Conversation of Michael Levin with Iain McGilchrist

hmm [Music] here we go great yeah yeah um fantastic to see you I'm so glad we have the opportunity to chat yes so I'm very pleased indeed it was something to have that little moment together on that um other uh podcast or whatever it was yeah but um yeah I've been very interested by by your work what interests you in mind how did you get to hear about it even well uh I don't know when the I mean I've been aware of it for a long time I don't know where the first uh I'm not sure where the first time was but um I'm super interested in this um this notion of uh understanding nature as it were in both directions so I like the the sort of reductive quantitative stuff but I also think it's it's really important to uh go go at it the top down as it were in in my language but this is you know these are the things that I mean you you integrated very beautifully and you write about the importance of it um you know and of course uh in in connection with with Neuroscience but also more broadly I'm you know I'm also uh friends with people like Mark solmes who also take a kind of a psychology Psychiatry psychology approach to it I think I think it's uh I think it's very important um to have both both ends so and so yeah I've been I've been following uh following your writings for a really long time oh that's that's great to know yes um and again you're actually on the editorial board of laterality which correct which is interesting yeah so you're obviously interested in naturalization as well which is not something and I I did I tweaked actually but um yeah so this is and so so I have three things that I wanted to ask you about and then of course anything that you would like to talk about but the but the asymmetry thing is one of them um when when I was a grad student uh within Cliff tabin's lab we characterized the first set of asymmetry genes so these were the these this is the pathway that sets the the laterality of the organs of the body so not so much I haven't done any work on brain laterality per se but this was this was the question of how do your internal organs reliably determine left from right in the in embryogenesis and so this is this is how I ended up on the board of laterality not from from brain uh asymmetry but but through them through for years we studied mechanisms of of uh Left Right determination and I think it's and as I'm I think you you say as well I think it's it's a very profound problem it goes well beyond the kind of you know these issues of the heart positioning and stuff like that it's a I think you know I think it's I think it's yeah very profound the way the way to um uh amplify these chiralities that exist we chased it down to the Single Cell level basically and other people have as well yes yeah yes and yeah so so I was really interested you know I I saw your your quote on pester and the important of asymmetry so I just I was hoping you would talk about that a little bit yes definitely and um talk about it going back a bit further than the positioning of the heart um as I point out Thomas Holstein um founded in nematostella vectensis the oldest excellent organism we have 700 million years old um there is already lateralization in what he calls the ancestor of the vertebrate brain so in this neural network there was already asymmetry and it it's fascinating it's as you say Pastor thought that this was a a fundamental aspect of well he he said a fundamental aspect of the cosmos and and Pierre Curie said the same and the asymmetry in in living organisms is part of a reflection of that so yeah so it's certainly an it's a it's a primary problem if I remember rightly it was not your research on I haven't looked at this for a decade or more but wasn't your research on how an organism gets to know its left from its rage um part of the argument which I know you've taken very much further um that it's to do with bio electrical gradients is that not right this is right one of the many things that bioelectricity does is scale up decision left-rate uh decisions made by individual cells so people have now found chirality and bacteria in single human cells in culture in a dish um all yeah we found it in Sly molds all kinds of I mean it's as you say it's it's completely fundamental and one of the things that we found that uh the bioelectric system does is scale up the very early left right decisions made by individual cells into a collective decision about uh as an organs or a collective of these cells what side of the body am I located on so to me what I love about this is because everything that we've been focused on is this idea of scaling how do you go from little tiny competent agents to great big ones that that integrate with a larger cognitive light cone and um and and you know in this in this unified perspective so this was the first uh I I you know this was the first example of this that I really um got to work on as a grad student and then a postdoc how the bioelectrics actually serves as this glue that that binds individual decisions into organ level decisions yeah and I I get that and I think that's fascinating but I don't want to lose if there's a lot more to tell you I'm sure for both of us about asymmetry but one of the things is that when you take that to the level of the morphology of an organ or the morphology of something as extraordinary as the eye or even the brain um I guess you're not claiming that you've cracked it but I'd like to know how your theory about bioelectric by electrical gradients fits into orders of explanation because it seems to me that it explains things at one level but it might be not unlike saying how did Holbein paint this incredible portrait of Thomas More well he used striated muscles in his in his arm and his hand and there was also input from the higher centers in the brain but in a way is it not just a description that a rather reduced level or something that still requires um unpacking and it's not really explained by talking about bioelectrical gradients so I 100 agree with you that uh explanations purely at the physical level miss the mark and and I'm I'm completely in agreement with that uh I do think however that one of the neat things about bioelectricity and it's not unique there are some other modalities that work this way too is that it allows us to uh to to to to merge levels so it is it is it is a kind of mechanistic explanation which leads us directly to a cognitive explanation in other words it and and and I'm not by no means am I saying I've cracked the whole thing but but I think that the nice thing about bioelectricity is that it shows you how large-scale information processing which you can imagine can can rise up to the kinds of explanations that we really want for these Complex events how that arises from uh individual mechanisms so what I like about it is that is that I think what evolution does is it uses bioelectricity to get me meaning and computation out of physics and that's I I think that's what we need in the end the physical the physical events are great but what we need is to find out where the meaning comes from and I think that bioelectric the bioelectrics is a is a step in that direction because and I'll just take a step away from the from the asymmetry for the moment um in our in our work on let's say from the regenerative medicine angle you know we want to understand how do the cellular collectives know to make one organ rather than another and the treatment is not going to be bottom up which is what molecular medicine works on now which is tweaking the gene the genes and the pathways I want to literally literally convince the the cells that they should be building something different than what they're building now I mean I I'm not using this as a metaphor uh other than everything is kind of a metaphor but I'm completely serious about that and so yeah right and and so what we need to understand is is how do these electrical networks store memories how do they have preferences how do they navigate the space of possible uh anatomical outcomes and and I think what they're doing is a tiny sort of precursor uh to uh what happens in the brain and I think they allow us mechanistically to talk about the the memories the um the beliefs and you know in a Proto form of course of tissue that is not neural tissue and and that that's so so that's so so I'm hoping I'm trying to develop that link exactly I don't think that the mechanistic explanation is sufficient but I think the bioelectrics gets us beyond that it literally lets us cash out what does it mean for a collective of tissue to hold a counter factual memory for example we've seen that in planaria where we actually have animals whose tissues hold a counter factual memory of what they would do if they got injured in the future at some point and and this is you know so this is this and and I can tell a similar story about the the asymmetry as well so how does the counter factual sorry you have to excuse me because I'm an outsider to this area and but how does that memory become instantiated over time and how does it contain information about hugely complex three-dimensional configuration such as the way in which intricate parts of the brain need to be organized how can it hold that information and where does it store it and then you know slime molds as I discovered um are creatures to be respected and they're able to do extraordinary things like Souls mazes and escape from their jars and all this sort of thing but um clearly they don't have neurons so where where for them is this um is this memory stored yeah so so the Slime worlds uh I'll start with that just because there's so much less is known that I can tell that quickly um we have a particular assay where you put a little slime mold the piece in the middle of a petri dish about 10 centimeters diameter and then you put some glass discs at the edges three glass discs at one Edge one glass disc at the other Edge these are just glass there's no chemicals there's no food there's no attractant just just glass they're very thin they're very light but there's three over here there's one over here what the sly mode does for the first few hours is it it gently um rhythmically tugs on the medium that they're all sitting on a on an agar kind of a slab sort of thing right and it makes these waves and it turns out that it senses biomechanically the strain angle that comes back to it after it pulls on this thing and for the first four hours it basically Builds an internal uh something and we don't know exactly what although I give you a hypothesis uh it it integrates that information doing not much for the first four hours and then it grows out towards the three discs not the one it chooses it always chooses the three and so during that time right it's sort of pulling together some sort of representation of what's going on in the outside world for some reason it likes the heavier masses better than light masses I don't know why uh and then it makes a decision and then you see the observable Behavior one of the things we've done is we've injected um fluorescent beads through this thing and when you watch the beads flow in and out what you see is that as it branches you know it's very a branched structure right like almost fractal in its in its nature um when the when the beads are going down uh one particular vein and then there are branches sometimes they go to the branch and sometimes they don't we it and and so so these genture points they open and close the thing has complete control over every juncture point so it's basically a biomechanical synapse at that point right you can if you can control the flow of of the you know going this way or going that way this is the beginnings of some sort of um hydraulic computer I think where you can actually start to process information by directing uh where where the flow of uh of of molecules are going to go through your network it's very it's not a garden hose where everything just sort of goes under pressure it's very um you know millions and millions of selectable points right and and people like Andy adametsky think a lot about how you take that architecture and do computations with it and make decisions and things like that so they have a very rich cytoskeletal Network they have bioelectrical phenomena which we really haven't studied yet although Andy has uh they've got this hydraulic thing going on um but it's very clear that they have periods of integrating information and then acting on it you know in addition to the memory Kinds of Kinds of things that you talk about yeah yes I mean that sounds absolutely fascinating I'm I'm I still find it difficult to know where we jump the Gap from a mechanism in which a pathway can be closed or opened to where um something like the three-dimensional structure of how you get through a maze just stored you know but that's that's that surely something to to be working on yeah yeah well you know Audrey de soture in in uh in in France has this amazing data where she's got she's got these slime molds and and the slime mold uh dislike salt they don't want to crawl over salt sure and right and she'll train them she'll train them to crawl over the salt to get the reward but then when she asked okay so and so it takes I think about 10 exposures for them to get the idea that it's okay and that the end of the salt there will be a nice piece of oat and whatnot but um what she found is that the way they remember to do this is they literally store some of that salt internally so it's a Memory it's sort of pre-symbolic memory it's like I don't have a symbol for salt I have the actual piece of this thing that I now need to know is okay you know um so it sounds to me like a very nice sort of uh you know you're on your way to having some sort of a late or maybe a representation of it but now you've got the actual you know the actual thing that's wonderful that's a lovely idea yes yes so the sort of been internalize the idea that this salt is okay because it didn't mean now yeah something something like that right yeah I mean the previous the previous thing you asked which of course is the key question is uh how do you store pattern memories in these in in well at all and so so this one of the stories that we have is this if you look at so so we've developed um a voltage Imaging method which is like a sort of like brain Imaging except that instead of Rapid spiking what we're looking at is a very stable uh spatially distributed resting Potentials in tissue so it's just much slow it's much slower set of phenomena and what you can see in these planaria is that there's a there's a particular pattern and much like what we've seen in the face of the frog in the brain the nascent brain of the Frog and so on the the there's a there's a pre-pattern that we've learned to decode and what the pre-pattern indicates is how many heads you're supposed to have that pattern by default right so so I think what the what what evolution has given us is an electric circuit with particular ion channels and such that by default settles onto an attractor that says one head that's the pattern and now why does it mean one head because that I'll describe in a minute the cells interpret it does so so it has this pattern what we can come along and do is not touch the genome whatsoever but give it a particular experience in physiological space using a blocker and a or or an ionophore various ion channels and change that pattern so that it says two heads and when you do this nothing happens for a for until you injure the animal so what we have and then I have nice videos of this you can have an animal that is got well it's it's got a completely normal Anatomy so one head it's got completely normal gene expression so so so corresponding to a one-headed animal but it has a different uh representation of what a correct planarian looks like how do I know because if we were to cut that animal it would then use that pattern memory to build what it says which is two heads so prior to you right so prior to you doing that it's a it's a primitive counterfactual because it doesn't reflect what's going on right now it's a it's an early form I think it's an early form of this um mental time travel where you can hold on to an idea that you know it's not true either it's a memory of something that happened or it's a prediction of something that's going to happen but it isn't a reflection of whatever inputs you're getting right now so you've got these sort of schizophrenic worms that they have the body they they have a certain kind of body right but the memory of what constitutes a proper worm is quite different and it's already been Rewritten and so so I think this sort of thing is an early precursor and then and then of course you have to work out well how is this pattern interpreted and so we have now we have now computational models that show how a collection of cells looks at a pattern not not each cell reads its own voltage but but it's a group phenomena it only works in a group how the collective of cells reads a pattern and first of all decides whether that's correct or not and that's required for regeneration and repair and things like that but also uh how it will uh decide which organs to make downstreet and this is how in the Frog we can now rewrite these patterns and so we can make we can put eyes on the tail and we have six-legged frogs and things like this because that's the reference point that they're using and if you change the reference point well that's there's nothing else for them to compare it to they will happily you know the same genetics the same Hardware will happily execute a completely different program um in fact you can hop species this way we've had planaria that make heads of other species and with with 150 million years evolutionary distance no genetic change needed you know right right so something very important about this you use the word attractor which I think is interesting because of course it's a non um mechanical propulsion it's a it's a it's a sort of a drawing together from something that is exerting an influence and where that is and what it is is an interesting question yes and you also use obviously you can't help using words like um compare and decide and so on but one's wondering what is it that's actually we can talk about the mechanism but again what is it that is it suggests some kind of decision making well that's exactly what it is not just the following of a blindly of something but actually a decision and so this is intriguing um but yeah I mean you said also that it's it doesn't work on the level of a single cell but then it does doesn't it sometimes when parts of a cell that are remote from another part of a cell know that that they need to be generating something that is um deficient or defaulting in another part of the cell so that is intriguing because that seems to happen at the single cellular monocellular level yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well no absolutely well when I said it doesn't happen I just met the the bioelectrics is not that's not the code there's a different mechanism that will do that yeah you're absolutely right um you know this this uh one of the things that we did recently was to examine um models of Gene regulatory networks which are extremely simple sort of paradigms of of like deterministic um you know genetic kind of things and what we found is that if you treat them as learning agents meaning you pretend that the different nodes could be conditioned stimulus unconditioned stimulus response they actually can exert six different kinds of memory so they can do associative conditioning right they can do they can do a habituation they can do sensitization they can do associative learning they can count to small numbers they can do a few different things and all of this is just in this super super uh minimal Kinds of Kinds of model extraordinary what a wonderful area to be working in it's too late for me but um I'd rather hijacked things by plunging into things I wanted to ask you but I know there were things you wanted to ask me so please do feel free yeah yeah I uh well well so I have I have three things on my mind I wanted to um hear you talk about the asymmetries and and and you know sort of as broad as you want all the way up the scale to human uh human life and so on and and the other thing maybe I'll start with the second thing because I think it's more self-contained and kind of simple um I've been asking people this and and uh I I would like to hear hear your opinion imagine because I think I think it leads in some interesting areas imagine some sort of discrete positive experience something pleasant that you enjoy you know um whatever it is it doesn't matter what it is and so now I'm going to give you two choices the first choice is that you will get this experience now but then all memory of it will be wiped afterwards you will have no memory of of having had it right and probably you see where this is going the other option is the exact opposite I'm going to give you a memory of having had this experience and you will go on but we're not going to actually do it you know we're just going to sort of I'm going to implant the memory and so what I'd love to hear is what do you think about that and which you prefer I found people split about 50 50 and they feel very strongly about which thing is obviously the thing to do and I'd love to hear um what you think about it well it contains one of the elements in many in a way irresoluable philosophical problems that it is so counterfactual it's like um uh you know there are a number of these things that come up in in in my line but can it what does it mean we have no way of knowing what it would mean to have a memory implanted but there wasn't anything that caused it if you see what I mean if it's a real memory I mean it's true sorry uh no please do please go ahead yeah um but let's assume that a memory with all the force of the idea that it really has happened um ah I I don't know but it what it draws me back to was when I was training um as a doctor and I remember obviously taking part of the number of endoscopies and you would see somebody really suffering they were squirming they were obviously in pain they were um you know and I thought oh God I never want to have one of these and um I remember saying to the um the person who's doing it you know what do you feel about this and they said you go and talk to them afterwards they have no memory of it at all and then I thought well okay uh but how would it feel like if somebody said to me um I'm going to talk to you within an inch of your life but never mind later you won't know anything about him um and it struck me that this wasn't a satisfactory answer to say that the valium or whatever it was would have um wiped out the trace of it probably because I believe that at some level experiences are stored even if they're not consciously stored and they are part of you and your experiences make up who you are and it's just very difficult to say yes you can do what you like as long as I don't remember it afterwards that would be a very because presumably there is a part of you but that's perhaps hedging the bets there is a part of you that actually does does remember it so I wouldn't know quite how to go with this because I'm not sure that memory is is single but you can of course since it's um an artificial experiment it's a thought experiment you can set it up in any way you like you can say well let's assume that you can't have any trace of memory or you must have an absolutely full recall of this although they're completely real I don't know I've got an answer to that one yeah I mean so so so I I believe and I think was tanagawa that did this um had examples of incepting false memories and mice of of experiences that they've never actually had um certainly people are working on it and I think I've seen some papers from his lab and others where uh they're now they're using optogenetics to now give give animals you know sort of right into the brain a clumsy version of what would have been written if they had had this experience right so they sort of Trace what the what the what you know what the experience would be and try to mimic it with um uh with with optogenetic tools and what I so so I yeah no I was just going to say I mean how can we know what a mouse remembers and indeed how can we know do we actually have the knowledge to say that a whole experience is stored somewhere that you can actually find physically in the brain yeah so so I I completely guarante agree with you that I don't think we understand the encoding or where it's located or anything like that but the kinds of work that he does I think looks something like this um you have a mouse that experienced being in a particular cage and it was very pleasant and it was very nice and then later on you give this mouse an electric shock in some other environment and it's and it's unpleasant and then what they can do is they can go in optogenetically and they can link those two experiences even though and I don't know all the details I'm not up on it of even though those two experiences never went together and what happens is that those mice but not the control mice when you put them in the cage they show all the evidence of being afraid that they're about to be shocked so the idea is you've you've created an association that that never existed the mouse has never been shocked in that environment in fact everything was fine in that environment but you've now created so so you know I I mean I'm not an expert in this stuff so I'm sure there are ways to critique it but I think that's the that's that's the idea that's the evidence you know it's this kind of behavior yeah so so what I find the reason the reason I like this question uh I find when people try to explain this is what I this is what generally happens one set of people will say uh I I all I have is memories of the past you know anything that happens now it's going to be gone you know moments from now literally and all I have are my memories and so the experience means nothing to me long term I I collect memories of things and that's what determines me are my memory so I'll take I'll take the memory the the actual experience is too fleeting I'll I'll take the long-term memory the other people say the opposite and they say uh there is nothing but the current experience these memories I can't even be sure of you know whether my memories are vertical or not who knows what happens with these memories I want the actual experience and I am right now it's me and I want to do this exp you know I want to do this and so so I pick now right and it's really I think it's exactly what you said it's very much related to this uh to you know torture and forget kind of thing because if somebody offered you a million dollars for that experience you might think well future me is it was gonna wish I had taken the money right it hasn't me doesn't want it doesn't like it but future me is going to say you dummy you should have taken the money I'd be you know I'd be in great shape now I wouldn't have the trauma but I'd have the million bucks so I think there's another thing yeah please go ahead okay well I just just to say that I think this really gets at the core of how people think about themselves and whether they're persistent or right and all of that kind of stuff yes well there's a lot to say about that I mean one thing one immediate um um observation is that it is absolutely impossible to recapture the Rapture of um of a transcendentally wonderful experience you know that you had it in a kind of technical way that it's there in the memory as it were but but you can't remember what it is much as thank goodness you can't remember what it was like to be in terrific pain when you're in the pain is the time you know about it um so the memory is not really worth having in essence um it's to that extent it's only the having it that that matters but on the other hand if what it has communicated to you and told you cannot be taken forward in your life then that's also hugely diminished in in value so uh surely our personalities our preferences are our whole character as a person are made out of the experiences and the reactions to those experiences that go to weave a very very rich tapestry and so if if they simply don't get to be stored anywhere or become part of the picture then they've also been rather pointless so in a way what you've done is you've taken you've eliminated how each of these is really rather pointless on its own you've made a beautiful argument for the necessity of a degree of permanence and the probably more interesting point that needs to be made is about the continuity of persons so as you know in the matter with things um I have a lot to say about time and flow through time and uh essentially a difference which you can find already in the way in which people respond to xeno's paradoxes between the idea of time or space as um made up of an infinite number of fragments and the continuous space The Continuous extension in space or time and the continuity of the person now it seems to me that this is distinctly and I have quite a lot of neuro pathological evidence about this that the left hemisphere tends to fragment the flow of time into this this this this this now now now but there's no continuity between them and it has the same problem in in causing space to have what there's one called durray as you get from the point how do you get from a point to a line you know is it what is a line well it's an infinite number of points well no it isn't actually because a point doesn't have any extension and so you can add as many as you like you will never produce extension there's a difference between extension and particularity and there is also in time there is also in the experience of the person which is more like a piece of music so all of these things have the continuity of a piece of music where you can find a note but it doesn't actually constitute anything really on its own so what what I think is that the left hemisphere tends to say I am just this here and I and the world have to be recreated all the time in fact Descartes said this Descartes thought that everything had to be recreated Moment by moment because otherwise How would how would there be me now and me a minute ago now that seems to me to be a problem that you get into when you're using this kind of Lifetime as you're thinking which introduces all kinds of other problems like how do I know when I look out of the window and see somebody down there in the Square outside the house how do I know that they're not an automaton dressed in a man's having cloak and so on so which is another thing he asked and and these are typical problems for people with schizophrenia and schizophrenia is very much like a condition of left hemisphere overdrive with the right hemisphere attenuating now the important thing about the right hemisphere is is that that which produces continuity and sees the whole and for the right hemisphere a fragment is never just a bit and a hole made up of those bits everything is a whole at its own level so a hole is made up of things that are holes at another level which are also holes and you mentioned the fractality of um I can't remember what exactly you were describing but this isn't a way a kind of fractality in nature um and I don't mean just human nature I mean I think in in the in the order of things that we can know so um with the right hemisphere at work it seems obvious that I am continuous with my former self but for people who don't have that Insight they see it as a problem how do I constant how do I now relate to myself in the past and you know famously um both a friend and a colleague at also um Derek perfect the philosopher um believed that there was no particular continuity between a person and their person that same person in the past or in the future and and he was admittedly and I don't think that that's any um secret he he was um you know a very brilliant autistic person and autism has some of these same very strongly left hemispheric tendencies in it so I think it depends on how you think of yourself but for anyone who sees themselves as an evolving process rather than a thing full of another thing followed by another thing in other words more like a river than a than a a train of trucks where each track is linked to the next one then you know it is a problem breaking up a person's experience in the way that you have just described interesting interesting this is that's extremely interesting I didn't realize I've been I've been playing around with this uh this idea of having to be recreated Moment by moment I didn't know that Descartes uh Descartes already said this yeah I didn't I didn't know that interesting yes he did yes yes and and as I say he's not alone I mean the prophet didn't say exactly that but he did atomize in a way um the the flow of the person of the experience of the time by seeing it as slices and this time slicing or space slicing to the two-dimensionality that goes with it is absolutely typical of two things people who have right hemisphere brain damage and people who have schizophrenia so in in the matter with things I have an old chapter chapter nine on the parallels between right hemisphere brain damage and the phenomenology of schizophrenia it's absolutely fascinating because of course schizophrenia is not as unusual and it's also a spectrum so if you people who are on the autistic book psychiatrist called the schizoautistic Spectrum May display many of the phenomena of the full-blown condition up to a point and it influences the way they think about what it is they're looking at amazing yeah yeah super super interesting um okay uh the the other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on which relates to this issue of identity and and so on is this and I read this I I can't remember where I read it uh what what but um it was a story of a of a therapist who had a patient and the patient developed a problem with um dissociative identity disorder and so what would happen is he had this other personality that you know the patient that was uh you know he has a job and then there's this other personality that likes to have fun doesn't like to go to work and it was obviously you know he would pop up in the middle of the day and mess up his uh you know mess up his career so so so you know they're working with the patient to integrate of some sort of Integrative therapy to try and you know sort of pull it together and one day uh he walks in and it's and it's the other personality and he says to the therapist he says uh what's this I hear about integration and the the doctor says well you know we'll integrate you to to sort of you know be better and he says integrate what's going to happen to me uh and he says well you know you'll kind of be gone and it'll just be the other guy that knows how to go to work and then I'm paraphrasing he says excuse me uh what happened to your hypocratic oath I don't want to be gone make the other guy gone I have a fight my life is funny all he does is go to work all day you have him gone I I'd like to I'd like to run the show and so and so uh you know the therapist has a real problem right because because if he does his job that personality which you know it's not a tick or a reflex this is a full-blown kind of thing that can that can talk to you and has ration and knows what the Hippocratic Oath is and has rational reasons and so on uh yeah it'll be gone in some sense and so that's why yeah I just wanted to sort of hear you um talk about anything related to that and and what you think about those kind of issues well you you've hit on another fascinating topic there um dissociative for identity disorder um is is very problematic um and we do know from the viability of hypnosis that different aspects of a person can be suppressed or brought forward we don't know how and we don't think anybody understands how hypnosis works um and Bernardo castrov actually um describes doing or an experiment maybe not done by him but in which a subject with dissociative identity disorder is um is given an EEG and Aries and she claims she's blind and the areas of her visual cortex where there's nothing wrong with them normally they do work but they just are absolutely not responding so some so some kind of suggestion or some kind of self suggestion can make bits of the person um temporarily suppressed or repressed or whatever one likes to call it um and I'm not saying that this is anything to do with the two hemispheres but it is nonetheless um experimentally verifiable that by suppressing one hemisphere at a time you can produce different aspects of cognitive and emotional functioning in individuals um I mean we used to be very much reliant on split brain procedures and those patients are relatively few and far between now but it's well known that after the procedure for a while although the astonishing thing was that they function remarkably normally it was possible for them to be intermanual conflict so one person you know would pick the flame colored dress out of the cupboard and the other one but the other hand would put it back and take out a black one you know so you've got that kind of problem going on which sounds a little bit like the the patient you described um and we do know that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere do you have different values and you know I uh oh no gun to your who is one of the world's authorities on um brain naturally asymmetry uh is on record who was saying that effectively I believe mcgo Chris is right that the two hemisphes instantiate different parts of a person so um I I think that's the way I would think of it I mean of course it's a mistake to think that for most of us our two halves our brain are sort of constantly a war it's not like that that's a very crude and an inaccurate way of thinking but it is nonetheless possible that we are balancing and I believe we are harmonizing and balancing different ways of looking at the world that come from different parts of our our mind and most probably from different parts of our brain so that's the way I would think about that I like it because of course it is um a demonstration of the fact that we're not always just this integrated entity that we think we are yeah well I thank God for most purposes we we do do a pretty possible show of being an integrated entity yeah yeah the the experiment that that you talk about with the with the visual uh with the visual region being silenced I think is really interesting and it it sounds to me like a an example of a of a more General um kind of dynamic which is the sort of top-down control in that uh and this goes to Placebo effects and and just normal functions exactly right I I I say to everybody right if if I told you that with the power of my mind I can depolarize 30 of my body you know voltage and say you're crazy but but I said well this is what you do when you voluntarily get out of bed in the morning you decide you're going to stand up and in the end what you've done is depolarize a bunch of muscle fibers right so this this high level whatever executive control you can muster to to do voluntary actions as to in the end control control uh electrical States in in cells it just it just has to right so so there has to be this you know um yeah we're we're currently um writing this this piece on uh uh kind of this intersection between pharmacology and uh and and beliefs and and Placebo and these kinds of things and I think it's a huge and so so I'd love to hear you you talk about that too I I think it's a it's it's a huge it's hugely important because that's where you cross levels right you normally and this is you know Hypno Dermatology you know Albert Mason's kind of stuff where he was treating treating skin diseases and getting new new skin cells to pop up right so so what do you think about this you know this this issue of transcending levels right from some sort of belief structure in the top level control down to cells it's fantastically important and it's a pure dogma of a kind of scientist that is less scientific than it should be that such things can't happen the idea that mind cannot change or have an impact on matter is ridiculous of course it does the placebo effect is a perfect example indeed even things like cognitive behavioral therapy if you believe that Improvement in levels of depression and anxiety is dependent on changes that can be measured in various um neuroendocrine functions and neurochemical changes in the brain then CBT something is common and widely um uh attested to Across the field is dependent on getting you to think differently and lo and behold your brain actually changes so it is it's very clear and I have quite a lot to say about that in a long chapter on Consciousness and matter which um in which I effectively suggest spoiler alert that um that there's actually completely irrational to suppose that Consciousness can somehow simply emanate from matter unless you have a different idea of matter which I'm perfectly happy with that matter is no mere matter I often say materialists are not people who overvalue matter they're people who undervalue matter we don't really know what matter is matter is capable of amazing things I mean if if matter is all that is making you and me have this conversation then matter is bloody amazing so you know there's so I I take the view that matter and Consciousness are not wholly distinct and that they are in fact manifestations at different levels or put it a different way phases of the same Elemental entity so much as you know water can look like the stuff that passes my house in a stream and is translucent and can run over your hand and there it is it can also be a block of ice such as we had last week which is immovable um opaque and doesn't go anywhere until you move it or it can be in this room and you can't see it but without it I couldn't breathe so this um you know water has phases they don't look like one another but I think Consciousness has phases that don't look like one another I would say that matter is an importantly resistant element in Consciousness because I believe for reasons that are probably too long to go into here but people can find out more by reading the math with things and I believe that resistance is essential to the coming into being of something so the creation of something is not done by a mere single pathway or gesture but it requires some some hurdle to be overcome some resistance to shape it rather as as William James says rather wonderfully my voice is the air that comes from my lungs but if I didn't have an obstruction in my throat called my larynx I would have no voice so it's actually the the larynx the the all it does is obstruct the flow but it gives him his voice so it's a bit like that I'm getting too far away from bioelectric currents I don't know but maybe not I don't think it's that far away at all and and I think uh I I'm in complete agreement and you know with with people like Chris fields and Carl friston uh really trying to give a different account of matter that really places it as a phase exactly as you said as a kind of behavior of mind uh that that is more fundamental um yeah no I think I think that's I think that's exactly right um I guess I guess uh you know sort of uh towards um uh towards the end here I'd love to uh get your thoughts on a more sort of personal not necessarily for you and me but but for every for anybody what what would you say is the um what do we take away from all this on a personal level so we can do science and we can do scholarship and all that but what what do you think is you know sort of the life lessons here what what's the what what does this mean for us in terms of being beings you know well I think there's a lot really but the most important thing to to to go to would be the concept of attention because it is the fundamental difference between the two hemispheres and this is not something that I've it's come up with on my own it's a very well-known fact that the left and right hemispheres pay attention to the world in different ways and I don't think you'll find any neurologists in the world who would dispute that and and the difference is largely that one prey plays uh or offers a kind of detailed focused very narrow attention to your detail in order to acquire it so it's it has various qualities it's narrow it's detailed it's highly focused and it's just something that we already know what it is and we know we want it the other attention that is doing everything else meanwhile so that while you're getting and grabbing you're not going to be got and grabbed by something else so it's looking at the whole picture and so its attention is Broad open sustained everything the left atmosphere attention isn't and completely uncommitted as to what it may find it might find a predator which is very important news or it might find your con specific which is equally important news so it's those things that one is a highly relational attention to something that is constantly reverberative modifying itself according to what it's finding is not integrating because its attention is already integral so it doesn't need to integrate the fragments the fragments come from the left hemisphere's attention now if you if you think that you think about the fact that how you attend to something utterly changes what you find so if you adopt a certain highly detached rationalistic absent kind of way of looking at something you see a mathematical pattern or you see a mechanism but you don't see the rest so I mean I sometimes say where I live in sky here there's a mountain behind my house and the name of this place is talaska which in in in it comes from the north where Talis again which means the sloping Rock so we know what this place meant to Norseman it meant a landmark which means danger because it's very dangerous Bay here it's a shipwreck but also that same place was something completely different to the picts who lived in the shadow of it and who found shelter there and saw it as the home of the Gods when people traveled here in the 18th century they saw it as a the mountain as a wonderful um you know many colored shaped to paint and draw in the 19th century they realized it was an Exquisite example of um columnar basalt and um to a physicist it's 99.99 space and even the other 0.01 we don't really know what it is so which of these is the real mountain there isn't a real mountain they're all different ways of experiencing that mountain now if you take that as a matter for the way we experience life in the world we can see many many different things there and if we adopt this I think very narrow window of a hyper rationalistic of nothing against reasons I mean I think that the K of reason and the neglect of Science in our age are far more important than the supposed subjugation of everything to them we're not scientific enough because we have dogmas which rule out various possibilities that I sense you and I might be more open to and I think it's very irrational of us to adopt many of the positions that seem rationalistic on the surface formulaically theoretically but are not rational at all if you think about the whole business of human life so what I'm what I'm really saying is that I think the whole purpose of writing that this last book that the matter with things which is upon on several levels is that we have adopted a very reductionist materialist vision of the world and we don't have to Cast Away either science or Reason in fact we need to embrace what science tells us and what reason tells us more wholeheartedly and we will see that there is a much richer more complex more beautiful entity there that we are in connection with and that it is our privileged Duty whatever while we're here to respond to it and so I'm painting a different picture and you ask what is the the payoff of this for us as human beings and the answer is I think it can radically change people's lives and not to um appear to be um I don't know I'm saying how marvelous the book is it is a fact that I constantly get from all over the world people writing to say your book has had a total impact on the way I think about things my life is better my work is better my marriage is better whatever so something is changing in people and I think that's real I mean tell me it's not you know I I don't believe you so that's that's what I what's what I say it has philosophical importance but it has everyday importance I'll just say something about the philosophical importance up till now we've only been able to say when it comes to arguing a matter in philosophy well this school thought this this school thought that take your pick but and so philosophy has gone on in this way but what I think I've been able to offer is that we can see the imprint of a less hemispheric limited way of thinking on how we would take the world and we can see the Hallmark if you like of viewing the world as the right hemisphere will see it and what I've undertaken to show is that the left hemisphere is more prone to delusion more mistaken less reliable than the right hemisphere now if that is the case and I can there is somebody to try and refute it I've drawn a vast body of of literature if that is the case then when we take the well-known paradoxes and I look at about 30 in chapter 16 of the matter with things you can see that one way of looking at this Paradox is that's the way that the left hemisphere take would be and the other way of looking at it is this is the way the right hemisphere would be so for example according to the left hemisphere Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise it's just impossible but everybody knows that Achilles can easily overtake the tortoise into a three strides so what I think I can show is that there are at least four aspects of that particular Paradox that show that the reason we get caught up in it is because we've espoused the left hemisphere's way of looking at it when we look at it from the right hemispheres way of looking at it there isn't a problem anymore now if that is the case then if I'm right then I have actually added in about this phrase something to the history of philosophy which is that we can now make more weighted decisions about which path is likely to prove in the long run more radical more helpful yeah yeah yeah super interesting uh I'm not surprised uh that that people react that way uh to your to your work uh it's so important and people I think are really looking for that I I get emails all the time like that asking you know so what you know so you know people looking for meaning in their in their life and things also yeah and in fact with with a couple of um collaborators um we're we're actually looking at uh trying to tackle kind of this thing uh or you know the loss of the loss of meeting right so so so with with with physics with evolutionary theory with so you know some of these things have drained away with some stuff that we used to lean on and some of that correct because we weren't looking at it the right way but it needs a replacement right we need to build it back up it's fine to sort of um uh just destroy some of those things but but then we need to build it back up in a more uh in a more in a better grounded more meaningful way and I I couldn't agree with you more yeah and from my point of view it is not part of the left hemispheres Evolution that it should be looking for meaning it's looking for stuff things and that's why I say the matter with things yeah um it whereas the right hemisphere is actually interested in purpose in meaning in what is all this about and what we now believe is that you know we're meaning seeking animals and that we must have meaning so we invent meaning but I say no it's not that we invent meaning it's that we either do or don't discover meaning so in other words the meaning is not something we made up the meaning is part of the process of living if you look at more fully what we are looking for is often a substitute for that which we can paint on to reality and say oh this is the meaning I've I've found to to paint onto it but that actually gets between us and what the what the meaning is and don't ask me to say in a few words what the meaning is because I'm talking about something that transcends language yeah yeah wow uh amazing uh so so much to think about um yeah I've taken a bunch of notes Here uh thank you so much this has been uh incredibly enjoyable um I'll I'll follow up I have many many other questions later so if you don't mind I'll follow up well it's been a huge pleasure for me to welcome and thank you for your time and um I'd love to do something again with you at any point um so thanks a lot thank you so much yeah absolutely I'll be I'll be in touch again thank you very interesting okay good all right good bye have a good one and I'll be still recording oh yes yes thank you okay that's good

Channel: Michael Levin's Academic Content

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Id: bCwTH5f2DnE

Length: 56min 29sec (3389 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023