Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a former 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, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch, who now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write, and lectures worldwide. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise - the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains. He was a late entrant to medicine. He went up to Oxford to study theology and philosophy, read English literature, and after graduating in 1975 was awarded a Prize Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford. A preoccupation with the mind-body problem led him to train in medicine, and during this period All Souls re-elected him to a further Fellowship (1984-1991), and again in 2002-2004. He trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. He has published original research on neuroimaging in schizophrenia, the phenomenology of schizophrenia, and other topics, and contributed chapters to books on a wide range of subjects, as well as original articles in papers and journals, including the British Journal of Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, BMJ, Lancet, TLS, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, Listener, Literary Review, Essays in Criticism, Modern Language Review, English Historical Review, Wall Street Journal, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph, on topics in literature, medicine, psychiatry and philosophy. He has taken part in nearly twenty radio and TV programmes and documentaries, including Innsaei: The Sea Within, and Bruce Parry's acclaimed film Tawai: A Voice from the Forest; and a Canadian full-length feature film about his work, The Divided Brain, is in production. His books include Against Criticism (Faber), The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale UP), The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning: Why Are We So Unhappy? (Yale UP), and Ways of Attending (Routledge, in press). He is currently working on a number of further books: There Are No Things, a book of epistemology and metaphysics, to be published by Penguin; some reflections on the humanities and sciences commissioned by OUP; a critique of contemporary society and culture from the standpoint of neuropsychology; a study of the paintings of subjects with psychotic illnesses; and a series of essays about culture and the brain with subjects from Andrew Marvell to Serge Gainsbourg.