I have begun slowly making my way through Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Matter with Things’, subtitled ‘Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World’.
First, a sidebar point. I have noticed – to my surprise and delight – that McGilchrist uses punctuation the way I used to, I guess it’s English versus American. For example, if a phrase is in ‘inverted commas as this is’, rather than put the comma marking the end of that phrase inside/within them, it goes outside, and the same for the full stop ‘at the end of the sentence as in this case’. In the American way which have been using for years but I NEVER feel comfortable with, the full stop or comma is placed inside the inverted commas, ‘as in this case.’ (Come to think of it, for years have been thinking this confusion was a symptom of Lyme Disease memory distortion – which happens – and didn’t realize that there are different conventions in such matters varying from English-speaking country to country. Silly me!)
He also – as evidenced in the subtitle – capitalizes generously as I am wont to do. I am not sure what the rules are, if any, but I find them arising sometimes though, again, in recent years have suppressed the impulse, generally editing out most such capitalizations. I think I like to use them when the word in question is of special importance, or involves a Key Principle. In any case, not even 70 pages in and already this book has changed my life!!
Yesterday I was searching for a quote about the importance of attention by William James. I didn’t find the one I was looking for, but I found another on a page which also has what I gather is a well-known video demonstrating something interesting; that if one is closely paying attention to one thing one can miss others. It’s a very short video and I won’t spoil your experience of it if this is your first time by saying any more. That will be for a subsequent post.
https://www.spring.org.uk/2014/02/william-james-on-attention-and-the-road-to-mastery.php
Embedded in that page is a YouTube which I strongly recommend watching. Doing so – and also doing the Dot Exercise from the previous post – will set you up nicely for understanding the next article which will, using the experience from the video, to explain – yet again – why the pervasive over-reliance on reductionist materialism is such a pernicious driver of modern society, and moreover how the modern world’s pervasive left-brain dominance is so dangerously blind to its own shortcomings making it almost impossible to inform those so afflicted that there are other modes we could, and indeed should, be open to exploring before we destroy each other in an ignorant maelstrom of myopic violence. (!)
Small serendipity: I found that William James page and video yesterday after my reading period was over in which I finished both the Introduction and the first Chapter entitled ‘Some Preliminaries’. This morning I returned to reading and, lo and behold!, that very same video was recommended as a great example of the subject matter in the second Chapter which is entitled ‘Attention’.
Two quotes from the page linked above:
“One of the most extraordinary facts about our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. […] Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery…” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)
“…whether the attention come by grace of genius or dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. […] And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)
baronbrasdor.art 