Speaker 1: One of the things that where is me in this
Speaker 1: world is that we are losing respect both for science
Speaker 1: and for reason. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 1: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 1: Ian McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, writer, lecturer, and former Oxford Literary scholar.
Speaker 1: He's the author of many books, including The One Eric
Speaker 1: and Ian discuss Here, The Master and His Emissary, The
Speaker 1: Divided Brain, and the Making of the Western World. Hi, Ian,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Great Here. It is a real
Speaker 1: pleasure to have you on. You are the author of
Speaker 1: a book called The Master and His Emissary, The Divided
Speaker 1: Brain and the Making of the Western World, and you
Speaker 1: have a great new two volume book coming out shortly
Speaker 1: also that really expands these topics greatly. Your book has
Speaker 1: been so influential. It's the sort of thing in you know,
Speaker 1: reading for this podcast. You know, I've been doing this
Speaker 1: seven and a half years and I've read five books,
Speaker 1: and your book because very very often reference. So it's
Speaker 1: really great to have you here. And we're going to
Speaker 1: get into your work here in a second. But let's
Speaker 1: start like we always do, with the parable. There's a
Speaker 1: grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops thinks about it for
Speaker 1: a second. He looks up at his grandfather says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. There's a couple of quite
Speaker 1: separate angles really to think about. This. One is, I
Speaker 1: think the one that probably I reckon you're expecting me
Speaker 1: to take and inviting me to take, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: how do I relate this to my experience? You know,
Speaker 1: do I recognize is this? And if so, what do
Speaker 1: I do about it? But the other is to make
Speaker 1: some reflections on the whole way it's set up, which
Speaker 1: is the idea of opposite yes. And one of the
Speaker 1: things I argue in the new book it may sound
Speaker 1: a bit strange, is that opposites tend to coincide, and
Speaker 1: that things that look like they're negative sometimes are not,
Speaker 1: and so on. So if I could just briefly address
Speaker 1: both of those, please, or whichever you'd prefer you to
Speaker 1: both are great. I mean, you're talking to a dedicated
Speaker 1: Zen practitioner, so I am all about your ideas around
Speaker 1: the opposites coexisting. So take it wherever feels like you'd
Speaker 1: like to take it, Okay, But in that case, let
Speaker 1: me just jump in and talk about that. As you say,
Speaker 1: it's an ancient idea that is certainly very prevalent in
Speaker 1: Oriental philosophy, and then it's also present in Hinduism, is
Speaker 1: present actually in medieval Christianity. Some of the great mystics
Speaker 1: that we don't read anything like enough and aren't known
Speaker 1: enough in the West, were very paradoxical in the way
Speaker 1: in which they talked and seem to be saying things
Speaker 1: that to the modern mind seem like how can both
Speaker 1: those things be true? And I also discovered more recently
Speaker 1: the Caballa, the body of mystical thought of Judyism, which
Speaker 1: completely blew me away. So these ideas that mean in
Speaker 1: any case, crystallizing thoughts in my mind for a very
Speaker 1: long time, which is that often we seem in the
Speaker 1: modern world, for example, to be beset by paradox as
Speaker 1: we set out to do one thing and we achieve
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite of it. To give a few concrete examples,
Speaker 1: we want so much to protect our children that we
Speaker 1: actually robbed them of the chance to experience any kind
Speaker 1: of risk, and but in doing so we make them
Speaker 1: more vulnerable. We protect ourselves from bacteria with all kinds
Speaker 1: of media that will will sanitize our environment, and in
Speaker 1: doing so we knock out our immune system and become
Speaker 1: vulnerable for infection. We take huge steps to protect society
Speaker 1: from the dangers of drugs, and we make very little
Speaker 1: impact on drug use, but in doing so we create
Speaker 1: a fertile field for organized crime. I could go on
Speaker 1: and on, but there are many things, and and some
Speaker 1: of them are very topical that in the modern political sphere,
Speaker 1: one sees people who advocate a world in which obviously
Speaker 1: what they want is greater justice, greater compassion, greater understanding,
Speaker 1: and they do it with such lack of understanding, such
Speaker 1: a lack of compassion, and such lack of justice, that
Speaker 1: they completely undermine what it is they're setting out to do.
Speaker 1: So we see this all around us. That's in a
Speaker 1: very practical way. There's a single hormesis, which I don't
Speaker 1: know if you are familiar with the concept. It's actually
Speaker 1: a concept from chemistry. But what it means is that
Speaker 1: sometimes a tiny bit of something that's damaging it's actually
Speaker 1: very helpful. I'll just give one example. Those who looked
Speaker 1: after biosphere two, which is an enormous geodome that protects
Speaker 1: an environment, and they want to see how how plants
Speaker 1: and trees and animals worked in this environment. And one
Speaker 1: thing that puzzled and very much was why trees kept
Speaker 1: falling over before they'd even retrieved maturity. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that for trees to thrive they need winds, they
Speaker 1: need to be stressed. They're not stressed, they don't grow.
Speaker 1: And of course there are many human I don't need
Speaker 1: to unpack them, probably for your listeners, but they will
Speaker 1: see them for themselves. So there's all that going on.
Speaker 1: But also at a deeper level, the level of Heraclitus,
Speaker 1: my favorite Greek philosopher, one of the very earliest of
Speaker 1: all the Greek philosophers sixth century BC. I mean, he
Speaker 1: is very much in the tradition that I would associate
Speaker 1: with Daoism and with zen of paradox, calling junctions the
Speaker 1: way up is the way down. You know, all these things,
Speaker 1: and that by changing it remains the same, and an
Speaker 1: extraordinary remark which turns out to be totally central to
Speaker 1: all living creatures and living organisms. So I see all
Speaker 1: this is very important. And one other thing is that
Speaker 1: I think the element of resistance is essential, as in
Speaker 1: the story of the trees. So one thing I've become
Speaker 1: very clear on, and it's a thread that runs through
Speaker 1: many of the great philosophers I admire, particularly Shelling the
Speaker 1: early nineteenth century German philosophy is the idea that actually
Speaker 1: creativity requires resistance, and in some ways this is whether
Speaker 1: they're like the idea that you can't move without friction.
Speaker 1: Friction is what stops movement, okay, but actually without some
Speaker 1: friction you can't move at all. So we need something
Speaker 1: over against to help whatever it is coming to being.
Speaker 1: It's always this coming together of opposites that are fulfilling
Speaker 1: one another, in some ways frustrating one another, but in
Speaker 1: doing so spurring them onwards, as Nietzsche pointed out, to
Speaker 1: greater and greater achievements and greater greater fulfillment of themselves.
Speaker 1: So those are some brief comments on the structure of
Speaker 1: this idea that the thing that's good and the thing
Speaker 1: that's bad and they oppose one another. I'd like to
Speaker 1: problematize a before saying anything. For well, I was fairly certain,
Speaker 1: knowing you and your work, that you might come right
Speaker 1: in and be like, you know, that's a very dualistic
Speaker 1: left hemisphere type parable. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a
Speaker 1: good place to lead us into the main thrust of
Speaker 1: your work is on the differences between the hemispheres in
Speaker 1: the brain and how those hemispheres work, how they process reality,
Speaker 1: and then what the consequences of over reliance on one
Speaker 1: or the other is. I won't I won't give away
Speaker 1: the conclusion, although most listeners probably know where we're headed
Speaker 1: with this. But how would you set this up? How
Speaker 1: would you start this conversation for somebody who's kind of
Speaker 1: coming in cold to your work? Okay, well, I'd ask
Speaker 1: a few very simple questions. They relate to facts that
Speaker 1: are well known too many of your listeners and viewers,
Speaker 1: but may not be to some others. The fest is
Speaker 1: that the brain is asymmetrical. Why because the skull ain't
Speaker 1: and the world that it's encompassing is all around. Why
Speaker 1: is the brain asymmetrical? Why is it divided in two?
Speaker 1: Why is there a whopping great divide right down the
Speaker 1: middle of the brain. We'll only mean a large number,
Speaker 1: but proportionately a very small number, about two of neurins
Speaker 1: actually crossing from one hemisphere into the other. If the
Speaker 1: brain is all about making connections to what the hell
Speaker 1: is that about? Why is it that when we look
Speaker 1: at all living creatures that we've ever looked at, right
Speaker 1: down to the most ancient living creature, which is a
Speaker 1: life form called Nemesis cellar vectensis seven million years old,
Speaker 1: the kind of c anemone described by Thomas Holstein at Heidelberg,
Speaker 1: who imaged it as the origin, the most ancient forebear
Speaker 1: of the neuromal system of vertebrates. Why is that already asymmetrical?
Speaker 1: And my answer to that in brief and I don't
Speaker 1: know a better one, is that all living creatures have
Speaker 1: to do too completely opposed things at the same time,
Speaker 1: coming back to opposite and how they fulfill one another
Speaker 1: or complement one another. An example I've used so many
Speaker 1: times that I'd be a rich man if I was
Speaker 1: paid a penny. But here it goes. A bird feeding
Speaker 1: on seed on a bed of gravel has to be
Speaker 1: able to pick out accurately and swiftly a seed from
Speaker 1: a piece of grit. To do that, it needs very
Speaker 1: highly focused but also extremely precise and targeted attention. So
Speaker 1: it's targeted, it knows what it wants. It's very narrow
Speaker 1: beam and it's highly precise. But if that's the only
Speaker 1: attention it's paying, then at the same time it will
Speaker 1: become someone else's lunch. While it's getting its own because
Speaker 1: it needs to have the precise opposite attention, an uncommitted
Speaker 1: attention for anything. It doesn't know what. It might be
Speaker 1: a friend, it might be a foe, it might be
Speaker 1: its offspring, might be it's made that attention needs to
Speaker 1: be very broad open, and it needs to be vigilant
Speaker 1: and sustained, not piecemeal from second to second. This bit,
Speaker 1: that bit, the other bit. Now that just gives your listeners,
Speaker 1: those who don't know my work, a little flavor of
Speaker 1: the idea that there are these two kinds of attention,
Speaker 1: and to begin with, when I learned about it, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, But is it that important? Isn't attention just
Speaker 1: another cognitive function? So steeped was I in the tradition
Speaker 1: in which I've been trained, I was also enough of
Speaker 1: a philosopher to realize that attention changes the world. The
Speaker 1: way we attend to things changes what it is that
Speaker 1: we find there. The same set of things attended to
Speaker 1: one way looks entirely different attended to another, you know,
Speaker 1: in a homely way. We can all experience this that,
Speaker 1: you know, on one day, the world seems like a wonderful,
Speaker 1: glorious or inspiring, beautiful place. On another it seems like
Speaker 1: a crop of ship and you go, what happened? What's changed? Well, actually,
Speaker 1: not much except the way you look at it. And
Speaker 1: this is also true when it comes to the world
Speaker 1: of ideas. If we teach people that the world is
Speaker 1: a pointless, senseless, purposeless mechanism that is best understood by
Speaker 1: taking it apart and seeing what it's made on as
Speaker 1: if we're trying to understand a bicycle in the garage,
Speaker 1: then we will see the world as pointless, senseless, made
Speaker 1: up a little bit, but you know, what the hell
Speaker 1: are we doing here with it? Whereas if you instead
Speaker 1: see it as something that is fundamentally living and an
Speaker 1: organism that can't be just summarized by taking it apart.
Speaker 1: In fact, you take it about lit and you can't
Speaker 1: make it again by putting the parts together. In fact,
Speaker 1: the parts may be an artifact of the way you
Speaker 1: look at it. I mean, in essence, I argue that
Speaker 1: there are only holes. There are holes that are parts
Speaker 1: of other holes. That is true. But in the body,
Speaker 1: the body is not made up of a liver and
Speaker 1: a heart and lungs and someone that are put together.
Speaker 1: The body starts as a single mass, and then what
Speaker 1: we called the part differentiate within the hole, and you
Speaker 1: can see the cosmos as a whole I would say,
Speaker 1: as a living being in which one of the drives
Speaker 1: is differentiation. But differentiation doesn't mean fragmentation. A very important
Speaker 1: distinction I make is that between distinction and division. Distinctions
Speaker 1: are important, but divisions are invented by us. So that's
Speaker 1: a little bit of that. Now, how does that impact
Speaker 1: on the way we see the world? In brief? If
Speaker 1: you see it as made up of little bits, then
Speaker 1: you see that the world is composed of things you
Speaker 1: already recognize. Oh it's the seed. Oh it's a bit
Speaker 1: of grit. It goes in my little box, my category,
Speaker 1: and my pigeonhill of seeds, bits of grit, etcetera. It's
Speaker 1: made up a familiar bit that are isolated can be fixed.
Speaker 1: They're not moving about, they're not living or changing or flowing.
Speaker 1: They're just there they are, and it's your job to
Speaker 1: make the world by putting them together in a way
Speaker 1: that makes sense. These bits have been taken out of context,
Speaker 1: and context makes every difference of all the things that
Speaker 1: matter to us. Like a poem, musical note, somebody you
Speaker 1: love a religious experience. It doesn't mean anything when it's
Speaker 1: taken out of context. It's only what it is in
Speaker 1: the context. They're abstracted, that they're no longer embodied, they're
Speaker 1: no longer experienced by the whole of us in an
Speaker 1: embodied way, but experienced only by the mind in a
Speaker 1: very cerebral way. They lack uniqueness because they've become general.
Speaker 1: They're in an on it because they've been stopped and
Speaker 1: killed by the process of fixing them with a gorgon stare.
Speaker 1: And what's more, their representations of something that used to
Speaker 1: be present after the word represent literally means present again
Speaker 1: later when it's actually no longer present, and we've got
Speaker 1: so used to living in a representation of the world,
Speaker 1: which is according to our scheme, our map, are scary
Speaker 1: that we are no longer aware of the immediacy of
Speaker 1: experience as it actually comes into being for us through
Speaker 1: the attention we pay to it. And indeed, I argue
Speaker 1: that we come to be who we are through the
Speaker 1: responses that the world makes to us, of the choices
Speaker 1: we make in the world. To sort of elaborate a
Speaker 1: little bit there, we know that there's two hemispheres in
Speaker 1: the brain. We know that they are connected, but not
Speaker 1: as connected as we might think. Why is this? And
Speaker 1: we know that by looking at the world through those
Speaker 1: certain ways, the left brain being the hey, I pick
Speaker 1: out the little bit of food from the grit. The
Speaker 1: right brain is I've got a broader awareness. I can
Speaker 1: sort of take in that there's a tree over there,
Speaker 1: in the sky is over there, and I'm watching, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and that ideally those two things come
Speaker 1: together to make a whole person, a whole bird, and
Speaker 1: the best version of those things, a bird, a person
Speaker 1: would be where those two hemispheres are working very closely together.
Speaker 1: And if you look at our world, your argument is
Speaker 1: that we see a world that has come to be
Speaker 1: dominated largely by left hemisphere thinking. You're absolutely right that
Speaker 1: we need both, and the reason they are separate is
Speaker 1: there needs to be enough division that they can actually
Speaker 1: sustain two completely different modes of attention to the world,
Speaker 1: and therefore two versions of the world coming into being.
Speaker 1: Of course, we are not aware of that. It all
Speaker 1: happens below the level of consciousness. If we were conscious
Speaker 1: of it, we would be stumped. I mean, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to move we'd be like, which one do
Speaker 1: I attend to? So that's all happening seamlessly. But it's
Speaker 1: division and union. Another theme of my new book, that
Speaker 1: we need separation, but we need the separation and not
Speaker 1: to be in the service of division. And they too
Speaker 1: go their own way, but that they work together. Now
Speaker 1: here comes the interesting point. One of them understands the
Speaker 1: need for the other. The right hemisphere, the one that
Speaker 1: takes the broad view, the view of the world is
Speaker 1: ultimately always interconnected, always changing, always flowing, always living, sees
Speaker 1: the need for occasionally taking a spotlight to a bit
Speaker 1: of it. But the one that uses the spotlight only
Speaker 1: because it knows less, thinks it knows more. It doesn't
Speaker 1: know what he didn't know. That is a very important
Speaker 1: point which is in many many religious traditions, as you know,
Speaker 1: and indeed I found that this image of an arrogant
Speaker 1: servant that thinks it knows everything trying to use up
Speaker 1: a master who is a spiritual leader who understands far
Speaker 1: more and appointed his emistry to do certain business for him.
Speaker 1: This image is present in Chinese, in Indian philosophy, but
Speaker 1: also in the native myths of North America. In Aboriginal culture.
Speaker 1: It's they're all over because we intew it that there's
Speaker 1: something in the brain. David Bone, the physicists, wrote about
Speaker 1: this very brilliantly, that there's a kind of thinking that
Speaker 1: tells you it's okay, I'm just doing this. I'm not
Speaker 1: really doing anything. You're in control that actually it wants
Speaker 1: to control you, as he says, and it is controlling
Speaker 1: us now. So what we need is a working together,
Speaker 1: but not in a symmetrical way. One of these knows
Speaker 1: far more than the other, and it hasn't got a voice. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere doesn't speak. The left hemisphere, for most
Speaker 1: of us, is the one that does speech, so it
Speaker 1: knows far more. But articulating it is harder, and I
Speaker 1: spent most of my life in one book after another
Speaker 1: trying to articulate what it is I believe the right
Speaker 1: hemispheres is. When I started out, before I read medicine
Speaker 1: and study neurology and neuroscience, I didn't know that that's
Speaker 1: what I was doing. In an earlier life, I wrote
Speaker 1: about the philosophy of art and literature, but what I
Speaker 1: was actually doing was articulating this thing that is very
Speaker 1: hard to say which is what the right hemisphere gets
Speaker 1: and what them understands. So we need these two things,
Speaker 1: but we need them to work in a certain relationship
Speaker 1: in which the very good servant is a good servant,
Speaker 1: but it's a very bad marster. And once it becomes
Speaker 1: the mercer or thinks it's got the mastery, then things
Speaker 1: start to go very badly wrong. And that, I believe
Speaker 1: is where we're at now. So we live, in my view,
Speaker 1: in the world in which we've forgotten about these more
Speaker 1: sophisticated visions, in which indeed a thing and it's opposite
Speaker 1: come together, in which everything is actually unique. There is
Speaker 1: no such thing as a generality except in your mind.
Speaker 1: You generalize. It helps you see shapes and patterns. But
Speaker 1: there are no two people, no two blades of grass
Speaker 1: anywhere in this world that are the same. They're all unique.
Speaker 1: That there is nothing that is actually ultimately unconnected to
Speaker 1: everything else. That when you start is John Muir said,
Speaker 1: if you pick out one thing, you find it ultimately
Speaker 1: connected to everything else in the cosmos. And of course
Speaker 1: you can, for the purpose of our argument, very easily
Speaker 1: I isolate something, and I'm not saying that's not a
Speaker 1: very useful thing to do. All I'm saying is it's
Speaker 1: a very bad mistake to think that that's how the
Speaker 1: world is. It's just a tool. And one of the
Speaker 1: ways you could sum up the difference is that the
Speaker 1: left hamp is here and knows how to manipulate the world,
Speaker 1: but really has very little understanding of it, whereas the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere understands the world and it's not particularly interested
Speaker 1: in manipulating it. Somebody has to. It's delegated that to
Speaker 1: the emissary, that's the emishy. In my title of my
Speaker 1: first earlier book, The Master in his Emisphry, the left
Speaker 1: hamis here, does the bureaucracy, the admin the manipulation, but
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere is the one that is meantime pre
Speaker 1: occupied with helping us understand what it is that we're doing.
Speaker 1: And in my new book, what I do is I
Speaker 1: ask some very very basic question. I say, Okay, we've
Speaker 1: got a huge crisis on our and nobody would deny that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it could well finish us off, no question.
Speaker 1: But even if we could find in time solutions to
Speaker 1: the myriad problems that beset us through misuse on manipulation
Speaker 1: are grabbing our lack of understanding of what nature is,
Speaker 1: it would do us no good because we just carry
Speaker 1: on being the same disgruntled, unhappy, selfish, narcissistic being that
Speaker 1: created the mess in the first place. So actually, the
Speaker 1: important first step is to rethink who we are, what
Speaker 1: the world is, and how the two relate. And it
Speaker 1: seems to me that is our task. And if we
Speaker 1: can actually reimagine what a human being is, get back
Speaker 1: in touch with what all the great with some traditions
Speaker 1: have said that, philosophers has said what. Indeed, modern neurology,
Speaker 1: in my view, tells us. If we can get back
Speaker 1: to that and see the world no longer as a
Speaker 1: predictable class mechanism, but as something that has drives in
Speaker 1: it and is in fact probabilistic and never a certain
Speaker 1: or fixed as modern physics cels, we would start to
Speaker 1: understand that our role in the world and our ways
Speaker 1: of responding to it have to be very different. A
Speaker 1: lot of people want me to provide a quick fix,
Speaker 1: and I think the thinking behind it goes like this,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the world's in a complete mess. There
Speaker 1: may not be one in ten years time. And I'm
Speaker 1: very comfortable with the way things used to be how
Speaker 1: can we get that back again? And what they really
Speaker 1: want is just to carry on business as usual. But
Speaker 1: my message is there is no such thing as business
Speaker 1: as usual, because it was thinking like that that got
Speaker 1: us into this mess in the first place. So we
Speaker 1: have to do some hard thinking about who we are.
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, for a civilization to founder,
Speaker 1: and it may be sadly that that's what we're witnessing.
Speaker 1: This is when people wake up and start to think
Speaker 1: about what on earth they're doing on this planet and
Speaker 1: doing with it. So there may be some very hard
Speaker 1: lessons ahead. I don't like to think about that because
Speaker 1: I have children and even grandchildren of whom are deeply fond,
Speaker 1: but you know, times ahead are just not going to
Speaker 1: be simple, and adopting the right hemispheres position is not,
Speaker 1: by the way, a nice easy, cozy, hippie like panis here. Oh,
Speaker 1: everything will just be so lovely because it will all
Speaker 1: be interconnected and everybody will see It's it's not like
Speaker 1: that because the right hemisphere, yes, is able to see
Speaker 1: that more beautiful picture. I absolutely don't deny it, but
Speaker 1: it also shows that the path to it is rigorous,
Speaker 1: as it is in all the religious traditions, that self
Speaker 1: discipline is required, that blaming other people for the way
Speaker 1: you are will never get you anywhere. That in other words,
Speaker 1: some self knowledge and self discipline and some hard tones
Speaker 1: are required. And I'm not holding myself out this. Anybody
Speaker 1: to follow on this. I was, I was bad boys
Speaker 1: the rest of you. But I'm just saying I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not. Actually, I'm not saying that what I've got
Speaker 1: is an easy onset. Thank you for all that. And
Speaker 1: I have children too, and the same thing. I look
Speaker 1: towards the future and it's a little bit scary, although
Speaker 1: I think every generation does that to some degree, so
Speaker 1: I kind of am like, well, it definitely does seem
Speaker 1: worse now than say, in my parents or grandparents age.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that I wanted to say is
Speaker 1: I just wanted to very briefly hit an objection that
Speaker 1: a lot of people make to this right brain left
Speaker 1: brain thing. You know, some listeners may have already heard
Speaker 1: it and been like whatever, and you know, hopefully they're
Speaker 1: still around. And the general argument is either one of
Speaker 1: two things. I'm sure you've heard all variations of it,
Speaker 1: but one seems to be that's a pop psychology idea.
Speaker 1: You know, we had drawing on the right side of
Speaker 1: the brain, we had riding your peloton on the right
Speaker 1: side of the brain, on and on and on. And
Speaker 1: the other is that, you know, the more we know
Speaker 1: about modern neuroscience, the more we know that things work
Speaker 1: in networks, that there is connection going on, and you
Speaker 1: can't just say, well, like, this little part of the
Speaker 1: brain does this, because large parts of the brain are
Speaker 1: involved in a lot of different things, how would you
Speaker 1: sort of answer those two things. Both of those are
Speaker 1: beautiful things to bring up because they help me. Let's
Speaker 1: take the second one first. The two most massively interconnected
Speaker 1: networks in the brain are the left and right hemispheres
Speaker 1: within one another. There massively by orders of magnitude, more
Speaker 1: interconnected than they are connected across the corpus, closing with
Speaker 1: one another, and a lot of that interaction is actually
Speaker 1: inhibitory when they do interact. So it's fascinating these are
Speaker 1: and it's good that we are now thinking not in
Speaker 1: tiny modules but in big networks, because it's big networks
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. And there's a lot of perfectly conventional
Speaker 1: neuroscience that will demonstrate that when you alter one part
Speaker 1: of a large net work. It has distant effects on
Speaker 1: other parts of the same network. This was first described
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century and it's very well known to neurologists.
Speaker 1: It's called the Ascus. But anywhere there were and we
Speaker 1: now know that there are these vast white hemisphere tracts,
Speaker 1: which are the super highways of the brain that connect
Speaker 1: the posterior part of each hemisphere with the frontal loop.
Speaker 1: So that is fine. The pop psychology is where, of
Speaker 1: course I usually have to start, because you can imagine
Speaker 1: that I've been searching this now for thirty five years,
Speaker 1: and a lot of my friends in neurology said, don't
Speaker 1: go there because it's toxic. You know, everybody knows this
Speaker 1: is pop psychology. And however, unfortunately a grotesque over simplification,
Speaker 1: because of course I'm not saying that all that stuff
Speaker 1: was right. In fact, the first thing I have to
Speaker 1: do is say, rid your minds of all the crapolo
Speaker 1: you've heard about. And I sometimes put up a slide
Speaker 1: when I'm lecturing, which is one of the better ones
Speaker 1: actually off the internet, and we're about twenty of these things,
Speaker 1: and I go, there's one thing in this list that
Speaker 1: is just about okay, All the other nineteen are complete rubbish,
Speaker 1: So you have to rid your mind of any of that.
Speaker 1: It's not about what the brain does in each of
Speaker 1: its hemispheres, it's the how. So it's perfectly true that,
Speaker 1: you know, we used to say language in the left hemisphere,
Speaker 1: reason in the left hemisphere, emotion in the right hemisphere,
Speaker 1: pictures in the right hemisphere. We now know that both
Speaker 1: hemispheres contribute to language very importantly, in fact, probably the
Speaker 1: single most important part of language pragmatics. What an utterance
Speaker 1: actually means in context is very strongly right handis bit
Speaker 1: of reason is very importantly right hemisphere dependent as well
Speaker 1: as left, including deduction, deductive logic pictures. Both hemispheres do them. Emotions.
Speaker 1: Both hemispheres have them. Depth of emotion. The right hemisphere
Speaker 1: is much better at, but certain rather superficial emotion such
Speaker 1: as anger, irritability, and disgust are very strongly lateralized to
Speaker 1: the left henmisphere. In fact, the most lateralized emotion is anger.
Speaker 1: There's a big literature on this, and it lateralizes largely
Speaker 1: to the left handisphere. So I'm undoing all of that.
Speaker 1: But what I am saying is that coming back to attention.
Speaker 1: There is a way of doing these things, a way
Speaker 1: of approaching the whole idea of understanding something, and the
Speaker 1: two ways of the two hemispheres are extraordinarily coherent. And
Speaker 1: I put a lot of evidence into the first part
Speaker 1: of the Marshrood his Emishy as you know, and in
Speaker 1: the new book I have massively expanded that. So I
Speaker 1: reference and unlike many people who write at great speed,
Speaker 1: I have had the leisure of the long time to
Speaker 1: look into these papers and I actually read them. And
Speaker 1: there are five thousand, eight hundred papers that I reference.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying I've read every single one from
Speaker 1: beginning to end. That would probably longer than I have
Speaker 1: years in a life. But what I certainly have done
Speaker 1: is I have read at least the gist of the papers.
Speaker 1: I've looked at them and sometimes looked at them in
Speaker 1: great detail. And you know, amazingly, what I found is
Speaker 1: that often things have been referenced and repeatedly referenced, sometimes many, many,
Speaker 1: many times, and they say the opposite of what people
Speaker 1: have referenced them to say when you look at it. Actually,
Speaker 1: so no, I'm I'm a great believer in actually doing
Speaker 1: the science, getting down to the nitty gritty, and the
Speaker 1: story I tell is a very very much more sophisticated
Speaker 1: and complicated one than the pop science one, which I
Speaker 1: can't wait to see the battle. Unfortunately, the message is
Speaker 1: getting out there and a lot of people, particularly and
Speaker 1: I would like to say the more imaginative end the
Speaker 1: sort of the great figures in neuroscience and neuropsychology, some
Speaker 1: of them around the Chandra and Howard Gardener, Yak Panks,
Speaker 1: the really names the conjure with and Colvin Travathan. Have
Speaker 1: you know who knows more about hemispheres than almost any
Speaker 1: living person? Have head? You know? Mcgirl Chris's aren't something
Speaker 1: important here? Um and I have a lot of support
Speaker 1: from such people. And I agree that people who have
Speaker 1: never really bothered to look at the literature, it's self
Speaker 1: fulfilling because if you heard that it's all blowney, then
Speaker 1: you don't bother to spend time looking at it. And
Speaker 1: if you think your colleagues will criticize you for getting involved,
Speaker 1: then you certainly don't even go there. So an awful
Speaker 1: lot of people don't really know what they're talking about
Speaker 1: when they rubbish it. They haven't actually looked. I would
Speaker 1: ask them will you read my work first and then
Speaker 1: see because I think you might get are we surprised
Speaker 1: as we're saying the water of the body. Here in
Speaker 1: the new book, you talk about eight ways of how
Speaker 1: would you say it, apprehending the world, interacting with the world.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm talking about attention, perception, judgments. Yes, I
Speaker 1: called portals. And the reason I called them portals not
Speaker 1: paths is that the books divided into three parts, and
Speaker 1: the first one is in neuropsychology pretty much, and that's
Speaker 1: about the portals, the ways we get access to any information.
Speaker 1: The second part is how do we understand it? Epistemology,
Speaker 1: what do we do with it? And that's where the
Speaker 1: paths come in. And I look at reason, science, intuition,
Speaker 1: and imagination and say we probably need all of these,
Speaker 1: and they have left hemisphere and right hemisphere aspects. In
Speaker 1: every case, the right hemisphere aspect, including in science and reason,
Speaker 1: are more important. But we need them all, not just one.
Speaker 1: And in the last part of the book is metaphysics.
Speaker 1: So if we take that approach, what have we got
Speaker 1: in the cosmos? What is space? What is time? What
Speaker 1: is value? What does matter? What is consciousness? So on?
Speaker 1: But to come back to your point the portals, Yes,
Speaker 1: I mentioned about it's actually seven I think. But attention
Speaker 1: is primary perception because I feel if you don't attend
Speaker 1: to things, you don't perceive them, and often if you
Speaker 1: don't perceive them, you don't attend to them. So they're
Speaker 1: not the same thing. You can attend without perceiving, and
Speaker 1: you can't perceive without attending. But they are not the
Speaker 1: same thing, but they're related strongly. Then with the judgments
Speaker 1: we make on perception, and judgments are inevitable because a
Speaker 1: percept doesn't come to you naive like blank. You automatically
Speaker 1: take already a judgment of what you're likely to be
Speaker 1: going to be seeing here to it. So your judgments
Speaker 1: affect both what you can see and what you do
Speaker 1: see in terms of what you make of it. And
Speaker 1: then I would say that comes what I call apprehension,
Speaker 1: which is the ability to use that information, to grasp
Speaker 1: it and take it and use it. Then there is
Speaker 1: emotional and social intelligence, which by no means as fringe
Speaker 1: as they sometimes are made to sound. In fact, they
Speaker 1: are probably every bit as important, if not more so,
Speaker 1: for the business of living than cognitive intelligence. Then cognitive
Speaker 1: intelligence and Finally, creativity, since what we see in the
Speaker 1: world is often something that we create. I don't mean
Speaker 1: to say that we just make it up wilfully out
Speaker 1: of nothing, but that the results of what we find
Speaker 1: are in part something we have brought to the party,
Speaker 1: You know what I mean. Yes, So these various portals,
Speaker 1: I think what I do is I think they contain
Speaker 1: some fascinating clinical material. You know, if people want to
Speaker 1: have the socks blown off by by just seeing what
Speaker 1: can happen to a person when they're right hemisphere, and
Speaker 1: usually it's the big changes can when they're right nonishiter
Speaker 1: not working, the big changes to their understanding of the world.
Speaker 1: That is, then there's wonderful clinical material here that will
Speaker 1: astonish anybody. How a human being who is not in
Speaker 1: any sense crazy is led to believe all kinds of
Speaker 1: bizarre things about themselves, their bodies, are, the people of
Speaker 1: the world, what's being said, and so on. And these
Speaker 1: have resonances with things that any attentive reader will see
Speaker 1: in the public sphere around them happening now as though
Speaker 1: the whole social sphere in which we operate, the pop
Speaker 1: intellectual sphere that is the media, and the world in
Speaker 1: which we encounter one another for the most part these days,
Speaker 1: it reflects many of these strange aberrations, delusions, or illusions.
Speaker 1: And the subtitle of my new book is Our Brains,
Speaker 1: Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. And what you're
Speaker 1: saying is that if you look at our delusions, perhaps
Speaker 1: a lot of our cultural delusions, a lot of what's happening,
Speaker 1: they resemble what you see in the clinical literature of
Speaker 1: somebody who has had damage to the right hemisphere exactly
Speaker 1: that is right. And if you have damaged to the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere, they you lose speech, often lose the use
Speaker 1: of the right hand, often devastating things for the majority.
Speaker 1: If you of us, it's easier to rehabilitate somebody than
Speaker 1: after the right hemispheretery in which they can still use
Speaker 1: their right hand, that they can still speak because their
Speaker 1: understanding has gone. And what I really share with all
Speaker 1: these portals that I've just mentioned, apart from apprehension, the
Speaker 1: business of using and manipulating the world, of which the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere is much better, the right hemisphere is in
Speaker 1: every case superior. It's attention, it's perception, it's judgments formed
Speaker 1: on those it's intelligent, including I Q cognitive intelligence, good
Speaker 1: old fashioned what most people in the street mean by
Speaker 1: intelligence more dependent on the right than on the left.
Speaker 1: That may surprise some people. So that's what I have
Speaker 1: to say about that. In the first part of the book,
Speaker 1: in brief it takes a few hundred pages. There, let's
Speaker 1: jump to the middle section. Briefly, you talk about four
Speaker 1: powers we have to arrive at truth. And I think
Speaker 1: these four are interesting because the first, to most everybody's
Speaker 1: gonna be like yep, okay, good, yep, I'm down with that.
Speaker 1: The second too might need a little bit more explain. Indeed,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about these four powers to arrive at truth. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I'll try and do that. It's succinctly and briefly as
Speaker 1: I can have three chapters on science, free on reason,
Speaker 1: and three on intuition and imagination taken together. And on
Speaker 1: the first two you're right, most people go, yep, I
Speaker 1: think I buy that they're very important, and indeed they are.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that worries me in this
Speaker 1: world is that we are losing our respect both of
Speaker 1: science and for reason. And that's in part that science
Speaker 1: has become less scientific than it could be by becoming
Speaker 1: dogmatic and not actually just dealing with empirical findings, and
Speaker 1: reason has become less reasonable. Then it could be by
Speaker 1: being something like a set of algorithms that the computer
Speaker 1: could follow. But that's not what for thousands of years
Speaker 1: people have meant by reason. It's bringing together logic with
Speaker 1: understanding of the world of people, of what is meant
Speaker 1: of all the subtle stuff, all the implicit stuff that
Speaker 1: is not spelt out in a way that the computer
Speaker 1: picks up. It's what a good judge has, you know,
Speaker 1: a good judge should be somebody who can put the law, experience,
Speaker 1: and everything together and make a wise judgment. Context again,
Speaker 1: context again. And nothing upsets me more than people who
Speaker 1: reject science because it doesn't happen to fit the theory
Speaker 1: they've got about the world. They may have a little
Speaker 1: theory that is the way they want the world to be,
Speaker 1: and then when science shows actually it's not like that,
Speaker 1: they go, no, no, no, there's something wrong with the science.
Speaker 1: That is very upsetting to me. So I think that
Speaker 1: we should listen to science, we should listen to reason,
Speaker 1: but I would like science to be more scientific and
Speaker 1: reason to be more reasonable. I explain what I mean
Speaker 1: by that in the book, and I think that they
Speaker 1: both have vast strengths, but they can't answer all our questions.
Speaker 1: You know, science can't tell us what love is. It
Speaker 1: can tell us what chemicals go off in the brain,
Speaker 1: but still can't tell us what lab is. Things that
Speaker 1: reason can't reach are not necessarily irrational. Reason can't explain
Speaker 1: to me why c Major Quintet of Schubert is one
Speaker 1: of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and why
Speaker 1: it could powerfully change my life. But it's not irrational,
Speaker 1: it's just transrational. It's a rational It simply isn't confined
Speaker 1: to what reason tells us, which doesn't make reasonable science unvaluable.
Speaker 1: They just have their limits. And then we come to
Speaker 1: intuition and imagination. And what I argue is an intuition
Speaker 1: that's had a bit of a bad rap through a
Speaker 1: very left hemisphere. Take on it, and I try to
Speaker 1: redress that balance. Intuition can be mistaken, certainly, but many
Speaker 1: scientific conclusions and conclusions of reasoning can be mistaken. They
Speaker 1: can lead us to places that in the end we
Speaker 1: will find are mistaken. So there is no royal road.
Speaker 1: And if you just disattend entirely to your intuitions, you
Speaker 1: will be a much stupider person. And we're invited at
Speaker 1: the moment not to pay attention to any of our instutions,
Speaker 1: because some very clever psychologists who loves this kind of thing,
Speaker 1: they've made their reputations on it, find very specific cases
Speaker 1: in which your intuition will lead you astrang Usually the
Speaker 1: reason is that, actually, most of the time, the instution
Speaker 1: underlying that will serve you very well, but on this
Speaker 1: occasion it doesn't. And this is an exact equivalent of
Speaker 1: optical illusions. In the book, I showed the famous checkerboard illusion.
Speaker 1: It's so extraordinary that nobody who sees it believes it
Speaker 1: that two squares on a checkerboard. One of them looks
Speaker 1: dark gray and the other one looks just off white.
Speaker 1: And the more you look at them, you cannot believe
Speaker 1: that they are in fact the exact same color. But
Speaker 1: they are, and it can be demonstrated very simply by
Speaker 1: drawing a bar between them. They are the same color.
Speaker 1: But I've never heard anyone go, oh well, right after that,
Speaker 1: that does it. I'm not going to open my eyes.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to use my eyes because they can
Speaker 1: deceive me. Yeah, okay, So I'm saying there are intuitive illusions.
Speaker 1: They can deceive you, but there's masses of evidence that
Speaker 1: intuitions make you smarter. And indeed, a great German juror says,
Speaker 1: in talking about how organizations should work, that they should
Speaker 1: maximize the use of intuition by their employees, because reasoning
Speaker 1: about something narrows you down to one single point at
Speaker 1: a time and often neglects all the things that can't
Speaker 1: easily be articulated, but that your intuition can bring into play.
Speaker 1: It can bring into play eighteen factors and balance them,
Speaker 1: rather like the judge, if you have good intuitions. And
Speaker 1: what I always say is these things in a war
Speaker 1: with one another. People who reason well have better intuitions
Speaker 1: than those who don't, and people who use their intuitions
Speaker 1: well know how to reason better than people who don't.
Speaker 1: And then perhaps I could just say something briefly about imagination.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether you've got time, but it's it's
Speaker 1: so important. Imagination, I believe, is not the way we
Speaker 1: turn away from the world, but the way in which
Speaker 1: we access the world, and without it, we can't access it.
Speaker 1: It takes imagination to see what is in front of us.
Speaker 1: Imagination is the very opposite of fantasy. And this is
Speaker 1: a distinction that was made by very is eighteen century
Speaker 1: philosophers more excessively by words within courage. It was a
Speaker 1: very important point for them. The imagination was what first
Speaker 1: put you in touch with something you thought you knew
Speaker 1: but really had never seen before. A rock, a river,
Speaker 1: a waterfall, a lake, a mountain. These things required the
Speaker 1: imagination to access them. Without them, you didn't see them.
Speaker 1: You just saw your representation of them in your mind.
Speaker 1: I just think because it's amusing. I like a little
Speaker 1: anecdote here that comes from Tolkien's college at Oxford. JRR. Tolkien,
Speaker 1: Professor of English at Merton College, Oxford. For a while,
Speaker 1: the fellows of the college was very tired of guests
Speaker 1: being brought into dinner by other fellows of the college
Speaker 1: and fawning on the great man, oh, Professor Tolkien. One
Speaker 1: day a guest was brought in and was introduced to
Speaker 1: the great man, Professor Tolkien. Your works are so they're
Speaker 1: so so full of imagination. And from behind the newspaper,
Speaker 1: a grumpy mathematician was heard imagine nation, Imagine nation made
Speaker 1: it all up that sort of in a way. He
Speaker 1: puts its finger on part of the problem that actually,
Speaker 1: in order to understand something you have to go and
Speaker 1: meet it. I know, actually arguing against the idea of
Speaker 1: making it all up fantasy. But what I do argue
Speaker 1: is that imagination is very much like what the right
Speaker 1: hemisphere of the brain does. It has an intuition, or
Speaker 1: if you like, a part perception, an inkling, a feeling
Speaker 1: about something, that something is there to which it responds,
Speaker 1: is drawn closer to it, seas more, and it was
Speaker 1: there for a reverberation between whatever is as we say
Speaker 1: out there problematic phrase and what is equally problematic in here,
Speaker 1: that these things reverberate with one another. And that is
Speaker 1: what I am getting at there, that there is neither
Speaker 1: just a world out there that that's the way it
Speaker 1: is and get the facts or you know, miss the bus.
Speaker 1: Nor is it the case that, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 1: since we take part in whatever it is, we'll make
Speaker 1: it all up, you know, kind of naive postmodernism. I
Speaker 1: reject both of these positions that are both the opposite
Speaker 1: of what I'm arguing for which there is a real
Speaker 1: something and that is accessible to us, but only through
Speaker 1: a process of reverberative interaction, of opening oneself to it,
Speaker 1: of being attentive, listening, actively receptive in a in a
Speaker 1: sort of way that you, as as zen practitioner, will
Speaker 1: understand exactly what I mean by that, actively receptive to
Speaker 1: the world, That this is how the world comes into
Speaker 1: being in a less mistaken way. I do talk about truth,
Speaker 1: but I said, there is such a thing that's truth.
Speaker 1: We can't ever really fully access it, but we can
Speaker 1: certainly know that some things are more on the past
Speaker 1: of truth than others. Well, I think that is a
Speaker 1: beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ian. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate your time and getting a chance to talk with
Speaker 1: you about these important ideas. Thank you very much, And
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I never properly honest with your first question.
Speaker 1: You want to take a ryan at it now already, Okay,
Speaker 1: we take five minutes. I don't think we've got five minutes. Alright.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me on.
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