Tokyo has a population of more than 38 million, and many people have claimed to love living in cities, with their hustle and bustle. If I remember correctly, 250 was suggested as a good size for these communities why 250 I don’t know, but there was reference to Dunbar’s number which is 150, the number of relationships the average person can retain.Īt the time I thought surely it will never be possible to return to living in small communities, when so many people now live in huge cities. Two years ago, when attending a 4 day course on the divided brain, organised by Field & Field and featuring Iain McGilchrist, there was an informal discussion amongst a group of participants who were suggesting that one way of addressing the problems of our planet would be a return to living in small communities. If properly understood and acted upon, it has the potential to transform our view of ourselves and our cultures, and prevent us from making a huge number of mistakes that might otherwise seem like sensible decisions … a truly wonderful book.’

I agree with Jonathan Rowson, who in his review of the book wrote: I recently listed them in another post – Introducing the Work of Iain McGilchrist There are also other ways to access Iain’s ideas, which include a variety of articles and videos. So these notes are no substitute for reading the book. Someone else’s notes might read differently, and no doubt the notes would be different if I myself wrote them again at another time. In addition the selection of what to attend to is mine. If you are interested and would like to know more, but don’t have the time to engage with this long and dense book, or have tried it and find it over-whelming, the wiki notes might help, but I must stress that any errors are mine. For this reason, the book is an important one for our times. It is easy to recognise our world, the world we are living in now, in much of what he describes. In the concluding chapter of his book he describes what the left hemisphere’s world would look like, if it managed to suppress the right hemisphere altogether. He claims that we live in a world dominated by the left hemisphere. Iain McGilchrist’s thinking and ideas seem even more relevant today than when his book was published ten years ago. The wiki is open to the public for reading and comment. During this time of enforced lockdown, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to re-read and engage more slowly and deeply with this very long and dense text. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

This is an image of the front page of a wiki I have created to record my notes on Iain McGilchrist’s ‘ground breaking’ book, The Master and His Emissary.

The divided brain book