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Alex Gomez Marin has an extended conversation on this book with McGilchrist on Youtube.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqBHk3itxyPBWvU7N2ZNCRXpjzMStjgm6

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Thank you for this. I bought his new books when they came out, but I didn't know he had a YouTube channel!

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They go through The Matter with Things chapter by chapter. Alex Gomez Marin runs the Pari Center in Italy and there are free Zoom lectures and talks. Next one is Monday with Federico Faggin. Dr. Gomez Marin had an NDE and interviews mystics and consciousness researchers in pursuit of that realm. Lots of old interviews on youtube also.

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I offer a classical liberal divided-brain manifesto, chapter 13:

https://clpress.net/site/assets/files/1105/central_notions20pubview.pdf

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The Master and His Emissary is a fantastic book. One of my mentors, Dr. Robert Melillo, references Iain McGilchrist in his teachings. There's still an ongoing conversation among psychologists that brain hemisphericity is a myth. One of my daughters came home one day and told me that her new psychology teacher said that left and right brain differences are a myth. Oh, boy, did I want to have a chat with her (I didn't).

In my practice (with the work of Dr. Robert Melillo, who developed his Melillo Method, and wrote the best-selling book "Disconnected Kids"), I see many children who show clear hemiphere imbalances where one side is clearly weaker than the other. As Iain McGilchrist explains that we're becoming more of a left-brain dominant culture, it's also causing babies and children to be severely right-brain weak, which leads to behaviours and challenges such as ASD, ADHD, OCD, tics, and others. Left-brain weak children present with behaviours like dyslexia, eating disorders, dyspraxia, learning disabilites, and more.

The important thing for these kids is to 'dampen' the overactive side (especially if it's the left side), and stimulate the underactive side. When we succeed in doing that, the child starts to improve, behaving healthier, functioning and performing better.

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Wonderful to know this, I'm putting that book on my wish list.

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The stupid software on this damnable computer cut me off. It is possessed lol. I cannot for the life of me find the book, despite really looking and buying used copies of books on reading, but I read a fascinating analysis of the phenomenology and experience of reading or listening to a story, which described how it is only in reading or listening, that the right brain makes images, images which are not wholly explicit, so that you can be aware of sitting on your chair or bed, and also simultaneously in the world of the story you are reading or hearing, with your right brain making that world, those images. If kids don't hear stories, if they only watch and have images sluiced into their brains, their brains don't have the chance to make worlds and images. Our species has been doing this since the first hominin grunted and gestured or drew in the sand of the savannah with stick, a sequence of events (go around big rock, watch for snakes, get honey). I think there is something truly terrible about this, crucial, and vital. And the right brain is vulnerable if not making worlds or images. This is why it is not just decorative or elitist or hoity toity to push for the telling of myths and fairy tales and the reading of poems, especially metrical poems.

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Highly recommended by me. McGilchrist's work informs many of my own articles, e.g. https://garysharpe.substack.com/p/the-view-from-a-self-traumatizing

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I nominate „The Machinery of Freedom“ by David Friedman (son of Milton). It was my introduction to anarcho-capitalism and it is as cutting edge today as when it came out 40 years ago.

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very interesting! Thank you again for everything.

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Years ago I read “The origins of consciousness and the bicameral mind” by Julian Jaynes who looked at this from the ancient history view. Good book, but was heartily slammed at the time by the “established historical consensus”, no surprises there.

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