Matter with Things
by Iain McGilchrist · first published 2021
90% recommend10% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A wide-ranging work on how brain hemispheres shape perception, language and consciousness, drawing on neuroscience and philosophy; suits readers interested in the mind who want a long, deep synthesis.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist. To be precise it taught me how to un-think. There are several podcasts with him available on YouTube, to get a first taste.
on “Ask HN: Books that teach you to think” ↗Check out the book Maxims for Thinking Analytically. Then read Power vs. Force by David Hawkins to get the other side. Even better skip both and read Iain McGilchrist’s new 3000 page 2 volume work: The Matter With Things.
on “How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught” ↗The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Ian McGilchrist is a good place to catch up to the state of the art in consciousness research that goes beyond materialism.
on “Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?” ↗…hives, but the inability to interpret things like QM literally and the inability of the left brain to process things holistically seems relevant to the interpretability problem. See Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things". (I promise it's less woo-woo than it appears)
on “A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past” ↗Moon is a nice font. Sir Iain McGilchrist has a lonnng book about the science and meaning of the left/right brain hemispheres (The Matter With Things, in the first half of the book). There's some metaphysics and epistemology mixed in throughout, but the science is a good compilation of the effects of lesions on each half of the brain and the subsequent…
on “Why the Brain’s Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed” ↗…Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" and "The Secret of our Success". Finally though certainly not least importantly, I'd recommend Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter with Things". Both touch on how it is we see and understand the world and how the current default perspective differs from those of other times and places.
on “Ask HN: What's the Best Book on Religion” ↗…approximately, Free Will is the story the right brain tells itself after the left-brain already made the decision. For more on the split brain aspect of this, see McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.
on “Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?” ↗"The Matter with Things" by Iain McGilchrist has the same effect. Highly recommend it.
on “C. Elegans: The worm that no computer scientist can crack” ↗The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist Completely rewired how I view language, consciousness, and matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things
on “Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?” ↗…eternally uncertain, connected to a whole and can interpret metaphor, people's faces, the shape of objects and much more. The implications go deep and don't lend to easy summarizing yet, the book the Matter with Things by McGilchrist spends multiple chapters just going through scientific example after example from brain-damaged and psychologically ill people to show the ideas that apply to the respective hemispheres.…
on “Consciousness is not computation” ↗…still deeply mysterious/poorly understood. EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models…
on “The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind” ↗…https://ashley-cameron.com/yt/remove-timestamps/ I tried a regex but it has been a long time, and some text matched the regex. Now, this is completely unformatted, so there are three books by the author that might be rewarding: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World Blurb: his book argues that the division of the brain into…
on “A Revolution in Thought? – Dr Iain McGilchrist [video]” ↗> The book I discovered later in life The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s like coming across an entirely new…
on “Philip Pullman: ‘I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch’” ↗…manual for a mindful life. Savor every page packed with insight, subtlety and poetic aphorisms. Also recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow, previously cited on this page. Next will be The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist. The two hefty volumes are staring at me from my desk...
on “Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?” ↗