How we can learn to get the right hemisphere back and change our world | Dr Iain McGilchrist

[Music] but there's a couple of things i want to ask about that because obviously the corpus callosum which is that a sort of a big part of connectivity between the left and right hemispheres and you're right that it's obviously it is inhibits too but there are lots of ways that that um front to back and left to right connection happens is not just through that one or one part is it so there's lots of different ways to connect and so i wondered how partly about if you talk about that a little bit but also where does that leave us in terms of plasticity because obviously you're talking it there's cultural differences in how we approach this with context in terms of plasticity and brain development and how we can learn new things how can we bring that more together because obviously i think a big part of your book is you recognize that the left hemisphere and right hemisphere are pretty much both involved in every brain processing activity that we do but your your argument is that they have different kind of modes of being that represent almost different ways of being in the world so how can we i suppose how can we bridge that gap so it's gonna be my last question then i'll open it up to audience questions yeah um yes you're right i mean it's like the master and the emissary they both need to be working for the place to thrive but one is much more important than the other the master is much more important than the emissary though unfortunately the emissary because the embassy knows less thinks it knows more and you know there's a well-known phenomenon called the dunning-kruger effect which demonstrates that people who think they know a lot know very little and people who know a lot think they know little so um that's the situation we've got there um i think your question was um well there were two really one was uh given that the corpus losum is not the only way in which the two hemispheres communicate how do i sort of square that well um first of all the corpus callosum is certainly the by a very long way the largest tract connecting the two hemispheres there are two very slender commissioners which over evolution have become even slenderer and the corpus callosum is like a hundred times bigger than either of them and they are very limited in what they do but it's still true that only two percent of neurons actually cross the corpus callosum and that intra-hemispheric connections are by several orders of magnitude far greater than inter hemispheric connections so the keeping of them apart is very important having said that they both get feedback from the world all around them through the senses through the body and below the level of the two hemispheres the brain is um not not divided nor is it nor is it at the brainstem level where some quite important sophisticated decisions are made so um you're right that it's not just that but you know to do justice to all of that would take me longer than i've got um coming on to what do we do about it well this is the million dollar question but i think the the the simplest way to address your point is that we haven't lost the capacity it's very much as i say a matter of retuning the dial it's true that our brain is plastic in the sense that it responds to the way we use it so if we constantly stimulate it in a certain way require it to think in a certain way it will get more like that and one of the things that concerns me is the effect therefore of are spending so much time interacting with a computer interface which is um something so stupid that a primitive man would never have had to encounter it um and that in the process we we blunt our own thinking processes in order to fit in with an algorithm or a process which if we don't learn how to interact with it we won't be able to get money out of our bank or travel or do anything so um that is worrying but the the overall thing is that if we did actually and we'd have to make a very big shift to education and to our priorities as a society and indeed if we don't we won't survive it's simple as that but if we do our brain is there the capacity has not been lost we can learn to get it back and it would come back very fast

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 13,363

Keywords: the master and his emissary, dr iain mcgilchrist, left brain, right brain, neuroscience, psychology, left brain right brain, brain hemispheres, ian mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist, left hemisphere, right hemisphere

Id: ldQQAVygAjU

Length: 4min 25sec (265 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021