03/02/2026
Iain McGilchrist: 'This is a highly original and stimulating book, the best I have read on one of the greatest of English poets. Blake’s thought cries out to be understood in the light of cerebral asymmetry.'
Philip Pullman: 'Absolutely fascinating - in fact both revelatory and thrilling.'
Dr. Mannie Sher, Director of the Group Relations Programme: 'This book promotes a form of learning that stimulates the growth of connections between the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain and allows people greater access to their creative, intellectual and emotional selves. I found this book profoundly engaging, through its thesis that both individually and collectively humans in our social systems have privileged left hemisphere functioning (information processing, domination, atomising, rationalising, and mechanising) over more imaginative and intuitive apprehensions of reality, involving creativity and the discovery of meaning.'
'The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity.
The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, and the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'.
In the second part of the book the author extends Blake’s understanding of Urizenic activities and functions into a broader discussion concerning the place of both religion and rationality in contemporary culture. Blake’s presentation of Urizen as the 'Holy Reasoning Power' succinctly captures what he saw as the underlying rationalizing processes of orthodox religion as well as the religious and largely unconscious nature of much post-Newtonian science.'
To find out more about the book please click here: https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/the-god-of-the-left-hemisphere-blake-bolte-taylor-and-the-myth-of-creation/32946/
