An apocryphal story has Picasso confronted on a train by a man waving a photograph of his wife under his nose declaiming, “Why do you not paint things as they are? Like this’’. “You mean small, square and rather flat,” responds Picasso! Different minds perceive differently but what if our own, apparently single mind, has two distinct modes of behavior? The one, like Picasso, seeing intuitively, things as a whole and the patterns that connect; and, the second, like the man, in precise yet fragmented, mechanically sequenced parts, of high utility but reduced depth or meaning. This, in a compressed nutshell, was the thesis of Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Mastery and His Emissary’ that explored in a renewing way the discussion of ‘right and left brain asymmetry’ and suggested that the emissary, the utilitarian, reductionist if practical brain, had usurped its place and become the dominant mode of perception. We have come to know much of value in the process but drained life of meaning and pur...