Lighting the Fire of the Mind with Dr Iain McGilchrist

In this episode, our Chancellor, Dr Iain McGilchrist, sits down with President Stephen Blackwood to discuss the formation of a human being.

From Plato's reflections on the conditions required for intellectual development to Antonio Damasio's insights into how the brain works, this exchange stays with the question of how human beings achieve the capacity to think for themselves.  Rather than focusing on standardized outcomes and instrumental ends, their exchange invites us to consider what happens when we pay attention to a given work for its own sake. The role of education, Dr McGilchrist argues, does not stop at the accumulation of information or the learning of rules, but extends into our capacity to go beyond the rules and reach past what is known for certain. 

In an age defined by algorithms and distraction, this conversation presents a vision of education that awakens the faculties by which human beings come to know freedom. This spark, well-tended, is what gives rise to the ideas and individuals that have the power to shape the course of history.

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Plato’s Seventh Letter
• Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass
• E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Samuel Johnson 
• Margaret Mead 
• Henry David Thoreau
• Plutarch
• Daniel Kahneman 
• Isaac Newton 
• Antonio Damasio 
• Alfred North Whitehead 
• Viktor Frankl
• D. H. Lawrence
• Johann Sebastian Bach