Iain McGilchrist Quotes

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

The moment you label something, you take a step-I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to - it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.

Therefore, when we arrive in a place and talk to new people about a new image, it is very hard for them to visualize it. That's where the drawings are very important, because at least we can show a projection of what we believe it will look like.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.

Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.