A Bridge Between the Neuroscience and Experience of Meditation
I came to Iain McGilchrist’s Ways of Attending as someone interested in both meditation and neuroscience. This very short book distills one of the central arguments of his much larger work, The Master and His Emissary. Rather than presenting a comprehensive account of hemispheric differences and their consequences for Western culture, it offers an accessible introduction focused on attention. For me, it provides a compelling bridge between meditation and neuroscience.
McGilchrist’s central insight is that attention is not merely a cognitive function that selects parts of an already existing world. The manner in which we attend helps shape the world we experience.
McGilchrist distinguishes between the characteristic forms of attention associated with the brain’s two hemispheres. He rejects the popular idea that the left hemisphere is logical and the right creative. Both hemispheres participate in nearly everything we do. What distinguishes them is not so much what they do as how they attend.
The left hemisphere employs narrow, focused attention. It isolates objects, analyzes details, forms categories and makes the world available for practical action. The right hemisphere sustains a broader and more receptive awareness. It remains open to context, relationship, novelty, ambiguity and the living whole. We require both. The problem arises when the narrow, analytical representation produced by the left hemisphere is mistaken for the whole of reality.
This distinction immediately suggests a connection with meditation. Meditation often begins by selecting an object such as the breath and learning to sustain attention upon it. This focused attention develops stability, precision and the capacity to recognize distraction. Yet meditation does not end with tighter control over a narrowly defined object. As practice matures, attention can become more open and receptive. The breath is experienced within a wider field of bodily sensation, sound, feeling and awareness.
McGilchrist’s account helps explain this movement from concentration toward presence. Focused attention establishes stability, but receptive awareness allows experience to appear without immediately being divided, categorized or judged. The meditator learns not only where to place attention, but how to be with what is attended to.
It would be too simple to identify focused meditation with the left hemisphere and open awareness with the right. Meditation involves both hemispheres and distributed networks throughout the brain. McGilchrist’s more useful point concerns their relationship. Narrow attention should serve a broader awareness: we encounter the whole, examine something within it, and then return that understanding to its living context.
This is particularly relevant to my practice of counting distractions during meditation. Counting provides an objective measure and trains the ability to recognize distraction and return to the breath. But measurement is not the destination. It is a tool through which focused attention can become stable enough to support a less effortful and more unified awareness. In McGilchrist’s terms, measurement should serve presence rather than replace it.
Much neuroscientific research describes meditation through attention control, executive functioning, emotional regulation and changes in brain networks. Traditional meditation describes it from within, using concepts such as non-grasping, equanimity, absorption and insight. McGilchrist helps connect these perspectives. He begins with the organization of the brain but follows it into questions about experience: What does a particular manner of attending allow us to perceive? What kind of relationship with the world does it create?
Seen in this light, meditation is more than attention training intended to improve cognitive performance. It is a practice of changing the manner in which we encounter experience. We retain the capacity for precise, purposeful focus while becoming less governed by grasping, categorizing and control. Focus becomes the servant of awareness.
Ways of Attending therefore provides more than a neurological explanation of meditation. It offers a concise point of entry into McGilchrist’s broader thought and a vocabulary for understanding how brain, attention and lived experience belong together. Meditation trains not only the ability to remain attentive, but the capacity to meet the world with a broader, more patient and more receptive awareness.
Last Updated on August 12, 2026 | Published: August 12, 2026