Iain McGilchrist – Rediscovering wisdom in a world gone mad

Local Futures Podcast

In this episode, Helena Norberg-Hodge talks to Iain McGilchrist. Iain is a one-of-a-kind thinker, an Oxford literary scholar as well as a doctor in psychiatry and neuroscience. His interdisciplinary achievements reflect his conviction about the importance of holistic thinking – a topic he has explored in-depth in his two ground-breaking works, 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World', and, more recently, 'The Matter with Things'.

In this conversation, Iain and Helena employ a big-picture lens to critique artificial intelligence, corporate globalization, and the profit-orientation of science and academia. They ask some hard questions about how things might change – through collapse, through movement-building, through grassroots action, or through a combination of these? And they also articulate insights into who we are as human beings, what constitutes genuine intelligence, and what a fulfilling life really entails.