Single Test

How do we experience the world? How do we make sense of it, measure it, construct it, and understand our position in it? A controversial scientist, Ian McGilchrist, has developed a radical theory about how our brain interprets the world. Ian McGilchrist, he’s a psychiatrist and author of the Master and his emissary, the Divided Brain and the making of the Western world about the various implications of the differences between the two hemispheres in the brain. Let’s start there. Like what? Two hemispheres have styles takes, if you like, on the world? They see things differently. They prioritize differently. They have different values. The left hemispheres goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole two ways of thinking that are both needed, but are fundamentally at the same time. Incompatible. McGilchrist claims that the left hemisphere of the brain is gradually colonizing our experience of the world with potentially disastrous implications. The way of thinking, which is reductive. Mechanistic has taken us over. We behave like people who had right hemisphere damage. Do we pay a price for being too left hemisphere centered? We may pay the ultimate price. It treats the world as a, a simple resource to be exploited. It’s made us enormously powerful. It’s enabled us to become wealthy, but it’s also meant that we’ve lost means to understand the world. His revolutionary theory has attracted prominent supporters worldwide. Comparing him to Freud and Darwin. I think the master of Ry was possibly one of the most important books I read. The idea that there is a distinction between those two perspectives seems to me correct. Um, and I see it all the time in my own field of clinical psychology. I kind of had one revelation after another. I mean, it just explained an incredible number of things that I’ve always been slightly puzzled about. But some scientists think he’s a heretic. It’s a fantastic book. It’s a fantastic book that I don’t believe in. The brain is as mechanical as clockwork. A famous English physicist said that, let’s just get over that. Now. McGill Krist is on the road, invited to speak about his view of the brain and society. Could the problems of the modern world be influenced by an imbalance in the human brain? And what does that imply about our future for Ian McGilchrist? The problem is not only bad politics or a warped economic system, the problem is inside our modern brain. The landscape speaks very strongly to people. Some people find it a little bit overwhelming. I suspect. It’s what the people call one of the Celtic thin places where the world beyond the immediate seems very apparent. There is something very special about the whole place. You know, there’s strong energy there from and wildness of nature. You feel it. It was here that Mcg Gilchrist developed his groundbreaking theory. My dad was a doctor and tried to avoid becoming a doctor. His first degree was in economics, and I rather repeated the pattern in that I didn’t even begin to be trained in medicine until I was 28. McGill Christ took an indirect path to reach medicine as a young man. He taught literature at Oxford University. After I got my degree. I got a fellowship at All Souls College, which enabled me to do really more or less anything I liked intellectually for seven years. And into that time, I then ended up really thinking more about the mind body problem. When we read a poem or we listen to a piece of music, it can bring tears to your eyes. It, it can quicken your pulse, it can raise your blood pressure. In other words, it has enormous effects on you. Physiologically, I felt that we were doing something destructive to literature. You know, people in the past had taken trouble to create something that was unique, embodied and implicit. So we came along and made it general and abstract and explicit. And making a poem explicit is a bit like explaining a joke. It, it just makes it fall flat. A work of art is an embodied being that has an encounter with you as an embodied being. It’s not a bunch of thoughts that just has an encounter with your brain. The base of the problem was the mind body relationship that we were looking at literature in much too disembodied way. Uh, I thought, no, I need somehow to tackle this problem. That was what impelled me to do. Medicine. McGilchrist spent the next 14 years training in neurology and psychiatry. It was a journey that took him to the renowned Mosley Hospital in London. So this was built, uh, just around the time of the First World War. This was, you know, one of the many places to which I owe a huge debt because I was seeing an extremely broad cross-section of patients conditions such as schizophrenia, severe personality disorders, and head injuries. This is an amazing painting, uh, by William lic called The Maze. What’s interesting is the very human anguish of this person with his illness. What one is seeing is a change in the whole way in which one experiences the world due to something out of the ordinary. In, in brain functioning here at the Mosley Hospital, I had access to patients for whom the world has become utterly changed, Particularly Interesting to me, work people with either tumors or, or strokes because, uh, you can localize, um, where the damage is. You can see it in a scale, and you can then see what happens to that patient. Good times starts from a really intriguing question. Why is the brain divided? You know, I never heard that asked in any of my training. It’s really what I’ve been thinking about all my life, about these two different ways in which we seem to inhabit the world. That was the beginning of a 20 year long process in which I tried to, uh, apply myself to the question of what the differences between these two hemis really were. Everything we human beings ever do, no matter how ordinary it seems, has a complex beginning in our brains. Finding out how the brain does this work is a study that has fascinated scientists for centuries. The brain is, of course, is an enormously complex structure. In fact, it’s kind of redundantly complex. We have two cerebral hemispheres, but it becomes a fascinating question to know whether the two cerebral hemispheres can operate separately. In the sixties and seventies in California at Caltech, there was some incredibly important and fascinating work. And what they were trying to do was to improve the quality of life for people with intractable epilepsy. Now, these people might have almost continuous epileptic seizures, which meant that they couldn’t really carry on any kind of normal life. The original idea was based on the notion that if you isolated a seizure to one half the brain, so it could not spread to the other half brain when a seizure occurred, uh, you would prevent a generalized convulsion. It wouldn’t spread throughout the brain. The patient wouldn’t lose generalized consciousness, and you would’ve helped. Today, Micah Gaza is a world-renowned neuroscientist and vineyard owner In the 1960s. He was a grad student participating in radical brain experiments By sectioning. The structures can be seen in this half brain section called the corpus callosum, and it has over 2 million nerve fibers and they richly interconnect the two have of the brain. What they did was there some trepidation initially to divide this corpus callosum. The main pathway by which the two hemispheres communicate, and what they found after the operation was that the seizures largely stopped. The other thing was, it was possible by setting up carefully controlled experiments to find out what the reactions of the left and the right hemisphere were independently. Each side of the brain controls the opposite side of the body. So the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and the right hemisphere communicates with the left. The patient looks at a screen, just imagine fixate on a dot. And over here we flash a picture of an apple. So if it’s in the right visual field that goes to your left brain, left brain’s got language of speech. Patient said, that’s an apple. This time you put the apple over in the left visual field that now goes to the right disconnected brain. And you say to the patient, what’d you see? And the patient says, I didn’t see anything, Something I left. I dunno what it, I can’t see it. Here it is. What’s it have to do with? I can’t tell you that either. They found that the left arm and the right arm seemed to be contradicting one another. So if somebody would select a dress with her right arm and the left arm would take it back and put it on the shelf and take out another one, Frustrating The experiments, prove that we have two brains in our heads. Not just one, but they do not see the world the same way. When I started to do psychiatry, nothing much was said about what the mass of the right hemisphere did. My training was that the left hemisphere was very important for understanding and language and for speaking language. But, uh, really, you know, what went on in the right hemisphere was not that, that significant. Michael Gga had said that the right hemisphere of the human brain had about as much intelligence as a chimpanzee. Um, so that wasn’t encouraging. Well, I used to give a lecture, the left hemisphere don’t leave home without it. And that summarize the importance I saw to the special modules we call ’em. Now, systems in the left hemisphere, that’s where the heavy duty liening comes for our complex cognitive life. But in this experiment with a split brain patient, while the right hemisphere is trying to make the cube, the left hemisphere’s hand keeps interfering because it doesn’t know what it’s doing yet. The right hemisphere on its own solves the problem in seconds. All of those who are involved in the team came to the conclusion that each hemisphere had. If you like, a different way of looking at the world, You separate the two hemispheres, you got mine left, and you got mine right. It’s what grabbed everybody’s interest. Everybody can understand that. And so well, what can one of the left talks and analytical and the right is creative and pull stuff together and boom, there. It was a, an industry Thanks to pop psychology. The right and left hemispheres became cartoon characters. It was no longer considered serious science. The left does language and reason, and the right does airy fairy pictures of emotion. And that turned out not to be right, because what people found was that over time it was obvious that each hemisphere engages in everything. So each hemisphere right and left is involved in reason and in language and in emotion, but in crucially different ways. Although the pop culture understanding of the left and right hemisphere was eventually rejected, a central question still remained. Why does the brain have two centers of consciousness, each capable of maintaining consciousness on its own, involved in everything but in a different way? It was only when I came to look at the animal literature that this, the penny dropped. Professor Gunter Kun. Hey Ian, How nice of you to see you. Hey, Absolutely fantastic. Have you, you Lovely to meet you. Absolutely. Same with Me. I apologize for our delays, but Ah, no problem at all. It was this university is maze. It’s Completely lost. It’s an absolute maze. Now, Dr. Owner Han is a leading researcher in the field of animal neurology. He focuses on how birds use each half of their brain. These are the animals with the eye rings. Using the Velcro, you can cover one eye At a time. Exactly. So there is a little cap that we have. And then the animal just sees with its left or right eye because as you know, the optic nerves cross completely. Yes. So everything the right eye sees goes to the left hemisphere and vice versa. Chuan devised a test where pigeons were trained to recognize human beings in vacation photos. Each time the birds recognized there was a person in a picture, they were rewarded. After a while, they start to understand there are pictures with humans and there are pictures without humans. But then the birds were given a harder challenge. Now we can start to alter the pictures. We cut out the head, we cut out the arm, we cut out the trunk and spread it across the picture. It is like a slaughtering scene. We take the pictures and chop them in smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. The left hemisphere says, okay, I see a hat. I see eyes, I see nose. That’s a human. I’m packing on it. The right hemisphere now says, this is no human anymore. The right hemisphere requires the correct position of the human body to recognize the human. So that means both hemispheres are doing an excellent job. Both hemispheres contribute and both hemispheres can decide human or non-human, but they, but they do it with different cognitive strategies. When pigeons are up to find food, they have to discriminate grain from pebbles. So that one hemisphere is really concentrating on the tiny little details of the food while the other one is glancing into the environment and is on quick alert if an aerial predator is coming. This is fundamental to survival. And that was the moment at which I realized this is profoundly important to all beings that have to solve the conundrum of how to eat and stay alive. Miguel Krist realized that in human beings, these two different kinds of attention played out in much more complex ways. You won’t find a neurologist anywhere in the world who will dispute that there is different kinds of attention paid by the left and right hemisphere. Then very clearly, each hemisphere must find a different world. What would those two worlds look like? McGilchrist observed that the left hemisphere gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail Without Understanding the larger context. It sees objects in relation to their usefulness. It’s in charge of the right hand, which has the power to manipulate things such as tools and technology. But it can’t make human connections. It doesn’t understand relationships, humor, tone of voice things. And people are not unique and individual, but groups that it can organize, sort and file in a system of rules and linear connections on its own. It has no sense of the whole. Even people are seen as body parts. The world of the left hemisphere is lifeless. It shatters the world into an assortment of bits without meaning. The right hemisphere by contrast, sees the broad view of the world. It is the master of the brain. It perceives an interconnected world. It understands relationships, body language, facial expression, and implicit meaning. The right hemisphere engages with life, understands movement, story and metaphor. It perceives how humanity fits into the whole of creation. The divided brain gives us two types of attention. Two ways of engaging with the world. It has made us the most powerful species on earth. But the left hemisphere’s narrow kind of attention reminded McGilchrist of something else. Our world. I began thinking about how in public life, everything has become more regulated, more rural bound, more explicit. For the last a hundred years, a way of thinking, which is reductive. Mechanistic has taken us over. It’s enabled us to manipulate the world, to grab resources to become wealthy. But it’s also meant that we’ve lost the means to feel satisfaction and fulfillment through a place in the world. And we created outside ourselves a world which very much looked like the interior world of the left hemisphere. Rigid lines of things that were rolled out mechanically and were non-unique. Bureaucracy is in its element. It depends on qualities which the left hemisphere provide. Organiz ability, anonymity, standardization, uniformity, abstraction and so on. Systems designed to maximize utility. There’ll be a loss of, um, cohesion socially.
’cause the left hemisphere needs control and there’s a lack of trust and a lot of paranoia. There’ll be a need for CCTV and monitoring of all kinds. The left hemisphere is the quick and dirty one.
’cause it has to make action, right? It likes things to be black and white. What do you mean there’s half or ambiguity or metaphor? I don’t want to know the facts. Okay, it’s like this or it’s that. People think, well, the left hemisphere is surely the basis for our intelligence. It’s the one that does all that analysis. But actually this is not the case. There’s a lot of evidence that the really critical one from a point of view of intelligence is the right hemisphere. Another important difference, the very important one is that between fixity and flow, so things in the left hemisphere are fixed, whereas in the right hemisphere flow is what it sees and understands. Now, that is very profound, that that actually changes the whole nature of what life is. Nothing is just isolated. It is always part of a flow. Things can only be understood in context when you take them out. They change when you grab them and put them in the spotlight of attention and make them explicit. They change their nature jokes, for example, sex for example, religion, for example. Thank You very much, Ian. What I wanna ask you is how do you guard this idea as you know, as it unfolds in the next few years? Well, That’s a very good question, and I am, there’s Something I think very counterintuitive, a little bizarre, a little. It evokes incredulity in people. And when I first heard it, I thought that that sounds really strange. Ian’s seen things that other people haven’t seen. The fundamental thing he’s seen is the philosophical notion that what matters is not what the brain hemispheres do, but how they do it. There are times when we’re very focused, very explicit, and there are times when we’re more nuanced and implicit and contextual. You do begin to notice it in certain places. So the the sort of creeping bureaucratization that you sense the fragmentation of knowledge, the over reliance on quantification, the obsession with evidence-based policy, um, the desire for data, the sort of ization of data really, um, and, and the sort of losing touch with broader patterns of judgment and taste and discernment. Many of mcg gilchrist’s insights into the brain hemispheres have come from patients who have had strokes. Your kes ring is a great neurologist. He’s a clinician, but also a philosopher and a great musician. As it happens, You See how hard life is in the mountain. It is very hard. I see that You want to do something serious and then the laughing winds Come and blow everything You mind. Susie, he has has Something you must go to here and also therapies everywhere. And you overhear It. Yes. Is having, it’s been fascinating going around seeing some of the patients that you have here. And, um, I remember you telling me about some, some cases. You mentioned One I remember well, that there was a gentleman who is a writer, he’s writing travel books. And uh, one night he woke up and felt an arm next to him. And then he thought, well, who could that be? Because my wife said she will stay at in Basel and another place so he cannot be her. And then he turned out the light and saw this arm and threw it out of the bed and followed it because it was his arm. And then he realized lying on the ground that something must be wrong. And he went by his own car, with his own car into the hospital. This patient relies on her left hemisphere. She’s been asked to spread sauce over the entire pizza. What is the definition of neglect that people behave as if one part of their outer space would not exist? This part of her surroundings does not exist for her. Now we changed the per heard, but they don’t have any here. Hey, what we it here? Huh? At here. And she’s surprised there was no tomato sauce anymore. Can show it For people and animals, the effect of losing the right hemisphere is the same. The left hemisphere on its own is deeply diluted in fact, and is unaware of its deficit. It doesn’t have insight and it doesn’t realize what it is, it’s missing. Hi, Mr. Coen. Dr. Hi Miriam. Hi Doctor. How Are you? I’m good. Six months ago, Miriam Cohen collapsed from an aneurysm. Look at my eyes and I’m gonna put some fingers up and you tell me how many fingers you see now don’t look over there. Look at me. Al Since then, she’s been relying primarily on her left hemisphere. Well, It was a fortunate thing for me that he just happened to be working very strong because, and I thanked him later on, I said to him, if you weren’t there, I wouldn’t be here.
1, 2, 3. Yeah, She had quite a severe, uh, case of neglect at the beginning. She was the same patient who wouldn’t know her own head. Neglects an interesting, uh, thing. People who have strokes, particularly in the right, uh, parietal area, uh, the patients will not, uh, have an awareness of the left side of their world. I would start my writing not on the left hand side. I would start it in the middle of the page. It’s not that I couldn’t see it. I could see it, but my brain wouldn’t register that I was there. Open Miriam’s stroke left her with a skewed sense of reality. She hallucinated, she’s an accountant, so she would see numbers everywhere. She also was adamant that there was, uh, a woman sharing her room. She was there. He never saw her. So why are you in my room? This is not your room. This is my room. These are not people who are mad. These delusions are mostly due to problems in the right hemisphere. So if anyone talks about the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain, that is my goal in life, to find a good balance between these two ways of looking at the world and acting upon the world. But I’m convinced of course, that many of us, with the two hemispheres functioning beautifully, have neglect for great parts of the world. Well, one of the primary features of the left hemisphere is that you often find this enormous capacity for denial. Um, this capacity to just ignore things and keep them shut out. I think what Ian’s trying to say is that there’s a certain disconnection from the natural world gradually happening. We’re living in cities much more. We are distracted much more. We have more thi more claims in our attention. The problem is when a completely urban life shuts you off from the ecological resources that sustain the life you have that are all hidden from us. I mean, our electricity, our gas, our waterer, our food sources, we don’t know where they’re coming from. So there’s a kind of delusion, really at the heart of modern urban life, this sort of implicit understanding that we’re a part of nature is no longer a default position. People broadly accept climate change is a global phenomenon. That humans are causing it. That it’s very serious, that we can and should do something quickly, and that if we don’t, there’ll be very serious effects. But we live as if that that knowledge was not there. We’ve gotta look at it from the perspective of science, from respective of technology, from law, from culture, from democracy, from behavior, from money. And to do that requires a form of perception and understanding that isn’t gonna come from the left hemisphere that wants to slice and dice and and and execute quickly To make quick decisions. The left hemisphere relies on abstractions, categories and models of the world. Economists have been amongst the most frequent. My correspondence saying you’ve described precisely the world in which I operate. The tendency to get fixed with models almost to fetishize them, has led us astray in, in, in many ways historically. Um, versions of instrumental rationality, reductive reasoning that we associate with the left brain, yes. Taking finance through boom bust cycles Mm-Hmm. Where people have failed to see, you know, what’s plainly obvious in front of their noses. Yeah. That we’re in potential bubbles and and so forth. The financial system was supposed to have been based on certain models and assumptions of 8% returns we’re supposed to given people the ability to lead a certain decency of a future life. The closing numbers on the markets today, at one point the market fell. We are down by between three and four point half percent speed.
60% percent Percent over in Frankfurt is down by 9%. Yes, we can certainly think of the crisis in some measure as being traceable to an excessive reliance on, on certain forms of modeling, um, on algorithms which was used to price mortgage backed securities and the subprime portions most, um, significantly, Everyone thought, yeah, well I’m such a brilliant at this market. It keeps going up until it doesn’t, until one day you wake up and you jump. People are jumping out windows, we see traders celebrating with thousand pounds bottles of champagne. And on the other side of that exact trade, there are people committing suicide. That clarifies the mind. When you suddenly think, hang on. This is not just an electronic platform which spikes on a chart. There’s a global real consequence to any action that is done in any market. I think it’s, it’s so fundamentally wrong. At two o’clock in the morning, I woke up and I said to my wife, I’m not doing this. I cannot do this. We serving a system that we cannot control. You’re not cleverer than the market. It’s the market that’s clever. When mortgage holders in Orange County, California start defaulting on their mortgages, and then all of a sudden the the whole nation of Iceland goes bust. So this level of intense correlation is something we need to be deeply aware of and try to come up with some new, more sustainable paradigms of how we do finance. Economics detached from a, a robust, resourceful picture of human wellbeing is very dangerous. And that’s what we’re living with in large parts of the globe. We seem to take it as absolutely self-evident that unlimited material growth is the best thing we can hope for. And I think the, the biggest single task is thinking again through that question of growth. Why, why it’s so obvious a target and why some kinds of growth are of course, privileged over the notion of the growth of real human wellbeing and understanding. We’ve become terrifically clever at technical matters. But technical matters are only interesting if they can be there in the service of a long term vision. If our society acts as if the left hemisphere is in control, how would the right hemisphere view the world? One scientist reveals her firsthand experience. Jill Ty Taylor is a neuroanatomist and someone who’s also experienced a stroke. But on the morning of December 10th, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. Then I realize, oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke. I’m having a stroke. And then the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow, this is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from The inside out? Dr. Miguel. Chris, what an honor. Thank you. Good to See you. I’ll give you a little tour. Thank you very much. So this is, uh, well this is my main space. I do the stained glass brains and this is my cosmic brain. Yeah, this is actually right hemisphere, left hemisphere. Okay. Uh, it’s a piece called neural processing uhhuh. And I’ve just started limestone carving. Oh yeah. Then I did a little brain. Right. And they’re just gonna get bigger and bigger. I have all kinds. That’s big ones, little ones, real ones. I just think the brain’s totally cool. Mm. Alright. And then right here is an arterial venous malformation. Oh, right. Yeah. Which was where mine was when it blew on the morning of the stroke. I end up in the hospital and I wake up later that afternoon and everybody else is freaking out because I’m drooling and I’m paralyzed. I didn’t have language for five weeks. I had a completely silent mind, no language whatsoever. Yeah. My mom was my best friend, and of course she ended up rearing me twice. I wasn’t that woman I had been anymore. She died. The woman I had been died that day. No question. No question. I didn’t have her friends, I didn’t have her knowledge. I didn’t have anything in common with her other than I was going to be in this body. Mom would take me to the store. People are rushing by all these products bombarding. They have sensory systems. Too much stimulation. I always say to people who have lost the left brain and they’re open to the big picture, right hemisphere. They can read people like nobody can. Truth telling and relationship between tone of voice and facial expression and body expression. These people should be hired by, by, uh, police departments and, and anybody who really needs a good lie detection because it’s obvious. What can it be? Like? Can you try and give us some idea of what it’s like to think and to know your thinking, but not to have words. But is that very frustrating? And there’s zero frustration. I think the frustration comes from the left brain not being able to express itself. Yeah. I didn’t have that. You didn’t really feel that? I felt none of that. It was wonderful. And the state of blissfulness feels like awe. My experience became the energy and the space between us. Right. It wasn’t about me and you. Right. It was about the experience of all of us. Right. I think you and I have a whole lot in common. Okay. I think the difference is is significant though. But I think that’s because I’m experiential. I agree with you completely. That our society has completely shifted and skewed to the left. And with that comes the left hemisphere value structure. Absolutely. Yeah. I agree with you completely. It’s too simple to be able to just say what she’s experiencing is the activity of the right hemisphere. I think it’s more complex than that. But what one cannot deny is that that is her experience. And you know, she’s done fantastic work on the basis of it. Strokes are one way to learn about the right hemisphere, but there is a time of life when we are all experts. Sorry. Hey, Microphone. Hey guys. Yeah, there’s a camera Coleman Travatan and he’s so important research on childhood development in terms of their hemispheric activity. Tell me more about what happens in terms of hemisphere shift in the way in which we bring up our children. There’s a complementarity. Absolutely. They work together. Yeah. But there are periods when one hemisphere is growing more rapidly. Right. And, and taking more responsibility for controlling behavior. And in the first couple of years, the right hemisphere is, is uh, definitely more active. Yeah. Yes. Enjoying imitation and games. Yes. Right From immediately after birth. Yes. Babies have a great interest in sharing rituals, little peculiar things like nursery songs and clapper clap Andy. Action games Here. Children make music and dance long before they can speak. They communicate through body language, music, and rhythm. Musicality is the innate need, the urge for human beings to move in expressive ways. And it can be dance, it can be music, it can be poetry, it can be anything. And that’s what art is. Art is the cultivation of play. Do you like this place? It’s our nursery. What’s the most fun thing about it? Right. Well, there’s been a revolution in psychology. It’s now clear that, that everything is embodied in movement. Movement and time have been neglected by people concentrating on information. The difference between that and formal schooling is that formal schooling assumes that they have a lot of knowledge to learn. Yeah. And they have to be taught by skilled adults. Yes. As children get older, their left hemisphere matures. It starts showing its talent for spoken and written language. The school curriculum moves away from areas where the right hemisphere excels. There is a kind of westernization or what, as he would put it, a left hemis theorization of the way we approach the world, the development of a kind of technical problem solving attitude to our lives. Certainly in education, almost everybody on the planet now goes to the same kind of school. And your life trajectory is determined by how good you are at that kind of learning. The more embodied the subject of the school curriculum, physical education, drama, the lower down the hierarchy of esteem. It is, you can drop them as early as you like. They get less time in the curriculum. So this imbalance is absolutely institutional. It’s in the bone marrow of our educational system. Look around. And many of the models we habitually use in education, many of the models that often government promotes in education are mechanistic, narrowing and dull. They buy into all the problems that we see. So this is a, this is a person who’s giving off light and, and, and do all people give off light or just this person? Uh, It’s like white color food. People Feel like it’s like a personality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people, we need people to think rigorously, to be literate, to be able to use models, to be careful, articulate and use it. My concern is that far from asking too much, we ask too little of our children. Far too often education is about ingesting information, not about learning how to think independently and critically and on many different levels of once In universities, the left hemisphere’s way of thinking becomes even more dominant. As students specialize in narrow fields, theories and categories become important. It’s sad because also the humanities at some level have been corrupted. When one reads a a piece of literature, it’s not experienced in terms of, you know, what, what can it teach us about the universal experience of being a human being. Um, rather it’s, you know, how can it be seen in the context of some narrow vision of identity politics or in the academy, there’s a lot of fuss over trigger words and Everyone warring over Language. What certainly would not happen is that things would be, um, calm because the left hemisphere is quite emotional. And one emotion that lateralizes particularly clearly is anger. And it lateralizes to the left, to discourse in public would become marked by anger and aggression. Dey, dey, desy, Dey. I think it is the trend in certainly a western society to try and solve problems by regulation rather than by culture. The questions that are around free speech in universities and offense and all these questions, Charles Murray. The trouble is that when you start legislating about it and try to control it, you produce higher levels or lower levels of anxiety, deeper levels of division. And you park the fundamental question, which is how do you evolve a culture in which people speak with one another patiently and respectfully. You can’t legislate that into existence. The monologue of the claimers who say world is like this and only like this, this reductionism that is a real danger for our world. And we have to cultivate the dialogue again and dialogue with different people, different cultures, and not just claiming I am the knowledge. I have to, I know everything. But in the world of the arts, students rely more on the right hemisphere to convey multilayered and implicit meaning. I darling, I know what’s keeping you here. You must get a grip on yourself. You’re a little intoxicated right now. You need to clear your head. Be my friend. Let me go. Has it gone that far? It’s as if she’s calling me to her side. Don’t you see? This could be her making. Let me In the brain memorized lines are worked on by the left hemisphere. Same magnificent, wonderful man. But how they are expressed, the tone and gestures is the preserve of the right hemisphere. I’ve never been in love, never experienced it. Young love, blissful, dreamlike, romantic, all embracing love. The only love that can bring about true happiness. What did we talk about yesterday? We talked about the fact that like lots of many wants permission To Leave, to leave. Ian, can you explain the left and right side of the brain? Um, there are versions of the world in which we are all living. Uh, we are not aware of it because we are bringing them together all the time. But in one, the world in which I believe we’ve got trapped is the idea of a world of things, um, which are knowable and precise and clear. But this isn’t at all how the world is. Um, according to the right hemisphere. Everything, everything is connected to everything else. It’s all about the relationships. Something completely electrifying. What’s happening in this room, which I, I could feel very strongly, which is emerges from the implicit. But all artists is like this, that the power of it lies in the, in the bits that are not explicit. What I find reassuring is that it’s not necessarily knowable, Actually it’s necessarily not knowable. The reason we have theater poetry, we have music, we have religious ritual. All these things are ways of taking us beyond the everyday language that we are pinned down by. It’s breaking outta that and only things like really powerfully performed art. You know, these things can take us there. Hello? Are you the brain specialist? No, I’m not the brain specialist. No. No, I am not. Yes, yes. My brain hurts Because this museum contains the skeleton of a very, very large man, taller even than new John. Um, How tall was he Thought have been the tallest man who ever lived. But here we’ve got an interesting specimen. Ah, this is Charles Babbage’s brain. You know Charles? No, the computer guy. The computer guy. The guy who is credited with inventing the first computing machine. It was thought interesting to find out what a genius his brain looked like. The answer is little disappointed. It looks rather like mine and yours, John. I mean, I never thought in by wildest dreams that I’d be sitting in a room in London surrounded by brains talking to you. Who know? But tell me how, how did, how did this come about? You Won’t believe it. A Monty Python meeting, right? Seriously. We had a lunch in an Italian restaurant in Soho, and at the end, Terry Gilliam suddenly started going on about your book. Right. And I think he’s such a fool. Most of my education was all to do with the left hemisphere, you know? Yes, yes. I got into Cambridge on science, then I did law. Yes. And that’s how I was taught to think. It’s been from this very logical, cold-blooded way of thinking into something that is hugely more intuitive. And this obviously came because I discovered by accident at Cambridge that I could write stuff that made people laugh. I began to see that the process that I used when I was writing stuff like this was quite different from the process that I used if I was trying to understand a legal case. They seem quite different ways of operating. I think sometimes you have something that is so completely silly that it’s almost meaningless. I can think, think of things in multi python jokes that you simply are unable to explain. And, uh, since then I’ve been very much more intuitive and very much less sort of logical linguistic in my approach to life. And much happier as a result. Well, this is sort of an as periodic moment. This chap’s clearly seen better days. Humor is a wonderful tool for illuminating idiocy. Yes. I think exactly why you restore our sanity is because you well it take the mickey outta this kind of thing. Yes. And it’s a sense of proportion as you say.
’cause assume it says humor is a sense of proportion. Well, I’ve been, uh, studying, uh, the DNA, um, ideas for some time and I’ve come to certain, uh, conclusions based on all the research I’ve done. For example, this gene just here. Yes. This Is, uh, the gene that determines whether you prefer raspberries or strawberries. Ah, yes. You know, indeed. Now This, this gene here is terribly interesting. If you have that gene, then you are likely to enjoy Nicholas cage films, Huh? Right. So That’s another mystery, if you know, and this one here was very strong view. As someone who, uh, spent 20 years writing a book, I wish I didn’t have that gene because it life I could get on with a life. Right. Can we do something about it? Please? If our society is relying too much on the left hemisphere, how have past civilizations perceive their world? When I began to look at the main movements in the history of ideas, a pattern emerged, which was quite extraordinary and so much more interesting than I could possibly have imagined. What I could see was that three times in the West there had been a period, a flourishing of a civilization Athens in the sixth century bc the beginning of the empire in Rome, then once again in the earlier Renaissance. And that this civilization in each three cases showed a marvelous balance of right hemisphere and left hemisphere modes of thinking. But in each case, it ended up with a movement further and further towards that of the left hemisphere, after which the civilization collapsed In ancient Greece and Rome statues and paintings portrayed individuals, people with character. But as the Roman Empire declined, subjects often faced forward without emotion. Individual character gave way to expressions of power and status. So one of the things that distinguishes the right hemisphere is the concept of depth. It’s a very important one, philosophically speaking. And one can think in quite concrete terms of depth in space, depth in time and depth of emotion. Here we’ve got, um, a crucifixion scene in the middle of the 14th century. There is no depth to this picture. There is no landscape that’s situated in the natural world and nothing to situate it historically. And it’s not a criticism of it to say that it doesn’t have such depth, uh, or any relationship to the world around. But during the Renaissance art changes suggesting a shift in the mind, When we come forward here to this adoration of the kings in 1500, the building work here obeys the laws of perspective, and at the same time gives us a sense of temporal perspective that this event is taking place, um, at some point in the past. Hence the, the ruin. You will only get that perspective from, uh, the, the right hemisphere take on the world. It is a mistake to think of the arts, all the sciences as being one hemisphere or the other. A renaissance man was somebody who was learned in and experienced in many aspects of, of knowledge. What you’d see is this broad perspective on life in which science and art came together. They weren’t separate as they so often are today. If you go from hemisphere to cultural history, it will feel incongruous. And, and like a non-sequitur, it won’t feel like it makes sense. But remember when hemisphere is really shorthand for a way of seeing the world. Um, and what he’s arguing is that of these two broad patterns of perception, two broad ways of viewing the world. Historically, you see them in a kind of battle for supremacy. One of the most daring maneuvers of the left hemisphere is the industrial revolution. We began a full scale onslaught on the natural world that we were the masters and we could control and exploit mere material as we saw the natural world something there for us to utilize. We saw machines, we saw a landscape that was increasingly molded by our efforts to, you know, slice through it with railway lines, to carve tunnels to put our stamp on nature. The industrial revolution also changed how artists saw the world. In the early 20th century. Modern art frequently portrayed the world in terms of fragments, cubes and geometric shapes. Artists always think that, you know, they can escape painting in the spirit of the age, but they’re very rebellion portrays the culture outta which they came. Art doesn’t come outta aire, it comes out of a culture out. I think there’s something different about the world that we, we have entered in the last a hundred years. What we find is that various kinds of ways of looking at the world that occur to people who have damage in the right hemisphere start to become fashionable. This is absolutely fascinating. As we come forward into the 20th century, it reflected outwards onto the world aspects of the left hemisphere with cities that were laid out on grids, which were full of structures that were recline, left hemisphere way of thinking of being able to use things. McGill Kriss theory of the brain and western civilization attracts attention from all over the world. Some leading scientists welcome his controversial theory, these Two. So the the distinctions that Ian is playing with between these two modes of knowing modes of experiencing that he associates with the two hemispheres. That distinction makes a, makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it’s extremely important in the, uh, in the modern world. There aren’t that many academics who can span, who have that broad span that can go from very authoritative, uh, analyses of scientific data through to the big picture and even on into spirituality. But among others in the scientific community, there is serious resistance to the link between the brain and society. You talk about this division as if it has a purpose, but that’s not how things work. It, it exists as a consequence. It’s just your theory that there isn’t a purpose. You don’t know that there’s a purpose. It’s an assumption of science that there is no purpose. This book is taking a selected set of neuroscience findings and trying to relate them to the, uh, clinical psychiatric, uh, experience telling a story that tries to mesh those two things. I’m not comfortable with that just because I’m one of the guys committed to actually finding out what these patients are, how they behave. Uh, and I don’t have the freedom to, just to go off on a, a larger metaphor, I think, here’s how you think about it. The brain is as mechanical as clockwork. A famous English physicist said that, let’s just get over that. That’s the way it’s, So we life scientists, we read the papers, come up with a working hypothesis that is one step ahead of what we know, but not two steps. Sure. Two steps are punished. So I think there are two options. One option is in 30 years, it could be the Bible of neuroscientists or it could be forgotten. Mm. I think there is nothing in between. Step stepping away from this debate. McGilchrist seeks a different kind of evidence. Scientists have argued that the human brain has been the same machine throughout history. And that every major civilization was built by people with the same kind of brain and the same perception of reality. But McGilchrist believes that the brain shapes and is shaped by human culture. And how do other cultures view the world? It is a question that is studied at Harvard University. A lot of psychologists have the strong intuition that what they study is something deep. It’s something about human nature. It’s something fundamental to how human brains operate. When neuroscientists measure the brain, they think they’re seeing a piece that’s constructed by human genes. That’s human nature. But actually our brains are heavily influenced by the environments. And our environments are heavily culturally constructed. Our social relationships, the physical environments we operate in, 96% of psychological studies are done with Westerners. And most of those are actually American undergraduates. Uh, just ’cause of the bulk of psychology being done in the us. So this really gives us a biased picture of human psychology. And we don’t know to what degree those things, uh, extend to o other members of the species. Henry Henrich and his colleagues decided to take their psychology tests to the rest of the world. People in Tahiti and the Amazon, one of the tests features an optical illusion, which line is longer. They’re both the same. Westerners have the biggest illusion and hunter-gatherers don’t actually see the illusion. So they accurately see the two lines. We live in a world of right angles, so our brains get really good at converting that presence of right angles in our environments and using that to create a spatial understanding in our brains. But in the world of hunter gatherers, there might not be any right angles. So their brains are calibrated more accurately. So it’s a basic difference across human societies. As our minds adapt to the culturally constructed world that we lived in At Queen’s University in Canada. Research is being done on how Asian and Western mines perceive the world differently. I Grew up in China. I spent first 20 some years there. It was not hard for me to get interested in culture because my own background, people think differently depending on their cultural background compared to North Americans. East Asians are more sensitive to the context. They attend more to the context. When we show people the pictures of panda monkey, banana, Chinese actually are more likely to put monkey and banana together because monkeys like banana. So they focus on that relationship. Next. For North Americans yulee, it’s more linear. I Would say it’s the dragonfly and the B. Why? Uh, because they’re both flying insects. Okay. In traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings, you do see less focus on the individual person. You barely see the face. Like you see the overall scenes. You see mountains, you see trees, flowers, the person actually is minimized. People get very uncomfortable with the idea that culture produces biological differences.
’cause normally in our minds, we separate biology and culture. So it certainly gives you an appreciation. The degree to which things you take to be just how the world works or how people are, is not the case. It’s a peculiarity of this certain cultural trajectory and that you happen to be born into Some cultures with a more balanced way of seeing reality may live within Western society. We know this as, give me me in Blackfoot. Probably the best translation would be an intellect into the mountains, the way we look at the world and send a Blackfoot mind. What you would see is a Panera view. Yeah. Yes. How do we fit in Yes. Into this whole picture, say and kind of drawing on some of the work you’ve done. Hey, that’s very, that’s very right side. Yes. Right. Brain thinking. Yes. Looking at this big picture. Yes. How we fit in. Yes. But at the same time, nothing is ever at a standstill. That’s what we refer to as that flux. Everything is related. I mean, the physicists say this Yeah. To everything else. And it is that also in, in the, in the wisdom and the culture of, of first nation people, If you hear native prayers, they will talk about all my relations. So when they’re talking about all my relations, they’re not talking about human relations. They’re talking about these trees. Yes. They’re talking about the water. Yes. They’re talking about the rocks. Yes. Those birds out there. All those animals, they’re all my relations. Yes. Yes. See? Yes. And that’s where, you know, we fit ourself into that relational network. And does that suggest, as it does to me, that that rocks and lakes and streams and waterfalls have a life? They’re not just sort of things, They’re all anate. Yes. And our way of thinking. In fact, in Blackfoot, there is no word for inanimate. So that’s the reason why our elders always come out and say, this is my church. Yes, yes. I am the environment. Yes, I am the environment. This is me. Yeah, this is me. That’s wonderful. If there are these competing forms of perception and there are mechanisms culturally that make them compete and play out and make one usurp the other, and I think he’d argue that pretty coherently, then we should act on it. You know, we should figure out what to do about it. The question is whether we as persons have agency and are capable to do something and whether we can translate that into society. Here’s the area where you had the bleeding in the brain. There’s no more blood there. Okay. And we’ll check the aneurysm to make sure nothing’s coming back. Okay. There’s been a big change. I believe that you have to want to get better. It’s very important that in your mind you say, I’m gonna get back there to where I was before. I wanna do everything I was doing before and I’m gonna do it no matter what I need to do. This is my neuroplastic attitude. We are not just the victims of our flattened world. Exactly. And the dog masks that some people put upon us, but we can do something else. And our patients are the best teachers in this respect. Yes. That in spite of deficits, we can change something and this is what we want to do. Like you, I appreciate that humanity is enormously resourceful and there must have been times in history when we could not have foreseen what was coming in terms of a shift in the ideas. Yes. And we need that shift now. Maybe asking too much of Ian’s work to say, just solve the problem for us. You know? Um, what he can do is point towards the direction of the solution. If we can get better at seeing things more holistically, more specifically, more, more in context. If we can get better at systematically resisting attempts to turn things into algorithm, to always measure, to always quantify. If we can get, you know, better and more robust at doing that, the world will begin to steer towards a better place. We need to take advantage of other systems of knowledge. We need to be, have a balance. If we do that, we will have, we will be around as a, as, as a species for a long well Then let us hope. Let us hope. I want my ideas to be picked up by other people and internalized so that they use them as a driver to look at the world in a different way. Things that were anciently known, they were embodied in myths, in drama, in poetry. The way of thinking that was kept for the kind of knowledge that logic can’t reach the whole way of thinking, feeling and being. Einstein said the rational mind is a faithful servant, but the intuitive mind is a precious gift. And we live in a world which honors a servant that has forgotten a gift. We do need a paradigm shift because it’s not about little things here and there. It’s about the whole way we conceive what a human being is, what the world is and what our relationship with it is. Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other. It’s such a simple saying, but it’s so deep. And I found it applies to many, many things in life. Really what we’re on this planet to do is to give attention to, to that other, it can be other people, but it can also be what until very recently was the other that we were all surrounded by all the time, which was the natural world, which is our hope, Which is this a completely amazing, beautiful, staggeringly expressive gift.