Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist, best known for his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, which has sold more than 200,000 copies. His work attempts to bring together a century of research on brain lateralisation and connect it with the history of Western ideas.
McGilchrist was born in 1953 and studied on a scholarship at Winchester College and then at New College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. In 1974 he won the English Chancellor's Prize and the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize. In 1975 he was admitted as a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he taught English literature and researched philosophy and psychiatry, particularly the relationship between mind and body.
He later decided to study medicine and train as a psychiatrist. As a consultant psychiatrist at Maudsley and Bethlem Royal hospitals in south London, he worked in the Epilepsy Unit, the National Psychosis Referral Unit and the National Eating Disorders Unit, and served as clinical director of Acute Mental Health Services for the southern sector. He also researched neuroimaging in schizophrenia and the philosophical phenomenology of the disorder, publishing in journals such as the British Journal of Psychiatry and the British Medical Journal.
McGilchrist's central idea is that the two hemispheres do not perform different functions, but perform the same functions differently. Each hemisphere offers a unique kind of attention to the world, an attention that “brings into being” a particular version of reality. According to him, modern Western civilisation has become entranced by the version of the world produced by the left hemisphere and has forgotten the insights offered by the right. McGilchrist argues that we need both hemispheres, but that the left should operate in the service of the right: the “emissary” left brain should serve the “master” right brain. In the second half of his book, he traces periods in the history of ideas when, in his view, the proper asymmetry of the hemispheres was disrupted.
In 2021 he published The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, in which he explores the metaphysical implications of the hemisphere hypothesis. There he examines the means by which we arrive at truth—perception, attention, judgement—as well as the paths towards it, such as reason, science and logic, alongside equally important paths such as intuition and imagination. In the final chapters, he attempts to answer questions such as what space and time are, what matter and consciousness are, what value is and whether a sense of the sacred is inherent in the world. His main target in this book is scientific materialism: the view that the world is nothing more than inert atoms colliding with one another in predictable ways. In place of this view, McGilchrist seeks to awaken a richer understanding of reality, one that is revealed when the hemispheres return to their proper asymmetric relationship.
After the publication of The Master and His Emissary (2009), McGilchrist appeared on radio and television programmes, podcasts and YouTube interviews with figures such as Sam Harris, Rowan Williams and John Cleese. A Canadian film about his work, titled The Divided Brain, was also made.
In October 2025 he was appointed Chancellor of Ralston College, succeeding Jordan Peterson. McGilchrist also maintains an academic presence in the humanities, having written for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. Oxford University Press has also commissioned him to write a book of reflections on the humanities and the sciences, offering a critique of modern culture from the perspective of neuropsychiatry.
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