Age of Wonder - Iain McGilchrist, March 30th 2014

yeah well well thank you very much and I will I will talk a bit about the the brain research that went into the book the Mercer on his emissary but I'm going to begin by talking about logic and Smith and also because no good lecture at this event can start or can L can go on without a picture of a coral reef there is a coral reef here and I don't think this thing is working actually but that won't be I think oh it is I wanted to pick up on I don't know if many of you were Richard forties talk yesterday the idea of abundance and diversity as a primary aim of evolution if one can talk to Leah logically in other words things progress not just motored by utility but it seems by a need for multiplicity and diversity and I've also feel very strongly in the nature of things about the human being that we're not just motivated in fact by utility the idea that all the beautiful things in the world that our spiritual aspirations can really be reduced to something about sexual selection I think is far-fetched and actually rather irrational and I think it leaves very much out of the story but anyway there we go I'm here to talk to you about the myth of logic and the logic of myth and for those of you who want to hear me debunked logic and I'm going to disappoint you because I have a huge respect for it and depend on it very much but I want to point out that just as there is nothing false about myths because it is myth it can be the putt most potent route to truth logic has its mythology too and it isn't by any means infallible so I'm going to start talking about the the the problems of logic and I was reminded of my dad actually when I starting this out my dad was a a very good doctor but he he wasn't very good at understanding off fram and one day I was watching the television and there was a relay from Klein born which is a place in England where they do opera and it was a Mozart's Don Giovanni and I was about 17 or something and I was watching this and it was just near the start of the opera's it only three minutes into the opera the Commendatore a is killed by Don Giovanni and it's one of the most moving scenes in all of Mozart and the Don is lying there on these steps clutching his breast who's just been run through with a sword and he's going oh so cold so and the strings are throbbing away underneath and my dad comes in he says what's this it's an opera what opera Don Giovanni by Mozart well that's ridiculous what's ridiculous well he's just sustained a pneumothorax I mean nobody can sing when they sustained a pneumothorax and okay he was a little little minded I suppose and I came across this wonderful quote from william Cobbett who was an English journalist social reformer and farmer in the 19th century in he wrote have you heard of John Milton and Paradise Lost it's one of the great works of English literature anyway he read the whole of milton's poem is such barbarous trash so outrageously offensive to reason and common sense that one is naturally led to wonder how it can have been tolerated by a people whom astronomy navigation and chemistry are understood this man also by the way criticized William Wilberforce the great slave reformer for being on the side of fat lazy laughing and singing Negroes he wasn't altogether right in his out on life and I'm also reminded of the late mr. Hitler who said that he never never read novels because that kind of reading annoyed him so being a being a averse to mythology and keen on the sciences and logic doesn't necessarily mean that you see most of the picture as I say I'm here only actually to limit the errors of logic it's a very very useful tool and the Greeks had two to two ideas about truth one was called Lagos which was what you found by the process of reasoning and the other was mythos what you understood out of the experience of life and at a level that might be hard to make explicit and it's really in a way a category mistake as philosophers would say to examine one in terms of the other it would be like taking King Lear for a literal account of the reign of a particular royal personage who might probably never existed so everything has its mythology and like everything logic has its mythology and what is that it runs ahead of what logic itself would support it really says that the only source of truth for an intelligent educated person would be the the process of of logic and I just want to say I think we should be wary of this and approach it as we should approach all things including myths with appropriate skepticism I suppose the first thing to say is that logic can't found itself so it has to start from something which it can't reason about these are called axioms so the things that is taken to be true they might not be true actually and the only way in which we can say that we we think they're true is that they normally accord with experience well normally according with experience is an important way of getting to the truth but it's not really the same as logic it's more like intuition which comes from experience equally it can't really tell us much about the fruits of logic and logical process ends up with something else but it can't really tell us very much about it or about its nature its quality or why we should value it that again comes from human experience so what is it it seems to be a sort of intermediary which will take us by a process of a sort of self referring nature give me some premises and according to an internal system I could unpack that and we can reach somewhere else that is a very useful thing to do but it can't either ground it at the bottom end or and say well this is definitely true where I start or what the truth is about where I end up it is a consistency machine actually we can't also rely on logic to explain why we should use logic you can't reason to logic using logic we have an intuition from experience that logic is often very helpful so it's wrapped up in at the bottom the top and in the middle with intuition and if that isn't bad enough let us consider the facts with which we reason facts of course facts and therefore unquestionable or are they first of all the facts from which we reason depend on how we attend to them in fact how we attend to something changes what we see that and therefore what facts we assume to do the case equally a lot of the facts don't agree with one another so you can find pieces of scientific research that will suggest things that are clearly opposed to one another that's the norm in science and of course there is a process over time whereby we we sort of we things out but generally speaking we're relying on whether they make sense at a higher level and that is really seeing the overall picture it's understanding the gestalt you like pieces of data that are wild they're worth paying attention to because they might upset everything and turn us on to a new paradigm that's true but if they don't get replicated or there's nothing else that suggests this then we tend to sort of phase them out so we harden our view up in in a sort of experiential intuitive way around those facts and of course sad to say a lot of the stuff that is produced to science is much less reliable than the mythology of science would say it was the plenty of scientific evidence that actually journals rely more on things like the prestige of the author's their readers and so forth can be fallible and so on and so forth and some of the research is actually fudged and indeed even when it's not fudged it turns out that scientists like philosophers often begin with their conclusions and reason back rather than start with evidence and reason forward to conclusions that's not because they're bad people it's because they're people and being a scientist doesn't stop you from being a person so I'm not here to cast aspersions on science or logic let me please reiterate that I have spent 20 years reasoning on the basis of science and I would be undermining my own work if I said that but I do think it's appropriate to think of the limits of rationality because nowadays there are people like friend Dawkins who gets wheeled out rather often in these lectures who seems to have a very narrow conception of knowledge of humanity of what the world might be the trouble is lots of people are terribly good at for example microbiology or they're awfully good at astronomy and somehow that leads them to believe there will be good philosophers and theologians and they fill the newspapers with their views on these subjects never having bothered to take a look at philosophy there we go see one of the problems with reason as the philosopher Stanley fish pointed out is that it doesn't know what it is it doesn't know because it is a self enclosed system it's not necessarily aware of the things that don't fit after all if they don't fit it simply ignores them because they don't fit into the system fortunately I don't just have to say that here standing before you was a rather and middle-ranking kind of scientist and mathematician I can call on the greatest names that ever lived in this realm for example Pascal one of the unimpeachably great philosophers and mathematicians said that reason is indeed poor if it doesn't understand how limited reason itself is and the philosopher and mathematician and he need logician CS purse the American the 19th century philosopher said it is the instinct the sentiments that make the substance of the soul cognition is only its surface its locus of contact with what is external to it and he also said and these both come from an essay called rather charmingly detached ideas on vitally important topics man is endowed with a form of emotional rationality he has the ability to cognize from his disposition to feel what is valuable seems to be immediately felt and cognized now in this setting we haven't got time to unpack all of that it's absolutely fascinating stuff it reminds me of the philosophy of max Scheler which again I can only advert to today the contemporary of Heidegger's who unfortunately died young and who according to Heidegger was the only man who understood him Heidegger and he gave it shayla's funeral the funeral oration in which he said he was the greatest Schaller was the greatest philosopher of his generation but shayla thought that in fact the value of something is not something new reason - it's something you were aware of as you're aware of the color blue it has a sort of realm of its own that can't be just utility utility or rationality and he called this in German var name when we haven't got away in English for rigorous in Dutch of saying this and so the sort of concept of value exception being something that you've just are able to feel as Antonio Damasio well-known American neuroscientist has pointed out and lots of others too what comes first is feeling it's not so much cogito ergo sum as sent you ergo sum I feel therefore I am and in biology this is called or in human biology this is called the primacy of effect and what it means is that usually our conclusions are based on intuition and a sense of something and that we later justify them through arguments yes of course there's also girdle and perhaps no good lecture on philosophy can manage without a reference to girdle and about whom Greg chaiten a prominent American mathematician pointed out that it's not just that with any self consistent system there are propositions that are true but cannot be proved by the system but there are and I quote from him an infinite number of true mathematical theorems that cannot be proved from any finite system of axioms so there's a bit of a problem with the idea that logic will get at everyone and indeed being rational can in at times be extremely irrational I mean if you think the same kind of thinking that gets you somewhere in court as a defense lawyer is appropriate in the bedroom you're up for a surprise and it's not just that but there's a kind of rationality taking rationality too far that is clearly irrational minkovski zen minkovski in the 1920s great phenomenological psychiatrist was probably the first person to note that although we think of aniss as loss of reason the madness of schizophrenia is better characterized as an excessive reason or even a displacement of reason so that we have to reason about things to understand them in a way that most of us would understand intuitively and from common sense and this often leads to false conclusions when ideas come to you that you don't recognize instead of being able to think he probably came from my unconscious you imagine that the police have set up a radio system in the next room and are beaming ideas through the wall into your brain because this is the logical conclusion I didn't recognize these thoughts where do they come from and again you will know from DiMaggio's famous book descartes Serra in which by the way he commits de cartes error throughout that he describes a man who could not any longer after a right hemisphere stroke understand things immediately but had to reason towards a conclusion about everything and he brought his life for a sound standstill perhaps in a more interesting way rationality is self subversive and if you don't know a book which is now I'm afraid probably 30 years old or even longer more 35 years old and by John Elster a brilliant Norwegian philosopher who speaks English better than most English people he wrote a book about this topic called sour grapes essays in the subversion of rationality in which he pointed out that it's quite irrational to do lots of things that rationally you would think right for example if you have a goal the rational thing is to go straight for it one would have thought and try and achieve it but there are many things in life that are paradoxical in this way starting with something as simple as going to sleep the harder you try the less you can manage it and the more you tell yourself I'm not going to try I'm going to try not to this subterfuge is seen through by your reason and you simply can't get to sleep but there are many other rather more important things like trying to be natural trying to be sexually aroused trying to be wise all rather important things in life but their best not done by trying in fact what is rational to do tends to be context dependent for example one of the problems with the financial crisis was that the algorithm said if following circumstances happen to be right you'll end so according to this it was just the same to lend to Nicaragua as it would be to lend to Germany but anybody with any common sense or knowledge of the world would know that these are differing sorts of lending with differing consequences and indeed unfortunately Americans not having a good grasp that there are other cultures in their own sometimes go into places in the world like the Gulf thinking we know what's right for people because any rational person would like a democracy and they wouldn't particularly want to be ruled by all kinds of old-fashioned laws and rituals but unfortunately every context is different and somewhere that has a different history a different climate a different geography a different ethnology different theology and a different philosophy of life is going to say thanks but no thanks sometimes and that can be mystifying to Americans with good intentions see the problem is if context makes things change and it does you you have a problem with your general rules because none of them are actually applicable we have to have rules in life in a way but we have to know how to break them and how to modify them according to general rules I like very much the saying of you Jen Jen Lynn the American philosopher who is the father of school of psychology called focusing he said and I think this is beautiful we think more than we can say we feel more than we can think we live more than we can feel and there is much else besides a couple of rather bright and French researchers called Mercier and Sperber well French and American I suppose even produced a paper you may know about a couple of years ago suggesting that reasoning is nothing to do with getting the truth it's about winning an argument I mean this is actually one of the problems with having a purely evolutionary approach is you don't like ideas like truth and so you think well it must have been about beating the other guy up but I do quite like this idea because it does it does suggest as Mercier says reasoning doesn't have this functioning of helping us get better beliefs and make better decisions in fact you may know that sometimes the more you reflect on the decision the worse the worst decision you make and that is psychologically demonstra ball and he says it's a purely social phenomenon it evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us truth and accuracy being beside the point well I'm not sure I swallow that I do think of course that it has as I keep saying its place but it's well to be skeptical because it's often used in that way and as Nietzsche pointed out it's not always a way that is actually very good at convincing people he said and beauty speaks to people through art incontrovertibly and produces a greater degree of agreement than any rationalism ever could nothing is less convincing than argument as the experience of every meeting at which their speeches proves and I don't know whether you know am under full book came out a year or so ago by a chemist called Andy Pross called what his life another book I'll recommend to you and I just want to quote from him because there is an idea that science has immutable laws and and works things out theoretically to logical conclusions but actually of course what it's doing is making do with a lot of approximations all the time that look good from experience so this is an exact quote in contrast to terms such as theories and laws which radiate some sense of absolute truth the term patent is more subtle less committed less definitive more open to modification even Newton's laws those pertaining to gravity and motion have had to undergo revision following Einstein's revolutionary insights if we keep in mind that every hypothesis theory or law is ultimately just a pattern the day that that theory or law is modified or revoked will be less surprising less disconcerting and he goes on to make the point that generally speaking what science does is not deductive reasoning but inductive reasoning which is really just learning from experience so and he points out that actually the problem in the financial crisis was that instead of learning from experience people learnt from their theories which were all very logical but actually then correspond with the world outside the window so he says I would argue this is pro ii that the essence of all scientific endeavor stripped of its many elaborations trimmings and jargon is nothing more than the successful application of the inductive method it's the successive application of the inductive method that forms the basis for what we term understanding inductive reasoning involves the reaching of general conclusions from a set of empirically obtained facts what one might simplistically term pattern recognition now I like that because pattern recognition is what makes a good expert in any field it what makes a good bibliophile or a manuscript expert or quite probably a good paleontologist and certainly a good doctor and certainly a good psychiatry it's not ticking boxes and adding them up and arriving is a diagnosis by what we call the Chinese menu method I have got two of those and three of those and that means I've got Chinese meal number four but actually by seeing the shapes and the patterns and having seen them often enough to know what's going on and that in fact in pattern recognition is where Lagos and mythos meet mythos doesn't mean that it is mythical in the sense of a lie mythos is a way to the truth equally Lagos is not a lie unless it steps outside its proper bounds and one important thing for all scientific thinking and for all artistic creation is not to collapse things into a certainty too fast if you're asked to be certain about something too early on in the process you won't get there now it was mentioned that it took me 20 years to arrive at the hypothesis in the book at the muster in his emissary and that's a luxury I had because I supported myself by doing a mass of clinical work fortunately I actually like patients unlike a lot of doctors it can't wait to get into the lab but I mean I actually enjoy the business of seeing patients and that kept my mind working and I managed to get free time in the library to do research and I wasn't forced to keep publishing a paper if I had I'd never have been able to produce as it were a broader picture of things and in a way part of us is asked to say we'll make up your own mind is this a duck or is it a rabbit you know it can't be just potentially a duck and potentially a rabbit at the same time the truth about many things is not necessarily consistent and those chairs look red in this light but that we could change the lighting in here and they would be green so in one light they're green and another light they're red what do we mean are they is it green or is it red it has the potential to be both it just depends on the context and equally for example let's get things down-to-earth safety can be very harmful for example protecting children from every kind of risk can start afire them in every conceivable way with their physical and spiritual and intellectual curiosity and growth and make them miserable if they can't be certain of everything and make them prey to every danger when they come across it so actually it's irrational although we want our children to be safe to pursue safety beyond a certain point the problem is that logic doesn't allow us what used to be called the coincidentally opposite orem the fact that opposites often come together this is ancient knowledge it's in loud sir the old loud sue the Chinese sage that's at the heart of Taoism it's in the philosopher Heraclitus my three favorite philosophers begin with age Heraclitus Hegel and Heidegger but anyway Heraclitus as you know for example was aware that things can change and remain the same this was decided all his flux like a river that you cannot step into choice but the only idea is in tantric Hinduism it's in Buddhism it's in German mysticism and it's in Sufism something can change and remain the same a road is at the same time the road up and the road down and the bow which was Heraclitus this particular idea a taut string exhibits Harmonia and what is Harmonia it is something that is pulled to both opposites at once not and it exhibits out of its tension a third quality that grows from the string that is the string of a bow of an arrow can be shot that has power to reach its target and equally from the string of a liar it is possible that music will come out of this tension it's not really there in the string itself it's something that happens from pulling it in two directions at once the idea is fruitful and I hope the hint is is is enough for today and indeed coming forward to Hegel said every actual thing involves its coexistence with opposed elements consequently to know or in other words to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations so what about myths let's think about myths well one of the grapes commentators on myth in modern times was lady Strauss toad lady Strauss famous anthropologist and he said lay meet suppose omoi myths think themselves in me rather Heidegger said I don't speak language but language speaks in me and I think what they were both getting at is these things are not just fruits of our conscious intellect that we made up to be useful tools but they have an existence deeper and beyond me and that they speak to something in me that is that was there before I was able to think and comes out of the unconscious realm where my conscious mind can't follow and I might point out that the Greeks who basically invented logic also majored on myths they were the great users of this and two great things that came out of Greece with the ability to think and reason logically with the ability to understand the overwhelming power of poetry and drama and the delist in other words in myths because myth in a way is the language of metaphor it's the language through which all art speaks whether it be poetry or drama or painting or music and we into it actually the need for myth we don't have to reason to it we we know it but we can reason ourselves there by looking at the examples of people who were very good reason errs Darwin has been much mentioned perhaps you know the passage in Darwin's autobiography where he says my mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding the general laws out of large collections of facts if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen some music at least once every week the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature and again Nietzsche who Nietzsche is like a like a toxin that in very small doses is life-giving and quickening and in large doses and causes intellectual death but occasional occasional references to Nietzsche can be deeply revealing I'm quoting from human all too human therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain to brain chambers so to speak one to feel science and the other to feel non science which can lie side by side without confusion divisible exclusive this is a necessity of health more of that coming as you can imagine I hope I'm doing all right for time okay in fact we become sick without it the English philosopher Gregory Bateson said mere purpose of rationality unaided by such phenomena as art religion dream and the like is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life and I wanted to suggest that these are really just to show you first of all that attention is something that we can't derive from something else we make a leap of attention but when we decide we're going to make a certain kind of attention to life we find a world that corresponds to what comes forward when we pay that kind of attention that indicates to us that the kind of attention we paid was right and we should pay it in future which means we get more of the same and so a world comes into being but if you pay a different kind of attention you see a different world for example where I live on sky behind the house there is a mountain from which the place takes its name talisca some of you heard of the whiskey which fortunately isn't made on my front door but then this mountain takes its name from a norse word meaning sloping rock now what that indicates is that the value of this place - Northman was that it was a landmark and so to them it might have been a very welcome sight on the sea to the Picts who live there it was the home of the gods - 19th century travelers who came there to paint it was a many textured surface of color and and beauty to people who want to but mine basaltic Rock it is a potential source of dollars and to a geologist it's very interesting because of his basaltic columns for the physicists would say there's nothing really there it's just the probability of certain atoms turning up in space and I can't be certain about that at all now these are all true facts about this mountain these are all true visions of this mountain but I can't tell you which one is the true one so I'm not saying there is no such thing as truth but we need to take net cast our net wide and this is really just to demonstrate how important context is so that those two orange dots are exactly the same size what's more bizarre is that they you had to take my word for it but the squares a and B are in fact precisely the same color and the same shade of color but because of the context they look different and sometimes context makes things hard to find in fact the dependence of meaning on context has its lighter side in America for example it can change the meaning of a word they have four sizes of cereal packets and the largest is called jumbo and that means very large and then there comes economy which means large and then there comes family which means medium and finally there is large which means small so contacts can completely change everything this is really just to suggest how important myths can be this is the enactment of the myth of King Lear nobody has suggested that because it's a myth it doesn't tell us true things about life in fact probably very few things that we've ever said or done tell us more truth about human life and this is the myth of Oedipus which helped to unravel complexities of how we relate to our parents and to our children quite important information that was hard to get another way and this is a myth that scientists would be well to respect the myth of Prometheus who believed he could do everything and didn't know what it was he didn't know as a result and Zeus kindly arranged for an eagle to come every day and tear out his liver and also kindly arranged that the liver would be the most self generating organ in the body which it actually is so this business is going on till this day I believe so what's this got to do with the brain now I've got gotten it ha I'm going to try and do a very very quick yep we're all right we're all right we're all right okay okay fine now we all know don't worry about the differences between the two hemispheres you can google it and you get this sort of a document the trouble is that with one exception absolutely everything on this list is wrong and because people have made such fools of themselves looking at this and because middle management seminar holders have made a speciality of talking about right and left brain no decent self-respecting neuroscientists and was prepared to go near the topic so I took my life in my hands and ventured right into the lion's den and decided that it was probably irrational because suppose that there was no difference between the two halves of the brain and this is just where you will find that the true story about all this and people have said I want you to die cot amazing when you say the two parts of the brain do different things well not necessarily they might need to be distinct and yet work in unison and there are many images that again are intuitive or mythological that go back a very long time indeed like the Taiji to what I particularly like about this is it's non absolute way in which there's a bit of yin in the yang and a bit of yang in the inn but they go together to make up a unity even though there is a duality within it now you might say well that's all worried well for the Chinese but in fact this symbol has a universal provenance here as a Saxon first century AD silver plate and this comes from a 3rd century Roman shield mind you probably that was traffic of ideas and symbols from the east I don't say not but it clearly meant something wherever it was discovered and take a look at that shape interesting isn't it the notion of something that is self self generating now there's the brain for those of you not used to looking at the mana slab and it's a bit of a cartoon picture but it'll do it shows the top of the brain is the front and the bottom of the brain is is is is is is is the bottom of the range the back and the right hemisphere has been pulled aside there to show you this band of fibers called the corpus callosum that connects the two it's not the only connection but it's by a long way the largest one of the two of the four or five but I never heard in medical school anybody ask why is the brain divided the question was probably too obvious and it escaped pupils attention you see there's a bit of a paradox here the brain exists to make connections in fact that's entire power consists in connecting neuron with neuron so on the face of it it's a whopping great loss of computing power to have this division and you'd have thought that every evolution we could have got rid of it but not a bit of it in fact it's got more over evolution in the sense that the size of the volume of the cerebral hemispheres has got larger in relation to the size of the corpus callosum over evolution not the other way around and well if you say it's just embryo logical well look your skull starts off as sixteen bones in Utrecht and ends up fairly well fused and for most of us that is really not an argument no and the plot thickens when you realize that a lot of the traffic of course the corpus callosum is actually inhibitory in nature there are many GABA sorry glutamatergic neurons that cross the corpus callosum and they're excitatory but in majority of cases in fact they end up on GABAergic into neurons which are inhibitory and the effect is to keep the hemispheres in communication with one another but keep them distinct and indeed in animals it's known that if they're not properly asymmetrical either in their brains were in their behavior they don't thrive so asymmetry and difference are at least as important as working together now this is really just to remind me to talk to you again about attention because in trying to work out what the difference was I thought I'd get a look at birds and animals and unfortunately unlike the human neuroscientists who got in a bit of a snit about these mental management people and oh yes that Volvo had the car feel right brain they didn't like that at all and but the animal ethologists just patiently did what scientists do and never that never mind that's being put off by that we'll just look at birds and I will see what they do and by observing them they were able to see that they actually use their right and left hemispheres in quite different ways quite reliably this is unimpeachable in in the sense that it has been replicated so many times and in so many species basically what it is is that they need to solve a problem of survival it's like this you need to get food you need to get shelter so you need to pick up a twig to build your nest you need to pick up the seed to eat but to do that suppose the seeds lying on a background of grit you need very precise attention focus on what you already know is important so you've got driven attention that goes to its goal and gets it and that attention is narrow beam and very precisely focused but if that's the only kind of attention you're paying while you're getting your lunch you become somebody else's because you need to be looking out for predators or indeed for your mate that you might be wanting to offer food to and so you need to know the whole picture and to understand it now because I haven't got time to justify anything I'm saying you'll just have to take a few sound bites from me if you want to know more there is the book to go to where there is an enormous amount of data I promise you that will back me up but effectively the the the sort of resident of the left hemisphere is utility of manipulation it enables us to manipulate the environment it's the bit that controls the right hand with which we make tools it's a bit that controls not all of language but the bits of language that enable us to pin things down so it's about precision and certainty it's the bit that says that's got to be a duck or it's a rabbit I want to know now don't give me that guff about how it could be one or the other you see and that's sensible because it's no good if you're out hunting thinking oh god is it a duck or is it a rabbit I think I want rabbit today no you better just go for something and eat it so there is a hierarchy of attention which you don't know about because when you think about how did I look at something you think oh I saw that bit and I saw that bit nice fall and added them up and got a picture wrong what you did is you took the whole picture in and then you focus on some details that interested you and there is a normal hierarchy of attention which means that most people see the H and the four before they see the ease and the eight interestingly the exception to that is in schizophrenia where there is a loss of a symmetry of the brain or sometimes a reversal of but in any case they can't see the whole picture they tend to focus in on details all the time so if you saw the ease in the eights first come and see me afterwards I have a duty as a doctor to D concern you there are many other possible explanations so for example here there is no way famous picture hands up everyone who's seen this before a few of you yes and those who haven't can you see what it is the Dalmatian dog okay so if I can make the pointer work oh yes I can there's the head ear dangling down the back of the dog tail rear leg front legs path crossing in the shade of a tree okay but there is actually nowhere no possible way in hell that you can go to that and say it's part of a shadow and go to that and say it's part of a dog and you build it up from the bits you don't there's an aha moment and that is actually a dramatic instance of what we do all the time so actually the whole is different from the sum of the parts and that's not just made up out of the parts and this hasn't something to do with the right hemisphere which is aware of the whole picture where the left hemisphere is focusing on parts and puts things together from bids and when people have problems with their right hemisphere they know the parts but not the whole they've lost what we call the cashed out that's probably a word in Dutch that's very similar to that I imagine so this is a man you see when it's got a you know thorax and abdomen and you've got at least three out of the four limbs but it's not recognizable this is a bicycle where the wheels and the pedals are there but they're in the wrong relationship and they are the wrong size in relation to one another and here's a house which one recognizes because it's got one of those things on top of it and very little else that makes sense so these are put together from the bit and you know you are summers you to draw an elephant and with their left hemisphere they draw a trunk and then they draw an ear and then they draw a foot and then but they can't draw the elephant so it's interesting and in one if we had to sort of I'm going to have to be very quick and dirty but if we won't had to sort of say what is it that differentiates the sort of world that the very focused piecemeal attention of the left hemisphere comes to create and the sort of broad open non-committed attention of the right hemisphere comes to make the differences are more or less V's that one understands that a whole is not just the sum of the parts putting the parts together misses a lot putting half a cow with another half of a cow doesn't necessarily give you a cow it also looks for certainty whereas it's narrowing down all the time to a certainty remember it's got to get things whereas the right hemisphere as Ramachandran calls it is the devil's advocate diabolo sbrick artists Diaboli so it's the one that is on the lookout for things being not quite fitting categories so it's much more interested in uniqueness it's much more in contact with the actual experience which is not predigested into one of those one of those one of those one of those putting it into pigeon house and so you could say the left is narrowing down to certainty and the right opening up the possibility one other difference is between fixity and flow so in fact everything in the universe depends on this and there needs to be forces for stasis and forces for flow and it's true of atoms it's true of cells it's true of plants and animals it's true of thinking processes one needs to get both working together so we need both and the problem is that sometimes the right hemisphere can appreciate flow so it's the one that really gives us our sense of time and our sense of music which unfolds through time as a flowing thing the the left hemisphere is better at points it sees it in a way as a shattering cine film creates the lumen of flow or as digital media create the illusion of a unity and if you have damage to the right parietal occipital region you can sometimes get this effect of trails which you can also get with psychedelic substances which are harming your right variety of occipital region another is the difference that I said before between the explicit sorry I'm going to go back because that's a bit distracting between on the one hand the the detail that's taken out of context and put into a category which is also decontextualized so the things that are made explicit is one of those I know where to put it compared with the right hemispheres better appreciation of the thing before we have cooperatives or something familiar and made it if you like almost already an icon or image of itself and Elkin on goldberg very distinguished american neuroscientist who many of you will know about spent most of his working life demonstrating this point that when things are new and it doesn't matter what kind of newness that is it might be a new idea or a new shape or a new color or new word or whatever but they come to you first in the right hemisphere and are more processed by the right hemisphere until they become familiar and then it moves over to the left so it's like the left is the world of representation where the left is the world of presencing and once again English doesn't have the right word for this I'm taking the word presencing it's not a verb in English to presence to be present it's not quite the same either it's a Heidegger ISM for which again I apologize probably in Dutch there's a useful word so and in the one you've got as it were the territory the right hemisphere and in the left you've got the map in the right you've got appreciation of uniqueness in the left the categories and I had have to finesse that because of course both of them do have categories but they're interestingly based on different principles so there you go so in the one you've got a world in which there are lots of parts that are relatively fixed uncertain that are explicit clearly members of categories that can be quantified and that are as it were already familiar and represented in the other you've bought a world in which everything is connected to everything else because it's all part of a flow in which there's only holes not parts or at least there are parts but their approximate regions of holes in which things are possible everything is potential in which the everything is actually best implicit and changes its nature and it's putting the spotlight of attention like sex and religion and and where there are unique things not just categorize things where the qualities the how nurse of things how is it done is as important as what is done and you have those two worlds and we need them both and we need them fused in consciousness now I'm just going to that's all rather abstract so I'm going to run through some nice-looking slides this one is something that medics will know immediately which demonstrates that following a right hemisphere stroke the world is constituted only by the left hemisphere and although there's no blindness involved you get only half the world the bit that the left hemisphere is interested in manipulating it can't be bothered with that stuff it knows that the bits it users are on the right and so you just get a right if you ask people to copy things they will just copy the right side and if you attend if you're standing in their left a visual field you you won't be attended to you have to stand over on the right not because they're blind is an attentional problem and they'd read only the right page of a newspaper and sometimes only close or shave the right part of the body not the left so reality is brought into being on one side now if you have a stroke in the left hemisphere so that the right hemisphere is constituting the world you don't just get a half world because it's interested in the whole picture and it's the one that is on the lookout so it has this broad vigilant sustained kind of attention which is enough to create a whole world now these are interesting these come from experiments in which people had one hemisphere at a time he activated so on the left you get a tree drawn by a person in the normal state this is their tree by the left hemisphere which interestingly shows just information on the right but that's not what I'm interested in here it's how withered and symbolic this tree has become in relation to anything you'd recognize whereas the right hemispheres tree has the sort of flow and form of life here the same thing has happened to flowers where in the left hemisphere version they've become geometric simplified objects whereas the right hemispheres have the structure of a living thing and this is really just to show that only the right hemisphere sees depth it sees things in the world in in a deep world not just a two-dimensional representation in the way the left hemisphere gives you a kind of map of the world and these are all by the left hemisphere and so you see the flattening out that happens and you see what a man or person gets reduced to there they're rather sad symbol of a human being and just to take from a Gazzaniga only do this is interesting this is it before the operation of kama sera to me this was what Sperry and Boggan pioneered in California in the 60s and at Caltech which is an operation to help people with intractable epilepsy where they divided the corpus callosum and pre-op you can see that the left and right hands can both do a possible cube but after the operation on the bottom here you can see that the right hand can no longer draw a cube because it's only in touch with the left hemisphere that divide that would have enabled information from the right hemisphere to get to the right hand has gone so it just draws a child's cube whereas the left hand not done a very beautiful cube but for post-op it's not bad at least it shows you the debt so that is some idea about it another aspect of the left hemisphere is it's denial which is quite amazing you can see a patient who's had a stroke and it's affected left side of their body and this is not unusual this happens in the majority of cases so any of you that are doctors or medical students will have seen this you go on the ward after the patients come in with the right hemisphere stroke and you see them in the ward round in the morning you say how are you I'm very well thank you oh good and any problems no no specifically any problems moving your left arm no no no let me see it then that well I didn't see anything did you see anything no no no see bring it right round in front that is it there move that they go oh that that's not my arm that belongs to the bloke in the next bed and these are people who are not psychotic they just have no concept that they're unable in some way and people who have right hemisphere strokes underestimate their disability and are therefore harder to rehabilitate than people with a left hemisphere stroke which is interesting is you think that you know left hemisphere stroke can't speak can't use the right hand for most of us that's pretty disabling but actually it's easier to get them back to work than it is somebody with a right hemisphere stroke because they don't understand the world they don't understand what people are meaning anything that's implicit like body language facial language tone of voice humor irony metaphor doesn't understand it and and also they don't know how limited they are so they're in a different world now so this is really to illustrate the kinds of attention of the right hemisphere governing sorry the left hemisphere governing the right hand and going straight for his target but if you like that is the way and the left hemisphere thinks and it's actually for all our sophistication at the bottom of many of our models a Newtonian mechanical idea of how systems work which has been lethal in finance lethal in biology in the understanding of a human being and lethal in general when applied to life because in fact life is complex and systems are self-referring for example if you predict the stock market you've already changed the stock market in which you on which you were basing the prediction equally if I tell you about some wonderful unspoiled island in Greece that only I know about and it suddenly spoiled so this is this is a problem where it's the right hemisphere so I down here at the bottom because the only way I could make it fit on the slide sees that things are interconnected there isn't just a to be that a to just about anything else and it's living so various studies have shown that the left hemisphere codes preferentially for tools and machines even in left-handers who are actually using the right part of their brain to control with the left hand and tools and machines whereas the right hemisphere is more interested in the animal now this is just to remind me to talk to you very quickly about the fact that things have changed over time times and cultures are not suggesting that the brain changes but I'm suggesting that the way we use the brain changes so they each offer us different ways of thinking and normally this is below consciousness you're not aware that you're alternating the version of the world that the right hemisphere gives them the version of the world that the left hemisphere give because if you were you wouldn't be able to move you wouldn't be able to do anything so we're shielded from the knowledge in consciousness which is why when people say there's nothing we can know about ourselves that we couldn't know without brain science I think they're very much on the track of truth because there's lots of nonsense talked about what the brain can reveal but this is one thing the brain can reveal that we wouldn't otherwise know it's revealed by clever experiments and by natural experiments such as stroke and tumor we know that they do different they give us different worlds and when we stop and reflect on reality we have to choose one or the other because otherwise we're inconsistent and in the past we were able to be inconsistent because we realized there was a coincidence here apposite or 'm wise people knew that things weren't cut and dried they're not all truth were compatible but not everything that's important can be made explicit that metaphors and myths are good ways to truth but since the Enlightenment we have come to a view that only one kind of logical self coherent picture is compatible with truth and that is the biggest error that you can make on the path to truth so looking back through the ages in the book I start in the ancient Greek world and I move through the Roman world and forward to the Renaissance and what I think I show is that three times we can see a picture of a society emerging in which everything that the right and the left hemisphere give when they're working together of course is a brilliant explosion of valuable and original work in science and in the arts it's not a science arts split because for both science and for the Arts you need both the left and the right okay for imagination you need both and imagination is at the root of good science and it's at the roof of good art so you can see that happen and each time you see over the centuries it drift away into the decay of a civilization as it becomes more in thrall to the explicit material the keenest ik view of the left hemisphere this happens between the sixth century and about the fourth century and certainly third century BC in Greece and then it happens again in Rome with a wonderful period at the end of the Republic in the beginning of the Augustine era an era of about a hundred years in which everything that we thank the Romans for for their wonderful poetry their codification of laws the invention of sanitation everything that they contributed to civilization including an perspective in art yes it wasn't just invented in Florence in the 15th century the Greeks had it and the Romans had it but in every case we lost it a civilization decayed it fell away with the Roman Empire and as an image of that you can think how those great walls that made of concrete that made the Roman Empire possible were filled with the bric-a-brac of beautifully proportioned temples just thrown in to make size matter where proportion used to be important and the same thing happens here where in the medieval world we don't paint what we can see we paint what we know by theory to be the case so actually we know that this chat is not really ten times larger than this chap but he's ten times important so he gets more space in the picture and we know that this is impossible perspective but we weren't able to record what we actually saw and if you come forward only 150 years you see this wonderful nativity by Gil and Dyer in which the concept of people connected in time and space is image to the landscape in that procession and you can go back in space deeply there there's a huge depth of space in which we are drawn to explore and there's a huge depth of time here this is set back fifteen hundred years earlier as the Roman sarcophagus indicates but it's also true now as the contemporary Florentine dress of the Shepherd's tells us and this is just an excuse to show you a very beautiful painting which is my favorite painting by Claude in the Ashmolean in Oxford and here there is a myth the myth of Ascanius and the stag but it's not really about that kind of myth it's about how we relate to the world there are five plains of depth out of this almost abstract painting of beauty of texture and form and already this temple has thousands of years of age on it although it's set to thousand year or 1,600 years or whatever it was prior to that we're nearing the end don't worry and this is in the modern era where we see reality as a construct which is painted onto the windows and unfortunately if you open the windows you'll find nothing that well what would happen if as I think we've come to view the world only in terms of the left hemisphere I think what's happened as we've we've we've said no to the intuitions that comes through myth to art through spirituality through the the the the the whatever thought of the truths of our culture we've we've said no to them we've said no we know better doesn't matter that people since time began have always thought in a certain way we are the clever ones well we might just be the first really dumb ones who don't know how to look after the world who are in the process of destroying it now if I was right that we were just using the left hemisphere to image the world what would it look like it would look a bit like this there'd be the loss of the broader picture knowledge would be come to place simply by information or by the tokens or representations of information spreadsheets sheets with boxes that need to be ticked and algorithms I mean of course they haven't been invented yet but if those things were that's what the left hemisphere world would look like I'm sure you've never had to fill in the tick box there'll be the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment because they're too human it would be replaced by something a computer could carry out oops hello there'd be simultaneous loss of the embodiment that means that things are neither abstract nor fully rarified on the one hand there just be lump and matter which is resource to be exploited and everything else would be cerebral eyes and we would be treated as there we were brains in a vat Peter Berger famous sociologist wrote about bureaucracy that it was characterized by these elements all of which would have a field day because these are the typical ways of thinking of the left hemisphere explicit procedures anonymity organize ability predictability justice reduced to mere equality and explicit abstraction the V loss of the sense of uniqueness replaced always by categories quantity would become the only criterion not quality and things would become black and white either all not a matter of shades of meaning reasonableness will be replaced by rationality in German there are the two concepts of force stunts and Fernand and again I hope in Dutch you have this in English we don't we just have reason but we can say rationality and by reason I mean balancing of logic with intuition born of experience what used to be thought of was the main purpose of a human life to become an intelligent wise person they be a failure of common sense which is by no means common these days and systems will be designed to maximize utility there'll be a loss of social cohesion because empathy comes from the right hemisphere the VD personalization would be a paranoia and lack of trust because the left hemisphere wants to control things and its own interest it's the one that manipulates and it's very unhappy when people do things that it can't codify and control so the V CCTV cameras all over the place and DNA data banks and so forth that you need in fact for total control and people think the left hemisphere is the one without emotion is the right hemisphere that deals with emotion but as I said all these generalizations are untrue the left hemisphere is actually the one to which anger most lateral Isis and that's one of the most lateral Isis of all emotions it lateral Isis to the left and we would see ourselves as the passive victims of others doing not taking responsibility for a world which had reverberate akan secuence --is would become purely conceptual visual art would lack the sense of depth which the right hemisphere comes interesting ly depth in space like harmony and music came with the Renaissance and disappeared with the 20th century and that we only distorted or bizarre perspectives music would be reduced a little more than rhythm which is the bit of music that the left hemisphere does get and language will become I hope not too much like mine diffuse excessive and lacking in concrete reference very very abstract there'll be a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder this is the age of wonder I'm supposed to be talking to you about but things like wandering or irritate the hell out of the left hemisphere which knows it can understand everything it doesn't really like this kind of concept it seems like an affront to its intelligence flow would be reduced to just an infinite series of pieces we'd have to discard all tacit forms of knowing and would become as de Tocqueville predicted in America in the 1830s overwhelmed by a network of small complicated rules we'd be rather spectators than actors in the world and all of this would be accompanied by a dangerously unwarranted optimism well if that rings any bells it might be because we are shifting toward a rigid way of thinking that characterizes just one half of the brain the half that doesn't see very much I'm winding up here I'm just saying sometimes we think we can make things happen sometimes according to the left hemisphere we make things happen by building them up from pieces so I have this fact which I know is true and I put it down and I build another this is the way in fact in which you build walls but it's not the way in which you make a painting or a sculpture or a piece of music or poem or a society in fact we clear things away and it became obvious to me as a literary critic that what my task was not to put clever things in front of the work of art between you and it but to get out of the way as much as possible and to clear the nonsense that was taught so that you could actually see it afresh for the first time this statue one of the last works of Michelangelo shows a prisoner coming out of the rock and I think it's a wonderful and moving image of creation as a clearing away of something that's already there not the putting together of something that our conscious mind can know and finally don't be deceived into thinking the world is just a heart a matter of utility it isn't there was a lovely series on British radio by a man who was the curator of the British Museum Neil MacGregor called the history of the world in a hundred objects I imagine it might even have been exported it was very good and in it he said right away looking way back in time to prehistoric times I was absolutely amazed to see that the first human artifacts are as much about beauty and complexity as they are about utility and that old lie that beauty and complexity are only for those of us who have afterwards is absolutely untrue in fact we've made our society more ugly then people who often in their poverty as we think have a wealth of spirit that comes out in their art thank you [Applause] do you know can Wilbur and it reminds me a little bit or it strikes me that can Wilbur guy who is like a master of defining all the sectors and really trying to get the big picture is actually building up kind of a left brain yeah look and some people say your work is incredibly thorough it's very logical and it's based on a mass of scientific evidence it's a bit left brained isn't it well I'd like to say my point is not that the right hemisphere is always right and the left hemisphere wrong my problem is that they need to work together and the left hemisphere thinks it can go it alone that's my only problem with it and that's what the the image of the master in his emissary is about it's a little hint taken from Nietzsche about a wise spiritual master who looked after a community so well that it flourished and he realized he couldn't look after it all its needs it himself but he actually also realized something more important which was that he shouldn't try to because if he was involved in all that he couldn't see the big picture so he delegated his brightest and best to go about being his emissary and doing the work but that mast although he was very bright they saw at the Embassy although he was very bright didn't know what the master knew and so he thought he knew everything and he pretended to be the master wherever he went because what I'm doing all the heavy lifting here that chaps just sitting on his backside smiling seraphic Lee but because he thought he knew everything he that everything became ruined that the community fell into into disarray and really this is a story of them of The Sorcerer's Apprentice and it's the story of Prometheus and it's the problem with the left hemisphere it thinks it knows everything but it doesn't so I'm complimented if it seems to bring the left and the right together if it was just to work at the left hemisphere he wouldn't have a broad vision but I've got to build bridges between the two camps in this world of those who sink with their left hemisphere and those who think with their right and the only way to do that is to present something even someone with very left hemisphere way of thinking can understand and people write to me saying things like thank you for book all my life I realize I've been thinking just using my left hemisphere but now I understand what everyone else is doing and my marriage has improved and my job has proved thinking yeah well I got through okay well in starting yeah I just overwhelmed this with so much information and knowledge if you maybe have to thank you right now last chance no okay thanks a lot thanks a lot [Applause]

Channel: OpenWebcast

Views: 34,929

Keywords: Age of Wonder, Baltan, Natlab, Iain McGilchrist

Id: uEB68f8kvnY

Length: 73min 16sec (4396 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 03 2014