. We've got to make those changes if we want to survive as a society, as a civilization.
Nate Hagens· Host0:40
[outro music] You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today, I'm pleased to welcome back philosopher and neuroscientist Dr. Iain McGilchrist to further explore and unpack how his theory on the divided brain is defining our present moment, including our left brain cultural demands for more and more stuff and faster and faster