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You're listening to the nocturnous conversations.

I'm Emily Silverman.

In the summer of 2021, I was invited to Galway, Ireland, to speak at a conference called DotMD,

a festival of medical curiosity.

And I was sitting in the audience at this conference and on stage appeared this man in, I think,

a tweed blazer. It may not actually have been a tweed blazer, but I feel like spiritually it might have been. But there was this man

Ian McGilchrist who delivered this interview about the brain and the nature of reality that just

kind of blew my mind. And so after I saw him speak, I rushed up to him and invited him onto the

podcast and he was kind enough to agree.

Several weeks later, we did the interview. In my mind, I like to imagine Ian sitting by the fire

in his home in the Isle of Sky and toiling over his manuscripts. Dr. Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist,

neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary

scholar. He's a Kwandam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a fellow of the Royal College

of Psychiatrist and former consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlehem, Royal and

Maudsley Hospital in London. His two books, The Master and His Emissary,

and the Matter with Things, are very, very well researched, very dense, but also completely

and utterly fascinating. And a lot of his work recently has been looking at the functional

asymmetry of the human brain.

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