Dr Iain McGilchrist - Understanding the human brain

[Music] hello i'm ian mcgillcrist um i suppose i describe myself as a a writer i'm a doctor i worked as a psychiatrist i started off in the humanities as a student of literature and philosophy and now i i tend to give a lot of uh talks over the internet marvelous um so welcome in uh it's such an honor to to be able to chat with you today and um i i i think out of everyone that we've interviewed um you're the person who whenever i've told my friends they can't oh my god can you please ask him this uh so congratulations it really is a huge honor to have you on on with us today and and congratulations to everything that you've done um i am i just thought that maybe i'd start i mean you're at the moment you're this in incredible uh incredible author incredible thinker but um you know have you always been this way how did you get here what was your journey to get to where you are i wanted i suppose i've always been a sort of horribly um curious child and interested in a lot of things um and yes i mean from my early teens certain philosophical uh positions particularly attracted me and interested me and there were a number of things i believe that most people didn't seem to think were right and one of them is that the hole is definitely not the same as the sum of the parts um the trajectories in nature are never linear but actually usually spiral shaped or circular um that the world out there particularly the animate world is not inert but it's actually actively uh in an encounter with us and our reality comes out of that encounter so i thought these things already when i was a teenager um i went up to oxford with the idea of doing philosophy and theology but in my interview they said philosophy and theology not even an honors degree you can't do that you you know you must do something proper and it i had to take the entrance exam in the school subject which just happened to being lit and uh my my tutor said oh you're rather good at this why don't you come and do this so i did and then as soon as i got my degree i got a fellowship at all souls college oxford which is an extraordinary thing that it gives a young person after a three-day exam if you win the prize you get seven years in which you don't actually get pressure put on you you don't have to teach you don't have to publish you only have to use the time to read and find out about things so at the time it was in colossal privilege of course and i didn't completely realize it was only in hindsight that i've realized what a what a gift that was and for a long time i thought i'd wasted it but actually what happened was i i got interested in the mind body problem for reasons i i could go into it was really my dissatisfactions with how we approach works of art we turn them into general abstract ideas instead they are unique embodied beings that we encounter and we make the implicit explicit and therefore destroy that power so i got interested in the mind body problem and that led me to many seminar rooms with philosophers but i thought the philosophers were just all too disembodied in their approach this question i wanted to do it in a more embodied way and the answer to that was go off and be a doctor and specialize in the overlap between the brain and the mind neurology and psychiatric that's what i that's what i did um cutting a very long story short and then i i started started getting interested in the difference between the hemispheres a toxic topic that i was advised not to touch with a barge pole because it was all pop science and had been exploded long ago but i thought actually no the more i learned about it the more i realized it was something incredibly important there of a philosophical kind so we may come on to talking about what those um what's what i mean by that 100 i mean i i just want to go back to a couple of things you said that one i thought was very interesting that you know you got got given seven years just to read and it's interesting whenever you talk to people who are doing remarkable things like yourself there often seems a really long period of reflection where you're given time to read and to think and i don't think you get that very much in the modern day workplace i don't and no what i was going to say is that i'm not even sure that i don't know that i'm right about this but i suspect that even the peace that i had then may not exist no because the temptation always is to to fuss to manage to monitor how's he doing is he really on course um has he published anything yet no five years has gone by and actually if i had been forced to write three papers a year i'd have crystallized my thinking very early and it would have come very narrow but because people trusted i mean after you're elected they sort of think well this is an interesting person with us let them get on with it and i think we would have much more of that in life in general stop breathing down the necks of creative people and it's quite true that sometimes they won't produce very much but if you breathe down people's necks nobody will produce anything interesting imaginative and creative you have to trust and occasionally you build into your thing it won't work but a lot of the time you'll get fabulous results and so i'm immensely grateful to it and it allowed me to spread my interest through science philosophy different languages cultures histories and so on and that eventuated in my two best-known books the master in his emissary the divided brain and the making of the western world and my more recent uh book uh the matter with things uh our brains are delusions and the unmaking of the world this this lovely book here well that's that's part part one of your lovely book is behind me and amazon only sent me part one um they're sending me part two today apparently um gosh that's terrible oh gosh that's uh so it's okay it's going to take me a while to finish the part one so i think i was going to take it to uh to grease with me to roads i thought that was a a good place to read a philosophy book maybe well i think it is i think it is but don't let it ruin your holiday but i think there's a message here which is about pace and the quality of attention that comes with slowing down and not being distracted and i guess this book was a very long time in gestating a very long time in writing and takes a long time to read but my readers tell me that this process has rewarded themselves nothing but marvelous things say bravo so your first book you're saying you you took almost 30 years to get to writing your first book and i think the second one you said was around 10 15 years or so that's right but it's not quite true because my first book i wrote in my 20s it was called against criticism and explained why i thought there was something wrong with the philosophical process of criticizing a work of art that was published by faber and then there was a very long pause while i um worked incredibly hard as a junior hospital doctor um with small children in the family and then ended up with these other books after i'd been to the morgue and become a a psychiatrist and neuro researcher yeah obviously then the the the you're staying at your your sort of specialism is in is in the two sort of different the brain is not one being it's sort of split in two there's a left and a and a right brain and and i i know you said earlier that it was contentious i i remember actually in in one of our courses with laurie then he talks about the left brain and the right brain someone emailed me once and said i want a refund uh there's no that was that that's been debunked ages ago it's uh there is no left and right right so um yes i mean uh yeah love to go into that yes well the first hurdle i have to get over is this uh idea that it's all been debunked i think by now i've pretty thoroughly debunked the idea that it's been debunked it's just that our earlier idea about it was wrong so anyone who tell them they need a bloody good debunking themselves and go and study mcgill crist because without being funny about it um i i must be one of a handful of people in the world who has so thoroughly researched hemisphere differences over decades um i'm not saying i'm the only one of course but i i i have a particular take on it and i have really put years of work into it and what what struck me was that in the past people had thought of the brain as a machine and so in the 70s and 80s they said what does each part of the brain do oh the left hemisphere does reason and language and the right hemisphere does imagination and painting pretty pictures and so that's the thing that got debunked but lots of people went on um being fascinated by the differences and so there was a colossal amount of research since the so-called debunking era and it needed somebody to immerse themselves in it and try and see the overall pattern and the shape and the meaning of it and and if you want me to say about that but i'll leave you definitely yeah what what is the shape in the past i was gonna say i guess why are they so clearly divided i mean if you look at a picture of a brain or if you think of a picture of brain there is a clear gap in the middle so yeah yes i i although i heard almost nothing about the right hemisphere um in medical school um it apparently was there just to prop up the left hemisphere which did everything um there was an interesting question which is why is this brain which is just a nexus of neurons and depends on the number of connections it can make to have the power that it has why would you build one of those with a whopping rate divide down the middle so that only two percent of neurons in the brain actually cross um right second thing why are the two hemispheres like asymmetrical in the same way and why third thing why is the band of fibers at the base of the brain called the corpus callosum which connects the two why is a lot of its work it's not saying you need to know about this i mean it does that of course but a lot of what it does probably the majority is you keep out of this i'm dealing with it and the history of that my my theory my belief my hypothesis which i i i don't know a better one and i've never heard anybody suggest a better one is that all creatures evolved in this way and it's not just us you know have these divided brains um this goes all the way down through animals and so on right down to the most primitive nerve centers in in worms and and and insects and the most ancient neural network in the world seven million years old in this year nowadays uh is already asymmetrical it's very interesting and i think the reason behind this is that every creature has to solve a problem that doesn't sound difficult now but is generally and has been throughout history very difficult which is how to eat and stay alive because the problem is in order to eat you've got to grab stuff you've got to identify it and get it you've got to catch that rabbit whatever it is you've got to be focused on something and get it and that requires a hyper focused very clear cut kind of attention to a detail but if you're only paying that attention you become somebody else's lunch while you're getting your own because you're not looking out for everything else that predator you're not looking out for your mate for your your offspring that you need to feed and so on so one part of the brain has evolved to do this grabbing and getting and it's not very bright i mean the left hemisphere contrary to what one was taught it's not particularly intelligent the the right hemisphere is actually more responsible for the element we measure in iq as well as emotional and social intelligence i mean the ideas got out there that yes okay the right hemisphere might be good at emotional and social intelligence but you know real intelligence iq no the right time is more important for that as well because it is the one that basically is able to understand to see things to make connections to see patterns and it's through the making of connections and those patterns that we come to understand the world including scientists and mathematicians they all describe so clearly they don't reach their results by plodding along a track in a linear way they work on something they get nowhere they turn their attention away and bingo they're going shopping and suddenly the thing comes you know so and that comes from the right hemisphere i mean we know that very definitely it's it's related to the right superior temporal sulcus and the right amygdala i i am i remember hearing your story and i don't know whether this is related but it was a story about um a beetle in australia that uh that they were dying out and the reason why was because they they kept on trying to have sex with um broken beer bottles that were discarded and outside and the reason they were scientists were saying was because they couldn't figure out that the beer bottle was not another shiny beetle so they were basically sort of thinking they had done their job and then heading off and i'd imagine that would be very much the left brain thinking that okay this is a mate but actually it's a bottle that's very different thing so nothing was happening and i i almost wonder i mean if i guess if you go a level deeper it could be maybe this is sci-fi talk but i mean the the world that we see as far as i can tell is is a construct of our of our brain like our brain tells us that there is color and it tells us that this is green and this is what green looks like and probably even deeper than that and so i wonder whether you know there's there's obviously a whole raft of things in around us that surround us we can't see like we can't see radio waves if you wanted to take a basic example unless we have a scanner um and i'm sure there are other things that we don't even have machines that can measure but are there and maybe those are things that we have feelings before i don't know we can't see the sounds that the bats and bears can hear for example we can't hear them at all right we might think they weren't there but they are so you're wondering right yeah this this sort of if i remember rightly the left left brain is very focused and very very rigid is there a creative or a non-creative past i mean are they both kind of creative um it's embarrassing um to have to say this um i would love it not to be true but after researching it in great depths i can say that unfortunately this piece of pop law happens to be correct the right hemisphere is much more important in contributing to creativity but yes i mean the thing that's so interesting to me is that people had focused on the machine question assuming the brain was a machine so what does it do the question you ask about a machine what's it designed for but in fact it's not about the what it's about the how and i find that this distinction between the how and the what is very important across a whole range of problems in the world of the how we neglect but it's actually the how that makes all the difference um and so you're right that in a sense what we see you said i think make it up what i want to do and i know you're talking shorthand but nonetheless there are important philosophical points here and the world tends to divide into people who have a rather naive view that the world just is out there and it's our job to record it as it were passively um like like a photographic plate or a mechanical voice recorder but in fact it's not that and it's not the other um extreme position which is uh kind of post-modern position but effectively there is no reality because we just make it all up in our heads neither of these simplistic positions is correct and it's all about what i call the betweenness the betweenness of my mind and whatever is outside of it in the world and so what i say is experience is an encounter and it's the quality of the encounter brings something of me to it of course and that that goes with the idea that each person sees things slightly differently although the differences can be exaggerated on the whole when we meet people we can have a common conversation about what we find but thankfully um so you know we we do we do have that um but it also there's something out there that we really do make contact with i'm very very keen to make that point that you know it's not a waste of time our perceiving we're not duped by it um but you see the difference between the hemispheres one of the many is that the left hemisphere starts with a its own purpose to get grab and get and it only sees little bits of things so it it has a design in its mind in a very abstract way but the right hemisphere sees the complexity of the world the fact that things are interconnected not atomistic as they seem to the left hemisphere that they're always moving flowing and changing not rigid and separate like slices as they are in the left hemisphere that they're animate that they contain implicit meaning not as the right left hemisphere only understands explicit meaning and so forth so the left hands who can't understand jokes takes them seriously can't understand poems so what does this mean and whereas the right hemisphere is picking up all of this richness and the difference in the end is that you've got one very big broad rich dynamic animate picture of the world that of the right hemisphere and you've got a schema a map a theory about how the world should be according to what's going on in the left hemisphere and and that's a very important contrast in the modern world i you know i argue in both these books that we are moving further and further into a left hemisphere-dominated world but it's now become extraordinary how much people believe their theory about what things should be like over the manifest testimony of experience it's it's i wonder whether part of that the sort of left bias is is could that partly be because we spend a lot of time in front of computers and screens which kind of train us to you know there's there'll literally be a thing which says click here do this do that and they were from marketing my backgrounds in marketing and advertising whenever we were doing stuff online our advice would always be to tell the brand to have a clear call to action because people are much more likely to do as you say when they're looking at things on the computer screen so i wonder whether the sort of brain is kind of almost emerging with a machine in some sort of way well i think it is but i think one can only blame what you're describing too much time spent on the the two-dimensional screen um that's an element but i think the roots of this go back much further go back probably a couple of hundred years and in the master and his emissary the first part is neurology and neuropsychology and philosophy but the second part is an attempt to look at the turning points in the history of the west and effectively one can see three arcs in greece in rome and our present civilization since the renaissance and each of these seems to start with the right hemisphere and left hemisphere working maximally fruitfully together the left hemisphere always being under the aegis or the control or the oversight wherever one wants to put it of the right hemisphere because the right hemisphere in the title of that book is the master the left hemisphere is just an emissary who goes about and does stuff for the master but it doesn't realize because it knows less it thinks it knows more you see the less people know the more they think they know everything it's only when you know a hell of a lot you realize you don't know very much so the left left hemisphere um thinks it knows everything and thinks it knows better than the right hemisphere but i can tell you in every way it's inferior so except in this one important way of helping us manipulate the world through language it's not the only one that deals with language the right hemisphere does as well but the left hemisphere deals with the ways in which we can target things with language make them very precise and it deals with the the right hand which is after all the bit which for most of us is how we manipulate so i think what happens is that civilizations overreach themselves they become too big physically geographically they become too um steep in their power hierarchy and their need for goods and so on and this demands a very machine-like bureaucratic way of thinking which is rolled out in a phrase that i abominate across the empire um and and this is part of it uh the left hemisphere makes you stupid but rich and most people are so addicted to being rich that they don't mind being made stupid in the process and now what's happening is that we spend um so much of our time interacting with machines even if as i have done today as i seem to do almost every day spent too long on a telephone with somebody in a call center where you are effectively talking to a human being who has been reduced against his or her will to behaving like a machine and so and we're now we're now taught by people who don't understand what they're looking at when they're looking at a human being that human beings are just faulty versions of what could be done much better by a machine but it would take us a rather long time to unpack the full classness of that position yeah that is in my book anybody who's listening wants to find out more if they're in my it's all in my books yeah and the books are fantastic and available anywhere so and even if you even if you're not a big reader your latest book is great for weight training as well uh so if you want to just is it another use um it's uh it's very marvelous at them you i guess um it was interesting what you said i love the way that you i remember rory southern telling me about that that um you know when they've done experiments and and you look at someone who knows a topic really really well and you ask them how sure they are about an answer to something they'll say well i'm not 100 sure but if you are someone who just knows a little bit about the subject they're like yes i'm 100 sure this is definitely right and i i mean i wonder if that is that related at all to sort of i guess rory would often say that most of what we do is unconscious we don't realize that we're doing it we had to focus on breathing we had to focus on just you know walking life would be pretty exhausting um yes so it's it and do you know what is there a rough percentage of that is there like yes there is um and it's about half a percent is what we're conscious of of what's being processed by our brains and uh there's nothing inferior about the unconscious indeed if we could survive allowing the unconscious to deal with almost everything we'd be doing a very good job and in fact part of making people wise is enabling them to get comfortable with things that are embodied skills that they don't have to consciously think about because they will do them much better if you talk to a skilled chess player or a skilled pilot or surgeon and ask them how do they do that they will make up something oh i just thought you know i don't know how it happened but basically the unconscious mind is able to take into account 17 20 streams of information and balance them in a way that we couldn't if we had them all on a list explicitly we wouldn't know what to do with them and once you make something explicit in in language you have reduced it to one thing out of all the great collapse of all that knowledge all that wisdom all that hard learnt experience is reduced to a few sentences that you can then argue about and a great philosopher a.n whitehead you know he was a logician mathematician and philosopher and wrote with bertrand russell the principia mathematica he is a philosopher i greatly admire and he says that consciousness is something that civilizations thrive as they make less and less necessary for consciousness because consciousness is rich and conscious sorry unconsciousness is rich consciousness is very expensive and he says it's like cavalry charges in battle you should only do it very occasionally it's very costly and you need fresh horses so what happens is when we we find we're stuck there's a problem something's gone wrong that's when the conscious mind comes and says let's see if i can unknit this and it's quite good at that we're very good at that but it when it's done its job you want it to push off because now you want the the business to go on again under its own steam yeah it makes a lot of sense i i am there there were so many different places i wanted to go there i'm gonna i'm gonna look at my nights to try and uh re re-uh re-balance myself um because i fear if i go if i go down the route of questioning i was going to that uh that this might take longer than an hour but i i can i can do my best i am doing my best to give shortest answers to some very deep questions this is incredible the next sort of um i don't know whether it's related or not it's probably almost going back a little bit but one of the things i was going to ask is you're one of the few people i know he is you know and please correct me if i'm wrong but you you you've been a psychologist and a sort of neuroscientist so like when you're looking at the brain are there when you're looking at particularly left and right brain are there any areas that the two and the two professions agree on um or are they relationships do they have prayer department i'm actually a psychiatrist uh psychologist i mean a lot of people don't really know what the difference is but a psychiatrist is is a medically trained doctor a psychologist um usually isn't um but you can't be a psychiatrist obviously without knowing your psychology um right i hope um are there things where where they agree well of course there are you're talking about what neuroscience and and the sort of business of cheating patients do they come together is that what you were asking sort of i i the reason why where where it came from was i remember when i was working at ogilvy i hired a child neuroscientist and to come into the agency and talk about how the brain works and um i just thought it would be interesting to you know kind of like we were talking about before like this you know my belief is that in today's world it pays to know a little about a lot um i think they sometimes call it sort of t-shaped people you know maybe there's one thing that you like and you have a broad understanding of things and so i thought if if a neuroscientist could come in and tell us about how the brain roughly works you know what what makes is is there any way to tell it to tell what makes us happy or what makes us sad or is there a way to train the brain all these kind of things so that was what i would have gotten to talk about but i don't imagine that that that what they think is maybe different to the more sort of um psychological side of things that that makes sense sorry for not using my words correctly no no i mean of course the number of questions um what the the question raises when you ask how does the brain works i mean um that would take 40 years to answer um not quite quite right but but to come to the narrower question there is more of a divide than i would like there to be between people who effectively um are and there are people who are fairly narrow scientists they they do all their work in a laboratory they work on um using machines to to investigate very small points very fine issues and the world needs such people but generally speaking anyone who is dealing with real human beings um sees something else um which is a different kind of picture which is much more like the right hemisphere's picture the broad one the rich embodied one the animate one whereas the the technical one tends towards the the detail that is inanimate and not connected with anything else so there is there is that effective dichotomy but i think where i see the most exciting things coming is from people who um can do both like vs ramachandran for example right and and i what i've found gratifying is that people like him and york pancep and um howard gardner and other people who work in in an overlap between the clinical and the neuroscience have been the people who have who jumped first to my side if you like and i find that the most uphill battle is with people who have looked at one tiny thing for a very long time i can't see why i need to connect this with people's lives i mean why would you do that i mean actually on the on the the film the divided brain which um quite quite quite good in places um there's a conversation with mike gazzaniga who's a very distinguished and you're a psychologist and i don't um other than respect him but he did say a very interesting thing which i thought was rather revealing he said well mcgilkins takes these sets of findings as it were neuroscience and then applies them to the lives of real people i'm not comfortable with that well that that's rather an extraordinary thing to say um but it's all all in keeping with the way things have gone um in fact when i got to the maudsley because you know i'd had this fellowship at all souls which it was a very rarefied academic thing and i've always been a very academic creature and when i got to the morgelli hospital which is i mean it likes to think it is and i i i wouldn't demand um the the the most distinguished training center for psychiatrists and in the country uh it was attached to the institute of psychiatry and i went there and because i went to do some research and somebody said oh yes please come and talk to me about what research you'd like to do and i said to this um lovely person and a distinguished person i'm i want to investigate how children develop the concept of time which i still consider an absolutely fantastic question um and she looked she looked at me and her eyes sort of glazed over and she said um come and clone the p450 receptor i said i don't want to clone the p450 but this is what happens is that people build empires on expensive machines that do detail things and they'd then really not got no room for somebody who is interested in the philosophical implications of all this so i realized that what i had to do was to do it myself basically you know to go off make my own life um pay for it by seeing patients which i fortunately absolutely love and find fascinating and then uh use that that might be in charge of my own time so that i could spend a lot of time researching reading and so on when you're um helping people do you find there's a my understanding of the brain is that it's elastic and that like if you don't exercise it much like a muscle there are parts that can sort of atrophy um or deadly shrink um when you're working with patients if you wanted to if you i don't know i don't know whether this is ever would ever be a real thing but if you met someone who was sort of almost sort of too stuck in the logic would would you ever give them exercises to try and work out their creative brain a little bit so sort of almost doing exercises that for your brain if that makes sense yes yes um yeah no no quite um first of all it's it's an interesting observation that uh domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild counterparts and we have smaller brains than the neanderthals had um so that bears a little bit of reflection but yes i think tendencies are are reinforced not so much that there are material changes in the brain i mean there are but that's not really this highly significant thing it's that we neglect whole areas uh that are open to our intellect and our imagination and and we don't see them i mean people i find this a difficult one to focus on but i say it's a bit like a radio set um it may be that um after you get a new radio and you're excited you listen to a couple of favorite channels and after a while you only tune into one channel the radio set is still capable of bringing in any channel you want it's just that you're asking it only to do one channel now that is really the situation in a way that we find ourselves in and to come to your question of what can we give them exercises i think the answer is no not in that sense but yes in another way um and this is best explained by my saying if i give you six things to do every day before breakfast that you know will change your life they won't really because you'll still be thinking of everything including these exercises in our normal reductionist utilitarian way well this is something good for me it'll make me make more money very good so but that's actually what we're talking about what we're talking about is a whole different way of thinking and einstein said this brilliant thing we can't get out of the hole we're in with the same thinking that got us into it in the first place so what one has to do is to change the whole way we think and if you do that the rest will follow now there are practical things i can say like mindfulness is very helpful it is i think it helps nourish the way of thinking of the right hemisphere which is not jumping in and chattering about things all the time but being sustainedly attentive vigilant and aware listening to the world and what it's saying as it were being actively receptive not in a passive way like a sound recorder but actually meeting the world being very present very alert very conscious but not filling the space with your talk that is important i think all children should be taught that and i think there are things to say about the way um education has become technical instruction these days even in what used to be called the humanities uh the ingestion of regurgitation of information seems to have taken over from using your mind and being trained how to use your brain but anyway um the the thing i'd like to say here is a lot of people have written to me saying things like this i realize after reading your book and it's usually um uh they're meaning the master in his emissary because this has been going on now for 10 years people have been writing to me and they say i i guess i see myself in myself i'm slightly autistic i i you know i'm somewhere on that spectrum i'm rather left hemisphere dominant but you have helped me see that and help me see what it is i'm missing and have helped me begin to change and say they say rather moving things like my marriage has improved my job is getting better i'm happier i i you know and so this is very rewarding because of course one of the things that part of my reason for wanting to study medicine was academic and intellectual about the philosophical questions i described how the mind and body relate but part of it was to be helpful my father was a doctor his father was a doctor they weren't great thinkers or anything but they were in part of that i i grew up with this rather wonderful idea of being somebody who could help people and um i i felt that very strongly when i was in clinical practice because people kept saying it like what would it feel like when you're not practicing so the last 11 12 years i've not been in clinical practice i'm living on an island you know in scotland um thinking writing talking but i realized that actually it was helping people just in a different way this almost reminds me a bit of sort of douglas adams where it's kind of the question is more important than the answers often and maybe they're kind of understanding where they were and being able to question themselves and their actions helped give them answers that oh anyway yeah yes simone simone siemen simone vey who's a um to a lot of people quite well known um 20th century french thinker um said love the question and what she meant was don't treat it in a superficial way or something bond with this question and allow it time to be addressed don't just think well i don't know what to make of that so i think that that is part of what you were saying you hang on to the question and often not having an answer is fine i'm quite worried by some people because they think they've got an answer yeah uh so it's lovely i i wish more learning was like that uh we're working on it um i know in part two of your book um you mentioned that there were sort of four main paths um i think you described them as you described them as science reasons intuition and imagination and i guess for these the kind of i was trying to understand more about it are these the the three these the four things that that sort of are these four sort of parts of the brain that you can work on or that everyone has a different mix of or yeah sorry i could use it i think you could you could see it like that i suppose but in fact um one of my general beliefs is that parts don't exist they're an invention of our way of looking at things things are whole and after our left hemispheres got hold of them and started analyzing it produces parts but let's be clear they're an artifact of the mode of attention so when you say are there in parts of the brain they're not even holy where the t oh with the th yes well they they are they're i what i consider to be the most likely candidates that most people would come up with i mean they'd almost everybody if you ask somebody so how do we actually get to know anything about the world i mean very few people would not mention science or reason yeah um and because intuitions had rather a bad rap lately um it's not appreciated although frankly it's outstandingly important and when we lose it we become the kind of clever idiots that i think we now are and imagination is also not um you know uh a way of taking one away from reality and having a bit of a relax imagination is a very serious matter which is actually the only way in which one feels one's way into what it is one's looking at so imagine it's a very deep thing and without it you can't no imagination no maths no imagination no scientific discoveries not only no tentaretto no whatever no bach but actually nothing of this works and people who have very little imagination are very very difficult to be around or to attempt to live with can one train them well i suppose yes of course you can i mean and we tend to be trained in science more than anything i suppose these days um most people get at least a basics of science but what they see is something very boring which is entirely procedural rather redundant in which one's endlessly proving the blindingly obvious and you know when i when i did this at school i thought oh god i wanted to decide i don't want to be one now but if you said they talked to me about you know black holes and and dark energy and things like that i just thought ah now here's something that's really interesting and important anyway so we do need all of these faculties and we're not we're actively discouraged from using our intuitions and our imagination because everything has to be monitored everything has to be micro managed we we live in the worst possible world in which the the mindset of micromanagement which is toxic in business is now applied to everything to academe to medicine to whatever we need to lay off and allow things to come to life again and allow people to use their experience and their intuition as well as of course their reason and their science will never let's go with those positively related to something else that that uh wondered about is do you know what happens in the brain when we sleep because i i associate sleep a lot with the imagination side of things which once came into mind when they were talking just then yes do you have any idea of what's going on there it depends what you mean by having an idea i mean we can do um eeg traces we've been doing that for yonks and and you can see differences in in the brain obviously that are indicative of sleep brain activity changes and the frontal lobes which are the most recently evolved part of the brain and whose job is basically to be an inhibitor of the posterior cortex of the brain and and the inferior cortex as well you know there's the bits of the brain that lie further towards the back of your head and underneath um that is relatively less active the visual cortex becomes extremely active um and there is no clear evidence about left and right in dreaming but the balance is definitely that the important parts of dreaming are from the right hemisphere which one would imagine would be the case for all sorts of reasons it understands symbolic meaning for example and it's it's no surprise that um that you know the mythologies that were picked up by jung um used symbols that he also used and are as it were there for the using and the asking in our brains but our chatty modern uh know it all mind has uh oh we don't need that anymore we don't that's all kind of rubbish but yes i mean problems can be solved famously in dreams and there are well-known instances of this by great scientists but whatever it does seem to be a very important thing and as so often i think it's one of those things that one needs to turn on its head i thought a long time ago the question was not why do we spend so much of our lives asleep but why do we spend so much of our lives awake and if we could we'd remain sleeping rather than i said if we didn't have to be conscious for certain rather technical demands um uh like getting and grabbing um we'd be better off remaining largely unconscious which wouldn't mean we wouldn't have any kind of mental life the unconscious is extremely rich kind of mental though anyway so yes there we go [Music] yes it's almost like um i i feel that with our conversation that there's there's definitely a love of the right hand side of the brain i mean which fits with me so i think we're we're often left brain uh we live in a left brain for the world so it's uh yes that's true and one thing i ought to say because i misunderstood often um i don't think it would be better if you all had a left hemisphere stroke there's nothing wrong with the left hemisphere it's a it's a very useful servant anything is wrong it's that it thinks it's the master that's the point it should always be this hierarchy of one that knows more and protects and uses what's helpful from the other but things go out of balance when the one that knows less believes it is the one that knows more and that's not just a neuroscience truth it's an ancient insight which you can find in japanese literature in chinese literature in indian literature in the north american native people's mythology the the same story is known to them and that's really the story that i meant to indicate by the title the master and his chemistry anyway yeah no i mean i was going to say if you're talking about or people i know that is it in good days and then they have sort of views of that as well is that it's that right or they have views of work sorry the the sort of they have that that kind of view of a left and right divided world and maybe divided brain if that makes sense um or is that would not well yes i mean one of the problems one of the reasons that people assume that because i have something to say about the current imbalance um that i we live in a very black and white world with all the shades of subtlety they've been um lost and and so um if you if you're not this extreme you must be that extreme you've seen this everywhere i mean of course it's it's the devil of social media you know the idea that actually you can have a balanced opinion in which well under certain circumstances that's true but under others it's not and we need a bit of this we need a bit of that and so on so the right hemisphere understands this it also is the hemisphere of both and after all it's the one that that asks the chemistry to do its job it deputed the atmosphere so it knows it needs both whereas the the left hemisphere doesn't know it's it's either or and i sometimes say that we we need not either either or both hand but we need both i don't know and we need both these ways of thinking in different circumstances marvelous um like i'll i'll uh i'll i'll probably uh uh try and try and wrap up and i wanted to ask you a silly question to end with um it's a would you rather um so so i had people always say a silly question when it's going to be a very difficult one to answer that's what they mean what i'll do is i'll give you two and then you choose which one you want to ask and then answer it i'll cut out the one that you didn't want all right um uh i've i've got first one was like would you rather have a fast forward or a rewind button in your life that was one option and then the second one i was going to give is would you rather be able to talk with animals or speak all foreign languages interesting questions um i think the first sorry i shouldn't say that should i i think the question about the fast forward button or the or the rewind button i suppose it depends whether you had any you were granted in this improbable set of circumstances you were granted the ability to to to to change something so if it were possible then i would love to be mine i would love to be able to talk to my younger self and say you worried too much about this you should have thought about that and so on um fast forward uh i'm not a great fan of either my future as i approach the grave uh or of or of of the future in general i'm afraid in the direction it's going now although i i have i see there are signs of hope that people will people are so fed up with this what i have shown them to be this left hemisphere world i think a lot of people you know they're hungry to hear something far more interesting imaginative sophisticated and the beautiful thing is it's backed up by a heck of a lot of science 5 600 papers are referred to and detailed in my latest book um yes would i like to i think i would i like to learn all the languages of the world or would i like to speak with animals i would like to speak with animals one of the things that's happened in the writing of these books is i've had to research a great deal more about animal cognition and we now know so much more about animals and all kinds of things that you know 40 years ago we thought oh animals can't do this they can't do that they don't have this that we have we're so wonderful and they time and again we've learned that actually animals lo know a heck of a lot more than we think and they know plenty of things that we don't know just as we know plenty of things that they don't know and i would very much like to be able to enter into as far as one can the the minds of some animals and to be able to converse with them to exchange whatever it is is in my mind with theirs and the the one that i would imagine would be the benefit of would be myself i i do like languages um i find they're fun and interesting and they give you new terms i you know the great thing is that languages have words for differences that we don't or we have differences that other languages don't that's great and and gerta said uh effectively as many languages as you speak so many lives have you lived so it's a very rich thing i i i it's a choice between two wonderful things but probably the animal thing is the one that i would find most most fascinating yeah absolutely brilliant answers for both [Laughter] it's fantastic yeah i am i remember reading i wonder whether this is related to some of the stuff he was saying earlier we're reading that um is it dolphins when they sleep they sort of shut down one side of their brain or something so they can they're always awake is that is that the same with a lot of animals um it is certainly true of some aquatic animals as well as dolphins but it's not true generally speaking of of most land-dwelling animals right but if they're doing that does that mean that do they still have left and right brains dolphins they're not yes they do and uh their right hemisphere is uh as it is with us more more social more uh connected to other creatures and the left hemisphere is more targeted towards prediction to to to catch things um yeah so but i mean the things that we don't understand about animals is extraordinary i learned just today that um in the history of of wales and whaling um there was one species of whales is known to be very dangerous it was the grey whale and they were known to attack large ships and sort of uh and so people knew that trying to catch the gray whale was was quite a battle and they could be extremely aggressive towards humans which generally speaking whales are not but at some point there was an international cheated that said we must not um pursue grey whales they absolutely not to be touched and within 48 hours of this happening gray whales started approaching human beings in the water and being very affectionate in the way that whales generally are and make what you like of it i i haven't had a chance to research the origins of this story but we don't i mean all i will say is that we shouldn't rush to conclusions we don't know um exactly we don't know what it is we don't know and that's a very important that that remark about the unknown unknowns which people laughed at was a very astute remark might have been the only stupid remark he ever made but well i i'm i'm very happy that i don't know a lot of things so it means there's there's lots more space for me to to grow it's been such an honor chatting with you and thank you so so much for taking your time and um if anyone's listening you have to go and buy all of ian's books um it's mandatory um [Laughter] and and if you if you want to hear more incredible talks and it's also got a fantastic youtube channel as well uh if you just uh go into google and type in in the killcrest you'll you'll find it um is there uh anywhere else people uh can reach out to you well it's channel mcgill chris that's the place um which is what you're referring to but i i have um in infested or infected youtube rather widely one of my friends said to me this is a slightly crossway i can't go online anywhere now and without bumping into you that's uh it's the the left brain algorithm uh yeah pointing them all in your directions thanks a lot chris i thoroughly enjoyed it thank you

Channel: 42courses

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Length: 57min 50sec (3470 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022