The work of Dr Iain McGilchrist’s is essential for anyone considering how humans make decisions and understanding attention. A good place to start is perhaps to listen to this lecture: https://youtu.be/3V3_Y_FuMYk?si=yqsbSuAVpIRk4672
McGilchrist lives in Scotland and speaks and writes a great deal about his theory of the two brain hemispheres. His books are here: https://www.amazon.com/Books-Iain-McGilchrist/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AIain%2BMcGilchrist
It is a shame that his focus is just on the brain because his ideas are very pertinent to risk and safety and his theories really bare much more about embodied being. It is also problematic that this focus on the 2 hemispheres tends to create a binary understanding of being and decision making. This is not really what is intended in his philosophy.
McGilchrist is best when he discusses the mysteries of what we don’t know about human decision making and consciousness.
In his book The Matter With Things he helps explain many of the fundamentals that Safety should be concerned about: attention, perception, judgment, cognition, creativity, intuition and reason. His work completely tears to shred the nonsense assumptions of behaviourism, engineering and scientism. He is also intensely philosophical in discourse and so with those two characteristics of his work, probably Safety won’t listen to anything he says.
He’s not scared to talk of faith (https://youtu.be/5Gi9bfSwwI4?si=sQhEsHcAXYw7Srq0), the spiritual, the divine, metaphysics (https://youtu.be/YSLpdWmjfMQ?si=VOCKKwqVjhPIa1jM), balance, wisdom, intuition (https://youtu.be/7Q6w82PxwM8?si=wUsGvyGTgC1yl-zG ), Poetics, delusion, emotions, meaning and feeling. You know, all of the things Safety has no interest in.
Yet, so much of what McGilchrist discusses is so relevant for risk and safety. You can explore more about him here: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/
Despite the fact I don’t agree with his brain dualism, his work is very helpful for understanding human persons, being, decision-making and risk. It would be even better if he recognised more clearly the dialectic (triarchic) nature of decision making.
His thinking on the unconscious is brilliant and would recommend to anyone who is curious about how the unconscious directs being.
This is critical to how we understand risk and make sense of how and why people make decisions. All of this is foundational for risk and safety that (unfortunately) is still anchored to the materialism and utilitarian mythology of engineering. Until Safety jettisons these philosophies, it will never become innovative or professional.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
- How to Escape the Safety=Zero Cult - January 14, 2025
- Making Sure There is No ‘Cultural Shift’ in Safety - January 14, 2025
- How to Make Ensure That People Don’t Speak Up - January 13, 2025
- It’s Not a Secret, We Just Don’t Talk About It - January 11, 2025
- Myth, Objectivity and the Subjectivity of Language in Safety - January 11, 2025
Do you have any thoughts? Please share them below