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“Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree which is supposed to grow to a proud height could do without bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, whether any kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, greed, and violence do not belong to the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible?”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“This finding is remarkable in a number of ways that have not always been appreciated. To begin with, it illustrates that attention is involved primarily not with seeing in itself, but – as far as the left hemisphere is concerned – with the bringing into being of the world, seen or unseen. We can see without attending and we can attend in the absence of sight.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“It is from motion that we gain our sense of both space and time. The right hemisphere seems to be essential for both, and the capacity for each is linked with the other.69 The left hemisphere’s focus, however, narrows both. If I want to focus precisely on a particular element in my environment, clearly and in sharp detail, I have not just to home in on it in space, but to immobilise or freeze it in time, too. It becomes like a snapshot (what the French call, suggestively, a cliché). The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’ The left hemisphere’s experience is fragmentary and therefore taken out of the flow of experiential life, and tends towards stasis. It is concerned with the moment of the ‘kill’. However, outside of this glare of the spotlight, things carry on living, moving and changing.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Hormesis’, according to one group of experts, ‘is fundamental to evolution and highly generalizable.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World