A Conversation with Iain McGilchrist

foreign [Music] this is Tim green with rattle magazine what follows is my conversation with Dr Ian mcgilchrist which took place in September 21st 2022 was published in the winter issue of rattle rattle number 78 the conversation is a deep dive into the divided brain exploring the role the two unique hemispheres play in creativity we also discuss how the modern world has come to be dominated by the left hemispheres Darrow focus and how poetry might be an antidote to the matter with things Dr McGill Chris is a psychiatrist philosopher and literary scholar he's a Quantum fellow of All Souls College Oxford a fellow of the Royal College of psychiatrists of the Royal Society of Arts as well as a former director of the Bethlehem Royal Mosley Hospital London his previous book The Master in his Emissary The Divided brain the making of the Western World reached International recognition Acclaim and has marked him out as one of the greatest thinkers and philosophers of our time his latest publication is a two volume work the matter with things which was published in 2021 by perspective of press a sustained critique of reductive materialism it concerns the questions of who we are and what is the world what do we mean by purpose value in the Divine and how do we most reliably set about finding out you can find much more of Ian mcgilchrist's work at Channel mcgilchrist.com That's Channel mcgilchrist mcg-i-l-c-h-r-i-s-t.com he also has a YouTube channel where we post many videos including a poem of the day during the pandemic so I hope you enjoyed this conversation and um we'll be back next week with the rattlecast take care but uh well let's start so this is a like I said it's just a thrill to be talking to um just to uh yeah where I'm coming from I'm kind of uh you know have a broad range of interests in the similar way that you do um I was a molecular biology major as an undergraduate and worked in in an mRNA Lab at the University of Rochester studying the The conformational Binding structures of mRNA as an undergraduate and then just a few years later I ended up being a poetry editor by some you know the way life works um but um but a similar kind of thing and and so I came a poetry at first from a scientific kind of curiosity I wanted to know like what made poetry tick and we had this whole archive at the magazine of interviews so I was reading through we had about 50 interviews at the time now it's hundreds um and reading through thinking about the ways poets talk about their creative process and and to me I started coming up with like this this model of of um um like the Consciousness sort of mining the subconscious for what truths and meaning that the subconscious knows and so when I came across the master of Emissary it sort of provided a neurological grounding for that belief in how poetry was operating and also sort of tilted it 90 degrees because instead of this this sort of ephemeral Consciousness and subconsciousness distinction it was really the the left and right hemispheres of the brain um so to start out could you explain just just your model of um of the two hemispheres um and their asymmetry and why they're they're they're different and the the basis for that um just so people that don't aren't familiar with your work can understand what we're talking about later sure um by the way are we actually recording because I haven't seen anything saying we are recording uh we are it's just um I'm according to OBS so oh okay that's fine normally a little thing comes up and says recording has started and then I go yeah got it uh well we usually do a live podcast so I'm using the same system is that and not not okay great yeah okay yeah um how to do this simply I ought to have got the elevator pitch by now um I I think it's it's the the first thing to say is that most people who think they'd have heard about the differences between left and right hemispheres need to forget just about everything they've ever heard because that is wrong uh what is also wrong is that there are no interesting differences um yes the old version of right versus left hemispheres has been exploded but no it's not that there's no differences there are very very important differences more important actually than the ones that were mentioned and the differences are in how not in what so in the old days it was language and reason in the left emotion and pictures in the right now we know that both are involved in absolutely everything but they just do them in predictably consistently quite different ways so the left hemisphere which from a point of view of evolution is the one that is helping us to grasp and manipulate the environment to get food accurately and swiftly to pick up a twig to build a nest that kind of stuff and the right hemisphere is seeing the broad picture it has sustained vigilance for everything else the 360 degree Arc whereas the left hemisphere is focusing on about three degrees of that Arc now this gives rise to two different kinds of world based on the two kinds of attention they pay and I just want to emphasize the word attention because it's pretty important I didn't initially tweak quite how important it is but it is actually the faculty whereby we constitute the phenomenological world we inhabit and if you have a very precisely targeted already preempted attention to a detail but or on the other hand have a completely broad open ready for anything kind of attention to the whole you see two different worlds the left hemisphere sees a world made up of little fragments that are isolated and static and his job is to somehow use them or put them together and it it sees a world in which what it understands has to be explicit is decontextualized is abstract and general and the right hemisphere is one in which what it sees is always connected with other things always moving always changing always ramifying never necessarily explicit it picks up all the stuff that's implicit which is terribly important like humor and metaphor and jokes and and and poetry and myths um and it understands that everything needs to be seen in its context including the context of the body so it's in touch with that the body and with the unique whereas the left hemisphere is not the left hemisphere's world is rather like an abstract plan a theory or a map uh it it works for certain purposes strategic purposes but it's not good at understanding the whole world that it Maps that's the right hemispheres task so that's effectively the difference that the world presences as in all its complexity Beauty and fullness and integrity to the right Hemisphere and the world is seen as a skeletal abstracted minimalist schema or map of that world yeah and I love the way you put it simply uh that the left brain is interested in apprehension and the right brain is interested in comprehension and and that seems to be the the main distinction is just what they're what they're interested in really and so why why would a brain develop such such strong asymmetry um and and I think you mentioned that the the corpus callosum in mammals is much thicker than um than in other other animals um and and so there's like the sense that it has to be divided um what is it that that like what is the benefit of having two minds instead of one wouldn't it be simpler if we had just one and and we knew what we were doing all the time yes well I mean the first point to make is that it is literally all pervasive so every creature we know however um primitive from our point of view in the hierarchy of living beings which we stand on the Pinnacle however low in that they stand if they have a brain at all it's divided and even the first neural networks that we're aware of there is a creature still living a CNN and equal nematocella vectensis has a neural net 700 million years old it's already asymmetrical what is this about it's about solving a conundrum on which survival depends which is how can I effectively and efficiently grab and get stuff that I need to manipulate and yet at the same time survive because if I'm just paying this very narrowly targeted attention I will become prey to whatever else that's going on around me I won't be aware of predators I won't even be aware of my own mate my my Offspring the whole of the picture will be absent from my mind so this is such a difficult thing to do with one neural network that Evolution has made sure that there are two the corpus callosum is in fact a mammalian invention so there is no uh connection between direct connection between the hemispheres or only very vestigial ones before you come to the mammalian corpus callosum there were some commissures but they they're um several factors orders of magnitude um less impressive in the corpuscalation and what's interesting is that overevolution in mammals the corpus callosum has not kept up with the increase in size in the brain so our corpus callosum is relatively small compared with our rather large brains and what's more a lot of the stuff going on between the hemispheres is actually inhibitory so what you've got is two neural networks each capable of attending to the world in a different way and therefore producing for its experientially too coherent but different pictures of reality both of which we need to draw on and neither of them is just right or wrong in certain circumstances we need the one in certain circumstances the other but the general idea is that they need to be able to function largely without interfering with one another and that's why the corpus callosum is actually often saying you keep out of this I'm dealing with it and that gets into the creative process that I keep seeing you know in every poet I interview they talk about the way that they you know we all will talk about how poems provide something that we didn't know we knew um you know poets talk about how they feel a scent and they have an itch and they just want to scratch it and they're like a bloodhound following a trail figuring out where it goes and it really feels like it's that that left focused attention that's trying to explore into the the deeper understandings of the right brain and sort of make sense of that um does that work in your model like where where does creativity come from in this process um with the with the holistic understandings of the right versus that focused attention and the language that the left has access to yes well this is the embarrassing moment at which I do accept that one of the things this has always been said about hemisphere differences is on an exhaustive examination likely to be correct which is that the right hemisphere has a much greater role in creativity than the left it can do things like hold opposites together without having to collapse them into is it this or is it that it therefore is able to understand different layers of meaning that may not immediately cohere to the conscious mind it can understand um metaphoric and understand as I say all the implicit stuff that is necessary for great literature and that doesn't have to be spelled out it indeed becomes much less powerful when it's spelled out much as a joke collapses as soon as it's explained so if the left hemispheres focal irritable need for certainty it loves certainty whereas the right hemisphere is more able to say yeah but it might be something else ramachandran BS ramachandran very famous neuroscientists living very near to you um in L.A says the right hemisphere is the devil's advocate so what he's really getting at is that it's it's seeing other possibilities all the time and what's very important in creativity is not to collapse what you what is coming into being too quickly into a conscious expression because it's Rich while it's doing this ramifying growing and you don't want to crystallize it before it's reached its fullness it would be rather than like pulling up a plant to examine the root system and make sure it's developing really well but this is not going to succeed in improving the flourishing of the plant so it it's a very important point that this these two kinds of uh intelligence um one much more imaginative than the other need to be kept apart for a lot of the creative process the left hemisphere comes into play at a much later stage where you're making perhaps kind of more distantly critical decisions about whether this is really the right word here or not and and that gets into too um that the title of your your earlier book The Master and his Emissary whereas uh the the right hemisphere is the master and the left is the Emissary can you explain why it why I use that framework well interestingly since writing that book and then coming to write my more recent book which came out in November last year um the matter with things I learned that all over the world there are myths such as the one I had heard of the master and his hemisphere the master and his chemistry story can be stated fairly simply there is a wide spiritual master who looks after a community well so it grows but as it does he realizes that he can't look after all the business of it in fact not only can he not but he must not get involved in certain aspects because if he did he'd lose his overall view so he appoints effectively a bureaucrat a minister his Emissary to go about doing his administrative business and to report back the outcomes and this Emissary though bright is just not bright enough he doesn't know what it is he doesn't know and so he thinks he knows everything he assumes he knows more than the master although he actually knows very much to less and he adopts the cloak of the master and the whole thing the master the atmosphere and the community fall apart in Ruins so I discovered that this is actually also present in the 8th Century Chinese text the secret of the Golden Flower it's also in the E Ching it's also in the great epics of the uh Hindu vedanta mythology it's also there as it turns out in the most extraordinary fashion in a in a myth held by the Onondaga people and in Iroquois um First Nation people in America which is so staggering that I I tell it at some length at the beginning of part three of my new book but that image is obviously something that we've intuited I mean obviously these people didn't know how the brain functioned in its two hemispheres but just by inspecting their own thought processes they realize there's a part of them that is very wise and knows a very great deal but it's constantly being sort of interrupted and encroached on by a lesser faculty that thinks it knows it all yeah there seems to be and I wonder there seems to be an almost a desperation for the right brain to to tell the left brain what it knows is that the case you think like that the communication is almost one way um you know I'm thinking a lot about last year we interviewed on James penabaker I don't know if you're familiar with his work about expressive writing in the healing powers of that yeah so so James penevere just fascinating he started um way back in the early 80s um at the University of Texas I think he um gave undergraduates this expressive writing assignment where they would just write about their most traumatic event and then the control group would write about something random and he found that the people who wrote about a traumatic event um had a tangible measurable results uh months later they had better grades they slept better and they even had their blood work showed better um just healthier blood work and so I think more T cells it was a T cell count and so um yeah and so there was this way that that somehow um you know getting to what you don't know you know but you don't know you know or what your right brain or your subconscious is trying to tell you is healing in some way it allows you to sleep better at night and you're you know there's less visits that's one of the things too that were less visits to the the health office for colds and things for the for the group that had had written about their traumatic events and so the idea that he the groundwork for that is that um that it's that that sense that the right brain knows this thing and it wants you to come to terms with it but you haven't yet in your left brain and so it's all it's it's sort of desperate to to have that kind of connection and then once it does you can sort of heal and move past that traumatic event that you experienced um and so that just that creates the sense that that the right brain wants to tell the left brain um but the left brain won't listen is that is that something that aligns with your your reasoning absolutely and at several levels so first of all um at the electro physiological level the right hemisphere does communicate more and more quickly to the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere does to the right then there is the evidence from split brain patients that soon after the procedure in which the corpus callosum is surgically divided so the hemispheres for a time are somewhat more distinct from one another more independent if you like um during those periods very often the right hand will show its impaired patients with something the left hand is doing sorry the the the left the left hand of the right hemisphere is doing yeah so for example um the the person may get out with their right hand left hemisphere a cigarette and begin to light it up and the other left hand of the right hand is a counter takes and throws it across the room so don't do this you know so I mean not that the right hemisphere is punitive but don't forget it knows more than the left atmosphere and it's less bogged down by um routine than the left hemisphere in certain literal ways but I think the more important thing from your point of view is that the right hemisphere communicates through complex symbols images narratives myths so the whole business of both art and indeed religious Traditions spiritual Traditions depend on myths and on symbols and so of course does art all the time it's it's dealing with things that must remain at the symbolic level people if they become simply a coded version of something that can be stated explicitly they've lost their artistic qualities they've just become a book like a manual that you could read so it must always remain at this level where it has power over one emotionally we talk about our gut feelings about things well that is actually literally also part of what's going on one's body is involved in the reaction to a poem it affects your heart rate it affects your blood pressure it can make the hair on your neck stand up it can bring tears to your eyes your musculoskeletal um your musculature it relaxes and and tenses in reaction to the movement of the poetry and you know you have more nerves in your gut more neurons than it are in the brain of an intelligent animal like a dog so your body is busy communicating with the brain about things that they'd understand yeah Emily Dixon says um you know I I know it's a poem I feel like the top of my head has been physically taken off and I've always thought that that that feeling which we all get reading a great poem um you know the Goosebumps and the sort of chills and that that just that visceral feeling has something to do with the the two parts of yourself um coming into alignment about something for the first time that you were disaligned about it feels almost like a you know the way like um like a step leader starts a lightning strike you know and so there's like this connection and then the bolt of understanding and that's that that feeling that we Chase as artists I think not just poets but in any art would you agree with that yes an also scientists and mathematicians by the way yeah so they have moments of insight in fact all great um discoveries in both maths and science seem to be accompanied by first of all a period of hard dogged work but then a letting go and relaxing and allowing that just to sink into the unconscious mind and then it's so often described almost inevitably described by great scientists and mathematicians that it was just when they were busy doing something else like one particular example is a mathematician who is putting his foot on the bus after going shopping suddenly the answer to something he'd been working on for two weeks came but this is the general story that these intuitions come and they are that sense the AHA sense is accompanied by activity in the right Superior temporal right Superior temporal sulcus and Jairus and then the right amygdala so it is very much a right hemisphere mediated element obviously in art but also throughout Human Experience and it involves being able to bring together shapes images and felt connections that if you look at them too closely it will vanish once you've got them they're okay but if you try and do this process too early that's really the point I'm saying then you lose it yeah and how much because so many scientific discoveries have come through dreams too I mean like the the structure of benzene was one thing that came in dream um Watson and Crick the double helix yes um yeah and I've heard that um I don't know if this is apocryphal but I've heard that Thomas Edison maybe it was I think it was Thomas Edison would sleep with a with a ball bearing in his hand over a metal pan and it's sitting in his desk he let himself fall asleep he'd have a dream and once he fell into a deep enough sleep to have the dream he dropped the ball wake himself up and he'd remember the dream and that's some of where some of the insights of his came from and it feels like that's all just tied together like it feels like poetry and just art in general is the stuff of dreams and dreams are trying to make this connection too like the dream a dream is almost like the right hemisphere trying to tell through symbols what the left hemisphere needs to know which is also what art is doing so so how are dreams how do dreams function within that's uh this this model well uh there are differences of you about the exact neurophysiology of dreaming and but my own view to cut a long story short is that it is effectively when the right hemisphere is more active in communicating about what it knows yes and certainly um young thoughts that dreams contain very important information about what was happening what might happen in the future Etc so there was a long history indeed of poets um likening their their insight to moments of vision and a dream any and in the Bible too prophecies are seen as coming in sort of dreams so that is a a strong connection that we've always made between this I think the important thing is not necessarily whether you're actually Dreaming or asleep or if you're awake but it's the thing of importantly not being in control now the trouble is that the culture in which we live leads us to believe that we should be in control of things all the time and if something's not in control it's a danger but this is the left hemisphere speaking don't forget it's the one that's trying to get stuff command stuff to have control over things to have power to do things uh it's the spirit behind technology um not behind the best science but it's what technology is is the ability to do more basically stuff um and we need to be a bit careful I'm not saying you know I depend on technology for many of the things I do but we need to be careful that we're using it wisely because otherwise what we're doing is putting machine guns into the hands of toddlers but in any case yeah um what can I say I I I agree with you and that so that that brings up the the act of making you know the creative process itself um and it seems to me that what poets is hearing them speak about their process what they're all trying to do is find a way to turn off the left brain or quiet the left brain so that the right brain can speak so there's um this this aspect of ritual to it for a lot of writers they'll use the same kind of like I have one of these Black Wing pen pencils which somebody gave me because that's the only thing they can write poems with um you know a certain time of day is the writing time of day you know they have to be in a certain place or in a certain setting or in a certain mood and there's sort of this this ritual aspect to it which helps maybe quiet the left brain and then there's the whole way that the architecture of formal poetry Works two which which always strikes me is a kind of way to focus on the details of language so that you so that your focused attention is like distracted almost so that surprising things can come out like The Poets who write formally all say that they can't write free verse poems because they don't have the same creativity it's like the the process of um of focusing on the meter and the rhyme is what allows them the freedom to move within and make these surprising leaps and connections so so yes is that is that something like how how yeah yeah how does that work how does that how do you go about shutting down the left brain so that the right brain can bring out art and poetry and those surprising understandings yeah I mean how'd you do it I think probably depends um from you know your changes with the person and some people have their rituals as you say um but what is definitely clear is that as so often in life a balance between freedom and constraint is very important and that actually some element of constraint actually liberates Gerta said it is it is the law that gives us freedom and and also as you said in limitation the master first declares himself and it's well known that many poets were sort of as it were guided into their very best lines by the constraints of meter and rhyme in fact I think the the lack of rhyme is is the throwing away of one of the most powerful effects in poetry um so yeah um we need to be able to to feel that and often I think and it's certainly been my experience that I'm not much of a poet but I have written in the past is that poems come to you as sort of shapes or outlines to begin with and occasionally there's a couple of words that seem to be kind of bringing themselves into Focus somewhere in this mix and it gradually kind of comes into being more like a picture coming into Focus than a line of things that get added to one another so there's a sense of the hole at the outset and then it gets filled out I suppose how you do that I don't really know I mean I I spend most of my time not writing what is conventionally thought of as creatively I hope it is creative in a way but I don't I don't really write poetry and what I found with that is it's just a very very very hard thing to do and some people I say you know when I tell them I really sweat blood over my writing they say that really surprises me it reads so easily and so well and I say yeah that's because I sweated blood over it how much of it is is meditation um because that that's the thing that I keep coming back to I always say uh that I think the best book of advice on writing is then in the art of archery have you read that I've read the more famous book with a similar title but I haven't read that one actually no yeah so so um it's just this this instructions on how to do archery um but okay so let me uh let me I don't okay so this is from Zen the art of archery the right art so so it's an instructor teaching uh somebody how to do archery and have the kind of calm and balance that it takes to actually hit the target so he says um yeah the right art is purposeless aimless the more abstinent obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede what stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will you think that what you do not do yourself does not happen and so it always strikes me is that the left with its goal oriented um focus is that willful will and what a creative person has to do is to turn down the voice of that willful will and let the spontaneity come out um does that does that resonate and that it feels like that's meditation though too like when we sit and meditate what we're doing is turning off that voice in our head that's just always yabbering about one thing and letting us be in the moment and of the right brain Maybe no that's that's absolutely right um I I was going to say that you know one of the ways in in which we can practice letting go of our controlling thoughts and controlling words and limiting ideas is through mindfulness meditation in which we're simply present that is maximizing the openness of the right Hemisphere and it should be distinguished from the idea of nothing happening you're making nothing happening but in that space of active receptivity not passive receptivity but actively opening your ears as it were to attend not to put something there to attend to but exactly to get away from doing that and to try and contact whatever it is that is trying to get in touch with you because if you're able to preserve that open receptivity you do find that there is much that it can be then communicating with you there's other ways the noisiness of your own thought processes would have drowned out so yes I do actually think that mindfulness meditation particularly is is a very good tool whether you want to write or not but perhaps to help still what is called monkey mind you know the left hemisphere jumping about going from one concept to the next and thinking yeah I've got it I've got it and so you want to switch off from from that and and the trouble is that most of our way of life in the modern world is geared to a distracting elements that distract our attention it's very hard for people simply to empty their mind of distracting thoughts and distracting wishes and desires so yes that this is about the willful will I would you know there is a sort of deep desire in the right hemisphere for attraction to certain goals but that sort of willful conscious controlling will is the left hemisphere interfering and yes I mean golfers musicians everybody who practices an art or a skill knows that if you try too hard you choke and you don't do well so it's there's a period though as I often say when a bit of willful practice is extremely important if you're going to be a great pianist it's very nice to be attracted towards the whole piece that's the first thing that happens that's the right hemisphere's openness to it and understanding of it but then you have to start going that passage at bar 18 I've got to keep practicing it and so on and and you understand the harmonic structure of the piece you're learning but then when you actually go out there and perform you've got to forget all of that or you'll do a terrible performance but it's not that what you did was wasted it's just that it must now sink into the realm of the unconscious and indeed a philosopher I very much admire Ian Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead said that a civilization advances by the number of things that it can do unconsciously and and he meant the same about human beings we become more and more efficient as we can do more and more without actually having consciously to strive to achieve it yeah it's fascinating that you bring that up because I was I wanted to talk about the the development over time of of poets and just artists in general because we do this other thing we have a rattle young poet's Anthology once a year which is um poems written by children at age 15 and younger and there's this fascinating thing that we found just reading the submissions that come in we get thousands of submissions every year we pick a few dozen for this anthology and and there's just so much creativity in the early you know we've had poets as young as age three and then up until around 12 or 13 there's just this sort of freedom and then around 30 you know 12 or 13 the freedom just collapses into the self-consciousness and then it feels like what um like like a poet across their life is trying to to follow that model of learning a piece that you were talking about because because we we fall in love with the creativity but then we we apply all of the learning and the knowledge of writing and the skill and then we have to get back to that child place at the end and that's where it seems like a lot of people fall out um Sharon old says that there's not a bad poet in the first grade and um and that's just our experience like they're all just natural poets every one of us was a poet when we were young enough you know every Everybody wrote some some lines and we learned acquire language through nursery rhymes and things like that and then eventually we fall out of it and we become self-conscious and and lose that sort of connection to the right hemisphere years sense of magic I guess you could say um so how do you see something happen at that age you know just neurologically to to explain that or is it socialization um and how and how much about about creativity is getting back to that childlike State of Wonder yeah I've seen just what you described happen and I think one does have to be discover that sense of one day in fact all one's life one needs to try and recover a sense of awe and wonder which one had earlier in life and which are people attempts to understand the world which we idolize and think are so clever drive out the more astute wisdom of the one who is simply awestruck there are many poets that have written about this words was encouragement about it the German poet wrote about it and um it's a very very important point I I sometimes distinguish between a kind of Unknowing and ignorance so ignorance is what you have before you know anything then you start knowing stuff and finally you need to come out the other side of knowing with a kind of Unknowing which is worth all that knowing and more you know and it's slightly like the Innocence of a saint is not the innocence of a child you have to go through the experience of being you know an adult in the everyday world and then if you're lucky be able to recover that very special innocence so I think it's the again it's the uncontro controlling the undoing the unknowing mind which is all there in Zen and really the wisdom of all this is is already there for over a thousand years in in the Zen literature yeah I mean that's just the fascinating thing about your work is it provides an explanation you know biologically and neurologically for for what people have been exploring in that tradition for so long um um so so you're a lover of poetry um and I love during the pandemic where you're reading poems on your YouTube channel um how do you conceive of the the importance of poetry for society and throughout history too it always strikes me as poetry um was almost the first tool we had because we had this long oral tradition that stretches back you know to the time of cave paintings 50 000 years ago and that was the one way we could record our important stories was through the rhythms and repetitions of language to keep the story straight and so it feels like we kind of co-evolved with poetry um how do you how do you envision the space um and importance of poetry within just culture and generally Into The Human Experience I can't express how important I believe it to be and in relation to what you just said I was puzzled at school to learn that poetry came before praise the Greek poetry was older than Greek prose for example and in the master in his hemisphere in chapter three I talk about the evolution of language out of the music of the human voice the other expressive parts of language other than purely the dictionary and the syntax and and I think that poetry is extremely important for conveying so many things that are diminished as soon as they're put in everyday prose which is why I think it's a mistake for religious rituals to be turned into um the most prosaic everyday language that you can find because in doing so you lose the poetic power of them so I constantly go back to the ancient texts and the ancient translations into English that were made in the 15th 16th 17th century which is so powerful made at the time in the English language was maximally expressive I think so I yes when we were all rather hit a midships by the um covered pandemic I I just I felt that we were all rather cut off from one another and what I felt was very important was to to communicate in powerful truths that were non-dogmatic but there were experienced viscerately by people simply using language and so I I I read 365 poems over the year one for each day and I suppose I could have gone on but I felt there has to be a time to come to an end um and I actually enjoyed it hugely I I it took me back you know to a a an era when I had much more I was much more immersed really in in poetry I mean I've always read it all my life but but it was wonderful to go back to these things and to just read them and feel them and from a neurological point of view what is special is that the same place that is so important for empathy which is the right frontal cortex is also where the important parts of poetry are understood metaphor above all um the the implicit meaning of something in context this is what poetry gives one you know I wrote early in life a book in my twenties called against criticism which was published by shaver and um I think it sold 400 copies and then was unceremoniously reminded um and but in it what I was trying to express was you know what is wrong with the processor the academic process of turning a poem into prose in order to quote understand what it means um taking phrases and expressions out of the context in which they stood and therefore rendering them utterly lifeless and losing the sense of the unique by turning it into the general of the abstract no it's Unique and embodied and you know so that was the theme of that book but what I didn't know at that stage but then later found out is that all these things the sense of uniqueness the sense of embodedness the need for context the understanding of metaphor of implicit meaning even the understanding of the the myths and narratives of great prose works or drama are all essentially in the right hemisphere either in the right frontal lobe or in some cases in the right temporary parietal region yeah um can you say more about metaphor we have something called The Neil Postman award for metaphor that we give every year for the best use of metaphor and one of our issues and Neil Postman because he was such a champion of metaphor he said um I think in the end of Education he says that um a metaphor is not an ornament but an instrument of perception and I always love that that sort of that idea that that we learn we understand the world like everything originally was a metaphor I mean even in a way like even the concept like a chair originally was a metaphor because not all chairs look the same you know and you have to sort of abstract into metaphor to even make a noun and so so the whole world has sort of built up these metaphors that the right brain has created that the left brain now uses um and so so can you just speak more about the importance of metaphor because the the strange thing that once once we put this this um award together and you look at just the metaphors you actually notice how even in you know 300 poems that we publish every year how rare a great metaphor really is um it's something that's that doesn't come up fresh and original and you know that kind of inspiring type metaphor where you're learning something it's so hard to do and it's so rare even in poetry so can you just speak more about the importance of metaphor and what that means to you yes indeed as you say your language is founded on metaphor it's how connections are made between the world of experience and language so even the word metaphor is from a word meaning to carry something across physically a gap the implied gap between these two elements in one's mind and Consciousness and even the words we use to describe abstraction like abstract itself means dragged away um you know immaterial comes from a root meaning mother actually originally then would and then so virtual comes from a meaning of the strength of a man they're all very physical actually at bottom and um as the philosophers Lake off and Johnson have beautifully Illustrated in their books metaphors we lived by and uh philosophy in the flesh really we can't say anything without using metaphor and particularly science and philosophy are dependent on metaphors to be able to say anything at all so it's a complete mistake to think that we should somehow avoid metaphor they're not little um Frills added on to the top of language they are the Bedrock of language out of which the Reds grows so I think this is something we we don't uh understand or honor enough and I think it's you know very important in not just poetry but in all aspects of life to be using the right metaphors and models one of the problems I feel with the way that not physics which is streets ahead of biology but where biology is still sort of you know in a doldrums of mechanical thinking in which it just Likens everything to a machine it's a terrible metaphor actually and um physics has gone long beyond that realizes that nothing is mechanical actually and that you need to be using as Neil spores said you need to be using the language of poetry to express the realities of physics so we're not talking here about something that can be dispensed with or something that is nice and decorative we're talking about something that is essential to meaning and as you rightly say often they've become rather cliched and they the the the um Research into where metaphor is understood in the brain has been mudded by people putting together cliched metaphors and fresh metaphors fresh metaphors were understood in the right hemisphere cliched metaphors have lost their metaphorical nature we just take them literally and they're understood in the left hemisphere and it takes a shock to get that metaphorical meaning out again and there's an English comedian um who specializes in this and I remember him he's called Milton Jones and I remember hearing him one day he was saying you know towards the end of his life dad asked us to rub his back with lard but after that he went downhill really fast where he's done and that's the right hemisphere you suddenly vivified a completely dead metaphor and that coming to life again that electricity is in the is in the right time which also incidentally understands humor yeah can you say these things are being driven out of our conversation at the moment I mean not ours right here but I mean in the public sphere people are afraid of and trying to stamp on humor they're afraid of you know anything that leads away from a few um dogmas which they have decided are the truth well I'm sorry guys and girls truth is not like that truth is is not just a fixed thing that you think is is right and is somewhere in the book we have to be talking to one another honestly openly with humor with kindness with with empathy and that world is the right hemisphere yeah I couldn't agree more um can you see more about the the connection between um humor and in creativity and art because there's a there's a wonderful essay by K Ryan one of the U.S poet law it from a few years ago I think it's called the ah and the AHA and she talks about the way in a poetry reading you know if you you come across one of those sort of enlightening that connection that top of your head come off feeling the audience kind of goes and she talks about the way that that's somehow related to laughter um somehow it's a release like that I mean I imagine it is like the bridge between the two hemispheres being connected and there's like a release of like emotional energy that's been pent up because of that so how do you see humor and art being connected well um I think obviously an awful lot of Art doesn't need to be connected with humor and high art usually is not but there is um such good humorous art um I um I love it and and it's it's also making the same sort of connections that poetry does I'm you know a friend of of John Cleese and I've said more than once to him as far as I'm concerned they're really great comedians such as yourself are up there with the great poets because they they bring these lightning insights from a double take on an expression or a thought so they're constantly stimulating our minds in this in this wonderful way um so yeah and you know there are there are great poets that that are very funny um and some I've just forgotten the name of a poet who I know very well and read read a lot of during May who's a very very well-known American poet Billy Oh Billy Collins yeah Billy Billy Collins that's it Billy Collins I kept thinking Billy Connolly no that's not right no of course Billy Collins I I just love Billy Collins I mean I could have done a year of reading Billy Collins poems I imagine he's read that written that many but they're so clever and so funny um very rewarding indeed yeah yeah what do you think um the poems that you read over that year um that resonated with you what do you think elements what do they have in common that you were drawn toward because you a lot of the stuff you were reading was a more traditional poetry rhyming and meter but then you did you do love Billy Collins as well so so what do they have in common even though they're so different in the way they're they're constructed well they just have to be good parents I say in a rather an unhelpful way um and an awful lot of good poems as I say uh you know benefit from the constraints offered by meter and rhyme if you can even call them constraints because they just Liberate the Poetry into wonderful you know I mean I think of so so many poems but the one that comes immediately to mind is a poem by Sir Walter Rowley I I read quite a few of the poems of his so from the 16th century but you know as you came from the holy land of walsing them met you not with my true love by the way as you came and then it goes on in this this ballad-like thing and it sort of you know it comes with this wonderful lines at the end but you know love is a durable fire from itself never turning never oh never be never sick never sick never roll never die from itself never turning and these really potion moments that even when you know them very well that it makes the sort of hair on on the back of your head to stand out you know I know I'm in touch it's the Houseman test you know he said that you know it's poetry when you're shaving and you read it and the hairs stand out and I I think that's a very good test so yeah yeah I I I like that and but also you see I do think that good humorous poems um do the same thing they they although they make you laugh rather than kind of feel a sense of oh and they make you contact something that gives you life I mean I think the great thing is that a poem communicates a little vital spark and a world without poetry is a world without life yeah yeah I I completely agree and then that brings up I was we were kind of dancing on the topic of your new book um the matter with things um about how the the modern world has become too left focused um can you I mean at 1500 page book but can you sort of summarize your your argument there the elevator pitch for that and then and I just want to know how you think that the Poetry can be the antidote to that because that's that's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing because I sort of have the same sense as you and the reason why I sort of give myself permission to do this rather than some kind of scientific research is because I think this is what's missing um in in life and so so can you explain um just what the thesis of your newest book is and then and then how poetry relates to it yes well and just in case people are frightened by the idea of 1500 pages I should mention the last 200 are the bibliography and index but um yeah I I I I started off writing a completely different book actually but anyway which was really just a shorter version of the master in his atmosphere and I soon decided that I had no interest in that at all what I wanted to do was to pursue the philosophical implications of this fact that the two hemispheres reliably offered to us two consistent phenomenological versions of the world which we we can recognize and we know we're juggling them all the time so if that's the case how do we say it what is true now you know I'm not saying there is one single truth of course not but some things we have to assume are truer than others otherwise there'd be no reason for doing or saying anything we might as well just stay in bed for the rest of our lives the only reason we do or say something is because we believe some things are fewer than others and if we can arrive at that how do we do it if there's two different versions of the world so the first part of the book effectively I look at the various handles that our hemispheres offer on the world I sometimes say portals so through the quality of the attention they pay through their ability to exercise perception to their ability to think and make judgments wisely on the basis of what they attend to and perceive their social and emotional intelligence their cognitive intelligence and their creativity which is also part of how we come to understand anything as what it is and I discovered that in to cut a very long story short in every case the right hemisphere is more reliable than the left now that might sound well okay I don't really care whether that's the right or the left so what well actually so quite a lot because if the left hemisphere's art is simply apprehension grabbing but not comprehension then we need to be able to recognize when we're being advised of what the right hemisphere sees and when we're being advised of what the left hemisphere sees and they have a Hallmark they have an imprint they have a stamp that we can recognize and sometimes famous paradoxes in logic which started with the with the Greeks of course are based on the difference between the right hemispheres take and the left hemisphere is taken sometimes the right hemispheres and one that is definitely right but we can't explain quite why the other one is wrong for example Achilles and the Tortoise Achilles you know is challenged by the tortoise a famously slow animal and achilles the fastest man on Earth you know to a race and achilles said well you know you're not going to win that one and he says no no no I can always you'll never even be able to catch me up so Achilles gives him a start and the logic is Achilles can never even reach the tortoise it's never mind overtaking because first he's got to get to where the tortoise starts from but by that time the tortoise has moved on so now he's got to get to where the tortoise now is but by then the tortoise has moved on and so on and so forth so this is an infinite series and apparently according to the logic you can never get there and achilles didn't overtake the tortoise but excuse me we know that he overtook the tortoise in a couple of straights so although these things may look equally good one of them is right and the other one importantly is not if you assume the other one you're going to go wrong so I think I've made a small contribution to philosophy because when you look through the history of philosophy often the competing points of view and people say well you know this school of philosophy said this but another said that you know and over time some people have gone this way some people have gone that way well I think for the very first time this is a bold claim but I think I can substantiate it philosophers can take a step at any rate towards being this is likely to be more reliable than that it's not just necessarily true and the other one Falls but it gives us a steer that's the first part of the book the second part of the book I can talk about more simply it's really just saying so what paths give them this equipment do we follow in pursuing truth and I take there used to be science reason intuition which we've talked about an imagination and what I basically arrive at at the end of part two is that we need if preferably all four of these to be exercised at least three but at the moment we most often use only one or two and each the best part of each of them including science and reason by the way is offered by the right hemisphere not the left so that's consistent with part one and actually the findings of Science in the end and of Reason are not in conflict with those of imagination and intuition and then part three the final part of the book is so when we use these paths to approach the universe and say what we find there what do we find so I look at things like time space matter consciousness and even things like values purpose the sense of the sacred which I think is a profound thing in Consciousness I don't think it's something we made up but something we respond to and there's a universal human feeling although you can kill it you can disattend to it and you can rubbish it but there it is it's important yeah one of the things that um you know having the the world be taken over through Science and Technology by the left the left brain's obsession with materialistic things I guess you could say is that um the left frame we have mentioned but the left brain lies you know I mean the left brain if if it gets some information it's so desperate to have a simple model that can focus on with that three percent that it's looking at that it will just make up any story it wants to justify not having to change its model and so when we have um you know when we have a world that's built around that we have end up with this like artificial world where where lies become sort of everywhere and I think especially in politics you you feel that and and something's been going on in poetry I'm not sure in the UK If this is the case but poacher's been getting much more political um there are a lot of political poems that are submissions we have this thing called poets respond uh where every Sunday we publish a poem written that week about current events in the news and just six or seven or eight years ago there was sort of a variety of things and over in the United States anyway um with with the rise of trump and that the the even more divisive politics it ends up that the majority of poems are um that we receive are political and and they're clearly the majority are written from the left brain perspective of like I know the answer and this is the explanation and I feel like when I'm reading submissions I'm just looking for I'm listening for honesty and and for that that truth it's like deeper than what the left brain is like projecting in this story that's trying to say um so so can you just speak to that like does the right brain lie or does the right brain is the right brain more honest than the left brain it certainly is and not just I have said that but a number of important neuroscientists have made exactly that point um its thinking is very simple tends to be rather tram lined and rigid it's according to dogmas and principles whereas everything that we're talking about in that creative realm has nothing to do with dogmas and principles but is alive to something very deep inside us I wouldn't welcome a move towards politics in Persia myself I'm not saying that no poem ever written for a political reason could be a great poem no but but I'm just saying I don't think that's likely to be a very fruitful move um and the left hemisphere uh the term used in neurology is confabulates it means it makes up a story to fit the little tiny bit it knows so it knows only three percent of the story but it makes up the rest that it sounds and it's not consciously lying but it is actually lying and sticking to its lies in the face of people challenging it and a very dramatic instance of this which I can I often do speak about is it's it's extraordinarily unshakable optimism that it knows best and it knows right and nothing to do with it is ever wrong so it will literally deny a paralysis so if if after a right hemisphere stroke a left arm or leg is paralyzed the person may completely deny that there's anything wrong with the left side of their body at all because after all the left hemisphere that is now in full control knows everything controls everything and makes it all right so that in the future it's just going to be fine now you hear plenty of people talking oh just a little bit more technology and we'll we'll have sorted ourselves out we'll produce a you know Wonderful World but wait a minute first of all technology only makes us do stuff and making do stuff is only as good as what we want to do so until we've got more wisdom this is never going to help as Einstein said we can't get out of the mess we're in using the same thinking that got us into it in the first place and I think that is something very very important to remember when people use this left hemisphere style and how do you recognize it well you recognize it by its anger because once again the old story was the left hemisphere was unemotional the right hemisphere was emotional but actually it may be of interest to people that the most lateralized emotion in the brain is anger and it lateralizes to the left and that it's the right hemisphere that inhibits successes in appropriate excessive emotion um it's anger it's self-righteousness it's narcissism it's I am right you are wrong I can point you to the text you should read you mustn't read these other texts um and it's it's Reliance on simple Dogma and refusal to debate refusal to hear another point of view because that is already um some kind of an outrage to it well this is this is the way a civilization breaks down and really fast yeah this is what totalitarian regimes have done this is how Hitler came to power in Germany and you know they burnt books in public and heiner said in the early 19th century I'm sure heiner will be one of your favorite poets as year of mine um when they start by burning books they end by burning people [Music] yeah yeah and so so I mean really I mean poetry is or art in general but poetry in particular is the antidote to you know what you point out in this book is the the way we're going off the rails because poetry is an Avenue toward wisdom and into deeper and into con contradiction and the complexity of life and the awe that we we should be experiencing every day but often don't absolutely and and you know I only have to go back to particularly words with um who I think is on inexhaustibly deep um I I and not just the famous short poems that are anthologized but his really great works like the Prelude and the Odeon immortality and the um and things like that um I only have to go back to those to sort of feel my sort of pounded flattened Spirit from this onslaught of ignorance and and and violence to feel my my soul Reviving again it is it is very profound the fact that poetry can have it really does bring back to life it's restores it's it's almost a a tool of of the soul of The Spirit Well Words which would have said exactly that not a tool he wouldn't have called it that and I don't really mean a tool because that makes it sound we only evaluate for a utilitarian outcome but what I mean it is it is the path the channel for the truth to come back into our lives and I just wanted to comment that you know I think truth and beauty and goodness these great values are not things that we invented I don't think they're human inventions I think their human discoveries which is a quite different matter that they're there and it's up to us to respond to them and that what's more our response to them brings them more into being in the universe so we actually play a vital role each one of us we're not just passive observers we are participants in the universe and you know John Archibald we live physicists said this is a participatory Universe we bring stuff into being and I think we do so how we attend to the world with what qualities remained and with the view of which values makes an enormous difference to the world we're going to live in and do living yeah well that's a wonderful place to end it on as much as I would love to talk to you for for hours I can feel like we could go on with that topic alone but thanks so much for generously offering us this one it's been such a pleasure talking to you Ian uh it was just as good as I'd hoped you know thanks very much Tim and uh if you ever minded after this that um invite me another time I'd be delighted to oh I would definitely love that yeah for sure thanks so much yeah okay okay yeah

Channel: Rattle Poetry

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Published: Tue Jun 27 2023