Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and since September 2025 the Chancellor of Ralston College. He lives on the Isle of Skye. He is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2021). He writes at Channel McGilchrist and on Substack.

Something has gone wrong with the Western mind. Not recently and not with any particular government or policy but rather at a deep structural level, over centuries. Iain McGilchrist has spent his career as a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar trying to make sense of it.

In this conversation we think out loud about:

The difference between the actions and thoughts produced by the left and right hemispheres of the brain
The most visible symptoms of civilisational decay in Britain and the West
The key inflection points in history that set the West on a road to ruin, having previously defined the path to greatness
What the Romantics were longing for in the industrial era — and why nostalgia is not a bad thing but necessary
Why we need more new Romantics to show us how to live more fully human lives in the machine age
What the industrialisation of man has done to our souls
What the world we have built is doing to our minds and why mental health diagnoses are so prevalent amongst the young
The mistake made by the West in becoming post-Christian
Why Iain would rather die than sever his relationship with the faith — What Iain has not changed his mind on

Find Dr McGilchrist's work:

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Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam.

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