![]() ![]() At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.” Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World ( public library) - an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. ![]() But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention - the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. ![]() Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. ![]()
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