Dr Iain McGilchrist speaking at the UnHerd Club:

'We Live in a Deluded World'

(Transcribed from a YouTube video: link)

0:45

Introduction

Mediator: Dr Dr Iain McGilchrist is someone we have been trying to persuade to leave his beautiful home in Sky and come to the metropolis and talk to us. And we've finally succeeded.

He is, as many of you will know, a neuroscientist, philosopher. Can I call you that?

McGilchrist: You can call me what you like.

Mediator: An extraordinary breadth of interests. He studied literature at Oxford, where he began his academic career. He's a fellow of All Souls and he's written a series of extraordinary books. He kind of rose to stardom with a book called 'The Master and His Emisary'. Which set out his central theses, which is what we'll be talking about tonight, and has followed up with a very substantial and very profound two volume book called 'The Matter With Things', which I very strongly recommend. It's absolutely worth the effort, and that's really what we're going to talk about today. If any of you have copies, I'm sure Iain would be happy to sign them afterwards.

Let's begin if it's OK, with what I'm sure you have been asked many times, which is to sort of start with the basic assumption for us. Many people here will know more than that. But for those of them who don't, tell us about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they each have a different perception of the world.

2:06

Iain McGilchrist explains how the two hemispheres of the brain have different perceptions of the world.

McGilchrist: Yes, this is a difficult topic, because people either know something that is entirely wrong, or know that the whole subject is wrong. Ands so it's very difficult to get people to listen. Or it was initially, but I', very glad to say that I carried the day with a lot of people.

Many of you, if you, if you do't know my work, will think, if you know anything about hemisphere difference, that the left hemisphers is rather boring, but reliable. It's like a decent accountant. It keeps good records, but it's not actually great company. And the right hemisphere is this flighty thing that is given to fits of passion and painting. And this is not a good way to think about it at all.

There were some conclusions drawn from some early procedures in which the brain was split. There's a band of fibres at the base of the brain that joins these two hemispheres, a bit like a walnut, called the corpus callosum. And for certain people who had intractable epilepsy, a curable condition, it became when they were able to divide the two hemispheres one from another. So that if there was an electrical storm, if you'd like to think of it that way, in one hemisphere, it didn't spread to the other. So the person was able to remain conscious and carry on functioning.

And after that, there were a lot of rather interesting experiments that could be done. You could address things purely to one hemisphere or to the other. And on the back of that the sort of myths that I mentioned grew up. And between the 70s and the 90s, people experimented more and more, and they found that in fact, all these cliches were completely wrong. And so they gave the whold thing up as a bad job. But I'd like to suggest that that was dogmatic and premature.

4:07

First of all, the brain consists only in making connections. It's lots and lots and lots, billions of neurons, nerve cells that connect and its power consists in the connections. Do, why would nature have endowed us with a brain that has a whopping divide down the middle with just a small connection between the two? That's the first thing.

The second is that the brain is asymmetrical. Why would it be asymmetrical? The skull is not asymmetrical, the world around us doesn't divide neatly into a left world and a right world, so why would the brain?

And the third, which was something I discovered in medical school, was that this corpus callosum, this connecting band spent al least half of its time, if not more, sending messages to the other hemisphere, 'you keep out of this, I'm dealing with it.' So it wasn't so much necessarily facilitating as inhibiting.

And just as an aside, primates have more inhibitory neurons than any other mammal, and humans have more inhibitory neurons than any primate. In fact, about 19% of the human brain consists in inhibitory neurons, which would take us somewhere that we may or may not go, which is the important part that resistance, negation plays in creation.

5:26

Anyway, ther we are. So that's the first problem. And then I started to look at the literature and I was fortunate enough to come across a colleague who had been working in that area for 20 years, John Cutting. And effectively what he had found is that there were significant differences, [between the hemispheres], but they didn't follow the map, you know, reason and language, emotion and pictures, for example, because it's quite true that both are involved in both. But now, each of them are involved in all those things, in everything that they do in a different way.

So it was not about what, but about the how, you see what I mean? And that actually turns out to be very, very important. They each contribute to reason and language and emotion and so on, and the left hemisphere is not you know, undiased and unemotional, it's actually prone to anger and agression. It's very far from being calm. It also tend to jump to conclusions more than the right hemisphere, which Ramachandran, the great neuroscientist has called the devil's advocate.

Anyway, what my researches over 30 years and my collaboration with John Cutting in the initial phases of that, reveal is that these two manners of being in the world that these hemispheres bring our are to do with the way in which we attend.

Now that may not sound very exciting. In fact, when I first realised that the basic thing here was attention, the penny didn't immediatley drop. Attention? It could be memory, it could be calculation, it could be anything. What's special about attention? Well, the answer is that attention is actually how our world comes into being. We can only know the world we experience and how we experience that world depends fundamentaly on the type of attention. So if you attend to something in one way, you see one thing. If you attend in another, you'll see somethingquite different. An they sometimes talk about a mountain behind my house.

7:40

And I sometimes talk about a mountain behind my house. I live in a place called Talisker on Skye, which is not actually where the whiskey is made. It's nearby. They try to keep it out of my reach. It's four miles away, but it's called that because it's from a Norse word 'talasgar', which means the sloping rock. Now what tha tells you, is that this mountain, which is very extraordinary mountain, it has slopiong silhouette from the sea. So what one knows is, to the Vikings 1,000 years ago, what that mountain was safety or danger, because it alerted them to the fact that they were in a very treacherous piece of water there, and the bay was full of rocks. But we also know there were Picts living there 1,000 years earlier than that, and they have their brochs, the ruins of their brochs, they're still there. And to them, this mountain offered both shelter and was the home of the gods.

Then in the 18th century, people started visiting Scotland to draw it and see the beauty in the sublime landscape. And so for them, this mountain was a many coloured, many textured form of great beauty. And in the 19th century, people got much more interested in geology for the first time. And it happens to be an extraordinarily good example of columnar basalt formation, the same as ... It is in fact, in line with the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. And so it's part of the same formation. To somebody who wanted to mine basalt, this mountain means money, money, dollars. To a physicist, what it is, is 99.99% nothing, more and then the other point 0.001%, we don't really know what's going on.

Now, which of these is the real mountain? Which of those is the real mountain? They're all real mountains. They just depend on the way in which and the goals with ehich we approach it. Everybody sees what they are interested in finding and the way they attend makes all the difference.

So basically, attention helps shape the world and these two kinds of attention came about for an evolutionarily important reason. And I should say that it's not just the human brain that is asymmetrical. All the brains of all the creatures, we've looked at, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, they all have ganglia or prototype brains that are distinct left and right and asymmetrical. And even the oldest extant organism nematostella vectensis, 700 million years old, off the Isle of Wight, where it blends in very well with the average age of the community, it has an asymmetrical neural network. And it's been described as the origin of the mammalian brain.

So there's something there that seems to involve all living things that required this asymmetry. What is it? It's that every creature has to solve this conundrum, how can I eat and yet stay alive? Now that doesn't sound difficult to you but if you think back for most of history, a creature has to be able to target something and follow it with it's eyes and get it, very accurately. And to do that it has to have very narrow attention. But if that's the only attention it's paying, it won't last long, because it won't see the preditor overhead, it won't see its mate and its offspring that also need feeding.

11:17

So there needs to be two kinds of attention and so different are these kinds of attention that they can only come about by having two centres of awareness. And the left hemisphere has this very narrow beam, perhaps three degrees out of the 360, targeted on a detail, it can see very precisely. It fixes it and it grabs it. And the left hemisphere controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing and the getting. Whereas the reight hemisphere has this broaad, open, sustained vigilant attention, which is on the lookout for everything else without preconception.

So on the one hand, you've got an attention that produces a world of tiny fragments that don't seem connected to one another, a bit here , a bit there, a bit elsewhere, that are decontextualized, that are disembodied, abstract, become examples of a category of things, and are fixed by the stare of the left hemisphere. So you've got these static, fixed, known, familiar bits and pieces. 'Oh, it's one of those, that's what I eat,' and so on. Whereas, with the right hemisphere, we see that nothing really is completely separated from everything else, or indeed, from anything else, ultimately, that all is at some level seamlessly interconnected, that it's flowing and changing rather than fixed and static. That everything is what it is because of the context it finds itself in. That embodiment is essential to the nature of what we're looking at, both our looking and the thing we're looking at.

There are unique individuals, that it's not just person, but it's Sue or Fred, or whatever it is. Those distinctions, the uniqueness is something the right hemisphere sees but the left hemisphere sees just an example of something it uses and needs.

13:16

The left hemisphere's world is thus lifeless, literaly inanimate kind of a world and the right hemisphere is an animate one. And you can in fact, now temporarily disable one hemisphere at a time in an experimental subject, completely painlessly. And when you do that you find that the left hemisphere sees things that are animate as mechanisms. When you have the right hemisphere alone functioning, it sees things that you would normally think of as inanimate, as alive. So the sun is alive, it's moving across the heavens, it's giving warmth. So these are very, very fundamentally different ways of looking at things.

And the last thing I'm going to say is that --and again, this may not strike you as so fundamental, but believe me, it is — the right hemisphere sees things as they come into being for us. I use the term 'presence'. They 'presence' to us, which is a term philosophers use translating Heidegger's 'Unreason'. And what he was getting at was that things are not just given, static, there, but they come about for us as we look at them and pay attention to them. And we see more what they are. They become what they are for us. And that's not to say that it's all made up by our mind. It's not as simple as that, nor is it that there's just a world out there and it's completely passive. There is an interrelationship between our minds and the world. It is all the time constructing it. The right hemisphere is aware of this and is part of it. The left sees representations which literally means 'present again', after it's no longer present.

So the right hemisphere's world is the world in which we live, the left hemisphere's world is, if you like, a map, a schema, a diagram, a theory, something two-dimensional. And it's got none of the richness that's in the right hemisphere as well. And there's nothing wrong with that, because actually a map is very useful. And the map doesn't get more useful by including more and more detail. About the names of the people who live in the houses and the plants they grow in the garden. No, a map to be useful, has to be selective. And that's how it is.

15:27

So we've got this one world, which is composed of things that are mechanical, useful, inanimate, reducible to their parts, abstracted, decontextualized, dead, and another wold, which is flowing, complex, living, changing, and has all the qualities that make life worth living for us.

16:14

As a wide society, how can this be that we use one side of the brain more than the other?

Mediator: Thank you. That's a wonderful explanation. Let me ask you now to do another 300 pages in three minutes. Which is, these two modes of attending have with them accompanying philosophies, accompanying ways of seeing the world. And your thesis seems to be that not just individuals, but as a whole society, and recently — I'm keen to know how long that you think that's been true for — have become overly dependent on the left hemisphere, or giving the left hemisphere too much attention, too much power in shaping the world, as we understand it, and has neglected this wiser hemisphere that, as 'The Master and His Emissary', the book I mentioned, hints at, should actually be in charge, using the left hemisphere. So tell us how this has happened, as wide as a society? How can it be that we start using one more than the other?

16:58

McGilchrist: Yes, I mean, the title of 'The master's Emissary' refers to the idea of a much wiser master who has a servant who thinks he knows everything. But because he doesn't really know very much, he thinks he's got it all. But the wiser master knows he needs a lot of work to be done — administrative work — by the emisarry.

So you were quite right. Things work well, there's vast amounts of evidence for this, as long as the left hemisphere is carrying out work it's deputed to do by the right hemisphere. Rather like we use a computer. The computer doesn't really understand the data we draw from the complexity of life. That's not its job. Its job is to process it very fast, and hand us back some data which we then take back into the world and make sense of.

But what seems to happen in civilizations and in the second half of 'The Master and His Emisarry', I trace Western history from the Greeks, through the Romans, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial revolution, Modernism and Post Modernism. And what I think I can show is that in two previous cases, the Greek and the Roman civilization began with a sudden outburst of flourishing in which the two worked very well together. And then over time, it got more and more towards the left hemisphere's point of view. Apparently, I think this is because civilizations tend to overreach themselves. They tend to amass an empire, and then everything has to be administered. And there are rules and procedures, and everything is rolled out under a bureaucracy.

And what this privilege is, is a simple, sequential, analytic way of understanding rather than the more complex, holistic understanding that is required, and is provided by the right hemisphere.

So to come to where we are now... What I think happened was the Renaissance was this sudden flowering in which — and it's not about the humanities versus the sciences. Neither by the way, is it true that the humanities are somehow right hemisphere and sciences somehow left hemisphere. Good science, good reasoing involves the right hemisphere as much as left. But what happened was, there were great steps forward in so many aspects of life, a great richnerss, and then towards the end of the 17th century, becoming much stronger in the 18th century was this sense that science had solved all the problems and we were beginning to understand how to control everything ourselves.

Unfortunately, the kind of thinking that gets drawn into that is also rather simple minded, and it therefore doesn't see what it is it doesn't see. And I think that's where we've got to. We've trusted a way of systematising, rationalising, and we believe that if we just had a little bit more power — which is the raison d'etre of the left hemisphere, to grasp, to get. If only we could do a bit more manipulation, we would solve everything.

But at the same time, we're making an unholy mess of the world in so many respects. We're destroying nature. We're destroying humanity, really. We'ree certainly destroying this civilization. I'd say we're taking a sledgehammer to it. And so this is a very sad outcome for this know-it-all left hemisphere.

20:33

One of the reasons I think it's become — well, they're several reasons why I think it's become more potent. One is that of course, it's the one that makes you rich. It's the one with which you do the grabbing and getting and that's easy and straightforward.

Another is that it's much easier to explain the left hemisphere's point of view. It's money for old rope, say, 'well, look, if we do this, it leads to that, leads to that.' Whereas actually, what the right hemisphere's seeing is a complex system, which is a complex system. Which is different from a complicated system. A jet engine is a complicated system, but it's not complex. It's not. A complex system is one which is inherently unpredictable. It's one which is inherently unpredictable. It's not disorderly, but it's not determined, and it has recursive loops within it, so that things become enormously complex. You don't have this A leads to B leads to C.

21:24

And another is that when you start to articulate what it is your civilization is about, rather than getting on with it, once you start to openly analysing it, then you lean more and more to this left hemisphere point of view.

And A.N. Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, who I consider one of the all time greatest philosophers, and certainly of the last 100 years said, 'a civilization flourishes until it starts to analyse itself'. And that's remarkable because Whitehead was a mathematician and a physicist, and he was the co-author with Bertrand Russell of 'Principia Mathematica', but he was able to see beyond, he was able to see limitations of science, limitations of reason, which is not to disrespect science or reason. I happen to believe our science is not scientific enough. It's too dogmatic. I happen to believe our reason is not reasonable enough, too dogmatic — and it's dogma that's always the problem.

We need need science. We need reason. But we also need to see that they can't answer all our questions.

You know love is very real. Anyone who's experienced it knows that it's one of the realest things that can happen to you. But according to science, for it to be real, you've got to be able to see it in the lab, measure it, manipulate it. You cannot do that. And then you start thinking about all the other amazing things that we experience: goodness, and beauty and love and all those sorts of things come under this head .

There are proper limits to science, proper limits to reason. Music, wonderful, can change your life. But it's just notes. What is a note? Absolutely nothing? Well, let's have another one then. Still nothing. Let's have thirty thousand. Thirty thousand nothings are going to make up Bach's B Minor Mass, which can be one of the most powerful things you can hear.

How did that happen by amalgamating so many nothings? It's because it's all in relation. It's all in relation. It's all in relationships. And what I'm suggesting is that relationships are primary. They're even primary to the things that are related. The things that are related, and what we call the things we notice, oly become what they are because of the relationships they stand in.

Mediator: So you started us with the Enlightenment there. Is that where it all went wrong, then is it? It feels like, even injust the past five years, the world is more dogmatic? More, as it were left-brain.

McGilchrist: It's accelerated.

Mediator: So, the chronology then, is it just gradually more and more left brained? And then more and more so or are there particular points and are we in one at the moment where it's suddenly speeded up?

24:12

McGilchrist: Well, I mean, how long have you got? But I mean, to put it very simply, there have been movements, back and forwards. So there have been corrections at various times, and after the Enlightenment came Romanticism, which — the name 'Romantic' sort of seems to mean that it's not serious or important — but in fact, the thinking and the art that came out of it is very great indeed. And so there was a correction, but then the power of the Industrial Revolution led to this machine-like way of thinking about living things, and we've never really lost that.

And although there are great artists in Modernism and Postmodernism, it's interesting. The ways of seeing the world that normally would only happen to somebody who had an injury in the right hemisphere, start to be represented in the visual arts in the 20th century. It's just just a fact.

I'm not saying it's all rubbish, I'm just saying, things that we would not normally experience unless we were not using our right hemisphere start to be visualised.

And there's a wonderful book called 'Madness and Modernism' about this topic, how twenty or thirty types of things you find in schizophrenia are now happening, and are being portrayed in our culture.

And it's not that we've all got schizophrenia. Of course we haven't. But what I think it is is we're all neglecting the right hemisphere. And if you like, schizophrenia is a case in which the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right hemisphere has been wound down, or is not really being listened to. And this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world, which is fully deluded.

We are all fairly reasonable people. I imagine in this room, but now it's quite comon to hear people say — and for them to go completely unchallenged — things that everybody knows are completely impossible. They don't have any science behind them and no reasonl, in flat contrary to experience?

26:14

Mediator: Such as?

McGilchrist: Ha, ha. ha. Well I think you know what I'm talking here. So there are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic, 'this is right, and anyone who says other is wrong.'

And that is, that's the way the left hemisphere likes to be: cut and dried, black and white. But the right hemisphere sees nuances, gradation, so there's good and bad in almost everything.

Mediator: So do you think we have ever been in as left-hemisphere-dominated a moment as we are now?

McGilchrist: No, I think this is un-hitherto-seen

27:02

Iain explains if technology has had an impact on the hemispheres of the brain.

Mediator: Do you think technology has something to do with that? You talk about how it's a representation. We now literally look at a representation in screen form every day. It feels like we are further and further removed from a kind of intuitive present experience of the world. Do you think that could be part of it.

McGilchrist: I think it definitely is. Physics a very long time ago, at least 100 years ago, learnt that the universe was not as Newton had described it as a vast mechanism. It didn't have any of the features of a machine. And unfortunately, biology was a lot slower in catching up with this.

So you had the rather extraordinary position where the science of the inanimate showed a universe that had to be perceived in a consciousness. And the science of the animate world, suggested that we were all just machines and consciousness didn't exist.

I think that's beginning to shift. Now, there were very hopeful signs that biologists are beginning to see that it's far more complicated than that, and the machine model doesn't work. But that has left a legacy that only somebody who thinks in this mechanical way, is being rational.

And I'd like to make a distinction, by the way, between what I would call a sort of rationalistic approach to something and being reasonable.

Being reasonable was something I remember from when I was growing up. There were reasonable people and they were admired. And the idea of an educatipon ws to make you reasonable. but now, that has been supplanted by something quite different, which is a rationalising framework such as a computer could follow. So we've been pushed by the development of our machines, the increasing sophistication of machines, the intoxicating feeling that we have power over the world, into viewing it in this reductionist, materialist way.

And the trouble with power is that it's only as good as the wisdom of the person who wields it. And I don't notice that we're getting wiser. In fact, I think that would be an understatement.

So it's rather like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers and then hoping there's going to be a happy outcome.

29:08

Mediator: So we're not living in an age of reason, after all. Is that fair?

McGilchrist: It's absolutely fair. We're living in an age of rationalising and reductionism in which everything can be taken apart, and it's just the bits.

Mediator: And yet it feels like the people in charge, whoever they are, whether it's in charge of the culture, or in charge of the media, or are in charge of the political institutions, are very committed to this rationalist framework.

And reading your book 'The matter with Things'. I was just continually reminded of what we come across in the day to day political conversation, which is an absolute insistence that particular mechanistic world is the only option and those people who take a different view or don't sign up to whatever the current precept is are considered outcasts. Yes?

Do you recognise that in the more day-to-day political world as well? Do you think we can learn from your framework? When just reading the paper? Or watching the news? Do you think we need to be remembering Iain McGilchrist and thinking, 'this is left brain stuff, block it out' ?

30:28

McGilchrist: I hope people will apply these ideas. I find that people spontaneously do in all walks of life, which is very pleasing to find out. But yes, I do think that.

I suppose there was an almost equivalent period — it was very short-lived — of Puritanism, when it was absolutely not tolerated for you to disagree with a certain way of thinking, which was, in fact, a very dogmatic, reduced, abstracted way of thinking.

But I think at that point, we hadn't reached the stage that we're ar now, very obviously, where it's harder and harder to articulate, but very much needs to be articulated. Because at that time in history, people lived close to nature. Almost everybody was surrounded by nature. Most people belonged to an inherited culture, a coherent culture, which also involved a religious element. And art had not been turned into something conceptual, but was visceral and moving. And religion had not been presented as something that only a fool or an infant would believe in.

And these are all very arrogant positions that we now hold. But what I'm saying is that those things, proximity to nature, to the place where you live, and the people you live with, a culture, some snese of something beyond this realm, which is important. It might be religious, or it might just be spiritual. We know that these things are the key to human flourishing. They make people healthier, both physically and mentally, if they have this context in which to live.

And we've done away with that and so now all we're left with is public debate about things. And it's very easy for somebody to say, 'well you've just contradicted yourself.' But in fact, if you're on to the truth, at some level of reality you will contradict yourself, because there's something called the coincidence of opposites, which I have a whole chapter on — and it's foundational, I think, to my view of the cosmos — is that if you push farther and farther in one direction, you don;t get farther and farther away from the thing you hope to flee, you start finding that you're approaching it again. Like in Alice, where she was told to walk awayfrom the door if she wanted to go into it.

And this is where we now are, that we think, 'Oh, this was good. So let's have more and more and more of it.' 'Let's have more and more freedom' of a certain kind. that in history has always ended in tyranny.

Things lead to the opposite if pushed far enough. We need to be harmonious in our thinking. We need to be balanced. We need to have some equilibrium to our thoughts, and we don't at the moment.

33:15

Mediator: Those people who do dissent from this rationalistic framework are often demonised as kooks or worse. And you see it all the time. It's a very heretical and big thought that they may actually be the wiser ones in our society. How should we think about that? The people in charge, who are so sneering often at people who, either because of religious belief, or because they don't sign up to whatever the current thing is, they suffer a kind of a great deal. I'm just wondering, how can we distinguish between those alternative voices that are actually wise, versus the ones that are kooks?

McGilchrist: Well I was going to say yes, the first thing is that just having a different point of view doesn't mean you're necessarily wise. You could be kooky and some are, but nevertheless, I think those who are wise do have a position far different from the one that is now instilled in us in schools and through the media, and so forth. Which is in fact, a very impoverished vision of life. It's lost all its beauty, its richness, its complexity and become very simple, sterile, repellent.

And so I think, if we could begin wo suspend our judgments that somebody who differs from this is automatically wrong and listen to what they have to say, we'd be making steps forward. I would say that a civilization cannot thrive if differing points of view cannot be heard.

Hanna Arendt, one of the greatest philosophers of the last 100 years, who was herself, a German Jew, and experienced Nazism, said that 'once something can't be said, you're already in a tyranny.' So, it is indisputable that we are all now living in Britain, in 2023, in a tyrany, because there are people who say, 'you can't say these things and there will be terrible consequences if you do.' And you know what I mean.

35:40

When does Science become Scientism?

Mediator: Let's talk about science a little bit. You have a big section on science, and in particular, how, although you're a big advocate, of course, of science - you are a scientist. Do you feel like it's taking a wrong turn. When does science become scientism?

McGilchrist: When it quite simply says that it can answer all our questions. But a moment's reflection shows that there are so many things that are important in our life, that science can't fully explain to us: the beauty of a rainbow; of a wonderful landscape; of a piece of music, its importance and meaning, which is very real.

36:28

It's not irrational or unscientific. It's just beyond the grasp of science and reason. It's illogical, irrational and itself unscientific to suppose that science can answer all our questions. Science is only supposed to admit things which can be proved to be the case. But it cannot be proved to be the case that science can answer all our questions. It's not a scientific assumption. It's an assumption of faith, and scientism is a faith.

Much as I would say, there are fundamentalist religious, who I very much regret. And there are fundamentalist atheists who I regret just as much. I think the reasonable person is somebody who has an open mind. And it's only by opening your mind that you experience what it was you experience what it was you were missing before.

It's rather like a figure of fun in earlier philosophy called Simplices, who wants to learn to swim. And so he just sits on the bank, and he reads about how to swim but in fact, you can't learn how to swim until you get into the water . To actually understand many of thses things, you have to behave at least as if for the time being, you're willing to be part of it, and then you find out what it is that you didn't see before.

And at the moment, we are just too rigid. And science has become dogmatic.

For example, for a long time, it's been saying there cannot be fields of form. In a way, Rupert Sheldrake has been the person who's promoted this idea. And he has always been rigorously empirical. He's always said, 'look, here are experiments you can do, carry them out.' And if he says that to dogmatic scientists, some of whose names begin with D, they say, 'we don't need to do the experiment, because we know it's wrong. Now that is not science. That is the opposite of science.

38:27

So now we are discovering that there are fields of form that are important in physics, and are probably the explanation for how organisms are aware of a form. You see, we thought that once we decoded DNA, we'd found everything in there, but it's just a strip as it were. And where in that do you find the exact position of something in the brain that has a nucleus that has ... No! It's a form. And if you cut something off a certain organism, it will regrow to that form.

Now, I don't know the answer to where this is but what I like to think is I was representative of a science that was interested in all the possibilities. In testing them and looking and finding out. Not just shutting one's mind saying, 'no, no, no, no, can't be.'

39:15

Mediator: And that's where we are?

McGilchrist: I think that's the worst of science. I think there are good scientists, and there are now at last good life scientists, biologists who are being imaginative and seeing these things and talking in a much more holistic way about things. And they've got a long way to go yet to catch up with physics.

I find that the scientists who are most interested in my work are actually physicists. Lots of them have written to me out of the blue and said, 'It's absolutely fascinating what you say.' Because these two different ways, if you'd like. to give a simple taste of this, rather like the differences between the wave and the particle. The one is specifiable here exactly at this moment in time and the other is actually existent over a broader area and is not certainly specified.

40:04

Mediator: You had an appendix in the first volume, entitled 'Why we should be sceptical of public science.' Which went into some examples of — and this clearly was annoying you — that there's actually ... the way public science is conducted. Well, you tell us.

McGilchrist: I mean ... public science is not the same target as science. Public science is run by administrators. And they have various bees in their bonnet, that we should all do this and do that, and do the other in order to be healthy. And usually when you come to examine the science, it's much more complicated than that, and often doesn't support the position at all.

There's also a problem with the idea of — I wish I had time to explain all these things — but with the idea of peer review. And peer review is the basic idea of science. You send it to another scientist. What do they thik about it?

There are all kinds of pitfalls in this. It can be corrupt, and it can not happen at all. And there are journals that will publish for a fee. And a lot of them now, have come into being. They're called predatory journals.

In order to survive as a scientist and have a career you have to have published. One of the problems for many scientists is finding anyone who's willing to publish what they've done. And there are now journals, a lot of them based in China, I regret to report, that solicit articles and will basically publish anything as long as you pay them to to publish it.

SO that's not how science should work. And there's an amusing example of this. There's a man, a computer scientist in Australia called Perter, I think, who was annoyed by constant solicitations from the International Academic Study of COmputer Science, or something like this. And so he wrote to them finally, to ask them to take him off their mailing list. He submitted a paper, which was called 'Take me off your fucking mailing list.'

And the paper was seven pages long and consisted only of the scentence 'take me off your fucking mailing list', repeated to the end of the paper. It also had a diagram in it, a flow diagram with little circles leading with arrows: 'take ... me ... off ...'. It was brilliant and he was flabbergasted to discover that the journal wrote to him and said that his paper had been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, on a fee, which he declined to pay.

42:39

But this is ... I mean that is an extreme example, but there's an awful lot of this now eating in ... You's be very credulous to believe that everything that you read is said to be science is science.

But this is a problem of living. Intuition is a very important faculty. It has now been programmed into distrusting. And in fact, that's made us as stupid as we are. A lot of the really stupid things that we now seem to believe, the sort of mass selusions , would never have come about if we used our intuition.

But intuition can be fallible. Absolutely. Reason can be fallible. One way of describing schizophrenia is, and this has been said more than once by people who didn't know that they've said this, that the madman is not somebody who's lost his reason. It's the person who's lost everything but his reason. And, in other words, leads by causation chains, to conclusions that are logically possible but to anyone who actually lives experientially, they're not likely.

For example there are voices in the room, and there's nobody there. Do it must be coming from the electricity socket, or from the neighbours or from outer space. But most of us don't think like that because as well as having a chain of reasoning, we also have a faculty of reasonable judgment based on experience that says, well, this is extraordinarily unlikely on what I know. And this is more likely.

So, I'm not attacking science, I'm just saying that science is not immune from all the problems that go with being a human being. It's practiced by humans, eith all their greed, their ambitiousness and so forth, competitiveness. And so it's a minefield. You have to use your discrimination. It's a lot of hard work.

When people say something, look it up. I spent thirty yuears looking up things that pwople said were true and finding out how evidence based they were.

44:41

Is there hope for fixing the mess the world is in?

Mediator: The world you describe has gone, it would seem, very wrong. And it almost seems bewildering, how to set about fixing it. You have moved to the Isle of Skye

McGilchrist: Everybody's followed me unfortunately.

Mediator: Yes, you were saying that the tourists have followed you. But do you have hope that this can be fixed? That this civilization can be righted? Or do you think now it's the time just to withdraw and hope for the best, or wait for some new civilizational cycle or something? Is it worth fighting every day to tey and fix it?

45:24

McGilchrist: I think it is, but in order to do that, effectively, you have to,and I think if I may say so, that for many people, what has opened their eyes to what is happening, is reading my work. Because once they've read it, they see what's happening everywhere. They see these patterns forming. And it's therefore easier to see what you need to push back against.

I think it is possible that we may survive. I think it's exptremely unlikely that this civilization will survive. But most civilizations have not lasted for more that a few 100 years .

So we're just seeing parts ofd what happens. I think life will go on, but it won;t be life as we know it. It's very likely to be. But why should we privilege that?

We've had that gift for a while, none of us is going to live forever, I'm sorry to tell you. We're all only here for a while and we enjoy the gift we've been given. And then the world moves on and something else will come anf they will have their gifts and their problems.

So something will survive,. Possibly some of us, human beings, will survive, and I think that if they were able to gather together in small communities — small enough to trust one another, because trust is crucial here. And you can't trust when you're in a virtual sphere of billions of people. Trust is the most important thing for a civilization.

They can trust one another, honourably work together towards .. with much simpler needs, closer to the earth. Not the extravagant and fantasy kind of lives that we now lead.

47:00

What can we do now? Well, there's a whole lot of things really. We can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature and that's, of course, the obvious and and is underwau in many very good organisations and human beings in the world today.

But I think we also need to re-establish some sense of who we are and what we're doing here. And I think that althoufh we've fot all this power and machines tha can wuote 'think' — they can't think at all. They can process information extremely rapidly. We're not really wise. And one of my answers to when people say, 'what should we do?'. is pray. And by that, I don't mean as Heidegger said, 'only a God can save us not'. I didn't mean that God will suddenly come down and with his divine hand, sort wverything out, and it'll all be OK. That's not going to happen.

48:01

But what I mean is that if we adopted a different, less, arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world. If we incorporated some sense of the limitations to what we know and can do. If we had some humility. If we re-kindled in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder before what is still there, in this beautiful world. And with it, brought some compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them down, vilifying them, telling them they're frightful because they disagree with them. Reasonably talking and saying, 'okay, you disagree with me. I'm Interested. Explain your point of view.' And then there should be a discussion.

So we become capable of rescuing the mess that we've got into. But what we mustn't do is follow the strident shrieking voices, whatever they may be saying.

49:05

Mediator: That is a wonderful moment to rake a pause. If the way to save the world is to gather in small groups and talk openly in an atmosphere of trust withour judgment. That is what we're trying to do.

All of us right ow. We'll take a 15 minute pause. The bar is open and questions afterwards.

49:23

Consciousness is an ontological primitive

Questioner: I think the key which established your credentials, in my view is your statement that consciousness and matter are the same things and there's no temporal aspect .

McGilchrist: Well that's an easy one. As you know, I hold consciousness to be an ontological primitice. That is to say, it's not derived from anything else. But it is, as it were, a primary constituent of the cosmos.

I don't think that consciousness is somehow secreted by the brain. I believe it is in everything. I am a a panpsychist, which is not at all an unusual position for philosophers these days, even in the west. And I'm, also a panenthiest, as it happens, but we won;t go there.

And matter I think, is a phase of consciousness. And when I say phase, I don't mean a temporal phase. I mean, a physical phase, as in water has phases. In one it's ice, in another, it's flowing. In another, it's just dispersed in the atmosphere.

So people say, well matter doesn't look like consciousness. Well, no, but what's dispersed in this room doesn't look like a river or a lump of ice. They have different qualities, but it's the same material, if you like, to put it in another way. Thak you.

I mean, I just fon;'t like the word 'esotericist', because it's conflated with all kinds of woowoo. And one thing I am not is woowoo. But on the other hand, I am very open to the insights of mystical traditions, East and West.

51:00

How do you listen to music?

Questioner: How do you listen to music?

McGilchrist: Well, there's npo need to sort of approach it consciously, and analytically, because it's a whole intuitive experience, hearing music, to which we as a whole respond, including our whole body. Never mind bits of our brain.

As you possibly know, in most people who are not professional musicians, most of music is appreciable, principally by the right hemisphere. That's to say melody and harmony. The only bit that the left hemisphere seems to get generally is rhythm, but even complex rhythms, syncopations and so on, are better processed by the right hemisphere.

It's an interesting observation that music has progressed, if we can use that word, in the context, to something which is largely rhythm without melody or harmony. So that's what I'd say. One simply appreciates it with one's whole brain.

I think one can get caught up in the idea that somehow each brain is isolatedly hearing one thing and .. no, because there's communication between the two hemispheres. The sound is coming all around to both ears. It's like the conversation I just had with a lady about sight. I mean it's not a rigorous split that's going on there. I'm talking about something at a higher level. About the way in which the world is put together by each hemisphere, and that's demonstratively different.

If you isolate one hemisphere of the time, you find a different personality with different preferences. There is no question about that.

52:32

Is there difference between the male and female brain?

Questioner: Is there difference between the male and female brain?

McGilchrist: Yes.

Mediator: Would you care to elaborate?

McGilchrist: Oh gosh. This one always comes up. And the trouble is that to answer it in a sensitive way and not set up a lot of hairs, I'd have to spend quite a lot of time answering it. If I tried to put it very simply, I think it's certainly not true at all that the right hemisphere somehow female and the left hemisphere male. If anything, I think the opposite. For example, what's established beyond doubt is that women's excellence in skills is often linguistic. Whereas for men, they may be much less linguistic, but more obale to manipulate things in space — visual and spatial manipulation.

And that is a right hemisphere property largely, and linguistic fluency is largely a left hemisphere property. And in utero, it is testosterone that caused the right hemisphere to expand.

I could go on and on and on. In fact the tight hemisphere is bigger than the left, as I often say, but that's almost entirely due to the influence of males who have a bigger right hemispheres than left. Women's hemispheres are more similar to one another.

And that takes me to the, I suppose the point. I was going to make, which is that, I think it's pretty indisputable that male brains are more specialised, the left and the right. Whereas in female brains, there's more overlap between the left and right. So there's more of the right about the left and more of the left about the right than there is in a man.

And this has a consequence, that if you have a stroke in a certain place in a woman, she's more likely to be able to recover using another part of the other hemisphere than is a man.

And I think that because, from an evolutionary point of view, women are absolutely essential. They're the ones that carry on the species, and men are somewhat dispensable. I mean, they can be experimented with by nature. And so you get men who are very extreme left hemisphere, or very extreme right hemisphere.

And don't forget that all those mathematicians and so on, are great mathematicians because of their right hemisphere, not because of their left. The left hemisphere is good at calculations, and can carry out procedures, but actually, the business of doing maths and so on, is very right hemisphere.

So it's a complicated picture but that's probably the most I want to say about it right now. Neither is better, it's just different ways of being.

55:19

Language has favoured the left hemisphere over the right.

Iain explains how language starts processing our brains towards the left side.

Mediator: Great. Let's go towards the back of the room shall we?

Questioner: I was thinkging about how we're moving towards the left. Do you think that it has anything tro do also with language and speech? We were taught, I remember in a pdgast with Sam Harris, you were saying speech comes from the left side of the brain. And so, speech inherently has to be limiting and break things down in order to communicate. I mean, Roger Scruton wrote us on 'effing the ineffable', which of course, you can't do. So, is there anything to that, the fact that we have language and that it starts progressing our brains towards the left side?

56:07

McGilchrist: Yes, it's undoubtedly one of the big developments of the human brain is language in general, and speech. And speech in most right handers, 97% is in the left hemisphere. In the case of left handers, it's 60% in the left hemisphere, 40% in the right hemisphere.

But I don't think we should get over excited about that.

The point that you're making, I think, is that the business of being able to articulate something in language requires a certain degree of analysis and categorization, and that the really important things in life don't lend themselves to this process and are famously ineffable.

I mean, the divine, love, music. All these things I keep coming back to. The experience of beauty. These things are enormously limited if one tries to do them inlanguage, unless the language is poetry. And I see poetry as the way of language undercutting itself, as it were. Outwitting language, to do something that an ordinary language can't do.

And the interesting thing about poetry is that it's very much right hemisphere dependent, because it involves all this explicit — sorry — implicit things like metaphors for a start, and tone and associations of ideas, and so on. The right hemisphere is much better at this, the left hemisphere can read a repair manual for a lawn mower.

But you know what I mean, there's a difference between certain kinds of language. But broadly speaking, if your point was that something very important happened to the brain with the advent of language, and particularly speech, then that's right, and it has favoured the left hemisphere over the right.

58:05

Creativity linked to the right hemisphere.

Mediator: Ands so the left hemisphere dominated culture will see a decline in literature, in poetry and imagery?

McGilchrist: I think creativity in general, because it is so dependent on the ability to hold many things together, that may not even look like they, they gel — not collapsing them too soon into a certainty. The left hemisphere wants to know what this is. And we know from accounts of creativity that the iportant thing is not to say, 'oh, I see what it is.' Because as soon as you've done that, you've plonked it into a left hemisphere box with a little label on it. You have to actually resist that and allow the thing to come into being and then it will be a true poem, not just a piece of verse as it were.

Questioner: So you could argue that for over 50 years now we've rejected this age of reason. If you look at Heidegger's existentialism, post-structuralism, all these things reject systematising, boxing, and doesn't leave anything in itsplace. But I mean surely we're seeing the inverse within intellectual history? It's not left hemisphere dominated, but at the same time, it doesn't seem to see any hole in it.

58:50

Post-modernism is a disaster.

McGilchrist: Well, you may or may not be right, but as you know — you may be a professional philosopher — that Western philosophy departments are almost exclusively populated by people who follow so called Anglo-American analytic philosophy. And they laugh at Heidegger and so forth, but Heidegger was I think, somebody who was trying to articulate things that the right hemiksphere sees.

The post-modern thing is a disaster. It's basically collapsing into, 'there is nothing really there, we make it all up.' And the two things that I am rejecting are that we make it all up, or that we have no part in making what it is. One is naive idealism, the other is naive realism. And actually, what is happening is — I keep saying this — a relationship. It's what our brain, our consciousness — better — does when it meets whatever it's experiencing that brings about reality.

So I accept that in intellectual history, there has been a shify away from that narrowly analytic way of thinking, but I'd say that's only in pockets within academia. And what is much more common is this, post structuralism, post modernism that anything goes, because everything's equally true.

Well if everything's equally true, why don't we all just cut our throats now? I don't think so at all. I believe there is such a thing as a truer view, a truer pronouncement. But it's not that there's something out there that we have to get to by a chain of reasoning. It's something that we have to feel our way towards and have a sense of, and then it comes more and more into being.

It's a responsive relational thing and you know when you'e onto a path that is somehow succeeding in approaching the truth. But you could never be certain about it. Co it's always up for grabs. There aren't any rules for defining what exactly is true.

You see, because we so idolise rules and procedures, we think if there aren't rules and procedures for something, then it can't really be real. But all of the really real things are not succeptible to this proceduralisation.

I was just having a ocnversation with a youn man who's studying at Durham at the moment, and I just hinted in what we were saying that one of the problems with universities now, as with schools, as with the medical profession, and with the whole of life, is the sudden explosion of bureaucratic procedures and thinking. There are manuals upon manuals that you're supposed to read and observe and follow. And then we're surprised that professionals who are skilled people, who have learned things through experience, want to leave the profession because they're effed off with the general tenor of the way in which they're cheated by managers who'd never been teachers or doctors or whatever.

I had a very distinguished colleague who was a bit of a mentor of mine, the professor of neuro-psychiatry at the Maudsley, and he was queried by a manager about why he sent a patient for a scan. And he said, when I have to explain to a manager, whi I've snet a patient to a scan, it's time for me to leave the profession. And he did.

And the people who really taught me knew what was what and they communicated a fire to me, which was the gift. It wasn't information. But if they had to fill out all these questionnaires and be jubject to guidance and rules and so on, they'd just have said no, forget it. I'm going to retire and cultivate my garden.

1:02:52

The crusade for certainty.

Questioner: Could we say, rather worrying, worrying me, that we're living in a world where the very reasons for doubting are doubted and there is this crusade for certitude?

McGilchrist: Absolutely. And by the way, that is entirely part of the hypothesis I'm putting forward, because one of the first things that differentiates the hemispheres is the left hemisphere has to have certainty.

These's a famous picture used by Wittgenstein, which is actually taken from a Victorian children's comic, which shows wither a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. And that the right hemisphere is able to hold those together without collapsing them. But the left hemisphere is unable to. It's either this is a duck or it's a rabbit. What do you mean?

And that's its attitude. It's cut and dried to everything. It's black and white thinking, dogma, cut and dried thinking unnuanced thinking, the craving for certainty that lies behind our problems now. And that is exactly an expression of the left hemisphere's mode of being in this world. Whereas the right hemisphere — I think may have mentioned this — is the devil's advocate. It was so called by Ramachandran, a very great neuro-scientist. It's the one that says, 'yeah, but maybe not.' And if only we had more of that voice saying, 'yeah, but maybe not, let's have another look.' We wouldn't be in the mess we're in.

1:04:19

The spiritual and the sense of the sacred.

Mediator: I'm just going to abuse the chair for one second and ask a follow up question. the one area that we haven't sp[ent much time on is what a lot of volume two of 'The Matter with Thing' is about, which is more the spiritual, I suppose, or the sense of the sacred. And here we are, we're 40 metres from westminster Abbey. We're going to have a strange coronation ceremony there in two weeks time. Do you think this must be part of the story, mustn't it? That that need for certainty is also an insecurity because there is an absence which religion used to fill in some way? How do we understand that in a big picture?

1:05:08

McGilchrist: I think to some extent, althouth I would say that any religion that peddled certainties was not a religion, properly speaking. It wasw a dogma or doctrine, which might or might not be right. But most of the great theological thikers and mystics have emphasised this. Not that there's no reality about it, they're very clear that there is. But not that there is a single way of thinking about this or realising it or seeing it.

Everybody has to make their own way there. And although you say that there's this sense of the sacred, it's actually one chapter, the last chapter. I put it there at the end, because I thought if people have followed me this far, they're going to see the point, because a lot of pwople will just be put off by the mention of the sacred or the divine. 'What? This guy is some sort of freaky basehead.' If I may reassure you, I wouldn't like to say exactly what I believe in religious terms, but what I definitely believe is that the great religions, all of them, and the great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, and so on, have central truths that they hold in common, and that these are a kind of wisdom that are not appreciated, unless one is brought up in a tradition that helped one see them.

And our tradition is dead against seeing them. So it's much simpler just to say, 'it's alo nonsense because I can't see any of this. I can't measure it.' But I don't think that that is reasoable. I'd be much more cautions and say that on a matter of experience, those who have experience of such a realm, and I think I do ... No voices or supernormal anything but just in my appreciation of the world since I was a young person. That the beauty of it. It spoke to me and still speaks to me of something beyond this realm.

When I first heard the great polyphony of the Renaissance, I thought, this is intellectual. Yes, it can move the emotions. Yes. But it's not primarily either inellectual or emotional. In fact, it's spiritual.

1:07:28

Safe practices that can promote right side thinking.

Are there any examples of safe practices that can focus our brains to right side thinking?

Questioner: Thank you for your talk. Very interesting. There is no shortage today of apps teaching you mindfulness. I was wondering if you could have any examples of safe practices that would focus on this right brain thinking. How should I call it? 'Mind-halfness'? or something like that? And I'm aware, it's a dumb question because you're trying to do a Gestalt switch, you're not trying to just give a bosy of content, 'have this, do that.' But I'm curious what you think about it?

McGilchrist: It's a very good question. You realy answered it, that one of the procedures, one of the ritual pratices that one could have would be mindfulness. And I believe it is extremely valuable. And effectively what it is doing is recruiting the right hemisphere's attention to the world in a peaceful and deep way, while silencing the chattering left hemisphere, which, as you know, in that literature is referred to as 'monkey mind.'

We're always rushing to verbalise, to judge things, instead of actually allowing them to declare themselves fully. And in 'The Matter with Things', I do quote a long passage from a Buddhist monk who is considered an authority on mindfulness. And I quote this fairly short passage and indicate 23 things in it, which indicate a right hemisphere preference over a left one.

So I think that is a valuable practice, thank you.

But also allowing one's mind to be free to and pay proper attention to music, not just have it on in the background to sort of make you feel calmer. I mean. good music can disturb as well and can bring very deep and profound feelings.

To open oneself to poetry, to make a habit of reading good poetry, listening to good music, you know, appreciating a walk in nature. Just being aware of one's surroundings. And then one finds there are good things there, despite the overall picture that I'm afraid I've given it just somewhat ... wel, it says realistic really. We can't go on as we are.

I think everyone knows that but we can do what we can. And those sort of things are personal things we can do. And there are other things we can do for society in general.

1:09:41

The notion that science can't prove everything is considered weird and unacceptable by mainstream science.

Questioner: I share your beliefs that basically science... If you say that science could answer all your questions, or could possibly answer all our questions in the future, it's anti-scientific. But also on the other hand, I also study medicine, so for me it's also difficult because my intuition is that science cannot answer all the questions in the future. But on the other hand, I think it's also rational that you believe because science has answered so many questions, that in the future might also be able to answer questions that we cannot yet believe that it's going to be able to answer.

So what I'm saying is .. What I'm always wondering, because also I don't want to, like by my fellow students, and by scientists, I'm always regarded when I have these views that you are sharing, I'm always regarded as this woowoo person. How am I supposed to respond to that? And what would you, in the practical world, suggest to young people, who are trying to be scientists? How should you proceed? To be regarded as a scientist and not as woowoo person? Kinf of combine these two hemispheres again?

McGilchrist: That you are seen, as you believe, in that light is simply a proof of what I'm saying about the culture.

But I do also know from many, many young people — and I'm very pleased that a lot people who listened to me and talk to me and write to me, are young people. And they see there's something profoundly missing in the version of the world that's given to them.

And there are a lot of these people in the medical profession as well. I have a lot of extremely humane colleagues who realise the value of the somewhat mechanistic science that we have. And I'm not saying it has no value. Absolutely not. I'm just saying it's by no means the full picture. It is a small part of the picture. And as to whether or not science can ever explain certain things, I would say not unless one expanded the meaning of science to include things that science at the moment doesn't allow itself to include.

So it would be a word game.

Questioner: Maybe there's going to be a machine that if I give in all my information, tells me what I should do. And that's likem kind of scientifically correct. But that might be possible, but I think it's just beyond comprehension for humans. So what's the practical? How can I explain to my friends and to like the society that we should think about what's the benefit ...

1:12:18

Concluding thoughts.

McGilchrist: Okay, yeah, I've got it.

I think the problem is the way in which we trained scientists to be doctors. Doctoring is as much an art as a science, and unless we understand that we produce bad doctors. And I don't think that anyone actually should be allowed to read medicine until they've got an earlier degree in something in the humanities. Something like philosophy, which would make them question the automatic assumption that what they're looking at is a machine.

They just get rather hurt if you say, but it's not a machine. 'Oh, what do you mean? That can't be the case.' But look, if they knew the first thing about philosophy, they'd realise that they're making assumptions that they can't substantiate. And against which there are many particularly good arguments. So, yes, let's re-educate doctors or change the way in which they're educated. I think that would be wonderful.

But at the moment, stick to your guns and say what you believe in because you'll find people respond to you. I have.

I need to stop I think, because I have to get train.

Mediator: Iain, I promised we would end at 8:30 and indeed, it is three minutes past.

Thank you so much to you. Thank you for coming. And thank you all for your questions.

 

 

 

 

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