The result is the exchange below.ĪNGE MLINKO: I very much enjoyed reading The Master and His Emissary. However, over the past five hundred years or so the left brain, or the “emissary,” has been gaining control over the right brain, which for our happiness-and perhaps for our very survival-must be the “master.” The Master and His Emissary is a compelling, disturbing book, and we thought it would be a good idea to have a poet, one who knows her way around the scientific material, to engage McGilchrist’s ideas specifically from the angle of poetry. The title of McGilchrist’s book implies a clear hierarchy, but he is quick to point out that both sides of the brain, operating in tandem, are necessary to living a full human existence. It sorts and counts, it manipulates and controls. The left brain, by contrast, enables us to arrange and organize given information.

The best description of the book comes from the author himself, who says on his website ( ) that “this book argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.” The right brain, McGilchrist goes on to say, is responsible for our ability to see things in their totality, to make metaphorical connections, to fuse ideas and disciplines (science and poetry, for example).

We’re fans of Iain McGilchrist’s new book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2010)-not only because it offers a fascinating analysis of, and a clear warning about, our increasingly divided brains, but also because it contains lots of poetry.

The master and his emissary criticism