What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening
to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens
to challenge consensus narratives, and to learn how to think critically about the systems
of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces
is the most requested guest in the history of the podcast. His name is Dr. Iain McGilchrist, and most
people know him for having authored The Master and His Emissary, a book about what we popularly
refer to as the divided brain and its role in the making of the modern world. His most recent book, The Matter With Things
has been more than a decade in the making and it explores the deepest, most fundamental
questions about the nature of the human experience. This conversation will provide you with a
new way of looking at the world that is very different from the one that has largely dominated
the West, going at least as far back as the dawn of the European Enlightenment. It is Dr. McGilchrist's view that we have
systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, because we have depended on that
aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it
to our purposes. The part of our brains that is most proficient
at constructing models or representations of the world, and sticking to them, indeed,
doubling down on them, even in the face of falsifying evidence. In the conversation that follows, you will
learn how the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere, which to sum up a vastly
complex matter in a phrase, is designed to help us apprehend the world, and thus manipulate,
control, and exert power over it, and the right hemisphere, which is designed to help
us comprehend the world, to see it for all that it is, in its richness, nuance, and glory. The problem, according to Iain, is that the
very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to make it more responsive
to our ambitions for power and control, have become the primary obstacles to our understanding
of it. The consequences of this imbalance can be
seen all around us in our ecosystems, our systems of government, our economies, and
within the very fabric of our own societies. The rise of narcissism, paranoia, our obsession
with categories and discreet identities, the rise in depression, the policing of language,
and the panopticon of surveillance and control are all symptoms, in Iain's eyes, of the tyranny
of the left hemisphere made manifest in the world around us. The first hour of our conversation is devoted
primarily towards understanding the physiology of the divided brain, and how we can recognize
what has contributed to our synthesized picture of the world by both hemispheres. In the second hour, which is available to
premium subscribers, we examine the various ways in which the dominance of the left hemisphere
is manifesting itself upon society, as well as the deeper, philosophical questions that
have concerned humanity since time immemorial. We look at the stuff of which the cosmos is
made, time, space, motion, matter and consciousness, as well as why we might see it as divine in
nature, and its apparently paradoxical nature. A paradox that Iain suggests has generally
resulted from the clash between the ways in which the right and left hemispheres construe
reality. This was an absolutely wonderful conversation,
and despite some of the audio challenges that we dealt with on my end of the microphone,
I'm confident that you will walk away from it with a sense of enlightenment and inspiration
and maybe even a new perspective on the world and our place in it. You can find related podcasts to this one
on this week's episode page at hiddenforces.io, where you can also access the second part
of today's conversation by joining one of our three content tiers. This gives you access to our premium feed,
which you can use to listen to the second part of today's conversation on your mobile
device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right
now. If you want to join in on the conversation
and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests,
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on our subscriber page, and if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io,
and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this truly inspirational
and enlightening conversation with my guest, Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Dr. Iain McGilchrist, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thank you very much. Very good to be with you, Demetri. It's so wonderful having you on, Dr. McGilchrist. I think that you are perhaps the most requested
guest I've ever had on Hidden Forces, which is saying something, both because we've had
a lot of guests and a lot of requests, but also because our podcast ventures so broadly. It's not focused on one particular area, and
so it's so interesting to me, and it has been for a long time, because you've been requested
so many times, that you have been just so highly requested among all of our different
guests. So before we get into today's conversation,
which is going to focus on your life's work, both what you talked about in The Master and
His Emissary, as well as in The Matter With Things, which is your latest book, your latest
tome, actually. Before we do any of that, before we get into
this part of the conversation, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about you,
how you got interested in these subjects, how you became a physician, and how you came
to study what is popularly known as the divided brain? Yes, okay. I've been probably like many of your guests,
the person who's widely interested in many things all my life. And I started thinking in my teens that many
of the things that I was taught to believe couldn't be right. That the world was inert and unresponsive
to me, that the whole was just the same as the sum of the parts, that things moved in
straight lines rather than in spirals, as I believe they do. That the intellect's desire to take things
singly out of context, categorize, and pigeonhole them, was the way to help understand what
was going on. I thought all of these things were rather
doubtful. And I went to Oxford and studied literature
really from a point of view of the philosophy of literature, and wrote a book about it called
Against Criticism. Not to say that I'm against criticism in general,
but that they seemed to me something wrong with the academic pursuit of analyzing works
of literature, in which something that was unique and essentially implicit and embodied
became disembodied, explicit and no longer unique, just generic, and you seemed to have
destroyed the very qualities you've gone to it for. And so I thought, well, this has something
to do with the mind-body relationship. And I went to all the philosophy seminars,
but they were just too disembodied in their own approach. And I thought that, well, I need to do this
in a more embodied way. And it was right around the time that Sacks,
Oliver Sacks, had just written Awakenings, and I thought, wow, this is an amazing book
for all sorts of reasons. But what he manages to do is see deep philosophical
meaning in what happens when something affects somebody's brain, and it affects their whole
being. And I thought, this is the way to understand
this mind-body relationship, so I trained in medicine. There may also be a gene involved because
my dad was a doctor, and his dad was a doctor, and as far as I remember, they both tried
not to become doctors, but in the end did. So rather later than most people, about 10
years on from the normal in this country, 18, when you go to university and study medicine,
I started a medical degree. And I then ended up at the Maudsley Hospital
in London, which is a big, psychiatric training center, they would say the best in the country,
and it has a strong neurosurgical, neurological arm as well. And I began to get very interested in certain
things, particularly after hearing a lecture by a colleague who'd just written a book called
The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders. And I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting,"
because all I ever hear about is the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere seems to be, well, nobody
really knows. Maybe it's just like a bolster to stop the
important left hemisphere from falling over. Nobody had any idea what it seemed to do. And I went to a lecture by a colleague, John
Cutting, who'd just written this book, and he said that it did certain things that seemed
to me very interesting, this right hemisphere. It was able to understand implicit meaning. It saw the unique case, not just the general
category, and it saw things in the way that they're embodied and embedded in a context. And this just was like an aha moment for me,
because I realized the reason I found my book Against Criticism so hard to write, was that
I was trying to get the talkative left hemisphere to put across the way of being of the silent
right hemisphere. And that led me into doing research on it
for, well, the rest of my life actually. And many people pled with me not to do this. They said, "Look, you've got a promising career
ahead of you. Don't ruin it by looking into this hemisphere
differences. Everybody knows that this is just pop psychology. It's all complete nonsense." Anyway, fortunately, I resisted that, because
although many of the things that were believed turned out to be wrong, most of them probably,
there were still important questions to ask. Why is the brain divided, after all? Why on earth would the brain, which effectively
is a network that increases its power by the number of connections it can make, why was
it divided down the middle? Why was the corpus callosum, the band of fibers
at the base of the brain that connects these two hemispheres, so much concerned with inhibition? And why were the two hemispheres asymmetrical? And I went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and
did some imaging of the brains of subjects with schizophrenia who have abnormal asymmetries
in the brain. They don't have the normal asymmetry, many
of them. They have either the reversed asymmetry, or
no asymmetry at all, but you actually need a certain kind of asymmetry in which the left
hemisphere famously is broader towards the back, but the right hemisphere is broader
towards the front. That one is the most striking, the largest,
asymmetry in the brain. But it wasn't even mentioned in medical school,
because nobody could really say what the right hemisphere did. So that was just ignored, and all the emphasis
was on this left hemisphere thing. Anyway, so I went on from there, and you know
what happened. I spent years writing these enormously long
books, but they're very good for people with insomnia. Right. Well, so there's so much to comment on there. First of all, having read your work, I read
The Master and His Emissary, and what I did in the case of The Matter With Things is I
watched many of the videos that you have put out online on your channel on YouTube, where
you and a fellow interlocutor who interviews you go through chapter by chapter, the book. And so I've devoted a lot of time to watching
you, hearing your thoughts, and reading your words, and you are quite a renaissance man. I'm curious before we go on to explore the
themes of the book, I'm curious what it was like to go to medical school, not just 10
years later than everybody else, but 10 years after you had devoted yourself to studying
something very different than your fellow students had been. I mean, coming with that perspective from
literature into the sciences, what was that like? Hilarious and exhilarating. Since childhood, I've been very interested
in science. My father and my grandfather, my mother's
father, actually, was a keen scientist and so I was all excited about that. But in my teens, I discovered the importance
of the humanities, and so spent most of my time until the end of my twenties immersed
in history, literature and philosophy. So it was a huge jump. And the reactions of my fellow students were
amazing because they were 10 years younger than me, and I was 28 starting, and they were... " So brave of you to do this," with one foot
in the grave. Anyway, I think it actually is very helpful
to have done something else before doing medicine. In fact, I quite like the American system
that you can't even start medical school until you've got a degree in something. Although too often, that's in a science, where
I think actually for medical school, it would be very good if you had a background in philosophy
or history. It was exhilarating because all my life I'd
been dealing with imponderable problems where there simply was no right and wrong. And then I discovered the beauty of anatomy,
which is intrinsically a very beautiful subject. I mean, I remember seeing a head sliced in
half and looking inside and seeing the cerebellum, and if you've never seen the cerebellum sliced
through, it's exquisitely beautiful. It has this pattern like a forest of trees. And I remember thinking even an ugly person
has one of those in their head. This is great. And the other thing was there were facts. A certain nerve has a certain innervation,
and you can either get it right or you can get it wrong. So this was great. So I want to get into your work. The last question I have before we get into
the physiology of the brain, because the way I conceptualized this conversation is to begin
with the physiology, then move towards a conversation about the social implications of your findings,
and the manifestation of what you feel is an excessive reliance on left brain-like thinking
in the world. Or the evidence of a world where people are
increasingly using their left hemisphere to navigate it, and to conceptualize it, and
to act upon it, and to understand it, perhaps, over-reliance on understanding it. And then the last part would be more of a
philosophical conversation about the nature of the world itself. How do we know what we know? What is it possible to know, and what can
we know about ourselves? But my last leading question has to do with
the controversy surrounding this subject and this framing. Why is the pursuit of trying to understand
the divided brain, so to speak, so controversial? Well, it's because it is a very evocative
concept. I've since discovered that in most cultures
around the world, people have myths that suggest that they intuitively are aware from introspection
that their mind is not unitary, but has these two particular kind of often depicted as warring
brothers, or as a general and an emperor but in other words, a master and his emissary,
in fact. That there is one force that needs to be in
charge of the other. But these two complementary forces are sometimes
in conflict, and sometimes work in union. And this therefore, got into popular culture,
because it resonated with people, I think, and they thought, "Yes," but unfortunately
the original answers were based on the typical mode of exploration in science, which is to
liken what you're looking at as a machine, first of all. And then to ask the machine questions. So the brain was "obviously" a machine. By the way, I utterly refute this idea. There's so many ways in which it's nothing
like a machine. Anyway, that idea then led them to ask, so
what does it do? Machines do something? And their answer was, well, the left hemisphere
does reason and language, and the left hemisphere does pictures and pink, fluffy stuff, creativity. And there were some elements of truth in this,
but over time people discovered that lo and behold, both hemispheres were involved in
all of these, and indeed in everything, which is indisputable. So where does that leave it? Well, in my view, bang on track, because the
point is it's not about what they do, but in how they do it. And by that I don't mean just the means by
which they do it, but the manner in which they do it, the standpoint, the disposition
from which they do what they do. So both contribute to reason, both contribute
to language, both contribute to pictures, both contribute to creativity, but in reliably
different ways. And once you've seen that, then the whole
picture forms itself, which is quite different from the old one. So the first thing I always have to do is
go, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know already that it's all rubbish about hemisphere differences,
because the things that were said in the 1970s were wrong. There was a big outbreak, if you like, of
this interest in the '60s and '70s because of the first split-brain operations, which
were carried out in California. And these were a great step forward in patient
care for people who had intractable epilepsy. So they would spend almost their entire time
having an ongoing seizure, so they couldn't lead a life. And it was discovered that if you cut the
corpus callosum that joins the two halves of the hemisphere, one of the hemispheres
may be having the seizure, but the other one doesn't. And with that other one, you can at least
get on with a life. So this was fascinating in itself. And there were also stories which got into
the public imagination that after this operation, the two halves of the brain seemed to contradict
one another. So somebody would go to the cupboard and take
out a dress to wear, and her other hand would take it back and put it in the cupboard and
pull out something in a different color. So there was a number of interesting ideas
here that were very fruitful but were too quickly collapsed into a simplicity. And what I've had to do is go back and look
at a mass of research, and in the new book The Matter With Things, I refer to about 5,600
pieces of research that bear on hemisphere difference. And nobody can say there's nothing in it,
and nobody can say, "Oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about." So one of the questions I wanted to ask you
is how do we know what we know about the lateralization of brain function? How much of it is derived from these aberrant
cases of either patients with strokes who lost right or left brain hemisphere function? How much of it is in cases of patients that
had corpus callosotomy, where the corpus callosum was split, like you described, in order to
alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy, and how much of it is actually from studying the brain
itself in MRI or PET scans and things like this, and how much do they compliment one
another? They do compliment one another, and it's a
mistake to rule any of them out. A lot of our first knowledge about hemisphere
differences came from strokes. Famously, Paul Broca, after whom an area in
the left frontal lobe where speech is generated, that area is named, Broca's area, described
in 1860s a case of a man who had a stroke there and suddenly went from being able to
speak, to only being able to make one sound, tone. And of course, there were many, many, many
others. So you build up a picture that is reliable,
that when you have a stroke in this area, something specific happens. When you have a stroke in another area, quite
something different happens. So that's one. Then there are ways of... And it's not just strokes, it can be an injury,
or a tumor, or anything of the kind, but these things can reliably tell you that something
in the area that's been disrupted has happened in that person's experiential world. And that's in itself very important. Then there are, as you say, studies of split-brain
patients where you can isolate one hemisphere at a time and send pictures to one or the
other hemisphere and see what it makes of them. So that was another way, and you can do this
with something called dichotic listening, where you put a sound into the speaker in
only one ear. And in the human body, all these inputs are
crossed over, so that the right hemisphere garners the left side of the body, and receives
messages from it, and vice versa. And then are neuroimaging studies, both the
kind FMRI scans where you can inject an isotope and you can see which areas of the brain are
active. And then there are EEG studies where you can
see the tracing of the electrical activity in the brain. Each of these has different strengths. For example, EEG is extremely accurate for
time, but not for space. Whereas FMRI is accurate for space, but not
for time. And it's also very difficult to interpret. It's probably the least easy to interpret
of any of these kinds of data. And now we have the wonderful thing that you
can temporarily and painlessly suppress one part of the brain at a time, using a technique
called transcranial magnetic stimulation. And you can see what happens. So you can do this experimentally, you can
switch off some part of somebody's brain for 15 minutes, and then let go, and it comes
back again. So this is another major step forward. In the past, some studies were done using
ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, which of course was a treatment for severe depression. And during that process, for about 20 minutes,
the side of the brain that has been treated is hyporesponsive, compared with the other
side of the brain. So you're tending to get a very one side,
one way, lateralized picture of the brain function. So all of these put together help us understand
the lateralization in the brain. And one more point to note for people that
might become confused throughout the course of this conversation, when we talk about left
and right brain versus left and right hand. The function of the brain is contra-lateralized
in this case. So the left part of the brain uses the right
side of the body. Correct. Can you just explain that a bit, so that people
aren't confused as we walk through the rest of this conversation? Well, it's fairly simple. Any output or input from one hemisphere, with
very few exceptions, which we can safely ignore for these purposes, goes to the other side
of the body. So the left hemisphere is communicating with
the right side of the body, and the right with the left. And this is true of the eyes and the ears,
but it's not... Let me just qualify about the eyes, because
in many animals it is true that the right eye simply feeds to the left hemisphere and
vice versa. In humans, it's slightly different because
we have eyes on the front of our heads, not on the sides of our head. And so it's the left visual field of each
eye, both left and right, that goes to the right hemisphere, and vice versa. But that's a small point, really. Yeah. That was actually the point that I wanted
to clarify specifically, because I've heard you talk about that with respect to the eyes. And I know that's not the case, for example,
in pigeons, which are used for many of these experiments. So I've heard you say that They have their eyes on the side of the head. Yeah, yep. Yeah. So I've heard you say that the brain's left
hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend the world, and thus manipulate, control, and
exert power over it. And that the right hemisphere is designed
to help us comprehend the world, to see it for all that it is, in its uniqueness and
nuance. Yeah. I'd like to spend some time right now discussing
each part in detail. Let's start with the left hemisphere. What does the left hemisphere specialize in? Well, its main specialty we've already referred
to, I suppose, is its ability to speak. So I make a difference between language and
speech. Much of language comprehension and language
formation goes on in the right hemisphere, as well as the left. But for most people, most right-handers, at
any rate, speech is in the left. Somebody who's a listener, who's a left-hander
will ask, but what about me? And unfortunately, there isn't a quick answer
in people who are left-handers. And by the way, handedness is a comparative
thing. It's not an all or nothing thing. So usually people may be right-handed for
many things, but left-handed for one or two things, and vice versa. And there's also such a thing as left-eyedness,
left-footedness and left-earedness. So it's a complicated picture, but in people
who are more or less left dominant, the left side of their body is dominant, the left hand
is dominant, for them, there are really only three possibilities. Either their brains are very much like the
standard right-handed person's brain, or it's just a mirror image, in which case you can
just replace everything where I say left by right, or, and this is much the communist
thing, there is a kind of mix of things going on which is different in each case, and therefore
can't be quickly generalized about, but can lead to specific talents or specific deficits. So you tend to find that pupil who are left-handers
are overrepresented at the top of many skill sets, and at the bottom. So anyway, I think we've answered the point
about how this is called decussation in the nervous system, and it takes place at the
level of the brainstem. And there are various theories about why it
should have happened, because it seems a little bit odd. But there are a couple of main theories about
how that might have come about. Well, one of the things that I found so interesting
about your, I guess it feels almost weird calling it a framework, in the context of
this conversation, because frameworks are so left-brained. But let's just say your view, is that it feels
incredibly intuitive. And once I began to grapple with it, I felt
that I could reliably predict what the left brain would do versus the right brain. Yes. So one of the, I think, key distinctions,
is that the left brain deals much more in abstractions, in categories, in bringing structure
to the world, coming to the world with what it is, and imposing upon it a certain kind
of order that allows us to be able to act upon it more efficiently. And as you talk about, to control, to manipulate,
to go after it, to get. And the right hemisphere, according to your,
again, view and theory here, it grapples with the nuances of the world. It seems, for example, that the right hemisphere
would look at a bird visiting its window and it would have a... ... look at a bird visiting its window, and
it would have a relationship to that bird. It would maybe have a name for it. It would understand it as a particular phenomenon
that visits it every day in all of its nuance. Whereas the left part of the brain would see
it as, "That's a cardinal. I know exactly what it is. I've sort of stereotyped it, identified it,
categorized it, and we can move on now." How accurate is that depiction that I've put
forward? And again, I'd like to really begin to work
through some of these distinctions, the things that we see in people that are... Yeah, it's true. Again, this is maybe not perfect, because,
like you said, each side of the brain does many things, and we're integrated people with
both hemispheres. But maybe for the purposes of this conversation,
we can also try to imagine people as though they were more left-brain dominant or right-brain
dominant, and what their worlds would be like. Yes. Well, if you'll bear with me, what I'll do
is I'll explain the roots of this in evolution, what that leads to in terms of the kind of
world that each hemisphere subtends or supports, brings into being for us. And then I'll talk about what happens when
people are over-reliant, usually for some pathological reason, on one or other hemisphere. So evolutionally, this is because every living
creature has to be able to solve a conundrum, which is how to eat and stay alive at the
same time. And that may not sound difficult to us, but
it is. It's essentially a problem that all living
things have to contend with. Because in order to catch food, it has to
have a very narrowly focused, targeted attention to a detail, which is what it wants to grab
quickly. Coming back to the distinction you made earlier
about apprehending, which literally means grappling onto, grasping, getting, having
power over, manipulating something, it needs to be very clear, very precise, very narrow,
and to have an idea it already knows it wants this thing. But if that's the only kind of attention it
pays, it will not last very long, because it's also got to have some kind of consciousness
that is looking out for the whole picture. Looking out for predators. Looking out for conspecifics, looking out
for the bird's own kin, or the animal's own kin. So these two ways of looking at the world
are one, a very, very narrowly targeted beam of attention to a detail, and the other a
broad, open, sustained, vigilant awareness of the whole picture. So that sets the scene. Now, what this means is, the kind of way in
which these two kinds of attention bring the world to us, widely different. Let me just give you an example. There are different ways of attending to something
like a human body, which depend on the circumstances. For example, if I'm a pathologist with a dead
body on the slab, I attend to it one way. If I'm a lover in bed, I attend to the body
with me in a different way. If I'm helping my elderly aunt who's disabled,
I attend to her body in a different way. If I'm in an art class, I attend to the model's
body in a different way. How you attend changes what it is you see,
and in really quite a radical way. So when you have this narrow beam attention,
what you see is a world made up of little tiny bits, of fragments. They're atomistic, they're taken out of context. They have no context. Context has been shorn off. They are somehow abstract and lifeless. They're sitting there, impassive, and are
relatively certain. The left hemisphere wants certainty and clarity. Remember, it's trying to get something quickly. So these bits are static little atoms of experience
that make no sense on their own. So the left hemisphere thinks, "I've got to
make the structure here. I've got to bring to bear a theory about how
all this is mechanized." And so you get into the left hemisphere's
view, which is a map or a diagram or a theory about how it believes things are structured. Which makes it very useful for it to just
get stuff. But the right hemisphere sees a completely
different picture, in which nothing is ever completely separate from anything else. Everything is interconnected. Everything is also flowing and changing all
the time. It's never got that stasis that comes from
a snapshot. The left hemisphere is taking a quick snapshot,
what the French call a cliche, beautifully. And the right hemisphere is seeing this moving,
unfolding, ever-changing picture that is interconnected. In that picture, everything is in a context,
and it's made what it is by that context. So when you rip it out of the context, you've
altered it already. Much of what is expressed, 90% of it is implicit,
not the explicit meaning. And this is true when we're reading or speaking,
we are communicating using all kinds of things. Facial expression, the tone of voice, the
body posture, irony, sarcasm, metaphor, poetic images, myths, and so on. Which are always of helping us understand. But the left hemisphere is rather like an
autistic dictionary that just says, "These are the rules. These are the words. I'll put it together," without any sense of
the context in which that thing comes to have meaning. So actually the understanding of what an utterance
is in context is more served by the right hemisphere than the left. And there are a few other small differences. The left hemisphere is more interested in
quantity. And the left, which sees individual things
with their qualities, and there are others. But perhaps the most important one to direct
your attention to right now, is the difference between something as it becomes present to
us through our attention to it. When you're not attending to it, it's not
present to you. But it becomes present to you when you attend
to it. And the quality of that attention, if it's
right, it richly allows that thing to come into being. But the left hemisphere doesn't do this. It takes what the right hemisphere has attended
to initially, and then abstracts it. It's dealing with a representation. Now a representation means, literally, present
again, after the fact. When it, in reality it is no longer present. So you've got a world of representations which
are diagrammatic, abstract, non-emotional, detached, fragmentary, and, frankly, void
of meaning. And another world which is pregnant with meaning,
which is rich, which is living and multifarious, and which is always coming into being for
it. So that's very different. Now, the third thing I said I would talk about,
and there's just so much to say about that, but I'll try and keep it very brief, is, in
the first part of The Matter With Things. Because it's in three parts, that book, which
is why it's so long. In the first part, I look at the neuroscience
of what happens when the right hemisphere or the left hemisphere are damaged. I look at the ways in which we can get to
know stuff about the world. Before we work on it, but just get that stuff,
get the information. And they are, I would say, attention, which
I've just talked about. Perception, which is not the same as attention. Judgments formed on the basis of perception. Apprehension, which is the left hemisphere's
speciality. What can I do with this? Emotional and social intelligence, how do
I understand this in a human sense? Cognitive intelligence, i.e., the sort of
things that are the basis of an IQ test. And creativity, because nothing ever comes
giving itself immediately. We have to use a certain degree of creativity
to see actually what it is that we are dealing with properly. So to cut things short, what I say in the
first 400 pages, and it's ripe with, and rich with, I hope, examples of individuals who
have suddenly lost a certain function in one or other of the hemispheres. And what I show is that, for each of these,
except for the grabbing and getting, which is clearly better done by the left hemisphere,
the rest is all better done by the right hemisphere. What this means is that, if somebody has a
left hemisphere stroke, they often can't speak. They often can't use their right hand, which
is, for many people, their main hand for doing stuff. For writing for example, or picking up things. So it's historically being thought of as a
huge catastrophe to have a left hemisphere stroke. Much better to have a right hemisphere stroke. But no. The right hemisphere stroke turns out to be
far more consequential, and is, in fact, much harder to rehabilitate somebody from than
a left hemisphere stroke, despite the fact that that person may not be able to speak
or use their right hand. And this is because our ability to make sense
of the world, to understand what people are saying, why they're doing what they're doing,
what is going on around me, is based on the right hemisphere. And when the left hemisphere is more or less
left to itself or overactive, and the right hemisphere is underactive, the balance has
shifted, it is frankly delusional. And I'm not the only person who have said
this. There are many accounts, and I can point you
to people who have made the same observation. On its own, the left hemisphere is frankly
delusional. So the really extraordinary delusions and
hallucinations that psychiatrists and neurologists are familiar with, almost all the really vivid
ones and the important ones are due to damage to the right hemisphere, not damage to the
left. So that just gives you some idea. It's the right hemisphere that grounds us
in the world, connects us to others, allows us to feel empathy for others, and allows
us to see a big picture and orientate ourselves in it. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote a book called
My Stroke of Insight that is extremely approachable and very short, and a wonderful read that
provides insight into an extreme version of what happens when you experience a left hemisphere
stroke. In her particular case, I recall this from
having read the book years ago, I believe she was on an elliptical machine or something
analogous. And she talked about one of the immediate
things that she began to experience, not having known yet that she experienced a stroke. She kind of came to that realization in the
course of... Which is actually also insightful to think
about, right? That she was able to understand what was happening
to her, which speaks to the extent of her cognitive faculties at the time. She talked about, if I remember correctly,
she was holding her hands on the levers of this elliptical machine, and she began to
lose the distinction between her body parts, and everything began to increasingly be one
sort of flowy experience. Which sounds very much like the way that people
describe their experience on psychedelics, which is that boundaries begin to melt and
things begin to flow, and lines begin to become extended, et cetera. What I also find interesting is the experience
of people with right hemisphere deficits, because you were just talking about that a
bit. And you said that this is what we tend to
define in schizophrenic patients. Yes. And one of the things I find interesting,
and I'd love to for you to speak to it a bit is... I mean, you kind of spoke to it earlier, you
may have said this, which is that when people have right hemisphere deficits, and they're
more dominant in the left side of their brain, one of the things that happens is they become
overly reliant on models. This is something that our listeners are really
going to appreciate. Because, I mean, many of the subjects that
we cover, or many of the topics that we cover, are economic in nature. We also actually recently did an episode on
geopolitics with Jonathan Kirshner, where we talked about the over-reliance on deterministic
models in the theoretical construction of realism, of structural realism, in international
relations. We've spent decades, especially since World
War II, refining and building these models of the world so that we can act on the world
more efficiently and project power. And one of the things that we've discovered,
one classic area where we've seen this has been in the economics profession because of
the 2008 financial crisis, is that many of the models that we have used to understand
the world are, again, they're just that. They're models. They're maps. They're not complete. They aren't the territory. The assumptions that we make about the world
determine how accurate those models are as a representation of the world. And what I find so interesting, to bring it
back to individuals with right hemisphere deficits, is that they're using these explicit
models of the world to act on the world. This brings us to something you talked about
earlier, which is this implicit versus explicit. And it also reminds me of the work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and the problem of trying to formalize into propositions the world that
we experience, and how that, in its own way, is responsible for the paradoxes that we experience. What are some of the more explicit aberrations
that we would tend to see in individuals with right hemisphere deficits? Because one of the things I want to accomplish
in doing this is because there are so many ways in which this manifests. I want to give people a redundant sense of
what this looks like, so that they can really intuit it. And I'll just say this. One perfect example that I'm thinking of is
the fact that someone with a right hemisphere deficit, who maybe is not cognizant of the
placement of his or her arm, when you point out that they can't move their arm, they say,
"No, it's not my arm. It's someone else's arm." In other words, they're so wedded to the model,
that they deny reality when faced with it. You've got it. 100%, yes. The capacity for the left hemisphere to be
in denial is quite extraordinary. And as you say, people will outright deny
that they've got a paralyzed limb. And they will say that it belongs to the doctor,
or it belongs to somebody in another part of the room. Or belongs to their mother, or something like
that. But rather than admit that their theory that
everything is fine with them... And the left hemisphere tends to be an eternal
optimist. I mean, not in a good way. It can't accept that there might be danger
and you need to do something now. It's always kind of, "Ah, it's fine. We've got it under control. We can do a few tweaks. It'll all be utterly fine. You just see." It has a very high opinion of itself and of
its own capacities. And in fact, it's much less intelligent than
the right hemisphere. I mean, intelligent in that cognitive intelligent
sense, as well as emotional and social intelligence. In fact, most of what is measured by an IQ
test is things that are done by the right hemisphere, not by the left. And damage to the right hemisphere impairs
the IQ more than damage to the left. So it's less intelligent. And there's a phenomenon in psychology called
the Dunning-Kruger effect, which you may have come across. Which basically means that the less somebody
knows, the more convinced they are that they know it all. And the more people know, the less they feel
that they can know it all. We are in a difficult position with such a
person, because they're absolutely adamant that they've got it right, and they are wedded
to their particular model. And they think the model is more real than
anything from experience. So some way of putting this would be, the
triumph of theory over experience. One of the difficulties with the modern world,
is that we have created a world around us, that we experience, which is more and more
like the sort of world the left hemisphere would create. Rectilinear, inflexible, concrete and steel,
not living. When you look out of the window to see the
world, that the right hemisphere would say, "But look at this. It's not like your model at all." You see something that is very like what the
left hemisphere would model. Because we've projected the left hemisphere's
idea of the world, a grid-like theoretical version of reality, out there onto the world. And much of the debates that I hear going
on in social media and in politics that often seem so completely weird, boil down to the
denial of experience in the face of an overwhelming theory. Whereas the point about theory is that the
theory should be tested against empirical evidence. And if it doesn't measure up to the evidence,
then it needs to go. So that's where we're at. And so now we find Nobel Prizes given to economists,
because they've got a model which means that the economies, the Western economies, won't
crash again. And then one or two years later, 2008-9, the
economy crashed. There's a lovely experiment which is worth
talking about, where the subjects were asked to address a logical problem, a syllogism,
in three conditions. One was the left hemisphere only, one was
the right hemisphere only, and the other was with the whole brain intact. These syllogisms had a falsehood in them. So the Hawaiian Islands are tropical. In tropical islands, the winter is cold. The winter is cold in Hawaii. Correct or not correct? And when the whole person is asked this, they
say, "But winters in tropical countries are not cold. So of course it's wrong." And when the right hemisphere is asked, it
says the same thing. But when the left hemisphere is asked, of
the same person. This is not aggregated data, this is the very
same person, on another day addressing the same problem. They answer, "Yes, it's correct. And then the experimenter says, "But don't
you know, in tropical countries the winters are not cold." "Yeah, yeah. I do know that." "Well, why do you say it's correct?" "Because that's what it says on this piece
of paper." Now, that is fascinating. Because in the world of medicine, where I
work, I've retired now. But increasingly what was written on a piece
of paper seemed to be more important and more true than the actual real experience of what
happened to this particular patient. And we see it everywhere now around us. That also kind of reminds me of this story
that I had read, I think this was in James Gleick's book, The Information, which I've
cited before. And they pre-literate societies, they created
a logical construction about bears in the north. Oh, yes. That's it. Yes, yes. Where all bears are white. Yeah, and they couldn't follow the logic. That's right. Why don't you tell our listeners what I'm
referring to so they also know. Yes, well, that's a different thing. But that was actually work done by the very
great Russian neurologist, Alexandra Luria. And he asked people in what was then the eastern
part of the Soviet Union about the color of bears. What he said is, "In countries where there
was a lot of snow and ice, the bears are white. In Siberia, there is a lot of snow and ice. What color are the bears?" And they would say, "well, I can't answer
that question because I've never been there. Only bears I've ever seen are brown bears." And he said, "Yeah, but look. If they are white when it's somewhere very,
very cold like that, where there's snow and ice, then what color are they?" And they said, "No, I can't answer that question. If somebody very old came to me, and they'd
been there, and they'd been experienced, and they said 'They're all white bears there,'
I'd believe them." In other words, they were completely empirical. And this is a very sane way to live, actually,
for those people. To believe the evidence of experience, not
some story that they have no way of evaluating. I'm curious why it is that the left hemisphere
seems to be, it's not just dealing more with abstractions, but it seems to exhibit a level
of certainty around the models that it's come to the world with. And it's impervious to new information if
it's contradictory. Absolutely. What explains that? Well, I think it's because it is evolutionally
developed to make snap decisions, and to stick to them. Because if you're going to be a good hunter,
or even just to pick up something quickly, you don't want to be entering into a sort
of Hamlet-like debate. "Well, is that a rabbit or is it not? It might not be. Maybe..." You've just got to go, "It's rabbit. I'm going to get it." So it has to be quick and dirty. One of the things that I get is, people who've
read Kahneman's book on thinking fast, thinking slow, where he talks about two systems. And system one is quick and dirty and efficient
for certain things. But system two is more thought through and
complex. And people say to me, "So system one, the
quick and dirty one, is the right hemisphere, isn't it? And the other one, the thoughtful one, is
the left hemisphere." No. It's the exact opposite. The left hemisphere is the quick and dirty
one that jumps to conclusions. The reason why it's so associated with delusional
thinking and delusional perception is because it jumps to conclusions. And the right hemisphere is what V.S. Ramachandran, a very great neuroscientist
that you may have heard of, says is, "The right hemisphere is the devil's advocate." In other words, it's the one that's going,
"Yeah, you think that, but it might not be. We've got a bear in mind that this could not
be the case." And the right hemisphere is able to hold open
two options. There's a famous picture of the so-called
duck rabbit. It's an illusion. If you look at it one way, it looks like a
duck, in another way, it looks like a rabbit. Wittgenstein talked about it. Well, the right hemisphere is perfectly well
able to say, "Well, it could be either a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at
it." But the left hemisphere is going, "What do
you mean? Either it's a duck or it's a rabbit. It can't be both." And so it is very black and white, exclusionary,
and simple in its thinking. It really reduces cognition to the most basic
level. And it's hilarious that people have believed
that this left hemisphere thinking is intelligent, and we ought to emulate it. There's a massive evidence that we do much
better if we take into account a whole lot of different kinds of evidence. And we can only usefully do that if we also
use our intuitions. So then we come to the question you asked
earlier. Or maybe that's where you were going. How do we know anything at all? Absolutely. And that's actually where we're going to go
in the second hour. Before we do that, I have one more question
that came to mind when I was reading your book. Which is that, the distinctions that we're
talking about today... And also I do want to emphasize, people don't
need to buy into your theory about the physiological differences to find value in the metaphorical
differences that we're talking about today, which I think we see everywhere around us. But one of the distinctions that came to my
mind in the course of reading your work is that between the analog and the digital. Yeah. Because the digital world is very discreet,
it's symbol-oriented. And the analog world is continuous. Is there some correlation here? In other words, is this digital world that
we're building, by its very nature more left-brained? I think that's right, but I'd like to first
just make a brief comment about people don't need to buy into it. I mean, goodness, the evidence is overwhelming. I really would like anyone who's read the
first part of The Matter With Things to explain to me where I've made a mistake in that. And nobody in the world of neurology or neuroscience
has been able to explain that the evidence is not substantial. So that's all I'd say. And I was stupid enough at the end of the
earlier book, The Master and His Emissary, to say, "If it should happen, and I think
it's very unlikely that what I've said, it just doesn't stand up, then at least it's
a very important metaphor." And people picked me up on that, as though
I'd said the science doesn't matter. I wouldn't have spent 30 years of a career
on the science if I didn't actually think it mattered. And I've been quite meticulous in that. I just wanted to point that out. Because I think it helps explain why everyone,
everywhere in the world has myths that relate to these two kinds of thinking in the brain. Which really you couldn't have known prior
to the 1960s. Such a wealth of information about hemisphere
differences are sometimes contained in those myths. They were ahead of what people were suggesting
in the period of pop psychology of hemisphere difference in the sixties and seventies. They'd already got there hundreds of years
ago. So anyway. The digital thing is interesting. Because of course, it is the exact equivalent
of breaking up a picture into tiny little bits of information, and losing the connectivity
of the whole. And there's something about a sweeping line,
or an outline, that means that it is a single, unified organic whole. I personally don't think that the levels at
which ears work, but I know there are people who say, "Oh, the old LPs were so much better
than a CD." I have to say, I think the sound that comes
from a CD is exquisite, and you don't have the problem of clunks on your LP, and having
to suddenly get up and change it over. But anyway, that's aside. What's really important is the way in which
this digital knowledge, this imperfect knowledge, because it's only an approximation by lots
of little bits, plays into something that's now happening. Which is the emergence of these rather sophisticated
bots, like ChatGPT, which give a digital rendering of the world. There's a writer called Ted Chang, who has
written a piece about this in the New Yorker, I think it is. And it's very well worth reading. What he basically points out is that, in the
past, photocopiers simply photocopied an image in a sort of analog way. But now they do it through digitalization
of the image. And it turns out that what they print sometimes
contains enormous discrepancies. Because an algorithm has worked on the data
and filled in the gaps in ways that make sense to the algorithm, but actually don't represent
what was on that original sheet. So the photocopy is no longer identical with
the original. Now, that's just an image. But if you take it to something that is trying
to answer a question about what happens when, what do you think about, it will search the
internet. And most of what it says will be not fully
represented, but lossy. It will have loss of data in it. And it will fill in the data with things that
it looked like they would fit in those gaps. And that then becomes truth. It reports figures, events, that don't exist. So this is a really, really critical point. Thank you for raising it. Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. Because what you have is a sort of inherent
level of abstraction from the get-go, because you're taking reality, you're- ... connection from the get-go because you're
taking reality, you're translating it, and then you're recreating it into the world. And that period between translation and recreation
creates the opportunity for misconstruing the reality from which you derived your symbols. I'm going to move us to the second hour, Dr.
McGilchrist. And as I said in the beginning, this is where
I really want to focus on the evidence of more left brain dominated thinking in the
world, the implications of that. And also the deeper philosophical questions
about what the nature of reality is, how we can know what it is, if that's even possible. What do we mean when we talk about truth? And perhaps most important of all, who or
what are we? And what is it that all the different mythologies
of the world try and speak to in this non-explicit way to get us back to Wittgenstein? What is it that maybe is most important, and
how might we begin to approximate that by recognizing to begin with that it isn't something
that we can explicitly point to this thing, this mystery that we all seem to be grappling
with across time and space? For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces
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using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now,
Dr. McGilchrist, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation
onto the premium feed. All right, Dr. McGilchrist, welcome back. Thank you. I want to also double down on something you
said when we were ending the first hour, which is that I didn't mean to imply that people
shouldn't take the argument you put forward about the physiological correlation between
the observations and the actual neurology of the brain. The reason that I said that was because for
me, reading the book without enough of an understanding to be able to immediately determine
with any degree of confidence whether or not that the thesis is correct. What I really just wanted to speak to is the
intuitive way in which it feels true, in which it feels deeply true. And not just deeply true, but predictively
true. In other words, I found myself being able
to predict with a high degree of accuracy, even if I might even say perfectly, what each
hemisphere would do based on the framework that you have put forward. And I think that's very powerful. As we were moving into the second hour, I
said that there are two areas that I want to focus on here. One are the social implications, and the other
are the more universal or philosophical implications of your work. Let's talk about the social implications,
because I see these everywhere. I see a rise in narcissism. Anger, something that you talk about also,
which is that anger lateralizes to the left hemisphere of the brain as an inability to
look outside of your narrow focus. If it's not consistent with your reality or
your model, it doesn't exist and you get very angry. People get very angry when you challenge their
point of view today. What do you think is going on? And also, how more commonplace is this reality
today versus where it was when you wrote The Master and His Emissary? Because when you wrote that book, your comments
around it were very pressing it. Reading it today, it feels very relevant and
it's hard to believe that you wrote that book... But you published it in 2009, so you wrote
it in the early 2000s. What is causing this, and do you feel that
it's gotten worse? I do feel it's got worse. As to what's causing it, of course, causation
is a complex concept. And I don't suggest that there is only one
cause of any human phenomenon. There are many different ways of looking at
what causes somebody to do something or to say something. But what I can see is a consistent pattern. And as you know, in the second half of The
Master and His Emissary, which is subtitled, The divided brain and the making of the western
world. I look back at the making of the western world
from the Greeks, the Romans, through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
romanticism and modernism, and post-modernism. And what I suggest is that civilization seemed
to move, have a certain dynamism which begins from a very balanced, harmonious use of both
of these faculties together. But that seems in every case that we know
of in the West, in the Greek civilization, in the Roman civilization, for example. And in our end, since the Renaissance, to
have drifted ever further into the left hemisphere's way of conceiving things. And I have my own suggestions about why that
may be, which I put in the introduction to the new edition of The Master and His Emissary,
which came out as a 10th anniversary edition. But they're perhaps not that important in
a way. I can talk about them if you like, but I think
in effect, they're due to civilizations overreaching themselves and becoming addicted to a certain
power. And needing to administer a very large and
over-extended body of territory and of people. And it leads to simplification, bureaucratization,
categorization, deadening loss of everything that makes life worth living. I think we're in that phase right now. As you know, the subtitle of my more recent
book, which is mainly what we've been talking on the back of, so to speak, is our brains
are delusions and the unmaking of the world. And I think that's important. I think we are actually, frankly, deluded. It's the only way one can explain certain
kinds of behavior nowadays. And that we are dismantling a beautiful world. Our assault on nature is very obvious, but
there is an assault on civilization as well in so many ways. It reminds me of nothing so much as people
in the Reformation going round with mallets and smashing unimaginably precious works of
art that we can now only think of with sadness because they're destroyed. Anyway, I believe that we are dismantling
civilization, that it's actually collapsing. And that nature is under an incredible assault
from humanity that's hardly controversial. And I think this is because of this way of
thinking, which is black and white, unnuanced, adopts extreme positions, refuses to listen
to another side of an argument. Is discourteous, arrogant, angry, narcissistic,
full of its own importance. Believes it must be the savior of the world,
whatever. And all this fits precisely with what we know
of the left hemisphere, which tends to be headstrong, impulsive, arrogant, quickly angry. Sees things as not individual cases, but just
as representatives of categories. And sees the world as effectively something
for it to manipulate that it can turn any way it likes. Now, unfortunately, the most movements in
the history of not just our civilization but of others where pupil thought they could suddenly
solve all the problems by making changes that they were so clever that they were much better
able to see than anyone in the past, have led to the greatest tyrannies that the world
has seen. I think we're heading into one now. I've heard you talk about the one manifestation
of this phenomenon in the context of all the different identity categories that people
have today. Talk to me a little bit about this because
I also found this quite fascinating. Well, it could have been predicted that we
would stop seeing people for their particular personal qualities and values, but see them
as representatives of certain groups. And that these groups would be at war with
one another. I am convinced, and there's a lot of evidence
that suggests that in the last 20 years feelings have run higher than they used to do. Adversarial stances have been more prominent. And far from healing, being compassionate,
being understanding, and creatively life-giving, this process is breathing almost deliberately,
opposition, hostility, and spreading lies. This is a worry to me, but it is what one
would've predicted. It wasn't really much underway 10 years ago
in quite the same way that it is now, although the process obviously had begun. But I talk about many things that would be
expected to happen in a left hemisphere dominated world, and a lot of them have come about. That the piece of paper is more important
than whatever it signifies. That we are discouraged from using our own
experience or valuing the experience of an expert, or deferring to any wisdom. Instead, we have gone from wisdom to information,
and from information to data. And we seem to be worshiping data. This is exactly what you would expect. You would also expect a world in which things
were increasingly standardized, bureaucratized. In which we'd be asked to give either/or answers
to questions, which really don't permit of such things because context is so important. We've lost the importance of context. Context changes everything. The same remark can be made in many different
contexts. Completely different things. Even an inflection of the tone of voice can
change immediately what I mean by yes. Yes. Yeah. Whatever. You can say it in 20 different ways and mean
completely different things. But the context in which something is said
makes all the difference. And here I have this amusing example, which
maybe I can just give quickly, which is how a word can completely invert its meaning depending
on the context. And that comes from American cereal packets. There are four sizes of cereal packets. There's jumbo, which means very large. And then there's economy, which means large. Then comes family, which means medium. And finally comes large, which means small. So depending on the context, a word can completely
invert its meaning. That also reminds me of another anecdote,
I'm not going to even try to recount it exactly because I'm going to butcher it. But it's a joke between mathematicians, and
it's where they formalize a joke. And of course it's not funny. And anyway, the punchline is- Oh, yes. Are you familiar with this one? Basically it's a bunch of mathematicians sitting
around a table and they're all laughing. Yes. The other person tries to repeat the joke
by saying the exact same formula and no one laughs. He's like, "Well, why are you laughing?" "Because you did not tell it right." Yeah, I know it in a monastery where they've
all heard the joke so many times they categorize them. And so somebody just needs to say 37, and
everybody laughs. Exactly. That's the one. That's the one, it was 68. And there's a great game of laughter. And then somebody else comes along and says,
122, and they just fall about all over the place laughing. And say, "That's one I've never heard before. It's just the way you tell it." Yeah. That's a different take on the same joke. I love that. It's the same joke. But you see what this interestingly and importantly
does is bring us back to the manner in which I mentioned at the early part of the first
part of this conversation, we are not attentive enough to the way in which things are said
and done. And there are things that if taken out of
their context and just examined in an abstract way, seem harmless, but done in a certain
way can be very harmful. Or vice versa, things that sound as though
they mean some threat, but if discussed in a certain way do not pose such a threat. So the manner in which is very important. And in a machine age we're beginning to liken
ourselves to machines. And actually, people's ability to speak expressively
and to read correctly so that they give the right inflection to the sentence that shows
they understand what they've done is deteriorating. No, I love everything that you said. The point about the machine metaphor is actually
something I'd like to delve into. This point about context I think is so important. And a great example is, let's say something
like a weapon. A weapon, it's not a thing. A chair can be a weapon, a knife can be a
weapon. But a knife can also be a tool that's not
a weapon if it's being used to cut a stake. The same thing with a chair. If it's being thrown at you, it's a weapon. And it's so much about the context in which
you are applying that word. And what we see in society today is that there's
an absence of context. So many people, for example, are judged out
of time. We have historical figures who are judged
by today's standards who lived thousands of years ago. And I think that context also matters when
it comes to humor. I think this is one area where we have a lot
of evidence, because comedians writ large are saying the same thing, which is that they're
increasingly unable to play at college campuses. They're finding that audiences are having
a difficult time laughing at jokes and understanding that they're in a particular place where a
different set of rules apply. That this isn't a comment to be taken literally,
it's part of a larger humor. Which I find to be, and I'm not the only one,
alarming. I find it very alarming for a number of reasons. One is that I think that humor is one of the
things that makes life worth living. I'm friends with some comics like John Cleese,
and I've said to him several times, "As far as I'm concerned, a really great comic is
up there for me with a great poet." And they use often the same ways that poets
use language to produce surprising effects. And they say things implicitly that don't
have to be spelled out. Now, the idea that this should be going is
very, very worrying, partly because rightly understood humor is one of the ways to defuse
anger, aggression, competition. It's one of the ways to bring things together. It's only ever emphasized that people can
mock in a cruel way. They can, but that is not the way in which
comedians normally use humor. They make observations which are fascinating. They've noticed things that we may or may
not have noticed ourselves. And we go a sudden moment of recognition,
we think, yeah, that's right. And so I think it's very sad. And humor is very much underwritten by the
right hemisphere, as is poetry. So poetic meaning metaphor, humor, irony,
all these things that change meaning are right frontal. And at the moment, we are failing to use that
part of our brains. And we are being actually specifically directed
not to. Not to listen to intuitions. This is terribly dangerous because we become
mediocre morons if we don't listen to intuitions. We've just become rather inaccurate versions
of a computer churning out information. We very much need to be able to inhabit these
realms which are underwritten by intuition. And intuition is the way in which great insights
discovered in science and mathematics were almost always made. I use many examples in The Matter With Things. And I can't think offhand of a single example
of a great invention that was made purely by doggedly working at things in a sequential
linear fashion. It was through changing perspective and seeing
a new gestalt. In another hole that formed. And so people point to, and there are armies
of psychologists who are very well paid by businesses to go in there and tell them that
people shouldn't trust their intuitions because there are examples that can be deliberately
set up where an intuition is wrong. But there are also examples, they're called
optical illusions, in which I can show you something that is correct and you can't possibly
believe it looking at it. But I don't know of anybody after seeing one
of these things said, "Oh, okay, after this I'm never going to open my eyes again." Because 99.9% of the time your eyes do a very
good job, and so does your intuition. And I have three whole chapters on intuition
and how they enable us to do many of the things that are admirable, inventive, creative, intelligent. And so to cut this out and to substitute a
machine mechanism is madness. Let me just give an example of why it's madness. Working as a psychiatrist, I needed to know
how safe some of my patients were, and people used to use intuition about the way in which
a patient spoke or appeared, and so on. And it was often quite hard to put your finger
on it. But people have been discouraged from using
that. And instead fill out a risk assessment tool,
which is a series... It's a questionnaire, basically. You tot it up and you get a score. And if you don't do that, you could be guilty
in court of having been negligent. But we now have evidence of what every clinician
has known for a long time, that these things are no better than chance. They're hopeless, and they're a waste of time. They dehumanize the patient, they dehumanize
the clinician. And actually what is important, is in my case
I used to rely on a very experienced nurse on the ward where I worked who actually had
no specific training, but had been a nurse for 40 years around certain kinds of patients. And if she said, "I'm a bit uneasy about so-and-so
or other," I would take that as a warning sign. And she was more right than the assessment
tools. I love this and everything that you've had
to say, it resonates so much with me. I know so many physicians, and especially
the older physicians who have been around long enough to see how the profession has
changed, feel that it's gone really in the wrong direction. And so far as this need to categorize and- Absolutely. ... scale. That's a big part of what all this is about. It's about scaling human activities. Yes. Now, assuming you are meaning by scaling that
by changing the scale of something you completely alter it. You do. And by also making it abstract, you give yourself
the capacity to scale something, but you have stacked away from what it actually is. Yes, indeed. And again, what is really important and interesting
is that certain kinds of model work for a limited purpose at a certain level of scale,
but they don't work at a different level of scale. For example, there's a distinction between... What does he call it? I think connective and architective structures
made by Mike Abramowitz. And what he clearly shows is that at a large
enough scale, only connective models really work, but at very small levels architective
ones do. Architective have the features of inflexibility,
predictability, linearity. Whereas connectivity have the right hemisphere
features of radical uncertainty, but that doesn't mean one doesn't get to know things
within a degree of reason. And it was also pointed out by, let me see,
Freeman Dyson, that when you look at a tadpole, you can model certain things mechanically. But as you go out further and further to the
frog, it gets harder and harder to model them. As you go down and down to a single cell,
you think you can, although we now know more about single cells and it's very hard to model
them mechanically. But as you go down deeper and deeper using
physics to go lower and lower, things stop looking like machines once more. So the machine model is something that works
for a local purpose at a local area in the spectrum, but should not be extrapolated as
the way to understand the whole. And when I talk about the unmaking of the
world, what we have done is we've used a very simple-minded, mid-Victorian, hydraulic, mechanical
mode of cognition to try and understand living organisms. And not just living organisms of course. But in doing so, we have grossly oversimplified. We've reduced the intellectual depth, we've
reduced the moral worth of what we are doing, and we've lost any spiritual value in what
we're looking at. We've deliberately excluded all these things. And what we now know is that these are the
very things that make life worth living. If you wanted to produce a generation of people
who were maximally unhappy, what you do is you'd estrange them from society, you'd estrange
them from nature, and you'd estrange them from the realm of the sacred or the divine
or the spiritual, whatever you like to call it. And the evidence on this is enormous. And I give the evidence about belonging to
a stable, coherent, societal structure in the end of The Master and His Emissary. And I give the evidence about closeness to
the natural world and the espousal of a spiritual cast of mind in the end of The Matter With
Things. And these three things really govern what
makes a life worth living, makes people fulfilled, makes them happy, makes them feel not lonely
and ineffectual, but actually vibrant and fulfilled. And so if you wanted to create a world in
which people felt pointless, lonely, depressed, anxious, and suicidal, you'd rip all these
things away. You'd say, "You don't belong to a society. You are a free individual, you can do exactly
what you'd like and nobody else can tell you no." You make up yourself just the very way you
want it, there are no constraints, and nature doesn't matter. You'd alienate people from nature by herding
them in cities where it was hard to find living things around them. And minimize their contact with the natural
world and their understanding of natural processes, which used to be what surrounded 99.9% of
humanity until the beginning of the 19th century. And you would tell people that only foolish
people and simple-minded people believe in something spiritual, religious. And in fact, the very opposite is the truth. And it is very, very easy. It's money for old rope to adopt this, wow,
it can't be. But it's a much more complex problem than
that. And all these people who are so adamant and
so vehement and so aggressive in telling us that none of these things is any longer important,
is to display their own lack of insight, in my view. Yeah. I haven't done a good job of doing this in
the first hour of pointing listeners to past episodes that speak to some of the things
that we've discussed. But in this case, we did one episode with
Johann Hari on his book, I believe the title of that book was Lost Connections, but it
was about the rise in depression and the loneliest epidemic. And I think that was episode 84. And we did another episode with Calvin Newport,
episode 77 on his book, which had to do with Digital Minimalism, how to live a more embodied
Life. And we haven't actually talked about that
or discussed it in any detail, which is this increasingly disembodied version of reality
in which we live. Yes, yes. Which I think makes it increasingly difficult
to have those types of intuitions because intuitive learning happens very much in the
world. You're next to someone, you can feel all sorts
of nuances that come from them that aren't able to be explicitly said. Or if they are able to be explicitly said,
then they are so complex that we haven't quite figured out how to formalize them into logical
propositions. And that speaks to something else, which I'd
like to try and tease out here, which has to do with God. What we call God. The word that I'm comfortable using is the
mystery, the mystery of existence. Which I feel that you see this throughout
the history of human literature, this reference to some of these common themes. I feel like a lot of times when people read
the Bible. Or atheists, so to speak, people who... And oftentimes what I find is that when people
say that they're atheist, what they're really saying is, I'm a materialist and I don't believe
in fairy tales about people that live in the sky. And that is in its own way a very literal
way of interpreting what people mean when they talk about God. And they look at the Bible and they look at
so many of the arguments or refutations of religion are based in false, literal interpretations
of what are truly metaphorical stories. How do you think about what's going on here? You're over in Scotland in some beautiful
island in nature. I'm here in a studio booth in Florida visiting
a family member recording this episode. We're using Zoom. My physical manifestation is reconstituted
on your screen. But we're in this experience, and we don't
quite know what it is, and we're trying to understand it. What do you think all this is that's going
on in the world? Well, there are two things there. The importance of embodiment and how to even
begin to think about something as complex and inexpressible as the divine. And I think to take the first thing first,
which you've just pointed to a way in which our lives are to some extent less embodied
than they were. It's a simple fact that more of us spend time
in cities, in offices, than we used to do out of doors and connection with crafts and
agriculture and the living world. And we've also come to feel that somehow we
are rattling around inside a lumbering machine, which is the body. But the body is no machine. We are continuous with this body, whatever
it is. And I would just like to say since we are
also touching on a religious topic or about to, that I don't think that... It's a shame that in certain religions, and
perhaps overall most obviously in Christianity, the body and soul have been set up against
one another. I know why, because there are bodily appetites
that can take you away from the spiritual life. And that is notably embraced by Buddhists
and Hindus as well, who often have ascetic practices. They fast and they do certain physical exercises
and they don't indulge bodily appetites to the same degree as perhaps most of us. So I understand that, but I think it's a great
shame to set them up in that way, because I'd like to say something that might sound
like having my cake and eat it, but I think is entirely defensible, which is that while
the soul does not depend on the body, while this life is going on, whatever I mean by
my soul, is very much linked to this body. And the two are not at war with one another,
but much of the depth of that experience comes from the body. And if you're not prepared to talk about the
soul or the spirit or anything, then fine, but let us just talk about the mind and the
intellect. So much of what we know and understand is
stored in the body. If it had to be retrieved from a filing system
explicitly in the head, we'd never get anything done. But our bodies are intelligent repositories
of experience. They're formed out experience. A lot of that, as you say, almost all of it,
is done nonexplicitly. It's done by watching, by following. This is, of course, how you learn a skill,
is by being with a true master and watching him or her do what it is that they do very
well. This has been known for thousands of years. And it can't be just by reading in a book. So embodied knowledge is important, and we
think that it probably constitutes 99.5%, roughly speaking, of all the things we know
and understand is stored below the threshold of our conscious mind, and would be better
represented by the complex of emotion and physical existence. So that when you are told not to trust your
intuitions, you simply wouldn't be able to get to square one with many things. In that book, of course, I talk about the
ways in which people who are highly skilled at certain things like dangerous sports and
making very fine and apparently entirely intuitive judgments about which race horse will win
a race, where the horses are all running to within 0.1 of a second. So these things are not easy to explain, in
fact, impossible to explain, but are real. And if you mistrust them, then you've suddenly
lost something. And of course, if you don't use a faculty,
you lose it. And I think that is what is happening to us. We are atrophying our ability to do anything
other than work with explicit data, and this is making us stupid. We are becoming a civilization of clever stupids. In other words, we think we're clever, we
know a lot of things, we've got a lot of data, but frankly, we haven't a clue about what
it means or how to use it wisely. And this runs into the thing about God, if
I may just... Obviously, we could talk for a day or two
about that. But I think your observation is important
and brings us right back to the hemispheres, that the mistake is to understand something
which is not intended literally as literal. It's like misunderstanding humor, misunderstanding
myth, misunderstanding metaphor, misunderstanding poetry, misunderstanding music. None of these things can be explained in everyday
language, but they have deep, deep meaning. And there have been fundamentalist believers
who have made the huge mistake of taking texts, making them infallible and taking them literally. And their mindsets are almost identical to
fundamentalist atheists who simply rigidly say, "No, no, can't be," without having really
thought through the complexities of what it is that they're saying no to. Of course, it's not about a bearded man sitting
on a cloud in the sky. Don't be ridiculous. But let's go to some more sophisticated level. And in my book I try to do that in the chapter
called The Sense of the Sacred. And I look at world religions and none, a
mythologist from, for example, the Onondaga people who are Iroquois people, Native American
Nation, and there, one can find wisdom which is spiritual and intellectual and deeply insightful
about the structure of our minds. And this is so rich and so powerful and so
important, but it involves being able to think in a different way. So some of the things that you have to be
able to think are that the things that you believe are simply dead and non-responsive
to you are capable of a reverberate interaction with you in which they change what they are
because of you, and you change what you are because of contacting them. That's something that we know at a certain
level, even in physics, but it's certainly true in other realms philosophically and psychologically. You'd have to accept that contraries may well
be true, that there is no necessity for one of them to have to win hands down and the
other one not to be true. That very often, in fact almost always, two
things that look as though they're opposites are equally true or certainly may be true
at the same time to different degrees. And that often one of our mistakes is to think
linearly, so that, "This has been good, so let's do more and more and more of it in the
same direction." But unfortunately, mental space is curved. You come round the curve and find yourself
in the place you were running away from, rather than the place you were hoping to get to. We are besotted with straight lines, but nothing
in this universe is straight. It works in spirals, as I've said before. You do come back to somewhere like the place
you started from, but you are now on a higher level and you can see the place below you
where you were last time you came around the spiral. And another nice thing about a spiral is if
you look down at it, it appears circular, but if you look along it, it appears to be
linear, at least a wavy line. So it has these different qualities, but I
think these are the sort of things that one would have to begin to understand. And I unpack those in the first two chapters
of part three, which is my part of the book on metaphysics. So what is that? And I then apply... See, what I'm able to do is, I think, a genuine
step forward in philosophy. That may sound hubristic, but let me just
say why I think that's the case. Nobody until now has been able to say so clearly
what our thinking looks like when it's dominated by the right hemisphere and when it's dominated
by the left hemisphere. That's point number one. So we can see the imprint on a certain point
of view. This looks very left hemispheric, for example. The second point is, in conjunction with that,
I've been able to demonstrate in parts one and two that the most important parts of our
understanding, as well as our ability to take in information, depend on the right hemisphere,
so that even reason and science depend to a very large extent on what the right hemisphere
can offer as well as intuition and imagination. So what one can say now is that there are
certain ways of conceiving, say, time, space, consciousness, matter, which reek of left
hemisphere thinking. And we know that it doesn't mean it's necessarily
completely false. I'm not saying that, but it should put us
on guard. It should make us think, "I'd need very strong
reasons for believing that, because it looks just like the usual left hemisphere jumping
to conclusions." And we can see another point of view is much
more consonant with what we know is the more intelligent, more insightful right hemisphere. Now, if that's the case, we can really begin
to make progress on what the world is like, what the universe is like, and what we are
like. And I say we've completely misunderstood them
because we've simplified things into a mechanism. We've reduced the wholes to the parts, and
we've de-animated everything and made up that there are no purposes or values anywhere in
this cosmos. Science doesn't tell us that there are no
purposes or values because it starts from making a statement, "We will not entertain
purposes or values." So then, at the end of the process, when it
solemnly says it can't find any purposes or values in what it's looking at, that's not
a function of the reality of what it's looking at. It's a function of the process, the method. There's nothing wrong with the scientific
method. I'm not criticizing it. I'm just saying it is a necessary consequence
of it, that it will be blind to any evidence of either purpose or values. And yet, these things are, I believe, and
many philosophers believe, present throughout everything that we look at and are also non-reducible
to anything else. They are what's called in the trade ontological
primitives. Is there something about human beings, that
when set against one another, we tend over time to move more towards left-dominated thinking
because it's a way of exercising power? That in other words, you could think about
this in a way in terms of game theory. Yes. That you're going to get some portion of the
population that's going to use this dominant strategy of left-dominant thinking. It may not give them an understanding of the
world, it may not give them what the collective needs to live in harmony, but it'll give them
enough to act on the world as individuals. Exactly that. And of course, it wouldn't make them happy,
it will make them anxious, fearful, paranoid to protect what it is that they've got. But no, this is right. And I refer in both books because I think
it's of such central importance to the Pyramid of Values developed by the early 20th century
German phenomenological philosopher, Max Scheler. And he suggested that there were different
levels of values in the world, and the most basic one was that of power, utility, and
pleasure. But that above that, there were ones which
weren't just achievable by pursuing power and pleasure, things like generosity, magnanimity,
bravery, and their opposites, mean-mindedness, cowardice, and I can't remember what the other
one was that I said that. But anyway, you see what I'm getting at. And the next level up from that were what
he called geistige werte, which means spiritual or intellectual values, because the word geist
in German means both. And these would be things like beauty, goodness,
and truth. And the top of the pyramid is geistheiler
werte, the holy. And he thought that the lower ones were in
service of the higher ones. But the story we've been told is that the
higher ones are only in service of the lower one, which is grabbing as much power and getting
as much pleasure as we can. And this has produced the people who are immoral
and blind, in my view, to what they're doing here. We are not here just to maximize power, but
to experience the whole range of richness that this business of living in this cosmos
gives us. And it's rich, it's complex, and it's beautiful. And we've turned our back on these things. Nobody talks about beauty anymore. They only talk about a powerful work. They don't say it's beautiful. Goodness has now been reduced to utility,
but goodness is much more than utility. Goodness is a cast of mind in somebody who
is a good person. It goes back to a whole way of being in the
world, not just to the outcome of a particular action and so on and so forth. So now nobody thinks it worth being generous
or brave or magnanimous. They think that only a fool would do that,
a sucker, because meanwhile, I can do the dog eats dog thing and just go and grab all
their stuff. Well, if that's really the way we want to
live, then it is time humanity did end, and I think we're hastening our way to that terminus. At the same time, it does feel like there
are pockets of the world that are awakening to this, to your message. Yes. What are you seeing from your perspective? Because you speak to hosts like me. And in my particular case, your message resonates
with me, and it's not one that's not particularly new to me, but I also had an experience at
a young age of having faced death and having to overcome symptoms of a brain tumor and
the loss of memory and et cetera. And so, I went through this sort of death
and resurrection process, and coming out of that, stories and myths all of a sudden resonated
with me in a way that they hadn't before. But I do feel like I see more people awakening
themselves to this. Now one of the dangerous aspects is that so
many gurus and people in these fields use this to try and capture people, and it's a
real dark side. I was also thinking of, in fact, I had a dream
last night, I had a nightmare. And in my nightmare, there was Darth Vader. Darth Vader, for me, very much symbolizes
that left brain, that obsession with power and control and taking. What are you seeing on your end? Do you feel like there is an awakening? And how can we hasten that? What does it require? What can we do? Because I seem to agree with you that this
is the only way forward if we want to really survive in the world. Yes. I'm happy to talk about that. I want to just briefly pick up something you
alluded to, which is that suffering is not necessarily entirely negative. Nobody should be welcoming or seeking suffering,
but suffering is a part of life that will come to you whether you seek it or not. And what you said is that through these experiences,
part of your mind was opened, your imagination was enriched, and you began to see things
that otherwise you wouldn't have done. I think this is profoundly true. So I just want to say that to itself instill
a ray of hope that these experiences all have deep meaning. Even things that we don't now understand,
I believe they have meaning. And I would also just say that what played
such an important role for me was learning to feel my way through life. And that was something that I didn't have
an appreciation for. I wanted to understand everything much more
concretely. And after that experience of going through
suffering, of learning the difference between giving up and surrendering to the world, I
came to understand it much more deeply and in a way that wasn't, so to speak, mental. No, no. But anyway, I just wanted to say that. Yes. And on that topic, I think one of the sad
things is that we've lost the ability to make ourselves vulnerable or to surrender. And I think these are incredibly sad elements
which are not empowering, but actually disempowering and make us smaller, meaner than we otherwise
would be. Obvious beacons of hope, the way in which
particularly the young people take the degradation of nature, the war on nature that I call it,
I don't talk about the environment because that means something that's just around you,
but it's not. It's within you, and we are within it. We come from nature and return to it. And I think that that point of view is much
commoner now, is gaining ground. It has its ups and downs and its better advocates
and its worse advocates, but I think that not taking it seriously is not an option. Quite how you put it into practice is something
that leads to extremism, where people ravish the idea that there is climate change at all,
will go to such extremes that they would make life impossible for many particularly poor
people to carry on their lives at all. So again, the answers are not quick and dirty,
cut and dried, and so on, but require contextual thinking and nuance thinking. I think also that people have gotten sick
and tired of the materialist vision. I think its bankruptcy has been revealed. And one marvelous thing in science is that
until very recently, until almost 10 years ago, it was only in physics that you found
people who were able to think flexibly, philosophically, in the way I'm talking. For example, after writing The Master and
His Emissary, my earlier book, I got many physicists writing to me saying, "What you
are saying is so interesting to us as physicists." But the same was not true of biologists, because
biologists still clung onto this way outdated mid-Victorian mindset of the mechanism. But now it's finally dawned on biologists
that one might call the toxic Dawkins effect of, we are all just run by genes, this is
a nonsense. We now know this is completely untrue. And so many people suffered through taking
this on board and believing it and being made to feel despondent or less than human because
of it. So I'm very glad to say that the science no
longer supports that position. So that's another reason for hope. And I think also, if I may put it this way,
the sheer number of people who respond to me when I go and speak or who send me emails,
if anybody's listening to this, please, please do keep writing because it keeps me going
to know that there are people out there for whom what I'm saying makes sense and makes
a difference. So I think most writers would be delighted
if they got one letter in a lifetime that said, "Your work has changed my life." But I do get people quite commonly saying
that. Now if that's the case, I can only be thankful
for their kindness and generosity in letting me know, and it gives me hope to carry on. So I do see this, and my hope is for young
people, my worries are totalitarianism reinforced by AI. I am extremely worried now by AI. In November, I gave the opening talk to the
World Summit of AI in Amsterdam, in which I outlined my feeling about AI, but I didn't
have time to go into some of the areas that I would now have wanted to go into and that
have become more acute since then through the appearance of Chat GPT. And I am worried about the way in which truths
will be multiplied through this process, truths which are not truths at all. And so, that the search will have a recursive
effect. It will search and find only what it itself
has already put out there. And so, you will have a typical self-perpetuating
mechanism of making us more and more out of touch with reality. So I think that there needs to be a really
serious and very deep debate about where we are going with AI and what can be done to
stop this thinking happening, this attack on human thinking and human feeling, because
of course, the computer doesn't have the things we talked about earlier. It doesn't have bodies. It doesn't have a moral sense. It might be able to calculate a utilitarian
chance, but it can't have a conscience in the way that we have. And it doesn't have a body and it's not going
to die. All these things are terribly important for
human meaning and human experience. Yeah. No, I think that it's a real challenge... This becomes more difficult because we live
more of our lives online. It puts us at a disadvantage. And I think also, because we've fetishized
science and misunderstood it so profoundly, we assume that if something cannot be quantified
or understood within the parameters of scientific theory, that it somehow falls outside the
bounds of reality, which is completely untrue. And so, we ignore or don't see at all the
things that are most important. It's the same principle and economics, the
externalities are the most important things. The environment upon which we externalize
the cost of our operation is the most important part of the entire world. But it falls outside the rigid boundaries
of our model, which is constrained by what we can concretely identify, discreet things
that we can quantify and identify and work around. And I think this is an enormous problem. And I don't know. That's why equanimity is so important. Yes. The perspective of understanding. I find it also disturbing and outrageous,
actually, not just disturbing, outrageous, how popular among a certain class of elites,
notions of transhumanism are. Oh, absolutely. Some of the most profoundly unscientific theories
about the origin of consciousness and the replicability of it, the absurd idea that
we can somehow speak in concrete terms about what consciousness is and our ability to transfer
it to a different hard disk, to a different piece of hardware. Yeah. All this is... Yeah. It's evil. I don't know if you ever read the work of
Ray Kurtzweil, but his relationship to his father in how he thinks of his father posthumously,
that he can recreate his father, that he can resurrect him from the fragments of his life,
feels incredibly demonic and evil, not in the sense of, "Oh, Ray Kurtzweil is evil,
he's a bad man," et cetera. The very notion of it feels to be the devil's
work. Well, in the talk that I gave, the address
I gave to the World Summit, which is available on YouTube, I did actually say that the notion
of cyborgs, that a part human and part machine, is, if anything can be called evil, is evil. And I don't say the people who think about
this and advocate them are necessary themselves evil. They may simply be terribly lacking in imagination. But if they have any imagination, they will
see that this has a huge moral dimension. So yes, the notion that something has to be
visible and measurable in order to be real is dismissible in one word, love, one of the
realest experiences for most human beings. And you can't possibly tell me it doesn't
exist. But it can't be seen and it can't be measured
in any way. So it is just really a way of saying that
there are many, many aspects of our experience that can't be dealt with in this way, including
funnily enough, truth, which science cannot invent or explain how truth comes about. Once there is truth, it can say that it will
adopt a certain procedure for determining what it's prepared to call true. And that is perfectly right, and that is how
science should operate. But it can't approach the gates of truth itself,
how truth comes about, what it is. I discuss the nature of truth, again, in that
book, The Matter With Things. So yes, gosh. Well, I try to remain hopeful, partly because
I think it's a virtue and even a duty to remain hopeful. But I read something beautiful on a blog a
few weeks ago, which was, "Hope is not the conviction that everything is just going to
get better, but that all experience, including suffering, has deep meaning." And I think that's the most insightful thing
I've heard about what it means to be hopeful. And it also speaks to the fact that we cannot
know also. Exactly. One of the things that I've loved so much
that it runs throughout your work, your deep humility. And that isn't just something that you say
or that we say. It's certainly important to say it because
it reemphasizes it, and it's always important to be reminded of it, but it is absolutely
true. It gets back to the complexity of the world
and our inability to really understand it or grasp it fully. So I really appreciate you and I appreciate
what you've done and what you're continuing to do and your voice. And I think it says a lot that you were so
requested by my listeners and that so many people are familiar with your work, even those
who haven't read it. I told people, "I'm going to have Iain McGilchrist
on." They're like, "Who's that?" I'm like, "He wrote the Master and His Emissary." They're like, "Oh, why do I know that book?" And I'm like, "Well, I don't know why you
know it, but I find over and over again that people seem to know it." So I hope maybe we can be so lucky as to have
you at one of our dinners in the future, one of our dinners in London if you're ever around. Who knows. That's right. It'd be an amazing opportunity to get to meet
you. So thank you so much for coming on, Dr. McGilchrist. Well, thank you, Demetri. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you. And of course, I would love to meet you again
and hope that we may do so. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you, and you. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's
conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation
and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our
subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited
by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website
at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter, @kofinas, and
you can email me at info@hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
