McGlossary

There's a short list of terms that McGilchrist (and his popular interpreters) have introduced. We have the "hemisphere hypothesis," the notion of "left hemisphere capture (or insurrection)," the "McGilchrist Manoeuvre" (via Rowson), and "McGilchrist's Wager." There are certainly many others. To these I have suggested a few additional ones to describe concepts that I think have been either stated or implied:

The McGilchrist Paradox:

In The Master and His Emissary he wrote: “It has been said that the world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. I am with the second group.” I think this might be called McGilchrist’s Paradox, a "true contradiction" or dialetheia. Because if one is "with the second group" this may be justifiably understood as acknowledging the existence of the very dichotomy it simultaneously refutes. The metaphysics of McGilchrist are necessarily inclusive (therefore paradoxical) and necessarily asymmetric or hierarchical (therefore translucent).

A Multiscalar Interpretation:

The hemisphere hypothesis is intended to be understood not only at the individual level, but at the integrative level above the individual, which is that of the group or culture. It is here that the collective dynamics have significant existential consequences for the species (and levels adjacent to or above that, such as civilizations and ecospheres). As McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary: “...genes which, at least partly through their effects on lateralisation, result in major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder), and developmental disorders, such as autism and Asperger's syndrome... [may] have been bred out long ago, if it were not for some hugely important benefit that they must convey. If they also, through their effects on lateralisation, in some cases led to extraordinary talents, and if particularly they did so in relatives, who have some but not all of the genes responsible, then such genes would naturally be preserved, on purely Darwinian principles.”

Stereoscopic Thought (independently suggested by several):

Jason Seed remarked that "If having two eyes gives us a visual ‘depth of field’, do two hemispheres give us a kind of ‘depth of thought,’ like the difference between monovision and stereoscopic vision? How do the fields of vision work together?” In this "depth of thought" metaphor, we need both the right and the left hemispheres to both see the big picture and yet limit our attention according to the situation. That is, the phenomenological analogue of stereoscopic vision, where two eyes complement each other to generate a single image, is opponent processing, where two hemispheres complement each other to generate a single phenomenology. The tendency to prefer visual input from one eye to the other, called "ocular dominance" suggests a possibly corresponding phenomenon in opponent processing. But the metaphor of perceptual depth or "thinking in stereo" breaks down when we consider that the world as revealed by either eye is substantially the same, whereas the world as revealed by either hemisphere is markedly different. (cf. "Etuaptmumk" the Mi'kmaw word for "Two-Eyed Seeing")

McGilchrist Invitation:

It was noted “McGilchrist has found a way to talk about spirit that materialists can understand. He’s using language that is accessible to rationalists to point beyond rationalism.” ...What does this mean? McGilchrist shows how the objective, physical evidence of biology (something eliminative materialists can understand) points to the need for dual modes of perception. Not just a single mode of perception. That is, evolution apparently saw fit to equip organisms with the neurological capacity for (to use the podcasters terms) both ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ modes of perception. That evidence provides rational materialists with an access point for engaging with this other mode of perception which they had heretofore neglected. To be sure, it’s only an invitation, and anyone unwilling to take it can easily find some excuse to decline it. McGilchrist: “What I am trying to do is introduce people to a world that I believe they already know about, but they've been taught to disattend to. They've been taught to devalue it, even dismiss it.”

McGilchrist Commision:

This was implied in a conversation he had earlier: "I love that whole story from the Lurianic Kabbalah of the shattering of the vessels and the repair of them. It speaks to us as a metaphor or fable, but what's so special are two things: the vessels will be better and more beautiful once repaired than they were before they were shattered (reminding me of that Japanese ceramic art kintsugi, in which a vessel once broken is repaired with lines of gold), and the other thing is that in the Judaic tradition it is our duty and obligation, but also our honor, to be the means for that repair. That is why we are here: to repair what was shattered. I think that is something very rich and deep." (What was shattered? The rift between mind and matter, between science and the humanities, and between left and the right hemisphere views of the world. For example, citing page 1333: "It is our duty to do the more difficult thing: to find out the core of wisdom in [what cultures wiser than ours were trying to express by speaking of God].")

McGilchrist's Crypto-theology:

In conversation with Segall and Davis, McGilchrist said: "I see [The Matter with Things] really as a work of crypto-theology. Not that it's expounding anything in terms of academic theology, but that it's encouraging us to look at the world with a different disposition, which is one that would be open to what is needed if one's going to understand the divine."

Naturalized Metaphysics:

In Philosophy Now (Issue 164: October/November 2024) Rogério Severo writes: "It seems there was a time when metaphysicians were all of a single species. Now they appear to make up at least two. Of the newer kind is the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, most famous for The Master and His Emissary (2009). His work is a notable contribution to what one may call ‘naturalized metaphysics’. It differs from classical metaphysics in that it justifies its statements empirically rather than by reasoning alone. Unlike traditional metaphysics, it grounds its claims about the nature of reality on the findings of natural science."

McGilchrist put it this way: "In writing a book called The Matter with Things, what I was daring to ask (but not able to fully answer of course) was an audacious question: Can we take a look, starting from first principles that have arisen from some new work in neuropsychology, and putting it together with the best streams in philosophy in the last hundred years, and some of the findings in physics, to say something about the nature of things?" 

McGilchrist Key (or Compass):

The McGilchrist Key is a practical application of the hypothesis for catalyzing a shift away from the world of the LH and towards that of the RH, whether that shift occurs at a collective or an individual scale. Thus unlocking the potential for transformation (RH liberation from LH capture). It mediates the tense space between two hemispheres with opposing modes of attention. It permits us to see the choice implicit within the opposition, where before we may not have recognized any (particularly the case when captured by the LH). As McGilchrist put it, "we can now make more weighted decisions about which, of any two paths, is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful." This draws upon Marcel Kinsbourne's neurological application of "opponent process theory."

McGilchrist's Metapolitics:

Jonathan Rowson: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forums. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical. It's about looking inside "what politics is" and recasting "what politics should be about". Clearly there's a relationship between the left hemisphere and power, for example, and clearly there's a sort of vision of the world presented by the right hemisphere. When you look through those lenses the whole idea of the political spectrum should dissolve. A new set of priorities should come into being. If the cosmos is as Iain describes it, "politics as we know it" changes fundamentally. So it's not as though the thesis says "therefore vote this way or that way", or prioritizes economic growth or something else, it's more that it recasts the very idea of "what political practice should look like" because it reprioritizes the sacred, education, imagination, and so forth. And through that a different kind of politics should arise."

McGilchrist's Bridge Laws:

Michael Spezio wrote, "Bridge laws perhaps are best understood as the theoretical-philosophical theories, maybe even one’s scholarly commitments, about how measured signals from the brain and the rest of the body (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance, pupil size) convey information about the processes involved in a given cognitive mode or task or experience." According to a theoretical-philosophical commitment to a reductive, mechanistic model of life, which is all the vogue within contemporary Western culture, we should "decompose the brain," from the macro-structure of hemispheres, all the way down to the synapses, and still further to the "computations" themselves, before we can be satisfied that we've found the "locus" of consciousness, the 'what-it-is' that engenders a mode of attention. This has led to a "bridge law objection" to the hemisphere hypothesis. However McGilchrist’s theory about the higher level structure of the brain derives from a more process-oriented philosophy that interprets the evidence of lesion-deficit studies within a relational context, where what is absent can be as significant as what is present. This philosophical inversion has asymmetric implications when it comes to accounting for phenomena such as gestalt perception. By comparison, eliminative materialism problematically disposes one more toward runaway reductionism and a flat ontology. These sort of considerations should preface any discussion of what might be called "McGilchrist's Bridge Laws," which are central to his larger project of reuniting the sciences and humanities.[1]

Notes: 

[1] McGilchrist: "One of the things that I notice is that very few people in the neuroscience world have said that the neuroscience that's in either The Master and his Emissary or in The Matter with Things (where it's more extensive) is wrong. A number of people have said, 'As far as the science goes, this is good. We’re on your side. But, then you go and apply it to the lives of people in the world.' And on the other hand, there are philosophers who understand what I'm saying about the world, and about what a human being is, and they say, 'Well, I don't know about the science. Of course, it's very interesting, but wouldn't it stand up on its own without the science?' So you've got these two factions that I'm trying to bring together, each in their way saying, 'Well, yes, the bit that's in our realm is okay, but why have these two together?' One of the things that I'm hoping for is that there will be a revolution in the way we think, an expansion of vision in the sciences and in the humanities that will enable each of them to see the value of the other. And one of the messages I'm trying to get across is the need for science and the humanities to come together again. ...The advantage of linking them is that this alerts you to things that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily think of."