Everything You Know About the BRAIN is WRONG! Here’s How the Brain ACTUALLY Works | Iain McGilchrist

[Music] dr ian mcgillcrest welcome to the show thank you for joining me oh it's a pleasure tom dude i am really excited by your work i i'm obsessed with the brain so in the early days of my career of transitioning from feeling completely lost and hopeless in my life to realizing that just because i was uh underperforming that day in my early 20s did not mean that that had to be forever the thing what really gave me hope was learning about the brain and brain plasticity um specifically and that work led me to vs ramachandran who i've actually had on the show and just shaped by his work in ways that i i can't convey and now encountering your ideas which really take the form and function of the brain and i don't know if you would say make predictions as much as explain the world but for somebody like me who's so far behind you uh in terms of research it it has this predictive quality of you know my own thoughts and feelings but also societal movements and in the book the master and his emissary and your new book the matter with things you seem to really take the form and function of the brain and spell out some of the pathology that we're all living through and i find that idea really interesting and i want to start with split brain patients which i think will help us understand the difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere and the massive confusion that people have by oversimplifying the idea of what the left and the right uh brains as people call it do so first if you don't mind just defining what a split brain patient is and then the idea of being able to interrogate one hemisphere and then the other and the differences that we see yeah sure well the sprit lane brain procedure or calisotomy as it's called um was a technique devised in the 60s in caltech to apply to patients whose lives were effectively unlivable because of epilepsy severe epilepsy and one of the ways it was posited that you might be able to make life more livable was to stop a seizure spreading right across the brain if you cut the divide between the two halves of the brain you might be able to do that for those who are not familiar with looking at brains i should point out that your brain is deeply divided down the middle rather like a walnut and uh there's only a commissure at the bottom the corpus callosum that connects the two well there are a couple of other small communists but effectively that's it and so the the brain works well as a whole but it's also quite clear that the two parts need to be distinct as well as working together anyway this uh procedure gave the opportunity to enterprising psychologists to find out a little bit more about the differences between the right and left hemispheres and one really fast before you go into that one thing one thing that i want to understand is the corpus callosum is passing what in the case of a seizure electrical impulses like what what is going on that that is passed exactly that electrical impulses a sort of electrical storm um instead of the the properly um massively complex coming and going of stimuli that are correctly following some kind of uh uh direction you're just getting a massive storm of electricity it's like you know blast the system and so people you know in the worst cases lose consciousness completely um and sometimes people were having these seizures more often than they were not actually so you can imagine their lives were simply not livable so it was a brave experiment and do do seizures start on one side more frequently than the other like is this uh it starts in the right hemisphere and goes left or they can start from they usually but not always do start from a focus and that focus can be in either left or right hemisphere and it may be something that is just an abnormality that's there from birth in the way the brain was formed or it may be the result of some other uh insult to the brain as we say that has caused a problem in an area and it begins to act in a in a strange way giving off these rhythmical discharges um and so the point of the split brain procedure is the problem that when you send out sorry is the problem when you send out the electrical impulse the reason the next one catches on fire is it has to do something with that impulse or is the impulse saying you should specifically be firing well if you can imagine that normally the connections between neurons very cleverly gated i this was something that fascinated me when i started learning uh in medical school because the brain takes a lot of trouble to be able to communicate very fast so some nerves fibers are coated in myelin which is the white sheath which makes it the white matter in the brain and most of the long tracks that are really connecting things uh are fast transmission and yet you know well it takes next to no time for that to go from one end of a neuron to the other then there is this clunky process where there's a gap called the synapse between the nerve and the next net and when the impulse arrives at the end of the nerve it triggers the release of a neurotransmitter which then has to pass across the gap triggering something on the end of the other neuron and and starting to send another signal and i used to think well this is very odd i mean the brain's trying to do stuff quickly and it's actually managed to do that down the nerve but it's got this clunky business of um gating uh either it will or it won't and it can be blocked or it can be enhanced or it can be partially transmitted or or wholly transmitted so you've got some sort of control all the time and all these billions of uh synapses trillions of synapses so uh the answer is that when when a nerve gets a stimulus from another nerve it will respond appropriately but not under these circumstances because you've just got masses of nerve fibers all together being overwhelmingly excited and so you get inappropriate excitation so i mean by the way very very little of my research is based on what we learned from split brain patients although it is very interesting because you can just find out a lot about the reason the reason that i'm starting here just to explain the reason that i'm starting with split brain patients is i don't think most people understand the the real nuance of what you talk about in your book and the way you lay it out and we'll understand we'll be coming into this interview with a deep understanding of of what the hemispheres do why they are separated what the purpose of the corpus callosum is what we learn by snipping it and you know getting into the story of all this to really make your work um accessible to a broad audience i think is is when we get into interrogating the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and like the the pathology that have it is so weird and so fascinating i think it will immediately open a gate to people to say your brain works some kind of way like it has a form and a function that you take for granted you don't realize that you're misinterpreting the world and this is like my sort of core life thesis is people mistake emotion for objective truth and as you begin to understand the brain you begin to realize how that comes to pass and so forgive me because i know for you this is like 101 or even pre 101 but i think it will help we we can we can come on to your last um supposition later because it's a very interesting one but something that may not strike people as very significant but is and i'd like to say at this stage is that everything that exists not just in the brain but in physics in the world at large in nature depends on a combination of division and union that just to be wholly unified is not good just to be wholly divided and atomistic is not good there needs to be the synthesis of union with division and i sometimes put it like this it's not that it should be either or and it's not that it has to be both and we need both either or and both and now that might seem a long way from what we were just talking about but it isn't because one of the basic misunderstandings is that as it were these brains are either war with one another or are actually cooperating to do the same thing they're not doing either of those things they do compete and they do collaborate actually this is just like the rest of nature although we've been sold this story that nature is red in tooth and claw and it's all about competition and the rest of it most of the history of the evolution of life is to do with collaboration which includes at times competition and so you see competition but you also see staggering cooperation and the cooperation and the competition together make what i would call collaboration now the the two hemispheres of the brain collaborate and in order to do so they have to be different but able to talk to one another it's no good having a team in which they both do the same thing because then you've suddenly lost the point and it's no good having one where they just both go off on their own so when they started cutting the corpus callosum what on earth is going to happen to these people and the the interesting answer is that very much less than had been anticipated in other words people were surprisingly normal and that's partly because there are lots of other ways in which the brain certainly by the time you're at the age when you would have had this procedure you'd be a young adult probably at that stage your both sides of the brain have been stocked with information from the other part as well but in the immediate aftermath of the operation there were some famously odd instances like somebody um picking up a book with one hand and the other one closing taken away and putting it down or a woman going to a cupboard to get the dress out and reaching with her right hand and the left hand coming over taking the dress and putting it back on the hook so clearly there were two different kind of views of life going on here and one of the more robust uh differences actually is can be put in this way that it's like two different approaches to the world in a way rather like two different persons two personalities so that one character prefers this kind of thing the other character prefers another but what it is not is what was often said at the time which was that the left hemisphere seemed to be rational and a bit cold but at least it was reliable a bit like a boring accountant and the right hemisphere was way off but its head somewhere um creating wonderful pictures but really needing anchoring down because it was a bit pink and fluffy and didn't know how to get on with the business now that is just completely untrue and even a slightly more sophisticated idea of that which lingered for a long time which was that like maths and reasoning go on in the left hemisphere and pictures and emotions go on in the right hemisphere these are also completely wrong okay because both hemispheres do everything in some way but it's all about that in some way it's the how not the what so they they do the what of the same things but they do the how of them completely differently now why is that well i don't know any better explanation than the one i put forward in that book which is that every animal every organism that we know of has to do two competing things to stay alive it has to eat and it has not to be eaten and actually that's more difficult than it sounds because in order to utilize the environment manipulate it for your own good like get something to eat pick up a twig to build a nest or you know whatever it might be you need to pay a certain kind of already committed attention to some very precise detail highly focused but very narrow beam attention if that's the only attention you paid then you quickly end up being someone else's lunch uh instead of getting your own because all around you there are other things going on some of them as we say as i have said competitive so a predator but some of them um you know uh collaborative like this is my mate i need to keep an eye on her make sure she gets some food too my little ones whatever it is so however you look at it you have to have these two different ways of being in the world at once and this is what the hemispheres make possible for us because attention is much more significant than it sounds i i i it took me a while you called attention a moral act yes i do and that's because i i'd be curious to to understand does that tie into this more mechanistic stay alive thing or or is that gonna um sort of prematurely for where i want to take the conversation open us up into a much broader place we can go there but but we if you want to talk about the nitty-gritty side first briefly then yeah i think yeah let's stay nitty gritty for a second okay well i think the point there is that we attention is as i say something that sounds like one of those uh cognitive functions that people talk about a cognitive function i love it it's basically like a not very efficient procedure that a computer would do better but a computer can't attend at all attending it can do all sorts of things it can't conceivably attend because what attending means is a way of disposing your consciousness towards the world it's the how of your consciousness now if you are in a certain frame of mind or you have a certain purpose in mind or you're just a certain kind of person or it's just one of those days you may have a very driven manipulative attitude in which you see things as stuff to get to grab quickly hoard use you know whatever but you may on another day actually think this is madness this is no kind of a wisdom actually there's a whole vibrant living world there that i need to be connected to and listening to and it is speaking to me and i need to speak to it so i'm going right from the most nitty gritty to the the most philosophical if you like but what i basically realized quite early is that how you attend to something changes what there is in the world at least the the weaker claim is what there is for you in the world we may get but we might have a lot of time to get there to the point where i can explain that i believe that it doesn't just make a difference to what i find in the world but to what actually exists as well um to a degree yeah that that's big and and we will certainly uh get to that but one thing before we go off the corpus callosum and splitting it i'd like to ask because this if this is true this feels extraordinarily revelatory to me which is that there was a split brain patient and one half of the brain you even said i heard you say that you can think of the different hemispheres almost as having their own personalities and in the split brain patient that i'm thinking of one half was devoutly religious and the other half was devoutly uh atheist in the same brain that's one i'd like to know can you verify yeah that's one of rahma's patience um and and romer is one of the the the great neurologists i think because unlike so many he's able to see beyond the wiring diagram you need to know that but he's not shy of seeing that this actually has something to do with living human beings now i can tell you an awful lot of the neuroscientists don't think that and so i mean i came to science from a background in the humanities philosophy literature you know art and i then studied medicine went into the neurology psychiatry interface and so i approached medicine right away as about human beings in their lives not just about mechanisms but an awful lot of people um were very good at the technical side perhaps i either never train with patients or only experimentally and they kind of see the mechanisms that's very interesting in the abstract and what you'd see down a microscope or with a particular investigation but they're very uncomfortable about about applying that to real people you know there's mike kazaniga is a lovely guy and i respect him greatly but we interviewed him for a film about my work called the divided brain and he he's a man who's you know mainly lived in in the world of the lab and he said um you know he takes all these findings from neurology and then applies them to real living people in the world and i'm not comfortable with that and i'm thinking oh my god you said it uh but anyway um he then says the brain's just a machine get over it well my 1600 pages that's just about to come out is devoted to the idea that that is just nowhere near sophisticated enough an approach but we may get there later so the trouble is we're dotting around a lot and i don't know where you want me to go right next because i think i think going into that is let's let's go into that so why so now that we understand that there are these very profound implications to the way that the brain is split and i'm going to sort of recap what we just went over and then we'll go into why our sort of current under understanding if we're taking a mechanistic look at this is wrong so we've got this brain it's split in half nature did not do that on accident in fact if you look back just an obscene amount of time through the evolutionary tree down to like worms and nematodes and all that they all have split brains that are asymmetrical so this was something that we happened upon very early your thesis on why we ended up there is because the these the how of of it all uh the great example you give is that you have to both focus in on something very specific how i can grab this branch how i can get this seed but also more broadly to make sure that i'm not eaten and so i think that will land for everybody i think they're going to really understand that yeah but there are other deep complexities and as we begin to think about how much information is that the two hemispheres are really working together and you go to great lengths in the emissary and his the master and his emissary you go into great detail about how what ends up happening is the emissary so the hyper-focused really looking at something specific but in danger of losing track of the whole because of its layer of intentional designed ignorance unfortunately begins to think of itself as the master and like i know more i don't need all this nuance i don't need all this holistic view like come on it's it's a branch you grab it it's a seed you eat it and because of that there's a tendency for that to run away with things and so we have this competition and collaboration between the two that's really finely tuned very sensitive to perturbation and we're going to get into what those perturbations are and how they go pathological but okay so now we have this grasp of all right we have a mind it's intentionally divided one side can be religious the other not one side can grab the dress the other can put it away so we know there's there's like this inhibitory signal that's often going between the two so a lot of what's happening in the brain is ah i've got it back off let me deal with it and as we begin to take in that richness the complexity we now realize that we have to extend our understanding so now i want to understand because it's very easy to grasp the mechanistic it is very easy to get excited when a neuroscientist or anybody gives you an atomized view of the brain and says the left does this the right does this and yay everybody feels like they understand yeah what's really going on if that atomized view isn't accurate what's really happening especially with the we're creating the world as much as the like there is a physical reality let me ask you a question do you know the difference between someone who crushes big goals in their life year in and year out and someone who can't seem to get ahead [Music] what is up my friends tom bilyeu here in my opinion there are seven strategies that you must use in order to achieve any goal the more of them that you can take action on the greater the chance that you'll achieve your goal i say that the difference between someone who is an overachiever and someone who fails to hit their goals is that the overachiever does everything they can possibly do to be successful i said a second ago that there are seven strategies you must use to hit any goal i'll be teaching them later this month on a live workshop called how to make any goal stick great news is it's a process it can be taught and you can deploy it in your own life and you can register for this workshop by going to this link i'll tell you though right now quickly what they are first extreme clarity and focus the average person fails to achieve their goals not because they didn't put an effort but because they don't actually know what it is that they're trying to accomplish they're not focused on exactly what they want second massive excitement and motivation there are two things that motivate us pleasure and pain most people don't properly leverage pain and negative emotions which means that they're only half as motivated as they could be or at least only using half of the tools of somebody else that finds their way to success third is desire fourth is massive pressure and this goes back to that idea of negative emotions if you use it the right way fear of failure can actually be a very useful thing fifth coming up with the right strategy sixth avoiding the trap of overthinking rather than taking fast aggressive action and finally evaluating your progress building grit and adjusting your course that loop is critical in fact that last part is what i call the physics of progress if you fail to do that you will never make progress all right these are the seven steps that i'm going to walk through in much greater detail on my live workshop how to make any goal stick so go to the link on your screen or click the button below to register alright my friend i will see you soon take care and be legendary peace yeah yeah yeah i use the image of the person or the personality on great good authority because um there's a researcher called owner guntu kun in germany who won germany's most prestigious prize for science which was basically all about the differences between the two hemispheres and he uh he wrote in the site that i was right to see these as effectively two personalities that have different ways of thinking but when you come to imagine daily life what is the truth about something quite simple like where i live i'm surrounded by mountains this mountain is it just a lump of rock well you could say that uh is it um a beautiful shape that can be drawn is it a marvelous example of columnar basalt formation uh is it um a means of somebody getting wealthy by exploiting it is it the home of the gods as it was to the pigs uh who lived under it uh you know what what which is the truth and the answer is all of these things have a type of truth and it's no good saying oh well it's just really a lump of rock because that's just to jump into a certain very subjective point of view it sounds objective but it's really just a very narrow point of view in which everything that you know about that mountain everything you experience at that moment has been cut off so that you can say it's just a lump of rock now it's that mentality that i want to get away from and beyond because it's not sophisticated it's destroying the world because we misunderstand who we are and what the world in which we live is because of this uh allegiance to the left hemispheres take and you alluded to the story of the master in his emissary and this is a story where the master is the right hemisphere and the emissary is the left hemisphere and in that situation the master knows the big picture and just wants the atmosphere to go and do a particular job but exactly because it knows so little it thinks it knows everything now in most of the cultures and tries therefore to depose the the master and so you do get this rebellion and in every culture that i've looked at around the world from the circumpolar regions to china india the native peoples of america and all the rest you find stories which are myths about this antagonism between two beings that are related they're like brothers or they they have a relationship but the one that knows least thinks it knows everything and as a result of that civilization goes to ruin in fact i actually found that there is a phrase in the e ching that says precisely this which is wonderful and also in the secret of the golden flower so what what i say about attention is that it changes the world and it changes you so the kind of attention you pay customers changes who you become and and that has moral implications for you and for the world so how we attend and i'm not the only person who said this i think simone bay who you know people probably know the french philosopher of the last century uh said something very similar to that um but anyway there we are so where would you like us to take the story next yeah so the i i want to dwell on this idea of um co-creation i don't know if you would use that word but the idea so i love the quote and i've heard you say it and i've used it many times which is that it doesn't matter what you look at it matters what you see and in that statement implies that you can choose to see something else and that in all of your work i would say that there's an underlying idea that we can choose perhaps through great effort but that we can choose to either over index on the left or begin to swing back to the right so we can either let the world be created by the emissary which your thesis is basically what we're doing right now um or it can we can swing back to the right and and take this more holistic view so one of those ideas is easy er to understand i think most people are going to get this idea of holistic versus hyper-specific the the sum total of a mountain versus the ability to extract ore from it right so extracting ore is the left hemisphere wants to know what's usable how do i grasp it the you can have a communion with nature by being on the mountain you can see a vista that leaves you in awe by climbing up the mountain you can get in better health by scaling the mountain you could have a picnic on the mountain with someone that you love all of those things are part of the whole and certainly get lost in the exploitation okay i think people are going to take to that very easily and i think is is is amazing language for people to understand some of the cultural difficulties that we're having right now which we will get to uh but the part that i think is more difficult is that you're very clear to say there is objective reality but you're also very clear to say but there is also co-creation going on in the mind and the outside world together sort of shaping each other and creating this this whole help me better understand that yeah uh it's a very important point and it's related to two things i just wanted to gloss when you were talking there that um one is that we could get carried away with the idea that somehow this uh beautiful communing with the mountain was a little bit airy fairy but i'm not talking about that at all i'm talking about a really much more sophisticated philosophical understanding of what our environment is it and interestingly the the emotional brain is as much the left hemisphere as the right it specializes in anger irritability and it doesn't like being crossed and so it's not a cool customer and it is less rational than the right hemisphere get that it it certainly helps us reason but the reasonable conclusions about reality need to be formed by the right hemisphere in the absence of the right hemisphere we're really into the territory of delusions hallucinations and all the fascinating psychopathology that you were hinting at earlier and i write a lot about that in this new book so yes there's that but the other thing is that we shouldn't think of it as an antagonism because that would be the left hemisphere's way between the unified picture and the more differentiated divided picture it is a union of the unified picture with the more differentiated divided picture and i see the whole business of the cosmos and you may say how can you use that phrase but that would take me another talk but i see that there's a drive there's something that drives this cosmos there's no question of that it's it's doing something and what it's mainly doing is differentiating so if you imagine a complete ball of everything the same it goes out like some amazing flower that is unfolding and showing all these things it's not destroying that flower it's not taking it apart it's unpacking it and unfolding it so in a phrase that david bohm the philosopher and physicist used this is an implicit world and it nature is the business of beginning to make it more explicit but nonetheless taking it back into the realm of the implicit in the end so that that's not lost can i just say something about that because a very key point is that the implicit is not somehow the explicit that we haven't been clear enough about the clarity is illusory when we're explicit it comes from the fact that we've cut away almost all the meaning from something and are just left with one little idea when we are dealing with with the things that are most profound to us to love to uh feelings for nature to religion to the things that move us and make us morally motivated these things are not easy to put into a simple phrase and that's why we have the greatness of art that's why we have poetry and narrative and myth and drama and music and great buildings and and these express these things in an implicit way if you say what does it really mean then i'm reduced to kind of a handful of platitudes which don't really help you at all because now you've lost it you had to be in communion with that thing and not something else that i'm paraphrasing the easiest way to think of this is it's like humor you know you tell a joke and then somebody said i don't get the joke and then you explain it they go because once you've explained the joke it's completely gone dead so implicitness is very important and let me give you a very practical example which i'm afraid i often use but there you go i think it's because it is very helpful anyone who has ever played a musical instrument knows this sequence you think that's a really great piece i want to play that so you sort of bond with it you try to play it so far we're in the realm of the right hemisphere encountering something new because the left hemisphere deals with things in a way oh i see it's familiar it goes into that box or category whereas when it's still new and unique the right hemisphere is is is encountering it and then some part of you says yeah but if i'm going to make any headway with this i've really got to practice that difficult passage at bar 24 or whatever it is and i see at this point we get a return to the tonic or you know whatever it might be um but then that helps you be a much better performer but when you go and perform it when you go out onto the stage you must forget all of that because if you even think about it for a fraction of a second the performance will have gone that doesn't make it a waste of time in this business of explicitness it's creative in its own way but only as an intermediary phase so that i often talk about this progression from right to left and back to right again what i mean by that is that you begin with the engagement you then send stuff to the left hemisphere to get unpacked a bit and then you take that unpacking back into a hole and if you don't and at the moment we go from right to left and then stop there you're left with a heap of meaningless fragments because if you're constantly paying piecemeal attention to things because you want them and grasp them and manipulate them not to understand them then you end up with a world that is just a heap of atomistic fragments that seem static and dead whereas with the left hemisphere you see that they're never actually static and they're never actually dead they're living flowing changing and ultimately interconnected but just to round this off it's not that i think we should just go oh all is one that's true up to a point but it's importantly half of the story the other half of the story is all is many and that's why we have this thing in oriental philosophy of the one and the many and as i say you don't become more whole by getting rid of the products you get more whole by bringing the parts together with the whole and you know so that in bones terms you are making what is implicit explicit and then re-embracing it in the implicit and interestingly there is a 15th century uh actually scientist i mean he was probably one of the first modern scientists um discovered some things that were only approved in the 19th century but he was also a theologian and i think one of the great thinkers of all time called nicholas accuser he's sometimes called cusanus which is his latin name but he's worth finding out more about for any listeners but he actually had already seen this process that is in a way embodied in the brain is also embodied in physics and this structure what's exciting me about my new book is that i use three main pathways to examine what is the world and who are we one is neurology one is philosophy and one is physics and from these three starting points around if you imagine the globe and they're far far apart from one another as you as we say drill down as you get closer and deeper you find the same pictures and the same patterns coming they're not neurology and theology are not at war with one another they are seeing the same realities just at slightly different levels and in different ways okay you have to take us in deeper that is so fascinating so one why those three be please be very specific uh and then two in from the left side of my brain it really does feel like they are at war it it feels often super jarring when i find a scientist who is deeply religious and i would love to better understand your take on that well yes i mean just an interesting aside on that um a book length study has been made of all the nobel prize winners since 1900 when the prize was instigated and they're asked about their religious beliefs amongst other things and anyone who says that they were ever at any time an agnostic even doesn't count as being religious when you look at these people over the last 100 years or more what you find is that those in the humanities uh a good third of them say you know that they have no no time with religion as you go into science the harder the science the more religious people become so biologists it's something like only 7.6 or 7.8 percent uh fall into this uh atheistic category um and then when you come to chemistry it's uh i think six something and in physics it's 4.8 or something like that so 95 percent of all the really top physicists um were religious and and i've looked at their lives and read their stories there's no question about this when you get into the realm of physics you have to be a bit of a dumb chuck not to think that there's possibly something in this idea that the world may be divine and there's nothing in science that tells us that it isn't science doesn't deal with that kind of thing there's a chap called jerry coyne who got famous for writing a book called faith versus fact and he starts i think on page one by saying i'm not going to go into epistemology you know which was the the study of how we know anything i'm just going to say a fact is a fact and if it's not a fact then it isn't true and i sort of feel like saying you know okay mate but if you're going to really stay clear of what he calls the murky waters of epistemology to that extent why waste your time writing the book because it's it's only possible to write it if you start to understand what understanding is and where it comes from so the answer to why those three there are three things that have always fascinated me but i can't pretend in any way to be in any way to be a physicist what i do though is i'm fairly cautious with the physics i rely on about eight or ten highly respected physicists and what they say and i have a little group of what i call friendly physicists with whom i exchange ideas before i publish them and say am i being an idiot here and uh usually thank god they say no you're not so but and i don't base anything on the physics so it's like i base it more on the philosophy than anything and the neurology and neuropsychology and then i just show and look the physics shows just the same picture that we've been looking at so that's why those three things because if you want to know about a human being the brain is a pretty central place to start you know there was a neurosurgeon called wilder penfield who's a canadian neurosurgeon and he was operating on brains in the 50s and he was one of the first people to realize as you stimulated the cortex of the brain at operation which you can do with the patient conscious because the brain is not has no pain sensors at all you can do anything to the brain and you don't it doesn't hurt so at operation he would stimulate different areas of the brain and they would say oh i can hear the voice of my sister saying something or other we're out in the garden when i was 10 or whatever you know so anyway what i'm really that's beside the point but what i'm really interested in is his remark that the business of neurology is to understand man himself now schrodinger you know famous physicist um also said in some lectures given in cambridge in the 1950s he began by saying no specialized knowledge is of any use unless it contributes in some form to answering the big question who are we and in fact he says it in greek because he's quoting platinus third century greek philosopher tienes de jemis so there we are so that's a very good place to start philosophy as it sometimes merges with theology is a very good other place but i allow the philosophy to speak before even touching on theology at the end of the book because i think people are very um easily put off by uh mentioning even certain things because i'm afraid very sort of simplistic stereotypes have been fed to us that you know as i say the world is a mechanism that only simple people believe there could be anything divine or sacred in it and so on so i i get there by degrees and the last substantive chapter which is pretty much book length is called the sense of the sacred and i explore really whether it is rational or not to accept that there probably is something that is divine or sacred very much i think to to really meaningfully have that conversation we're gonna have to define what what is divine what is sacred so i'll give you my interpretation of uh spirituality i'm not sure what the right word's gonna be uh and that'll be sort of our grounding mechanism so i'm not religious meaning that i don't uh subscribe to any of the the written down traditions but because i am right i agreed and because i am uh at least partially aware of the just massive nature of my ignorance um i have to conclude as i look at how little i understand about the world and that i can't even conceive of you know what this would be without time or time being an arrow or you know any of those things that there's something i don't understand and once i recognize there's something i don't understand then i certainly can't claim to know everything and so it seems self-evident to me that the you use the word cosmos i'm far more familiar when people say universe i don't know if you use them inner uh interchangeably or not but that the universe was created by something i can't comprehend and if that's what we're calling the divine then i understand it but if we're talking about a specific religion and a man in the sky i start to lose you well of course um we're not talking about a man with a beard sitting on a cloud there's so much to say about what you've just said um the first is that i think it's it's an area where it's wise not to think you know everything um william james the great psychologist a far greater man in my opinion than his brother the famous novelist um one of the greatest philosophers and psychologists has ever lived said uh ignorance is a sea and knowledge is a drop in that ocean and that was you know 100 years ago but really the more we learn the more we understand what we don't know and what that's what the great physicists are now saying they've always said that basically the greatest scientists people like einstein didn't pretend that that we know everything he said the world would be a lot better if we all recognized there's a great deal to be modest about we don't really understand anything of the basics here um he didn't want to be branded as religious but he was also annoyed when he was wheeled on to say uh you know einstein says the currently uh anything that we would call divine but your thing we first have to define terms is it looks a very reasonable uh thing to say and of course it is the way that in the west we've been trained you know everything is a problem we start with a proposition we then work through certain things we then conclusion preferably with an equation and either god does exist or god doesn't but the very words exists i mean some people will will love me for saying this and some people just think i'm i'm you know yeah lost the plot but the important thing is that we don't know exactly what god is if we could define it we'd have got it wrong and this is not just me this is what all the great minds of the religious traditions of the mystical traditions and indeed in philosophy have said you know about this we cannot know and that is its defining feature at least we can't know in the sense of the word savoir in french and vicin in german i i need to make this distinction because in most languages other than english there are two words at least for no and we only have the one and it causes so much confusion in philosophy one is knowing by experience and the other is knowing the fact that so i know that paris is the capital of france that is savoir and in german that's vissen but i also know paris because of the time i once spent there living there and getting to understand it and that is in french connect and in german canon and these are quite different ideas now you can come to know god perhaps but only by observing all your knowledge uh your knowledge in the sense of you know reasoning is not going to help you with this except that you can use reasoning which is very important thing to be able to do to show the limits of reason and that's not at all controversial i'm probably one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers that ever lived pascal said reason is very feeble indeed if it can't see that there are many things beyond reason and everything that is beyond reason is not irrational it may be trans-rational so for example um my experience of schubert c major quintet is not irrational it's not against reason it's just the reason can't help with it it's an experience it is very very deep and very very real and that anybody who opens themselves to it and has enough understanding of that kind of music will experience it so it's not in any way um false or irrational it's trans-rational and one of the problems is that we've argued ourselves into a box whereby the bit of our minds that understands least and can express least in words is the one that does all the all the uh well not expressed least in words but it has the drive to express things in words and therefore expresses the least amount of that reality so that's that's where the problem starts so at the beginning of my chapter i say you know all the traditions that i've looked at they have some sense of the universe as you would prefer as not just chaotic random and meaningless as something orderly we can't necessarily grasp the order but we can sense the order and know there is order and also beautiful and complex and it's just no question about that because you know unless you're a halfwit i mean if you if you if you look at science if you you re you think philosophically you can see that even if you don't understand all these processes it's not just an irrational heap of nothing there's something going on here that is complex beautiful and orderly and physicists describe this and philosophers describe this now in most other languages there is a different term for this so for in china chinese it's called li and um in in other traditions such as the hindu tradition it's called um long before islam actually in the what is now the islamic world it was called allah and so on you can go on with these words that describe this thing that has form when helicitis one of my favorite philosophers one of the first greek philosophers and i don't think there's ever been a greater greek philosopher used the term logos not in the way that it got later used to mean a sort of logical thinking but he says the logos is so deep that the soul cannot encompass it so he's talking about something that has to be approached in a spirit of a degree of humility a degree of openness and and then see what comes of that um and so i start right away by saying and in the western tradition this is called god but oh dear what a lot of trouble that little word god calls it because it immediately sets up all these ideas that now we've got a word for it we know what it is and i don't think it exists i think it does and it's all in a book no no no no that was just written by p you know you get into these stupid disputes and in a way both the psychology and the philosophical position of hardline atheists and hardline fundamentalists is almost exactly the same they're mr right entirely left brain it's all in the book i'm right you're wrong there's a whole set of rules and procedures that must be followed you know and there's no room in here for uncertainty for the subtle that is in fact the realm that this divine whatever it is inhabits and so i always think the argument is not between atheists and believers it's between the atheists and the fundamentalists on one side and on rational people on the other who mostly say they don't know but if you ask people do you believe in god in this country because when we're rather heathen compared with america something like 11 of people only say they do but if you ask people do you think that the scientific materialist account is enough to encompass reality ninety percent of them will say no so it's that kind of thing i'm talking about and i can't really condense it satisfactorily for the purposes of this but i did spend a lot of time it cost me great pains to express it rather carefully in this new book because i don't think you know some people said leave that out you've written about time and space you've written about um purpose and value you've written about reason and intuition you've written about it science and imagination why spoil it all by bringing religion or anything like that smacks of it in at the end and i thought how strange a reflection that is on the world in which we live most people since time began thought that this was the really key thing and now we're saying anything but i don't want to go there don't trouble my picture of the world so i thought no i will create some people who will just go oh he's a faith head or something by the way i'm not i mean i i don't go to church or anything like that i i i am enormously interested in the rich spiritual literature of so many traditions around the world and again although superficially they seem you can find differences yes but effectively what they are trying to get at and what they convey is very much the same thing so i want to ask a question that i know runs the risk of forcing you to put a point on something where the whole point is to not put a point on it but at some point it's interesting you and i both share a passion for taoism at one point i actually considered myself a taoist if you had asked i would say that i am taoist i think and that's really interesting so we'll definitely have to discuss taoism so there's a really cool in fact i think it's the first line of of the dao de jing which is the dow that can be named is not the eternal dao and they gave me the chills just to say that so there that's very interesting and i love it and like over enough time you can sort of crack someone open in into i would say what you're you're opening them up to is openness itself but you go to great lengths to explain all of this stuff why does it matter well i just what about you why does it matter to include religion why the making sure that people take a holistic view like they're you talk about the cosmos having a drive which i find utterly fascinating and actually hope we get a chance to talk more about that but as the cosmos has a drive you have a drive and i would like to understand what is driving you why you want people why you couldn't because you might sell more books if you never talked about whatever god is right but you don't care about that it's somehow important to you to to include it and i'm just curious what's driving you what is up my friend tom bill you here every week inside impact theory university i get to mentor and coach people just like you on how to achieve their biggest goals reach their potential and live an extraordinary life one thing that i hear again and again from my students is that they're more focused and motivated than they've ever been in their lives to achieve their goals but when they work harder and harder to be successful they don't actually see immediate and fast progress at least not at the rate that they want they tell me that they feel stuck overwhelmed or like they've been working and grinding so hard for so long without anything to show for it and i get it and if that sounds familiar first off you're not alone that is where basically everybody is at one point in their journey or another now second of all i'm hosting a live workshop later this month before thanksgiving and i want you to go to this link or click the button on your screen and get yourself registered when you do i'll teach you the same thing that i teach my students inside impact theory university so you can actually take action towards your goals and have confidence and certainty that the work you're putting in is actually going to bring you results it's free to join i don't often do live teachings like this so if you've ever wondered what it's like to get coaching for me join me and let's get to work on your goals and dreams i promise they are achievable but it's a process you have to learn the process i'll also be giving a bonus class on how to become unstoppable to everyone who registers we're going to take that idea out of this sort of airy concept and really make it tangible so that you actually can't be stopped i got a whole thing around it trust me you're not going to want to miss it right guys click the link on your screen and reserve yourself a seat and until i see you in there take care and be legendary peace i i i i would be giving the wrong impression if i if i said that i know anything about what god is or um i'm a believer in whatever but it would also be equally wrong equally wrong to say i dismiss this or i don't believe it it's an area where you see the thing is we now think belief is a matter of propositions because western philosophy for 300 years has gone into this extremely sterile analytic mode um which it wasn't prior to that and has become less sense with the emergence of phenomenological philosophers and so forth and wittgenstein and many others but setting that aside the word belief its root is love it it's it's cognate with believe in in in german uh in shakespearean english the word leaf meant my dear my dear one my dear lord my dear whatever was the one's leaf lord once leaf husband wife whatever it was friend so it's about and even the word glauben in german which is the word for to believe is related to love leben so initially belief is not about believing six impossible things before breakfast it's about a disposition of your mind towards the world and that's why i think it's so important because we started from attention and indeed one of the primal things about all the religious traditions and all the good practices about paying attention to the world stilling your own monkey mind as they call it you know your own little chatter about it and opening yourself to the possibility of learning something and becoming just a little bit wiser now if we don't do that we're lost and in fact i think it's through being over arrogant overconfident that we know everything can fix everything and understand everything first of all anyone who knows the literature on this knows that people who are like that are not very intelligent there's something called the dunning-kruger effect which means that effectively the more stupid you are the cleverer you think you are and vice versa so um that that's a problem but what i'm trying to say is we we want to get away from this to an idea of a disposition of ourselves towards the world because if we can face these very dire practical problems that we have now the destruction of nature the devastation of the lives of indigenous people all around the world and and uh dismantling apparently of our own tradition in the worst way what you know what would good come of it if we could carry on living and we'd still be the unhappy spiritually sterile um destructive people that we are because we just repeat history so we need a wake up we need a spiritual awakening um not in some sort of ghostly um evangelical football arena way i mean about thinking that there's more to the world than i know and this is the the three really key things are not to lose a sense of wonder or or because so easily you can think that a description of some process uh either explains something or even worse helps you understand it often it doesn't even explain it never mind help you understand it and so we need to be able to keep away from this way of reducing our understanding keeping ourselves open to all and wonder keeping ourselves with a little humility about what our intellects can actually do and having compassion for people who disagree with us now in the world i see all i see is black and white positions hatred um you're one of them can we have an adult conversation there are degrees of right and wrong here you know i would love to live in that world i would love to live in a world where we don't just see that we rape nature in order to get what we can and then leave a dying world to our children and our grandchildren and i'm a grandparent i worry about this stuff so no i really think it's very important that that we we wake up effectively and that's why i didn't want to cut this chapter out because it it would be like sort of playing um the whole of some wonderful bark fugue and then just stopping before the last bar of resolution you know just be what [Laughter] so there we are i love that i i think that that's that's really insightful nobody needs to be frightened of uh being asked to sign up to any kind of religious proposition at all i'm not asking anyone to sign up to anything i'm asking people to open their minds you know and and you know cosmos by the way carlsbad says a greek word which means not only orderly but beautiful it means the beautiful and the orderly and it's been reduced now to the word cosmetics so when people put cosmetics on they're beautifying themselves but the word cosmos comes from the idea of a single beautiful hole and i think that is a more useful image all images are only metaphors all stories are myths including the one that we're all just machines they're all just myths and stories it's which myth and which story are you going to pin your soul to pin your life to and live according to that's what matters and i would say that the picture we've been offered is um intellectually shoddy i mean the idea that it's just all mechanism you know no it is not there's far more there even the most basic science will tell you there's far more there that can be accounted for in this purely mechanical way and the idea that we're just these competitive monkeys who want to kill one another and and take power from one another this is not true either this is a terrible thing to tell people because if you believe these things you behave worse so we know for example the studies done on populations of people who believe that um everything is just pre predestined by physics you know if you could know the position of all the atoms in the universe you could predict everything including you know what i'm saying to you now and the feelings that are going on in in in your mind um that's absolutely insubstantial i mean it might have been a nice myth in the 18th century but we know i mean physics has completely killed that one but people who believe it are less moral than people who don't and i didn't realize until i'd almost finished the book i'd done a lot of research some of it's in the master in his emissary on the importance of societal cohesion it's in the last chapter where i talk about how the effects of belonging in a community of people who are you know living together in a give and take sort of way within a sort of compassionate relationship their their health of mind and their health of body is staggeringly better than that of people who don't and the effects are very striking so the effects are as much as on stopping smoking and reducing your blood pressure going to the gym four times a week that's just social cohesion then i started looking at the literature on the relationship to nature which i'm sure you know and this has become a big research area and time spent in nature opening oneself to nature it has a myriad benefits on one's emotional state diffusing anger or making one feel more stable and settled and it induces a sense of purpose in life a sense of meaning in what is going on the whole process in other words is exactly the one i was describing of opening oneself and attending to something other than you which is why as i say it's not all made up in here there is something out there that we need to contact and anyway to cut a long story short i hadn't really thought about the effects of religion on people and it is staggering because it's stronger it's stronger than the effects of nature and it's stronger than the effects of societal cohesion and they are very very strong the effects on health and happiness physical health whether you're likely to have a heart attack or you know what cancer things as simple as that and on the other hand your your frame of mind your peace of mind your anxiety levels your anger levels all of these things are affected by it in a very positive way and i had no idea about this and i didn't go looking for it i just thought well i better look that one up and see and it's absolutely extraordinary i include that in this new book just in an appendix because i'm not arguing that people should should think of becoming oh i better become religious then it's like stopping smoking no no you don't get it and you shouldn't meditate because it's good for your blood pressure or make you a better stock broker the thing is you do it because it is useless because it is valuable in itself it can't be utilized and we now live in a world in which what can't be utilized is thought of as useless in the negative way but the greeks actually thought that everything that we really felt was most important in the world was useless it couldn't be utilized it was beauty it was dignity it was the encounter with nature it was leading a moral life it was these things that we seem to have lost sight of that were the useless things and the paradox of course is that if you don't seek them for their own value they will bring value to your life if you seek them because you think it'll bring something to you it won't do and most of the structure of what i call the cosmos is paradoxical in this way i mean the first two chapters of part three of the book are on uh the coincidence of opposites and on um the one and the many which is another kind of paradox so i start with the idea that paradox is something that is basically what the left hemisphere doesn't understand because it doesn't compute and often the reason is that the left hemisphere has seen the world in a very strange way let me try and be very um practically concrete about this so in philosophy one of the most well-known and fascinating paradoxes is achilles and the tortoise and i apologize if if everyone knows what it is i'm just going to describe it very briefly achilles was famous for being the swiftest runner and he was challenged to a race by a hare by tortoise and the tortoise said i can i can go where you can never reach me you you'll never win the race and achilles kind of laughs and says okay okay i'll do it but anyway i'm going to give you a head start so he gives him gives the tortoise you know 100 yards start and the the the uh zeno who invented a paradox explains that in fact the tortoise was right because achilles first has to get to where the tortoise starts from but by the time he gets there the tortoise has moved on so now he's got to go to the place where the tortoise has now got to but by the time he gets there the tortoise has moved on and you see where this is going he can never actually catch up with never mind overtake the tortoise now we all know that he can actually bypass the tortoise in two or three strides so that kind of thinking is clearly mistaken but we can't see why and what i've done in this book is try and give people an insight into what the world looks like when the left hemisphere deals with it and one of the first things that it does and this may not sound that important but i hope it will do because you're a taoist is it stops flow flow is not present to the left hemisphere flow is appreciable by the right hemisphere what the left hemisphere substitutes for flow is something like an old cine film a lot of in themselves absolutely static pictures and it then looks backwards at something so i often say the right hemisphere is the world as it presences the left hemisphere is the world that is represented literally present afterwards when of course it isn't actually present at all so it's a it's just an image it's an after image it's like a diagram it's not the actual experience and so to understand motion you have to get out of the left hemisphere state bergson a philosopher i very greatly admire said when you move your arm from a to b it's true that in retrospect you think that it passed through a point halfway in this arc let's call it x but it didn't actually go to point t u v w x so it didn't go to any point at all it went straight through the movement and afterwards the movement is then represented in two dimensions fossilized no longer moving on a chart and you can go there as the point and it's similar to the problem of how do you get from a point to a line well you could have lots and lots of points no you can't because a point has literally no extension at all if you put a load of them a million of them an infinite number of them together if they've got no extension you can never reach a line if you think like a pencil point you're cheating because the pencil point has already got some extension but what you can do is after you've got the extension of a line you can look back at it and say there's point a or b or whatever in it but that's because you have destroyed extension the extension's no longer there instead there's a mental map in the left hemisphere dead and it can be dissected so this is why there are your paradoxes and i look at about 30 days so one thing i i want to get into sorry what's the way out how do we shift at a societal level back to a more holistic integrated right left view it's a very reasonable question and a very good question and a very difficult question and you'll probably expect me to say what i'm going to say which is that first of all we have to be careful not to be um submitting ourselves to the desire of the left hemisphere which is oh panic things are out of control we need eight bullet points yes eight and if we can do those eight bullet points it'll all be fine but we must enforce them and make sure that by law nobody depart no that is never ever going to save us what instead we need because i can't say this more clearly because it's so important it's the how that matters not the what and that is also true of what you say it seems to me that we should live in a world where there is virtually nothing that you can't say it's how you say it if you blatantly say it in order to cause violence or something then okay but if you don't you know we need to sort of go back from this world in which everything is micro controlled and take a few risks you know life is risky from the moment you're born you're dying you know get real that's the one when none of us gets away from um so i would say we need to think about how we look at the world and lots of people write about what we might do and i i'm not in any way knocking the value of that it's it's essential but it's only a part of the story because as i keep saying if we only do certain things but don't change the way the how in which we relate to the world and to one another and as i would say to the cosmos it's no good because we won't break out of this if we survive at all we won't be able to keep it up for long because we'll just fall back into the same problems but to me almost more important is we won't deserve to survive you know i have an unpopular vision that actually life is not just about getting pleasure i love loads of things in life that give me enormous pleasure my family my friends my music good food nice wine my garden uh you know hundreds of things i'm not some ghastly old puritan but i do think i do think that we've lost the idea that there's a bit more to it than that as wittgenstein said you know i don't know why we were born but i'm pretty certain it wasn't just to have a good time and having a good time is not a bad thing but of course once again it's one of those things that tends to come better if you're not focused on it the more you focus on i must have a good time i'm going to be happy the less easily it comes because happiness is famously elusive and famously people find happiness often by sinking their own aims their own needs in those of others so it's a very complex picture but what i've i can only do a little bit i mean i'm only one person and i've only got a few years left um so the little thing i think i can do while i've got time is what has practically killed me is writing this book because it's a demon has taken me up and said write this book and to begin with i thought it was going to be a shorter book and it said no no you haven't finished yet nope we're going there there there there and i just have and all i can say is i've done my best shot at as we're taking the reader by the hand and not arguing with the reader not going listen it you're irrational if you see it like this or if you look at the brain like this i'm not saying that what i'm saying is come with me because i think the way we tend to see things now is not the full picture and i want to show you something that's beautiful and what's more i think when i show it to you you will not be surprised because you will know it somewhere already you will recognize it a lot of people who've read my book have said to me you know you've changed my life but it's only because you opened my eyes to something that i knew all my life but i didn't know how to say it i had no words for it and you've given me that confidence so what what i really want to do is give people a taste of not talking down to them it's a it's a you know be prepared for some strenuous stuff but i try to make everything um so that any you know college level person can read it without any special inside knowledge um so and i try to explain and that's why it you know takes me pains and a long time to write as i try to make things that are really quite difficult to say fairly simple but what i want to offer is that that's my answer to your question what do we need what can we do i i can only say here's my book and at the end i quote from a german poet called angela silesias that says reader surely this is enough but if you want more then you yourself go and you be the book and you be the life and that's you know that's basically my message that is a phenomenal place to wrap this up i do want to read a brief quote from you that i think really um says exactly what you just said uh in a beautiful way here it is there are four main pathways to the truth science reason intuition and imagination any worldview that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail and with that dr ian mcgillcrist thank you so much for joining me today your work is unbelievable i'm so grateful that you've taken the time to put all of that into words uh so that the rest of us can use it as an orienting mechanism it's truly breathtaking thank you so much for joining me today i really enjoyed it of course and thank you very much for inviting me and giving me a platform of course where can people find you if they want more with you um if they google my name the first thing that will probably come up is channel mcgillcrist um and even if you don't know the spelling you'll probably get there and that's one of the good things about google but channel mcgillcrist has a large open area you don't have to become a member if you're interested there's a lot of other material that members get but we have a lot of stuff that's there for public browsing and you can learn more about my thinking my work you can see little video clips and there's all about the new book including a few reviews i've already got of it a quarter of an hour's talk by me trying to explain what the book's about and even a rather nice cgi image where you can look into a book that hasn't yet been made but it's using the typographed pages so it's actually quite quite nice so that's where to go uh channelmcgillcrist.com thanks amazing all right guys i know that you will be blown away by further engagement with his work and speaking of things that will blow you away if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 138,671

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, epilepsy, seizures, right brain left brain, right brain, right brained people, left brain right brain split, corpus callosum, science and religion, left hemisphere, left brain, brain, brain plasticity

Id: 6Dtp1-BCZzc

Length: 79min 49sec (4789 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021