Certainty and flow, Iain McGilchrist (part 1 of 2)

[Music] we often ask our viewers for suggestions for interviewees and your name has come up a lot I think you're probably one of our most requested interviewees I don't want to sort of recap too much on the big picture of your of your books and your theories because I think there's a lot of that elsewhere I'd like to direct people to the RSA animation I think it's a really good summation of the the general thesis it's a nice introduction yes yes of Master Anne's emissary but what would be the elevator pitch for mastering as emissary it's that we are not aware that our reality is constructed by two different systems if you like we focus on different aspects of reality and therefore construe a world with different qualities and the first part of the book explains that in terms of neuropsychiatry and philosophy and the second part of the book suggests that in the history of the West three times we have been in a position where to begin with a civilization flourished when it kept both these visions together that of the right hemisphere and that of the left but then in every case and I believe we're repeating the pattern for the third time as the the civilization overreached itself things deteriorated and the mindset became more rigid more bureaucratic less imaginative less flexible less in touch with reality and became locked into a way of thinking which is that the left hemisphere which is useful it's not a mistake that we have it but it cannot be our way of contacting reality a simple way of putting it is it's like mistaking the map for the territory and you you've touched already on what the dangers are of this what why does do you think this happens why do you think this is a pattern that has repeated itself so many times well there are a number of reasons one is that it the left hemisphere is really a very limited kind of organ it's the bit that helps us grasp things it's relatively simplistic but it does enable you to grab things it's the part of your brain that controls your right hand with which we grasp things and it controls also the aspects of our mental life whereby we say oh I've grasped it but unfortunately it doesn't know what it doesn't know and it therefore neglects a whole range of things which the right hemisphere does know but the right hemisphere has no speech the right hemisphere contributes to language but speaking for 97% of us at any rate of us right-handers is in the left hemisphere and so the knowledge that the right hemisphere has is not easily expressible and as we become more powerful and in each case the Greeks the Romans overreach themselves for them as and in our case I think simply you know the West has done the same thing again and it's very difficult to let go of this mentality that gives you I'll have that I'll take that and it's very selfish kind of way of thinking not a communitarian way of thinking it's not a broad picture it's a very narrow picture it sees the short term not the long term and it's perfectly successful in its own terms but if what it doesn't see is its leading into a blind alley and one of the criticisms of your work I've seen and I think you actually address it at the beginning of the the RSI animation that there was a very simplistic understanding of right-brain left-brain in the past maybe the 60s and 70s and a lot of people say well that's been discredited the whole idea of these two parts of the brain doing different things has been completely discredited yes well that was one of the hurdles I had to get and probably if I'd had a regular career where I had to just churn my way through an academic career bringing out papers every every few months I'd never had the leisure and time and well it wasn't leisure it was time stolen from my clinical work but actually - I spent 20 years looking at the literature and there's no question and it would be absurd to suggest there's no difference and forests are the most primitive creatures that we know about going back 700 million years the very first ones that have a neural network already have an asymmetrical neural network and that has simply become more if you'd like more pronounced as we go up the Volusia nary tree so the two halves of the brain are just clearly different they're they're better precises different weights different shapes they have different so-called gyro patterns that's the convolutions the surface of the brain they have different preponderance --is of gray and white matter different preponderance --is of neurotransmitters they react differently to hormones they're just different and it's no good saying there isn't the difference also psychologically they're clearly different because we know that the left hemisphere for example is the one that speaks it's the one that does certain aspects of language and the right hemisphere we know has other faculties there's I spend the book explaining so it's just that people latched on to a very simple-minded model and that model was that of a machine now the question you ask of a machine is what does it do and if you ask the question what does the left hemisphere do and what does the right hemisphere do the answers that came out of pop psychology in the 70s and 80s the left hemisphere does reason and language and the right hemisphere does emotion and visual spatial things is not true they're both involved in everything but they're involved in different ways in reliably different ways so it's not the watt of the brain it's the how and that's a very important question but it's not one that scientists are so readily going to ask because they're mainly interested in Mecca but actually it's as plain as the nose on your face when you come to look at it that there are these vast difference is in the disposition of these two neural networks towards the world they pay attention in completely different ways and when you pay attention to the world you see different things in it and so if they do that they're going to construct two different versions of the world we talked a lot on this channel about the meta conversation the idea that what we need is a conversation that opens up to the not knowing to what needs to emerge beyond and what it feels like is happening now increasingly with social media is people are getting stuck more and more in certainty and in what they do know is that a right-brain left-brain phenomena well it can be looked at in that way in that one of the features of the left hemisphere is that it prefers what it's already familiar with and it finds it very difficult to shift set so once it's stuck into something it keeps on repeating it where's the right hemisphere Ramachandra and BS Ramachandran well there neuroscientists calls it the devil's advocate because it's able to see other things than it is saying yes but yes but is the Zen saying that I very much like so you can see it that way the right hemisphere is much more able to be flexible and also very importantly although or not although but just because the two hemispheres have different takes on the world they have different takes on their own relationship so the left hemispheres take is an exclusive one either this is right or that is right and therefore what I know excludes what you know whereas the right hemispheres take is a both and to take that there's a room for what the left hemisphere does there's a point in analysis but there's also a point in synthesis and imagination and what we are desperately lacking is is that overall synthesis it seems to me that at the moment we officially pride ourselves on being a very free thinking people I'm going sound like a terrible fuddy-duddy but I think the intellectual world was far more open in the 60s and 70s when I grew up than it is today it's closed down to a number of dogmas the internet which is a wonderful thing hasn't helped because it's possible for people to get trapped in bubbles where they reinforce the things they believe Without Really hearing other points of view I'm a keen proponent that in education and one of the most important things one must do is teach people always to invert everything they believe and see the value in it in fact I believe there should be in government a department of inverse policy so whatever the government is proposing there should be a department that is dedicated to seeing what would happen if we did the precise opposite and it should be you know centrally funded and I think it would be a very useful exercise but really it's an intellectual exercise that we all need to do if we start being too certain about anything it means we've missed something else this brings us to a very important metaphysical point which is that a thing that its opposite according to the left hemisphere simply as far apart as they can be and we move over to the linear way to what we'd identify as good everything I know tells me that in fact opposites are connected and if you pretend that you are only having one you don't notice the dark side and this is terribly true in psychiatry it's almost an atchoo ism to say that a lot of the work one does as a psychiatrist is helping people to see that there is a good side to what it is that they fear and disliking themselves but there is also a dark side to the bits that they pride themselves on and that you cannot get rid of the dark side you accept it and work with moving it towards something creative and all creativity and all life is creative mental world is Korea our daily reality is created partly by us not out of nowhere but it's grounded in something else but we helped create that process depends on opposition it depends on a degree of resistance actually and as soon as you've decided that x y&z are good and their opposites are bad and we must have more and more and more and more of the thing we've decided is good you end up reaping a whirlwind because the things you didn't take note of come back and bite you in the bung and I think that what we are now seeing in the very destructive and and damaging and regrettable moves of you know Breck's is and Trump and so on entirely understandable reactions which I like to perfectly well forgive from people who have just been told that their opinions are no good because these are things we don't talk about these are things that you know a liberal person knows that liberty equality fraternity is all it's about and the opposites didn't matter so I think where we're enduring now a backlash that we could have avoided by having a mature conversation yes this is good but also forgot to take into account that this is what we've talked about quite a lot on the channel and our perspective is that we're seeing the shadow of liberalism the Trump and brexit are both the shadow of liberalism I didn't know that that was what you said but it's exactly what I believed yeah I mean you mentioned a lot of different psychological thing because I mean Jung's idea of the shadow is a perfect one and it at some sense it feels to us that this is the time of the integration of the shadow that what we're seeing through the democratization of different forms of media is all the things and the cracks between things that we thought we've got rid of are now rising up and I going to have to be dealt with they're gonna have to be integrated yes how do we do that well of course there is no you not expecting me to have some simple answer and one of the difficulties is that we have accelerated the pace of change so fast that the kind of changes that we require not only sort of work but simply can made to happen that first and we're in a crisis which requires something to happen very quickly really because accelerating technological advance has put machine guns in the hands of toddlers we have not increased in wisdom in fact I believe we have lost wisdom in the West and yet we have gained enormous Leander gaining very fast in power inevitably if you put power in the hands of people who have their wisdom this is a formula for disaster and we see it in the current environmental disaster we're facing we see it in the destruction of species we see it in the destruction of the lives of indigenous people we see it in the mind control that is already being put into effect in China with enormously sophisticated AI the tracks that faces the movements they everything the thoughts of all its citizens and we believe I will that's China but that could never happen here but that is very naive democracy our kind of democracy is fragile it's not the norm it's something very precious and it can easily be destroyed especially in an atmosphere where we don't know who or what to believe which is becoming more and more a problem so we have got ourselves into a very difficult situation and I'm not suggesting there is an easy fix to it but there are things that we could do to try and get away from this I mean one that they're going to have to involve radical changes we can't expect to go on living the kind of lives we do with the demands on the world that's just not sustainable they're not sustainable even for us and now that ten times as many people will want to claim these rights to extraordinary privilege the world simply cannot sustain it so we've been living on on fool's gold if you like so what are the practical things that can be done if if your diagnosis is correct and that we're looking at a whirl that's ever more sort of narrow and rational how do we get out of that yes easier said than done and and there are patients that you cannot help which is one of the first things you have to know in my trade but I believe one of the things I can do I can't do much but one thing I can do is raise awareness and I think that's happening so people are becoming much more aware of in a way I've opened people's made the things they already knew one of the communist things people say is I had this feeling of southern recognition that all my life I kind of felt all this but have no way of articulating it so I think that that is one thing so of course it's just a start in terms of practical things I mean we've got to begin by completely rethinking education at the moment it's about shoveling information in to people not training them to think critically to think imaginative Lee I was lucky in that in my education I was taught to to think of all sides of a question as soon as I believed something passionately I would be asked to defend the exact opposite position which is a very important exercise that I think no one should leave school without doing you know this is what you believe speak about it now speak about and defend the opposite position and we will school you on how well you do that exercise that is good but it's also about imagination I mean education is drawing out faculties within people it's not shoveling facts into people that is the reverse of education so I think the emphasis on you know a cliched [Music] caricature would be but it's not unfortunately that far from the truth you're doing English a-level there are six points you must make about Jane Austen you know to me that is the death of English and so is conforming it to current preoccupations with what however brilliant weaving they are filtering it through isms of you know political correctness instead of putting all that to the site and simply opening oneself to the incredible gift of something that somebody created which can work on you in all kinds of ways that you don't now conceive the more you approach things with preconceptions the worse it is this is really interesting watching the documentary you sent over hmm you mentioned identity politics as a left brain phenomena that it's effectively its assert it's another certainty or it can become another certainty because what we're doing through that is for example you're taking a work of literature and you're critiquing it not in the way that it kind of reflects the grandeur of the human spirit or the developmental journey of the individual it's it's it's about okay how does it it which immediately diminishes it from that to that yes and can you talk about that so there's nothing new in there's a left brain as a left brain phenomena I can but I'd also first like to just gloss through a remark because it's interesting I didn't actually mention identity politics anywhere in the film but what happened you say political correctness or was this someone else but today what happened was and I didn't know this that in the film as you know Rowan Williams is interviewed and the way the film was made was I would go and meet somebody we would be filmed talking together and then there was always a bit where I went out and they just talked to that person because then they were free to say whatever they wanted to say and a bit that I had never seen until the film was completed was where Rowan Williams chose for some reason to talk about the angry black and white views of people who just know what is right and wait listen to other people and want it legislated and he just said you you cannot create a better society by this kind of thing we need to develop a society in which people can have we can listen to one another and have reasonable conversations and he actually made the point that by trying to stamp out certain things you don't diminish the anxiety behind it you ramp it up which is exactly what we're seeing which is another psychological truth of repression yes I mean that one of them there are many problems here the one is the left hemisphere is far too certain that it knows what's what it's far too clear that things are unipolar that there are just Goods where as you know once you see something that is much clearer and oriental tradition that everything has comes inevitably with its opposite you don't think like that anymore it doesn't see things contextually it doesn't see individuals it's not prepared to listen to another point of view it's just saying this guy I have heard on Twitter has said something you know which is now a soundbite you don't hear or all the rest that went round it you don't see this as part of somebody's journey that it might be worth listening to you you just dismiss it now I believe very strongly once again that it it's not the what it's the how if I've said that before I'm gonna say it again and again in life it is not the what it is the how it's the disposition you have now I believe it is possible to say anything and I don't think there should be things that nobody can say I think we should have a system where anyone can say anything but they must say it in a way that is not inflammatory and that is open to reason and discussion so that applies to both sides of a political argument and in that same section of the film it made an interesting point that anger latter eliza's to the left brain so that so that if we're in a sort of left brain certainty anger is the result angrily you know people think the left hemisphere I mean the old view was but he might be a bit dull but it's terribly reliable and it's down-to-earth and it doesn't get emotional well number one it is not down-to-earth it's in a fantasy world number two it is not reliable there's good work coming out of Gazzaniga slab sharing you know he was the man who said the right hemisphere has about as much intelligence as a chimpanzee I mean that was 3040 years ago but still his lab is now producing wonderful data showing that the right hemispheres far more sophisticated at making judgments much more reliable than left hemisphere tends to jump to conclusions is open to bias and in terms of emotion the left hemisphere is far from devoid of emotion the most lateral eyes of all emotions is anger and it lateral Isis to the left hemisphere naturalizers just means what it what it means that when people are experiencing anger there is a great increase in activity in the left hemisphere and you know at the chapter in verse 4 that it's somebody called harm and James has done a lot of research into that but the chapter and verse will be in is in the master sense there was a really interesting example with birds and I don't maybe you want to kind of explain very simply how because that that for me really illustrates the difference between the two the two ways of interacting with the world yes well well the you know human neuroscientists were busy dismissing it the animal scientists were simply getting on with what society scientist was supposed to do which was observing and taking note and they noticed that birds and animals use their two hemispheres for different purposes it's easy to observe in a bird because in most Birds the input from the right eye goes straight to the left hemisphere and the input from the left eye go straight and the right hemisphere it's not true of human it's more complicated but at least in Birds and quite a lot of animals that have eyes on the side of the head you can tell which hemisphere is engaged by just looking at which eye is being used for this particular moment and what they noticed was that birds and animals reliably seemed to use their left hemisphere for latching on to a small detail like I need to pick up that piece of seed on the background of grid and they use their right hemisphere the left eye for everything else for who others are around is there a predator is my mate nearby because I would like to share this all that contextual information is the right editor and the left hemisphere is literally seeing a tiny piece of reality now that was in itself an aha moment I could see that this if this was in any way true about humans it would have colossal implications because I have a background in philosophy and I know that attention changes the world so if there's a big difference in attention one is fragmentary piecemeal narrow the other is broad sustained and vigilant they're going to see two different realities and so that got me into then looking at the human issue and lo and behold this difference is very marked in human being so if people have a right hemisphere stroke they can have this pathological narrowing of the window of attention like looking the wrong way down to tell escape and you're the sort of the grand theory as well is that we are in a world that is concentrated more and more and more on this narrow atomistic mechanical way of looking at the world and neglecting the more holistic the more relational aspects well it seems to me and that's the subject of a work I'm now writing that actually we don't start from things and then have to work out how they relate and how this think this billiard ball hits that one and so but in fact that there are very broad patterns and flows in the world and that what we call the things are the sort of bits that stand out to our attention they're little nexuses if you like that go oh I recognize that little familiar thing that I'm gonna call that a but actually everything is part of a larger picture and the trouble with focusing on detail is not only do you miss the overall meaning the overall purpose the overall connection the way in which this has ramifications the bits that are not explicit the thing that is not in the spotlight which is everything else but you also think that you can understand the world by taking one thing and putting it with another and building it up as you'd build a Meccano set or you know mend the bike in the garage but the world is not like that I wrote down from the RSA animation left abstraction power to manipulate the already known fixed static isolated decontextualize explicit ultimately lifeless right individual changing evolved interconnected implicit incarnate living never entirely known and that reminded me very much of what Martin Buber talked about but we had the I it relationship to the ID our relationships which I found very profound I also studied philosophy when I was when I was at university and that that really stuck with me that there are two different types of relationships we can have in the world one the I thou is essentially kind of on there was an unknowability about that relationship is that something do you think that map's on absolutely and the results of a reciprocity in the eigth our relationship whereas in the I it relationship is a unidirectional one which is about power and inference whereas the other one is about a reverb responsive coming into being of something so that is a very important distinction and I relate the I though and the I it to the evolution of language we won't time to because it's a long story but it's in the book but in brief I believe that language emerged from what you might call music in other words the music of speech the sounds and the denotative language is a kind of special set of a much more richly embedded embodied connotative way of communicating and that it became necessary when we were no longer in groups where you were largely just talking I too though but we're talking about a third party or something else we had designs on and so that is how where language becomes very important I've seen your work reference in many many different places particularly by people who are talking about the more spiritual the more even an author called Gary Lachman I don't know if you're aware of him so he he's written a series of books about the the hidden occult history of Western thought and he uses your work as a way of saying as a way of kind of maybe giving it scientific respectability or at least explaining this could be a process that we're going through these these more holistic ways of knowing have never been part of the Western kind of mainstream tradition and maybe that's because of the right-brain left-brain split do you do you agree with that well I think there is not true that they've not been present in the tradition I know what he's talking about but they're very much present in pre-socratic philosophy as we know something very important and I think very damaging happened to Western philosophy with Plato and Aristotle and particularly with Plato but these other aspects in the West have been more expressed in our extremely powerful music one thing you can say about Western civilization it in many ways is it lacks the wisdom of Oriental civilization but it is pretty colossal II rich music and so it also produced you know Shakespeare so I would say our art is where it has been expressed but when we start doing philosophy we're like well we've got to make this consistence I've see this and I'll goes in there and this bit leads to that and whereas you're therefore as as I say sort of building things up from little certainties but the first thing is there are no certainties to start from there intuitive you have to start from axioms reason is based on the intuition and it ends in intuition and so I think there are those elements are there but they have been sidelined and neglected the key thing we'll must remember about the left hemisphere is that it's it's bright enough but not very bright it doesn't really see that there are things that it doesn't know it's so hermetic its world is so self-contained and consistent and self referential that it doesn't feel the need of anything else because it's not sensing that there's something bigger the right hemisphere sees what is implicit what is going on not us in the foreground but in the in the background in the context in all these things that are everything that we really value love art and we used to value spiritual truths these things are only approachable in an indirect implicit way as soon as you start to say well we need to pinned us down and make it certain you're already on the wrong track so I think that Gary's right to point to that it's just that I think there's more to the story and you you talked about that rationality begins an intuition so well yes it has to I'm in fact it begins a nutrition in two ways one is that we we can't rationally prove my reason as a helpful we ensure that it is a useful tool but secondly when we begin reasoning we have to begin from quite a host of assumptions science they officially claims to make no assumptions in fact makes quite a few assumptions before it gets started it has to that's not a criticism the system can't work without somewhere to start because nothing could be supported on nothing it has to be on something before it can get started so that's what they mean and it also ends in intuition because the results of reasoning have to be reintegrated into a broader picture so it's an intermediary tool reason and indeed the left hemisphere is an intermediary to one way of thinking of it is it's like this when you learn a musical instrument you're first attracted to a piece of music in a broad sort of way then you start trying to play it and you realize you have to go over and over the fingering in bar 18 and you know there's a return to the dominant at bar 32 or whatever it is but then when you've done all that that's not time wasted but when you come to perform it if you're still thinking like that you can't perform the relationship with the hemispheres is a bit like that the immediate grasp of something that the overall take on it is right image the left hemisphere then gets to work and does procedural matters but then it's the right hemisphere that must reintegrate that information that is not lost that process was valuable but it must have stopped there in a nutshell I think in our society we stopped with the light left hemisphere we don't allow it to be reintegrated into a much bigger richer picture which is in touch with all the stuff that the left hemisphere doesn't know it doesn't know this reminds me quite a lot of Richard Thomas whoo yes whoo I'm afraid I haven't read yeah no I he his book had a huge impact to me when I was when I was at university but but effectively he said that he told the story of Western philosophy and said that it had become more and more isolating more and more a prison of the intellect and that the way out would to reom brace in tuition reimbursement get out until we did so it just it seemed that it maps on very very clearly to the the picture that your your painting yes that's right the other thing one ought to say is that philosophy has made strides in the last couple hundred years and i think that there's been a redressing of that particularly in early on in Hegel and in the the German idealists Victor shelling and so forth to an extent in Nietzsche who's a mad genius but mainly in the tradition of two two groups one is the American pragmatists CS purse William James and Tom Giri and the other is the phenomenological tradition in Europe Heidegger marathon T Shayla Russell to a degree so I think in and the later Wittgenstein would fit with that the earlier they could Stein not you there was a comment on the RSA video from a physicist who said that he found it very useful in looking at why they were so far away from coming up with a theory of everything because his sense was that they're looking at the individual details and not looking at the whole does that make sense it certainly does and I hadn't seen that comment but well one of the gratifying things has been the number of physicists who have written to me saying there are enormous resonances between your work and what we are doing in physics I thought you unskilled to recognize those although I have an idea of the shape they're talking about and recently I've been trying to acquaint myself with quantum field theory which is actually very interesting development out of quantum mechanics and I will try to write a bit about that in my current book but only after running it by some very kind physicist friends but I think what is important is that what I'm saying if it is true will apply to everything because it's about the nature of reality and the people who are at the coalface of reality are poets and physicists and you know they have written to me saying how how much they feel the residents but what has struck me is that people that I didn't expect like lawyers and people in the world of finance and economists you know are some of my most frequent correspondence because they say what you're describing is exactly the problems in our realm so I'm delighted because I never had the slightest belief or hope that this could happen but that what I'm saying has been picked up by people in all walks of life [Music] you

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 64,184

Keywords: iain mcgilchrist, jordan peterson

Id: fI1ngqwH5us

Length: 37min 29sec (2249 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018