Dr Iain McGilchrist at Ci2012 - "The Courage to Think Differently"

right well and as you see my latest book is on a rather limited topic and I'm gonna have to try and pad out for 15 minutes I thought I'd limit myself actually to three problems that illuminate something of why the world isn't actually the way we often think it might be and these are the neglect of context the mistaking of the map for the real world and what I call the laziness of action and I'll deal with those as we go through so first I want to stress the importance of context context changes everything the process of analysis takes them out of context where they may not be the same thing at all it could even radically alter the meaning of words let me give you an example in America there are four siren sizes of cereal packets there's Jumbo which means very large there's economy which means large this family which means medium and as large which means small and context can I'm not getting a much response from this do we move on a slide perhaps I'm pointing it the wrong way yeah I mean look at this thing you've probably seen it before with the squares a and B marked on that picture are in fact the same color context makes them look different I'm hoping I can demonstrate this to you and lack of context can also make things hard to understand this is not actually the face of a rather squashed looking teddy boy looking to your left but with a little bit more context perhaps you can see that it's only part of a picture of somebody looking at you and sometimes context can make things hard to see but it's not just the seeing the appearances that are changed by context the sort of way in which we look at things the context in which we see them the nature of attention changes the world where I live in Scotland I live at a place called talisca on the Isle of Skye and it gets its name from a norse word meaning sloping rock because behind where my house is there is a mountain which from the sea was a landmark to Norse seamen to them it was an important point for navigation too many people who have come for hundreds of years to paint it it's a many textured form of beauty and color so the people who used to live there it was the home of the gods to a prospector it might be a potential source of wealth to a geologist a chemist or a physicist it will in each case have a completely different meaning because different attention is paid to it none of these is the real mountain you can't find a real mountain apart from the way we attend to it you can abstract yourself but that's just a privilege a certain kind of very abstracted attention which doesn't necessarily bring you nearer to the truth for example you get a truer picture of what an act of sexual love is or what an act of worship is for seeing it through a lab window the words in a poem the words that mean so much in the context of that poem the notes in a great piece of music Schubert C major quintet could change your life but the notes themselves are nothing context is everything now what does this got to do with the divided brain there's an oddity about the brain which is that it makes all its everything that happens the multifarious beauty of the world come out of connections it exists only to make connections and yet this organ that's all about connection is whopping ly divided down the middle and in fact over the course of you volution it's got more divided rather than less so now what the heck is that about it turns out is to do with the tension birds and animals also have divided brains and they had to solve a Darwinian problem of evolution they needed to be able to pay a certain very specific kind of narrow focused attention to something they needed to get to eat to build a nest to get that twig to pick up that seed against perhaps a background of gravel so forth at the very narrow focus precise attention but if that's the only attention that you can pay you'll end up being someone else's lunch while you're getting your own because you need to have the exact opposite kind of attention a broad open uncommitted attention as to what you may find for predators or for mates for friends or foes these two kinds of attention build different worlds one is contained of highly charged tiny fragments which the things that we want the other is a broad picture a broad context in which we can understand what the world is so broadly speaking the left hemisphere has evolved for us to manipulate the world to get things and he used them the right hemisphere has evolved for us to understand our relationships with our mate with our enemies with the flock that we belong to with humanity at large now this has consequences because these two hemispheres produce two kinds of attention and two kinds of world and those worlds are so different that we need the brain to be divided in order to deal with them we need them both we need them at once but they are strictly not compatible so they need to be somehow held together but apart and that is the job of the corpus callosum that little band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres you see in this diagram but you see we think that things are made up of parts but in fact holes are real parts are invented and we start there's a hierarchy of attention which means we start with the big picture and we only then focus on details that seem to be important almost everybody looking at that would have seen an H and a 4 before they saw E's and 8 there's an exception to that which is in schizophrenia so if you saw EES an 8 please see please see me afterwards actually I mustn't worry people there are other explanations say but you see for example here a famous picture of a Dalmatian dog everybody can see the Dalmatian dog there's an aha moment when you spot it and I don't sure if my pointer works I don't think I can do this for you it's not very easy but anyway um there is a picture of a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground where the shade of the tree is and two paths cross and you can only see it as a whole there's no way you could look at one of those splotches and go hmm bit of a path I think um another splotch bit of a dog it doesn't work that way relations matter more than things there was something that I call between this which is both the things that appear separate and their connection taken together and this is most obvious in music if you take as I say I mentioned music but just think about this a single note a b-flat doesn't mean anything put it with an A it still doesn't mean anything because an A doesn't mean anything you put lots of things that don't mean anything together you don't have any meaning so perhaps it's in the gaps it seems to be in the gaps it seems to be in the gaps between the notes that create the melody the gaps between the notes that create the Harmony the gaps between the notes that create the rhythm but in gaps the silence silence doesn't mean anything so there's nothing there that means anything at all until the whole context comes into being and then as I say it can move you profoundly or change your life so we need to be aware of context we need to be taking the broadest possible view of our world or we will miss the Predators we will miss the dangers those dangers actually probably come from ourselves and I just like to suggest that although the left hemisphere controls the right hand which is the bit which we reach out to grasp things and it controls the bits of language not all of language but the bits that say we are grasped it we've pinned it down that is what the left hemisphere does but there is another kind of attention a broader attention a more creative attention which you can offer the word attention comes from the Latin at tendrá to reach out a hand you can reach out a hand to take or you can reach out a hand to create to give life confusing I said I'd talk about confusing the map with the real world now what happens is everything when it's new because it comes from the broad picture it comes from the periphery of attention where the right hemisphere is vigilant is first registered by the right hemisphere and then it gets taken apart and pidgin hope it gets abstracted generalized and put into a category and as it becomes a no longer present thing but a representative presented again it's over in the left hemisphere Elkin and goldberg famous american neuroscientist and Koster did research on this every kind of experience every kind of image every kind of work when it's new is first better processed in the right hemisphere then moved to the left because the left is interested in creating a representation of the world a representation is what we need in order to use it in order to manipulate it if I go from London to Edinburgh I really need to know exactly which road to take but all the richness of the world all the landscape I go through the people's houses I pass what they have for supper what they call their dog how they treat their wives I don't need to know that but it's actually the real world the map isn't the real world but we can get to the point where that piece of paper with that tick box on it and that little theory we have about the world takes precedence over the multi for various complexities of the world as experienced the use of your myth that the life left hemisphere is realistic is it really realistic I don't think so in its well things are brought into our attention in a way that helps us use them for that they need to be fixed they need to be static they need to be distinct and separate and they need to be certain but actually as physics tells us and as just living as a mature human being tells us things are interconnected everything is interconnected to everything else things are fluid things are living and they are fundamentally uncertain so although the Newtonian world is logical for the left hemisphere a much more complicated kind of world is the one that the right hemisphere enabled us to see then when we don't we're not aware of it and we don't see it then we get surprises we get things like the financial crisis where our theory takes over from the reality a simplified system from one in which there are recursive loops chaotic dynamics and this left-hemisphere system denies things that don't fit in it's a very neat way of solving a lot of difficult problems example consciousness what's that doesn't exist that's the reply you get from the left hemisphere doesn't exist lots of people go around saying this now influential thinkers consciousness doesn't exist I'm quite interested what they're using to say that with where they got that conclusion from if it didn't come through consciousness but they were now the last point I want to make to you is that of what I call the laziness of action you'd like to know what are we to do about this you would like seven bullet points to take away I have only one bullet point anybody who gives you bullet points is not worth attending to so a great English psychiatrist Antony's store taught his young psychiatrists in training don't just do something listen and actually in the attentive space something grows something that has meaning now the nature of creativity is not that we can make it happen by a series of actions we can sure as hell stop it from happening by our busybody illness and by being too busy and running headlong with our noses buried in what it is in front of our noses rather than seeing the broader picture we need a change of heart and mind so there isn't an easy recipe but if everybody in this room took away the idea which I hope you'll find better expounded in a book I wrote that these two hemispheres of the brain needs to be balanced but in our world only one of them seems to be operating and to a very large extent controlling the way in which we think about I mean don't worry your brain is working fine but in the culture the take of the left hemisphere is the dominant one the nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen we can drive it out with our busyness and our plans as Goethe said art is not a matter of making things as though Mozart whipped up Don Giovanni like a cake for eggs and sugar as these wonderful moving last sculptures of Michelangelo show it's often about not putting things together but clearing things away about removing things about making space about negation which is profoundly creative putting distance there where that was before something too close to your nose for you to be able to see what it really is thank you very much you

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Keywords: Dr, Iain, McGilchrist, creative, innovation, futuristic conference, sustainability, environmental, business conferences, australian conference, melbourne conference, human resources, inspirational, motivational, social, entrepreneurship, innovative, competitive edge, workplace, learning and development, strategic thinking, productivity, leadership, special events, business and art, climate, environment, community, social change, differently, courage, successful future

Id: kunVEneaGNg

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2012