Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary (O5, O6)
Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and literary scholar, wrote The Master and His Emissary about the two hemispheres of the brain and the two ways of attending to the world they represent. He treats attention as anything but neutral, on its quotes page: "Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede." His argument runs on two Big Five facets.
The appetite for how we know is Intellect
The first is Intellect (O5), under Openness, the pull toward ideas and toward understanding how understanding itself works. McGilchrist contrasts two modes, on the same page: "The left hemisphere needs certainty. The right hemisphere holds several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together." A high scorer is drawn to that kind of hard, abstract question and is comfortable leaving it open. A lower scorer prefers the settled answer and finds the book's density heavy going before it pays off.
Questioning the reigning worldview is Liberalism
The second is Liberalism (O6), under Openness, the readiness to question inherited assumptions and the way your culture has decided things must be. McGilchrist's real target is civilizational: he argues the analytic, controlling, left-hemisphere stance has quietly taken over the modern West, and asks you to doubt it. A high scorer takes readily to that reexamination. A lower scorer trusts the established, rational frame and feels the cost of unsettling it.
Read your O5 and O6 to know how The Master and His Emissary lands. If your intellect runs high, McGilchrist hands you a vast, demanding argument about the mind to sink into. If your liberalism runs high, his critique of the worldview we take for granted will feel like permission. The book is a long case that how we attend has made our world. McGilchrist asks you to attend differently.
Read the book: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist.
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Research Citations
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.