Take 20 minutes to watch this brilliant TED talk by Iain McGilchrist.
I agree with everything he says in this, but I was especially struck by his mention of the gene which codes for eyes. It’s the same gene which codes for a fly’s eye, a frog’s eye and a human eye. What makes the difference? The context of the other cells in the separate creatures. We are not just our genes, and our genes only express themselves in the contexts of the cells in which they exist.
I also really like what he says towards the end of the talk about protocols and the practice of medicine. How on earth can a protocol devised by a committee somewhere tell a doctor how to treat this particular, unique, individual patient today? It’s nonsense.
Heroes Not Zombies 
I found this psychiatrist’s take on medication very refreshing, worth four minutes http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/01/psychiatrists-perspective-antidepressants/
[…] Well, Iain McGilchrist’s theory, written up in full in The Master and His Emissary, or summarised in the Kindle Single, The Divided Mind, is that we have over developed the left hemisphere approach so much that we have developed the tendency to see only what we have already “learned” – so if we were taught that it was symmetrical, and we haven’t explored the differences between the two hemispheres, then we’ve become a bit blind. Time to start using our whole brains? […]
[…] We’ve always had these competing forces. Thomas Berry refers to them as discipline and wildness. Iain McGilchrist describes them in the context of the distinct approaches to reality delivered by the left and right hemispheres of the brain. […]