Ways of Attending

How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World

By: Iain McGilchrist

Narrated by: Mike Fraser

Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilizing the world, the other better at understanding it.

Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.

Ways of Attending is expertly read by Mike Fraser. The cover design has been adapted from a Cajal original drawing, and used with permission of Legado Cajal (Madrid).

This audiobook was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. © 2018 Iain McGilchrist (P)

©2018 Iain McGilchrist (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Basically a short version...

of Mcgilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. Read this and everything else Mcgilchrist has written

Wow

Short but powerful. Insightful and revealing. A culture catapulting towards using only the left side of the brain and the dangerous ramifications of that.

Informative

So relevant to our lives and fate. May many more read it.
A nice synopsis of his ideas.

I'm so glad this exists

I thought I would cry when I first tried to read the original text. This summary is so wonderful, it allows the the reader to take knowledge from the overview and talk with AI about the concepts and physicality of the subject matter.

Great summary

Beautiful summary of the gist of The Master and His Emissary- helped me understand more deeply