Right Brain, Creativity, and Meaning in Life

I recently had a rich conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist about our divided brain and what it means for, well, everything.

Ten years ago I wrote an article for Scientific American called “The Real Neuroscience of Creativity”. In that article, I presented an exciting new approach in neuroscience called the network approach that looks at how large-scale brain networks interact with each other to produce creativity, and I noted that these brain structures recruit areas in both the left and right hemisphere. In other words, creativity is not exclusively a right-brain phenomena.

Fast forward to 2023, the Institute of Art and Ideas asks me if they can repost the article. That’s all they ask me. Of course I give them permission. They published it, titling it “The right-left brain hemisphere split isn’t true”.

Next thing I know, I see a response from Dr. McGilchrist on their website called “The right brain is essential to creativity” where he vociferously replied to my post. Oh man, I unintentionally triggered him! I had no idea the good folks at the Insitute of Arts and Ideas were going to ask him to reply to that article, especially considering that post was not a criticism whatsoever of Iain’s careful work. It was more a response I wrote to the pop psych notion that creativity is only a right-brain phenomena.

Anyway, long story short: I reach out to Iain and explained the situation to him and we had a good laugh about the situation. Our correspondence quickly became friendly, and we started sharing each other’s work with each other. I decided it would make sense to have the conversation in public so invited him on my podcast, and here we are.

I’ve greatly enjoyed going down the rabbit hole of reading Dr. McGilchrist’s work and was pleased to see just how many areas of overlap we have in regards to fascinations, including our attempts to understand the nature of intelligence, creativity and even sacred & transcendent experiences.

This conversation is very rich and I think brings clarity to some important issues in the field of psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Dr. McGilchrist.

You can listen to the audio-only version wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio). See here for the full transcript.

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