The brain hemispheres communicate not only through direct neural connection (corpus callosum) but also through shared sensory experience of the body, the endocrine system, a common internal environment, the brain stem, and other non-corpus-callosum pathways.

Without some overarching coordinating field, it is difficult to explain how single-celled organisms detect changes and respond to them in other parts of even that single cell; this coordination problem becomes even more acute in multicellular organisms.

Constant musical practice, rather than the distinction between amateur and professional, is what modifies the brain; people who play regularly develop differently from those who play only occasionally.

The predominance of the administrative or bureaucratic mind over almost every aspect of modern life is deeply damaging; it reflects a left-hemisphere way of trying to control and 'understand' things while misunderstanding what it is dealing with.

Modern science has become a huge bureaucracy with financial incentives that favor conformity; money flows to researchers who 'toe the party line' and 'do more of what everyone else is doing,' making it extremely difficult to break out and see or do something different within a 'sclerotic hierarchy' like 'the middle of an enormous Byzantine civil service.'

The future of intellectual inquiry will depend on the development of small private colleges that admit only the brightest people and give them freedom to think; large universities are 'turning themselves into something that can be easily dispensed with' as they succumb to bureaucratic logic.

A seven-year fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, with freedom to pursue whatever intellectual interests one chose, enabled McGilchrist to later write comprehensive philosophical books drawing on wide fields of inquiry that would have been impossible without that freedom.

Much 18th- and 19th-century science was produced by priests, monks, and clerics—people like Mendel, a monk—who had the security of institutional support and were allowed to think and observe, conducting inquiry unrelated to professional advancement.

Approximately 500,000 neurons are generated every minute during gestation in the womb, and all those neurons must end up precisely in the right place in the brain with minute three-dimensional architectural accuracy—the complexity of this three-dimensional information could not be encoded in simple linear code and must be stored or coordinated by some overarching field.

The ethos at All Souls has changed over time: previously, fellows had freedom to pursue intellectual interests; now there is more emphasis on monitoring what fellows are reading and whether they have published papers, suggesting that credentialism and bureaucratic oversight are gradually replacing the original institutional model.

Intellectual range—the opposite of ever-greater specialization—is very important for producing substantive intellectual work, and institutions should recover the practice of giving people periods of freedom to explore diverse interests.

The master and emissary metaphor addresses the question of whether there is an organizing principle that unites the master and emissary or whether the master can act on its own; the answer involves differentiation within a single overarching field.

Working outside mainstream institutions is not a career path that can be recommended to most people because it is not easy to survive outside regular salary structures; it requires either unusual privilege, independently wealthy circumstances, or institutional tenure that provides security.

McGilchrist feels sorry to say that Oxford and Cambridge are turning themselves into something easily dispensed with through not sticking to their guns; they have a thousand-year history but are now committing suicide.

In the 1960s, institutions used to take people who had proved themselves intelligent and give them career security (office, income) and then said 'follow your intellectual interests' about what you find interesting; this led to many inventions and breakthroughs.

The 'aha moment' insight of scientists and mathematicians—the moment when a new gestalt or understanding suddenly becomes clear—is robustly associated with activation of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus of the right hemisphere.

The corpus callosum is a mammalian invention; reptiles, amphibians, and many creatures lower in the evolutionary tree have two brain centers that are not connected by direct neural pathways as mammals are.

Colossal agenesis—the congenital absence of a corpus callosum—occurs not uncommonly in humans and is often discovered by chance at postmortem; people with this condition can lead reasonably normal lives, and casual observers would not notice any functional problem.

Quantum field theory suggests that what we describe as 'particles' or 'little balls' is metaphorical language for particular states of an overall field with energy and influence; such coordinating fields are very basic and fundamental.

People born without limbs nonetheless have a phantom sense of those limbs they have never experienced; this internal sense is generated from an organized field rather than external experience.