7/7/25
Music is essential if humanity is to meet the existential challenges we face today.
Why?
Because it engages the whole brain – to survive as a species, we need music!
In his seminal book The Master and His Emissary psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains how humanity needs to balance the left and right brain hemispheres in order to thrive, and ultimately to survive. The left brain handles structure, symbols and specific details, the right, context and flow. We live in an unbalanced world, with left-brain dominance obscuring our connection to reality, limiting our potential, and through its tendency to create structures that divide and separate, contribute to insane, horrific events like the one we experienced in London 20 years ago today. In short this imbalance is creating an existential crisis.
We can’t intellectualise a better world – words, a product of the left brain, are part of the problem. However, when we deeply experience music, our whole brain is engaged and begins the journey back to balance – we feel a profound internal shift enabling us to perceive connections, possibilities and solutions we couldn’t previously fathom.
Indian Classical music, through the concepts of raga and tala, is the epitome of this: