Iain McGilchrist

Trained first in English literature at Oxford before moving into medicine, McGilchrist worked as a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal hospitals in London and researched neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University. His books The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021) argue that the brain's two hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, and that Western culture has become dominated by a narrow, detail-fixated left-hemisphere mode at the expense of a more relational, embodied understanding of reality, an argument that has drawn him into public dialogue with philosophers, theologians and non-dual thinkers such as Bernardo Kastrup.

Appointed Chancellor of Ralston College in October 2025, he remains highly active, giving talks, seminars and online conversations through his Channel McGilchrist platform, including a recurring in-person seminar at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.