Dr Iain McGilchrist & John Cutting discuss schizophrenia and philosophy

well it's my extremely great pleasure today to have with me uh remotely at any rate i'm a figure who has been very important in my intellectual development dr john cutting he's probably the person alive to whom i owe most intellectually speaking and that's largely because of something that happened almost on a whim and that might have not have happened i was working at the the morsely hospital in the institute of psychiatry and i saw advertised a lecture uh by dr cutting who i didn't know and the topic was the right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders which was um the title of a book that in that year 1990 was published by oup and i was intrigued because i had already asked a number of questions to myself about lateralization but i had no framework in which to put it and i went along to this talk and was completely blown away by what i was hearing which was that effectively the two hemispheres had a different take on the world and that to one what is implicit is more readily available than to the other what is embodied is more available than to the other but what is unique is better understood than to the other and in each case this was the right hemisphere which as people who know anything about this area will know is not capable of speech and i've been puzzling for a very long time why it was that i couldn't express certain problems i had with the way in which when we took a work of literature and made it explicit it lost its uniqueness it lost its meaning and it became entirely disembodied and abstract and i found no language in which say this clearly i had tried in a book called against criticism but there it was john was telling me it's no surprise because the right hemisphere is the one that understands the implicit understands uniqueness understands embodiment sees things in context and the left hemisphere relatively speaking doesn't so afterwards i was bold enough to go up to john and say that was an absolutely fantastic talk and in fact i wrote a book you know that you might be interested in taking a look at and he very kindly said yes he would and took away a copy of against criticism read it and said he was very interested in it and would i like to join him in some research he was doing in which i was effectively able to take advantage of some work that he'd already done over a long period of collating information on patients with various um psychiatric disorders so that's how it all started and over the years john has um very willingly given of his time in conversation and in other ways directing me to things that i might be interested in but didn't know about in fact my interest in max shayla comes entirely through john who is translated for the first time into english some of shayla's work and when i was uh in johns hopkins in baltimore in 1992 so two years roughly after or perhaps even only a year after we we'd met um i got a very excited missive from john saying there's an amazing book called madness and modernism by an american psychologist louis sass you've got to read it and i did and that became the other plank of my interest in lateralization not i should hesitate um should uh quickly point out not that louis talks about lateralization but he does talk very much about schizophrenia now at that point i think what i'd like to ask john i've explained how i came to be caught up in this business of lateralization but how was it that you john came to be so interested in it and did it have anything to do with schizophrenia oh well thank you very much for those of those comments here well let's go back to 20 years because i started in psychiatry in the early 1970s and almost straight away i um thought that schizophrenia was such an extraordinary condition the people i was seeing and the books that i read about it and on the one hand the extant explanations at that time were woefully inadequate and yet it seemed to me that there must be some explanation so there was a polarized between the current inadequate explanations and the very fact that you know something must explain it so for instance there were social explanations like overprotective mothers well there are plenty of overprotective mothers around and whether any of their children became schizophrenic or not um how could that in itself explain a delusion such as um thinking that rays were penetrating your brain it just didn't make sense to me and then there were lots and lots of psychological explanations virtually every mental function that you could think of attention perception thinking consciousness had been incriminated in them in the um causation of schizophrenia now i actually did a lot of psychological experiments around that time and one that struck me most was had come by chance there was a theory around that um there was something wrong with the way schizophrenics categorized the world so a sort of typical instance and a sort of out of you know out of order incidents were when i was not appreciated so i started i gave them a little test so i had them say a robin and a pterodactyl as an example of a typical bird and a atypical bird and i showed them these and asked them which they thought you know was more you know typical of a bird but then i thought i better have a control task to make sure that they were attending and i chose faces so there was one happy man and one grumpy man and asked him which was the happier now this was so simple that my children who were only three and five at the time could do it easily they got them all right and to my amazement the the category um items they did quite well on but they were no better than chance on deciding which um you know person was more happy and i thought that was quite remarkable and i then discovered that this in neurological parlance is called prosopagnosia for facial expressions and that even at that time was regarded as a right hemisphere problem and then even the neurological explanations around at the time didn't um account for the particular pattern of schizophrenia and most of them didn't say any more than there must be some brain damage but the whole um history of schizophrenia had been that the first person to properly describe it's a german called crepelin um had called it dementia prycox meaning early dementia the swiss psychiatrist broiler who came along a few years later said no no that's not correct it's not a dementia it's something different that's why he called it schizophrenia from the splitting or a shattering of the mind and then over the years up until i met you as more and more information about right hemisphere um functioning and left hemisphere functioning came in i was just absolutely convinced that um there was something similar between righteous damage and schizophrenia to my amazement not one person was was interested in this and and i've you know i've seen some of your previous talks and you you also had the same negative feedback from people about anyone who who dared to step into this sort of murky um murky pool and what struck me about you was that you you saw from the word go how how interesting and important this this theory was yes i mean you pointed out that pros of agnosia which is something that um we find in schizophrenia the difficulty in reading faces is a right hemisphere disorder but you also amassed a vast amount of information about people with right hemisphere deficits and logged the way in which they were similar to patients with schizophrenia yes and i think that the key to me and what was so exciting was that you set all this in a philosophical context you weren't simply saying well that there's this finding there's that finding clearly they're bonkers you know they think this but you were saying what seems to have happened is that there is a coherence to their world in a way but it's one a world that's very different from us have different qualities from ours and it's rather like the world that the person with right hemisphere deficits uh experiences and one of the sayings i sometimes quote from you and you may even not remember saying it but nonetheless i love it is that um psychiatry is a branch of philosophy and that medicine is a branch of psychiatry and i think that's so so right that behind all this we are dealing with the business of a human being's experience of the world and outside of that context you cannot understand what they are experiencing whether it's mentally or physically and that everything has to be understood in terms of the whole person not just as a fragmentary phenomenon what do you think about that oh yes i think that's very good so what what really happened from the 90s onwards was that some i became disillusioned with with psychology as a as a discipline because it didn't seem to me to to cover the the sorts of issues that you you've just been talking about and i i then moved on to consider what i call the the philosophical inventory that th this was the um the areas i became interested in so space time movement individuality and thingness you know what makes her a thing as a poster of a living living person so there were a whole set of categories which which psychologists had absolutely nothing to say about and that's when i got into the philosophical area and then max schaeler i got interested in him because he more than any philosopher i'd i'd had read and even some of the um 20th century philosophers he seemed to understand um the um area that i was i was talking about it was the only philosopher that seemed to um pinpoint the the sort of issues that i thought might some be responsible for schizophrenia so that was the move then well i think some viewers may be thinking very interesting but i don't see what this has got to do with schizophrenia so perhaps you could help us there um well that's that's some a slightly different point this this was me if you like taking off into into philosophy but yeah that this got more i think to do with the the the hemispheres because i i do think that each each hemisphere has a um um takes part in this value perception and and so each hemisphere has a different you were using the word tape and so so some values are are um grasped by the right hemisphere and and and some by the left hemisphere i've got a feeling we might some have a disagreement about that but that's that's that's what i think i think from the you can move on to schizophrenia because i think that one of the problems with schizophrenics or people with schizophrenia is that they actually grasp a higher value than the normal person do they're very bad on practical things if you ask them to you know mend a light or something they're very poor about it and that they must prefer to talk about religion and science and you know the world and in some ways they're the philosophers monkey because you know they're they're internally sort of attracted by by the the higher level of values and so they're they're in in their everyday life they they often cope extremely badly because they're too busy um um philosophizing all the time so yeah so there is a implication for schizophrenia as well yes i mean i i i think probably we do differ a little bit about the the values in relation to the hemispheres but maybe we can come on to that but i think that where i would agree entirely is that they're dealing with something in the abstract and this is why i think that the notion of thingness has to be rather carefully glossed because it can mean a number of things it can mean being very down to earth or it can mean seeing things as inanimate and seeing um static things rather than processes and these can all be aspects of thingness and i would say that the the left hemisphere um and schizophrenia as a left hemisphere hypertrophy or overdrive condition involves excessive abstraction taking things out of context um and simply not having them rooted in the embodied world that mello ponti would say is that our way of actually taking a hold on the world and understanding it so that they're very disembodied in a way that a lot of the worst kind of philosophers are so when one says they're philosophers they're like very like that the worst kind of anglo-american analytic philosophers who are off somewhere in entirely um theoretical realm whereas there was another kind of philosophy which i think the continental philosophers of the 20th century have been better at understanding which is not abstracted in this way you

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

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Keywords: dr iain mcgilchrist, neuroscience, psychology, left brain right brain, brain hemispheres, ian mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist, right hemisphere, schizophrenia, philosophy, john cutting, iain mcgilchrist and john cutting, schizophrenia and philosophy

Id: f6QoO0YJj1M

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021