Working on Chapter 2, and focussing a lot on the Attention (particularly “Breadth and Flexibility Versus Focus and Grasp”).
Structural references are strange to hear again in this context, which feels more like that of academic text book. As a family we’ve become accustomed to them being associated with one very specific brain in one very awful context. Brain-injury/-impairment and recovery-related discussions still are fairly common at our supper table. It’s a bit odd to have it back in someone else’s hands.
McGilchrist says in “Breadth and Flexibility”: “If what it is that exists comes into being for each one of us through its interactions with our brains and minds, the idea that we could have a knowledge of it that was not also an expression of ourselves, and dependent on what we brought to the relationsip, is untenable…to say this is ‘such-and-such”, that is, it has certain qualities that enable me to place it in a category of things that I have experienced before and about which I have certain beliefs and feelings….The world is no longer ‘present’ to us, but ‘re-presented’, a virtual world, a copy that exits in conceptual form in the mind.”
While so far, I think the work he is doing around these ideas are probably going to be the key to this section (probably whole book), reading it and in the context of brain research and the related vocabulary, is far more personal than I expected it to be, precisely an example of what he is explaining. For a while terms like “CSF” “Intercranial Pressure” “Ventricle” “Cerebellum” (along with “Cerebellar Mutism”), “Posterior Fossa” and the like were a daily part of living for my family. These words now have all sorts of things attached to them that illustrate exactly McGilchrist’s point. How utterly ironic.
@MarkD how is your reading going?