Iain McGilchrist Interview
>>Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the
Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I've done
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if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there's a PayPal button on every
page of the website. And there's also a page explaining other ways to support it if you
don't like to use PayPal. I'm honored to have as my guest today Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Dr.
McGilchrist researched in literature and philosophy as a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford,
and then went to medical school and became a psychiatrist and clinical director at the
Maudsley Hospital, London. Later he was a research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins
Hospital, Baltimore. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range
of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry. He is the author
of a number of books but is best known for The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain
and the Making of the Western World, which we'll be discussing today. He is currently
working on a book on neurology, epistemology, and ontology and I hope we can discuss that
too towards the end of our conversation. He lives on the Isle of Skye and has two daughters
and a son. I'm just going to show you a little glimpse here of what the Isle of Skye looks
like. This is from his website, Channel McGilchrist: you can see that it's a strikingly beautiful
place. I'm sure he doesn't want us all to move there. Right, Iain?
>>Iain McGilchrist: That's always been my passion to come and live somewhere like this.
And I am living it. And loving it. >>Rick Archer: Here's one other little bit
from Monty Python co-founder John Cleese, who said of Dr. McGilchrist that he is, quote,
unusually self-effacing for a genius. He emanates a gentle, curious amusement that puts ordinary
earthlings at their ease. I believe he's one of those rare polymaths who's more interested
in finding the truth than he is in being right. So I love that phrase.
>>Iain McGilchrist: They re lovely words, lovely words. Totally, totally unmerited,
but very nice. >>Rick Archer: Well, that just verifies what
John Cleese said about you. So the title of your most famous book is The Master and his
Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and I thought it might
be a good place to start for you to just tell the story of the Master and his emissary.
And you know, it'll become obvious as you tell it, why that's relevant to the brain.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Okay, well, it's a story that actually, unlike everything else in the
book, I'm not quite sure where I found it. I say it's a story in Nietzsche, but I can't
really find it in Nietzsche. But the story goes like this - and it's really a story very
similar to that of The Sorcerer's Apprentice'. There's a master, a spiritual master, who
looks after a small community. And because he looks after it so well, it flourishes and
grows. And after a while, he decides that he must not try to look after all the business
of this community, because if he did that, he wouldn't be able to maintain his wise overview.
So he appoints his brightest and best to go about and do his business on his behalf, effectively
a kind of high functionary who is a bit of a bureaucrat, who can pass back messages to
the Master. The thing about this emissary is that bright as he is, he doesn't know what
it is he doesn't know. In other words, he's a typical person with not much insight, who
thinks they know it all. And so he starts thinking, what does the Master know? He sits
back there at, you know, the temple sitting on his ass, smiling, but I'm the one that
knows everything. I'm the one with the power and the influence. And so he goes about the
place donning the Master s cloak and pretending to be the Master; and because he doesn't know
what it is he doesn't know, because he doesn't respect the Master, the emissary, the Master,
and the whole community falls into ruin. And that struck me very strongly because of the
way I understand the relationship of the two hemispheres of the brain which is a way quite
different from the one that most people think they know. All of that, quite correctly, has
been dismissed. But nonetheless, there are important differences, very, very important
differences. And one is that the right hemisphere understands a good deal more than the left.
But the left is the one that does all the kind of administration, does all the talking,
and does all the kind of working out of things. And it thinks it knows everything, but actually
knows very little compared with the right hemisphere. And I believe that we live in
a world in which this left hemisphere take has become the dominant one. And we've lost
the wisdom that we could have had from what the right hemisphere prompts us to know.
>>Rick Archer: This reminds me of what I think happens to every religion, which is that some
great mystic comes along who has, you know, deep spiritual insight and enlightened perspective,
but could probably be adept at administration if he put his mind to it, but he's busy having
the deep spiritual insights and has better things to do than sort of running an organization.
So administrators take over, and, and they begin to dumb it down. And in fact, they begin
to persecute the mystics in that religion, you know, ostracize them, then the whole thing
becomes sort of this top-heavy left-brained operation that loses the spirit that started
it in the first place. >>Iain McGilchrist: Absolutely. And that is
the theme of the very last chapter. There are 30 chapters in this book that I'm just
finishing now, and that chapter is called The sense of the sacred , and it's basically
a kind of short book-length in itself. But in it, what I suggest is that the wellspring
that is recognized in our idea of the Divine, and the sacred, is something that cannot be
articulated, regulated, systematized, and monetized. And that's what happens when institutions
take it over: it becomes left-brain and it's dogmatic, and you must believe this , and
it's all written in a book , and we are right and you're wrong , and all this kind of thing.
So it's the opposite of what the original person with the insight wished for.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, there's a joke you can add to your book, if you like, God, and the
devil are walking down the road, and God sees something, picks it up, and puts it in his
pocket. And the devil says, "Hey, what's that?" And God says, "It's the truth. And the devil
says, Oh, give it to me. I'll organize it for you."
In any case, I know that, you know, from my layman's perspective, I've been reading things
about the two hemispheres of the brain since the 60s. And like most people, I think I probably
had a very simplistic understanding of the functions of the two hemispheres. So perhaps
you could spend a little time now dispelling that misunderstanding and giving us a more
nuanced understanding of what's actually going on.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Okay. Well, first, I'll just say something about why I got involved
with this whole topic, because it's a strange topic for somebody who wants to have a career
to get involved with. In fact, I was warned in no uncertain terms, don't go there. Don't
even look at this, because it's so toxic. It's all to do with middle management seminars
and advertising. People won't take you seriously. So just to backtrack a little: when I was
at Oxford, I was interested in philosophy and literature. And I became intrigued by
what it was we were doing to works of art, works of literature, in our seminars, we were
taking things that somebody in the past had taken great care to make, quite unique objects
of great beauty poems, like a vase, you know, can't be paraphrased, or, you know, have its
meaning ripped out of it. And yet, we would make this implicit thing explicit. And we
would make this embodied thing disembodied. And we would take what was special and categorize
it. I wrote a book called Against Criticism, which is very hard to get hold of now. But
one day I ll make a reprint. And then I went off to do medicine, to find out more about
the mind-body problem. And when I was there, I just happened to go to a lecture by a colleague
called John Cutting, who had just published a book with Oxford University Press called
The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders. And I thought that's really interesting,
because in my training everything was about the left hemisphere. So I happened to go along
to this and it changed my life. And I'll explain why. He had spent 20 years sitting at the
bedside of people who had some kind of right hemisphere injury, damage, stroke, tumor,
and seeing what had happened to their take on the world. And it's much subtler than what
happens after left hemisphere injury, where you can't use your right hand, you can't speak,
it s pretty barn-door obvious. But something much more important happens after a right
hemisphere stroke, which is that you don't really understand the world anymore. You don't
understand what people mean. And he pointed to three things that were quite relevant to
my move from the humanities into science, which were my dissatisfaction with this process
of abstraction, disembodiment, and the turning of the unique into the general. And what he
said was, the left hemisphere only understands things as they belong to a category, the right
hemisphere actually sees the unique instance; the left hemisphere sees things in a very
abstract way, the right hemisphere sees things in relation to emotion and embodiment. It
has much better connections with the body and with the part of the brain, in which our
emotions and our bodily sensations come to be merged with our thinking in a very important
and valuable way. Also the right hemisphere understands the implicit, it understands metaphor,
it understands humor, tone of voice, all these things that are so valuable in literature.
And the left hemisphere doesn't get it at all, it takes everything very deadpan, like
somebody who, you know, just can't understand what human beings mean. And so I realized
that why I had not been able, or had found it very difficult at any rate, to overcome
the difficulties in English of explaining why the implicit is more important than the
explicit, why the embodied is more important than the abstract, why the unique is more
important than the category why that was difficult was because the voice, my speaking, is all
done by my left hemisphere, which doesn't understand: it hasn't generated vocabulary
for it. So a colleague of mine, who was a sinologist said, Well, you might study Chinese,
because it has words for all these things. So I had to toss up, either to do medicine
or Chinese, and medicine won. Anyway, what you're seeing there is three aspects of a
vision of the world. It's not what they do, in each case which we d been told in the past:
It's like the left hemisphere does reason, does language, and the right hemisphere does
emotion, does creativity. They're both involved in just about everything. And that had made
a lot of people think Well, there's nothing in it, you know, because we now know that,
actually, they're both involved in everything. So that s the end of the story. But no, that
was just the beginning of the important story, which was to see that it's not what you do,
but how you do it, that each hemisphere approaches whatever it's doing in a quite, quite different
way. And this has to do with attention. The hemispheres attend to the world in two quite
different ways that we need in order to survive. One is the attention that helps us grab stuff,
it's a very narrow beam attention precisely focused on a target, it enables you to get
your food, pick up a twig to build shelter, be quick and dirty and get and grab before
the other guy. The right hemisphere meantime is looking out for everything else, while
you've got this very narrow attention going; because if you had only that attention going,
you'd soon become a prey to another predator. And you need to be understanding the whole
of the scene around you. So the left hemisphere pays this very narrow-beam sharply focused
attention to a detail that it knows it wants, whereas the right hemisphere pays an uncommitted,
broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to the world as a whole. And that results
in a significant difference in the way they have a take on the world. Because when you
attend to the world differently, you see different things. You know, that's very obvious in daily
life, that if you're interested in one thing, when you see something that somebody else
sees, as well, you're seeing two different things because your focus of interest is different.
For example, there are many, many ways in which you can look at a human body: when you're
appreciating a work of art, when you're doing a pathology examination, you know, when you're
in bed with your lover, these are all completely different ways of experiencing the body: they
bring different kinds of attention, and they change, therefore, the experienced world.
That means that, you know, we have these two ways of looking at the world. What are the
main differences? I'd say the main differences are that the left hemisphere sees disconnected
fragments, which then have to be somehow put together in order to make something: it sees
them as static, two-dimensional, categorical, either/or , fixed, known and familiar, and
certain, and can therefore be grasped because the left hemisphere wants to grasp things,
it actually controls your right hand with which, for most of us, we grasp things. Meanwhile,
the right hemisphere, is seeing that that is a very artificial view, it's like a snapshot
which rather nicely the French call a clich . In other words, it's got all the real life
drained out of it. The right hemisphere sees a world that is living, constantly changing,
complexly interconnected, where everything is interconnected, ultimately, to everything
else, in which there are shades of meaning, in which nothing is ever completely repeated.
There is uniqueness, the joy of discovering the unfamiliar, and so on. And that's a world
to which we feel connected. Whereas the left hemisphere s world is a world from which we
feel detached, as though we were clinically observing it through a lens; whereas in the
right hemisphere s take we are part of the world that we are observing. So that's putting
it as briefly and as broadly as I can; it gives the listener an idea.
>>Rick Archer: Interesting, as you were saying that I was thinking about the implications
of it for degree levels of spiritual awakening, which this audience is, is very much interested
in. And we'll get into this more as we go through the conversation. But in the spiritual
community in general, over the last couple of decades, that seemed that there was initially
this sort of impersonal, heartless, they call it Neo Advaita approach to spirituality in
which you know, the very existence of a person is denied. And that, you know, you are not
involved in activity, you're just a witness, and you there is actually no, you and there
was a tremendous emphasis on that. And after a while, the community at large, you know,
with some exceptions, began to think, well, this isn't working, you know, what about life?
What about emotions? What about feelings? What about, you know, compassion and all this.
And so there was an emphasis on embodiment, and integration, and the word embodiment is,
has been used a lot in recent years. So I wonder if there was some kind of growth of
awakening such that maybe in some way, I don't know how this would relate to the hemispheres,
but maybe in some way, it started out in the left hemispheres of people, and then kind
of expanded to incorporate the right as well. Does that make any sense? Or would that again,
be a simplistic take on it? >>Iain McGilchrist: I think there's quite
a lot of in that. It relates, again, to stuff I've written about. In the Journal of Consciousness
Studies, I was asked to contribute to a series of articles about the nature of the self.
And there were various people, mystics, philosophers, and so on, and we commented on one another.
And I tried to explain that to think that there is no self is as simplistic and as damaging
as the idea that we're just ourselves, in some isolated atomistic way; that we mustn't
try to collapse these dipoles, as I call them (that are like the two poles of a magnet);
it's much more comfortable to just go, okay, the self is just an imaginary construct. Or
to say, I'm just me, I don't know what you're talking about, that we're interconnected.
You have to hold both of the difficulties together. And true spirituality is not to
deny either of these things. But the way in which you understand the self changes, so
that instead of seeing the self as something that is over and against other people, it's
something that partakes of other people. And it's something that gives to and belongs to
other people. So that a primitive ego gets taken up into a much more sophisticated idea
of the self. Jung talks about this, that, you know, when you're young, you need this
defended concept of yourself as different, because you're distinguishing yourself and
setting your boundaries. But then as you grow in insight and experience, you see that something
much more mature and valuable comes which is this other sense of the self I've been
describing. >>Rick Archer: That's very good. Here a few
minutes ago, you're saying how the right hemisphere is good at nuance and both and thinking and
stuff like that. And I think that's what a lot of people have kind of realized in the
spiritual community that you can't just glom on to, you know, one perspective to the exclusion
of all others. But the true spiritual maturity is kind of an incorporation of a whole range
of, we could say perspectives or levels of awareness or whatever, which might seem contradictory
to one another taken in isolation, but which, as a whole, from a more holistic perspective,
or, we could say are harmonized within a more holistic perspective on made compatible even
though taken in isolation, they may seem incompatible. Does that make sense?
>>Iain McGilchrist: Completely, yes. In fact, again, I have a chapter in this book
>>Rick Archer: We'll have to do another interview when that book comes out
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, sure! on the coincidence of opposites, the generative nature of opposites,
that nothing exists without its opposite. And we live in a world in which we think that
things are very simple: x is good, and therefore more and more and more of it is going to be
better; y is bad, and less and less and less of it is going to be better. But actually,
things are never like this, as Jung pointed out, there is always the dark side to everything
that has a positive. And it's knowing these things and being able to hold them in a fruitful
conjunction without, you know, dispensing with one or the other. An image I quite like
to demonstrate this is the idea of a very good loving relationship. It's one in which
there is a degree of togetherness with a degree of independence. It's not better if the two
elements in the relationship are fused. And it's not better if they're so diffused that
they really don't sort of touch one another, then you want something that is in the middle.
But it's not just a middle position, it's not just a compromise. Because in this position,
you are both together with the other person and maximally fulfilled in your own individual
self. It is through that relationship that you are fulfilled as a self. And it's through
the fulfillment of you that the relationship is enriched for the other person. So these
two things that look like they re opposites the solution is not like a midpoint. It's
like a holding of the two together, which is really what I'm saying. And it's that,
that the right hemisphere is able to do, and the left hemisphere can't. It thinks it s
got to be this or that. Or it's just something in the middle. Another image that I often
use is one from my favorite philosopher, the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and he
has the image of a bow or a lyre. So a bow that shoots an arrow or a lyre that plays
music >>Rick Archer: A lyre is like a little harp
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, like a little harp. And he says they do not understand how a thing
and its contrary come together. It's like the tension in the string. And if you think
about it in a string like that, the power, the force, the energy comes from it being
pulled apart. And you might think, well, what's the point in pulling it that way, and that;
let's just conserve energy and just stop pulling. But no it just goes flat, and then you've
got no music, and you've got no arrows. So everything depends on this holding of the
two extreme positions together. >>Rick Archer: In harkening back to your point
about being able to focus sharply while maintaining broad awareness, and you use the example of
a bird pecking a seed out of some, you know, gravel, and yet and actually using what is
it using the left eye to look for the seed and at the same time, the right eye is looking
out, broad perspective looking for predators, so he doesn't get gobbled up while he's trying
to find the seed. A spiritual teacher I studied with for many years spent a lot of time focusing
on a very similar point that one needs to culture the ability to focus sharply and maintain
broad awareness. And he used it in a practical sense, like, you know, he used to say routine
work kills the genius in man because like you're working on an assembly line, and you
have to focus sharply, but you lose the broad awareness and sort of squelches your, your
creativity. And he was, you know, he used it in that sense, but also in a spiritual
context. Because one stage of enlightenment is that, you know, you're functioning in the
world able to focus on details, and yet at the same time, awareness has become unbounded.
There's a Buddhist sage from way back named Padma Sun bhava and he said that Although
my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma meaning action is as fine as a grain
of barley flour. >>Iain McGilchrist: Mmm, very nice. Yeah,
I just want to just clarify something because you misspoke earlier. You said, the right
eye is looking out for predators. It's the right hemisphere that's looking out for predators,
right? Therefore the left eye. Yes, I just want to clarify in case people were confused
there. So the right hemisphere is taking the broad view for predators, the left hemisphere
is taking the narrow view for what it wants to get. And that maps onto, in the case of
a bird, the right eye being the tool of the left hemisphere, and the left eye being the
tool of the right hemisphere. Just to complicate it, it's not true of humans but we don't need
to go there it's the left half of the visual field that serves the right hemisphere, and
the right half of the visual field of both eyes that serves the left hemisphere. That's
because our eyes are on the front of our heads, whereas with a bird, they are usually on the
side. >>Rick Archer: I have a friend who's a brain
scientist, and I asked him about this a little bit, he said, For humans, the outer field
of each eye goes straight back to that hemisphere, but the inner field of each eye crosses over
and goes to the opposite hemisphere. So each hemisphere gets input from both eyes.
>>Iain McGilchrist: That's right - that's exactly right. And so, yes, to go back to
your point about being able to balance these types of attention, we can only do that because
we have two neuronal masses, each of which is capable of sustaining consciousness on
its own. If we didn't have that, we couldn't if we just had one neuronal mass, we couldn't
dispose it in two ways towards the world. It's only because there are two that can support
consciousness on their own, that one can do it one way and the other can do it the other
way. And it's valuable in life always to be able to blend these, although as in the image
of the Master and his emissary, one of them should always take precedence, the right hemisphere
should guide the left, and the left should serve the right because the left doesn't understand
very much. So when it takes over, all kinds of terrible things happen, which I think we're
witnessing in the world around us which we can come onto at some point. There is a spiritual
exercise, which I have enjoyed trying to do at times, which is to focus your attention
very, very narrowly. And once you've managed to achieve that, at the same time to broaden
it as broad as you can and hold the focus and hear the periphery and be aware of the
periphery. And it's a very good exercise to do that.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. >>Iain McGilchrist: But I like the image.
And I think that there's something here also about, you know, what I was talking about
the idea of the self and so on, and too easily dismissing something. It's like that famous
there are various versions of it, but you know, the 13th century Buddhist, Zen Buddhist,
Dogen? >>Rick Archer: Yes.
>>Iain McGilchrist: And he said: Before enlightenment, mountains were mountains and streams were
streams. When I was gaining enlightenment, mountains were no longer mountains, and streams
were no longer streams. When I achieved enlightenment, mountains were mountains and streams were
streams. And so what he's saying is that he didn't just reject the old thing. But a synthesis
of something came together into a new vision, which is first articulated as the mountains
are mountains , but by now, he had a much richer understanding of what that was.
>>Rick Archer: Yes. And several themes here we could pursue, but um, what since you've
just said that one. Another one stage of it. Another stage of enlightenment considered
a higher stage is that when you look at the world, you see it. Actually, in terms of the
self, in other words, you look at the mountain, and you're actually looking at the essential
nature of the mountain, which is identical to your essential nature. So there's a unity
between oneself and the mountain, but you don't deny its existence as a mountain either.
So it's appreciated in both respects is it you could say the full spectrum of its existence
is appreciated its essential nature as consciousness, and its, you know, apparent nature as mountain.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Absolutely. And this takes us to another very important issue, absolutely
central in all philosophy and all spirituality as well, which is the relationship between
what the left hemisphere calls objective and what the left hemisphere calls subjective,
and it sees those again as two incompatible elements that somehow have to be linked; whereas
to the right hemisphere, they're both present in one thing that doesn't actually annihilate
the subjective element or the objective element but doesn't make a hard and fast distinction
either. I'm sorry, I'm quoting Japanese poets, and mystics, but that's alright, that's okay
for your audience! You know the great Japanese poet Basho said to one of his disciples, the
trouble with most poems is that they're either subjective or objective . And his disciple
said, do you mean either too objective or too subjective? To which his full answer was
no . >>Rick Archer: Like a Zen koan there. Actually,
I was thinking about that, because I know on your YouTube channel, you read poetry on
a regular basis, and I should really start listening to that. And I've always, I mean,
I think I have a brain deficit in that I've always had a hard time, not spacing out, when
listening to poetry, if it's something very literal, like Robert Frost, or maybe, you
know, some Rudyard Kipling or something, I can really follow it. It's almost like prose.
But the more sort of abstract poets, I just, I'm off in LaLa land, and I lose the train
of thought. So what does that say about my brain?
>>Iain McGilchrist: Not to worry. I think you may be unhappy with the idea of allowing
your mind to be taken where the poem will take it. And there's nothing wrong with that.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, I'm going into abstract realms, but um, I don't know with poetry.
I've always had that problem. And in fact, that reminds me. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry,
>>Iain McGilchrist: I think the thing about poetry is that TS Eliot had something very
good to say about poetry. He said, the meaning of a poem is the meat that the burglar tosses
to the dog while he burgles the house . What he s saying is, while the left hemisphere
is going oh, yes, let me see what's going on , it's, you know, it's out of the picture.
And it allows the right hemisphere to take it in. And as you remember, it's the right
hemisphere that understands metaphor, is aware of the movement of the verse, understands
all the implicit associations that are being evoked. So the right hemisphere is vital for
understanding poetry. >>Rick Archer: Nice. Want to just touch back
on something you said a few minutes ago, you said you had a technique you practice where
you'll focus sharply on something and then try to maintain, you know, broad awareness
as much as possible. And there are kinds of meditation which actually do that, as part
of their, you know, their mechanics. So, for instance, you could be, you know, attuning
yourself to subtler and subtler levels of a mantra and getting down to a very fine subtle
appreciation of a mantra, and at the same time, your awareness is expanding to, you
know, vastness and your, your culturing the ability to have that subtle focus on something,
in addition to vast awareness simultaneously, which eventually becomes I think this would
be as a result of transformation of the brain, it becomes a normal way of functioning in
everyday life, not just something you would do in meditation.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Right, right. Well, that sounds like another way of bringing these
two types of attention to bear on the world at the same time. And it's a useful exercise
if only to make one more aware of how the two types of attention work together and to
be able to deploy them a little more at will. >>Rick Archer: yeah. And what happens is,
I believe, you know, you can comment on this, that is that there's a, you know, over the
years of doing such a thing, that through neuroplasticity, or whatever the whole neurophysiology
actually does get restructured such that that becomes one's ordinary way of functioning
24/7, as opposed to just something one can do when sitting in a meditative state.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, there's quite a bit of neuroscience evidence, which again, I quote,
in this new book, which points towards of course, spiritual practices are very complex
things, and you wouldn't expect them just to narrow down, in some reductionist way,
to some part in the brain. But broadly speaking, what tends to happen is that parts of the
right hemisphere cortex become thickened, they become enlarged, they grow, with use,
and one's ability to use those parts of the brain seems to increase neurophysiologically
as well, by EEG measurements, so we do have some evidence that that is the case. In any
case, you've seen it from experience, and that's probably more important than any kind
of neuroscience. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. But it is it does emphasize
the point that I think, you know, I mean, obviously, the brain functions differently
in different ordinary states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, and sleeping. And if enlightenment
is as radically different from ordinary waking state, as it is purported to be, there probably
is a radically different style of brain functioning associated with it.
>>Iain McGilchrist: I would imagine that is right. Yes. And I hope we never find out what
it is, or somebody will try and instrumentalize it in some way
>>Rick Archer: They're doing that actually. Jeffrey Martin, who has been on my show, is
doing stuff with some kind of magnetic thing that stimulates very deep structures very
specifically in the brain. And he's, he's got a guy working with Shinzen Young, who's
also been on my show, a very long-term Zen practitioner, who says that it's, it's eliciting
the most profound spiritual experiences he's ever had. Personally, I mean, I don't know.
It's like, do we really know what? Well, I shouldn't speak for Jeffrey. But to me, I
mean, spiritual evolution is not just eliciting some particular experience. But there, there's
a whole grab bag of deep impressions and you know, that have to eventually be worked out
in order for spiritual enlightenment to become a living reality. You can't just shortcut
the process as people try to do with psychedelics and expect to sort of be transformed.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, it's not an area that I feel confident to talk about. It's
never really interested me, psychedelics. Partly because it seems to me very difficult
to square it with, with my understanding of spiritual transformations; but I'm not, I'm
not ruling it out, and I'm not belittling it. And I'm not saying it doesn't happen.
I suspect it does. Because some people say that the experiences they've had with drugs
have altered their life. And you can't argue with that. I just happen to be completely
unresponsive to these drugs. I mean, as a young person, I wasn't interested in them,
my drug of choice has always been good wine. But as life has gone on, various people have
said, you know, given your interest in the brain and spiritual experience, why don't
you try these things. So I've tried quite a few of them. And not one of them has the
slightest effect on me, except to make me feel slightly premed-y - like, you know, somebody
has given me something that's made me a little bit woozy, but I have no further experience.
That includes marijuana by smoking it, inhaling it, syrup cakes, in conjunction with magic
mushrooms. I've even experimented with being injected (by a doctor) with ketamine. None
of these things has more than a very limited effect. It's interesting. So it just doesn't
really interest me. But I would say that you know, my peak experiences have all happened
through poetry. And I have them a lot in nature, you know; you know, where I live is just like
a place to respond in that way. Yeah, perhaps not as dramatic. But it's, it's a very beautiful
thing. >>Rick Archer: Your experience with drugs
reminds me of a story with Ram Dass going to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, and he had a
bunch of LSD pills. And Baba said, "Give me the pills", and he just sort of swallowed
them all. And apparently, nothing happened. >>Iain McGilchrist: Right. I don't know. Well,
fascinatingly, the occasion on which I took magic mushrooms and marijuana was at Ram Dass
s house in Hawaii. >>Rick Archer: I thought he d given up that
stuff - >>Iain McGilchrist: He had, it wasn't he who
gave me the stuff. It was a common friend who took me to meet him. And so yeah.
>>Rick Archer: Moving on to another slightly different topic. I watched an interview you
did with Jordan Peterson. And in that interview, you mentioned that the left brain resists
anomalies, and the right brain is open to them. And that's very interesting. You can
explain perhaps what anomalies are. But there s a famous book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions. And he talks about how, you know, anomalies provide a certain
stability excuse me, not anomalies, paradigms provide a certain stability to our knowledge,
but they are, you know, impacted by anomalies, things that conflict with the paradigm. And
when those anomalies get convincing and perhaps overwhelming enough, the paradigm has to shift.
And I think it was, I don't know, some famous physicist said, science progresses through
a series of funerals because people are very resistant to that shifting. But I wonder if
you could comment on that whole phenomenon a bit?
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yes. Well, I think the remark which was either Bohr or Planck was
very true. And I sort of understand why. By the time scientists have achieved any kind
of progress in their career, they've had to conform an awful lot, otherwise, they would
never have got appointed. And their career is now fixed on certain kinds of tenets that
underlie all their research. So they really don't want to hear about the possibility that
that might be too simple or wrong. And I think it's very important that we have to balance
the need for stability, with the need for fluidity; if things are over-stable, they're
fossilized, but if they're over-fluid, they become chaotic. So it's a question of knowing
how many and how valid are the anomalies. And there comes a point when you have to say,
we have to look again and find a better paradigm . And that is the point at which I find myself
standing in relation to the brain: putting forward a hypothesis, at enormous length (I
mean, you know, The Master and his Emissary is, what, 600 pages in the original, anyway).
And the book that I've just finished is almost twice as long. And in them together, I rely
on about 6000 individual pieces of research; it's almost impossible to just dismiss it.
So people are beginning to pay attention. But it's a slow process. I mean, everyone
says it takes about 20 years to get a breakthrough acknowledged. And I'm not saying that I've
made a breakthrough, I'm hoping I've cast some light, and I'm hoping that people will
find it useful. All scientific insights are going to be developed, and to change. Because
we never get to the end of the road. We never know it all. And so what I'm suggesting is
just a new, what I call a Gestalt, you know, perhaps your listeners do, which is a German
word, which simply means the overall form or shape of something we don't really have
a nice word for it in English, but it means seeing the whole thing in a new way. Rather,
like, you know, those optical illusions where, first of all, you see a vase, and then you
see oh, no, it's two faces looking at one another . Well, there are two Gestalts if
you like: one Gestalt is the vase, that's one way of seeing the whole; the other is
the two faces. And what I am getting from readers, and what I hope to achieve with this
new book, is that they will look at things that they thought were familiar, and they'll
go, Oh, my God, I've just seen it a different way . And people write to me every day, saying
things like that, that it just was an insight that has completely changed the way they see
the world. Which is lovely. I mean, I didn't expect to get any emails like that, and most
writers wouldn't. But you know, I get them almost on a daily basis, which is one of the
things that keeps me going. >>Rick Archer: That's great. In Part Two of
your book, The Master and his Emissary, you look at the evolution of Western culture,
beginning in the ancient world. I'm quoting you here, with the extraordinary efflorescence
of culture in the sixth century BC, in Athens, where it seems the two hemispheres worked
as never before or since, in harmony ; then there s the decline associated with the rise
of the left hemisphere in the late Roman Empire. And then, in turn, at the seismic shifts that
we call the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial
Revolution, modernism, and postmodernism, you say, I believe they represent a power
struggle between these two ways of experiencing the world, and that we have ended up prisoners
of just one, that of the left hemisphere alone. So is your purport, is your hope, in publishing
these books, to actually, you know, rebalance things in society to help, you hope to have
that influence and to shift us back from what could be, you know, a catastrophic future
if we don't shift back. >>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, in the second half
of the book, as you say, I do a sort of overview of the main shifts in the history of ideas
in the West. And I think that three times I can see the same pattern, that You'd think
that a civilization would build up very, very slowly, and then crash. But it seems that
what happens is that it comes into being, just like that, and then sort of tails off.
And in the Greek case, things were, you know, at their best in the sixth century BC. And
then over time, the balance between the two hemispheres went further and further towards
the left. And then you get the same thing in Rome, you know, around the year dot , the
end of the Republic, the beginning of the empire, things were very good. And then, as
you go on for the next 300 years through the Empire, they get more and more left hemisphere.
And I think we can see the same thing in our own time, since the Enlightenment. So things
are sort of tailing off. I mean, in every case, this has to do with a number of things.
One is usually an empire that overreaches itself, that tries to administer too much,
and tries to take on and influence too many things, and therefore overreaches itself.
And the only way it can do this is by a sort of a simple way of putting it would be a very
bureaucratic take so that everything is rolled out the same, everything is procedural, everything
is categorical, all the fineness, the individuality, the responsiveness goes and everything becomes
very kind of cut and dried. And I think we are very strongly heading in that direction.
And I want to try and help, I think, you know, there are a number of massive problems, they're
so obvious I hardly need to name them. But one is, you know, the way in which we're killing,
literally, the living planet, and another is the way in which we're driving to extinction
peoples who have a pre-Western or non-Western way of living their lives. And in our own
civilization, I think I can see things breaking down now. Many of the great institutions that
used to be on the side of, you know, things that are rich (I mean, imaginatively rich),
and spiritually alive and flexible, instead are becoming dogmatic and categorical, are
overrun by bureaucrats, managers, and people who have to tick boxes, this is not a good
way for any institution to be, whether it's a church, or a university, or a school, or
anything or a hospital. And in fact, in my lifetime, I've seen the hospitals become more
and more and more left-brained. You know, when I was first training, things were more
flexible. People were much more willing to try something, in case it worked. And we've
seen a little of that come back, just for a while, in the COVID crisis. So we've been
so desperate for something, you know, that that doctors have finally broken free of red
tape and have been allowed to sort of go, Well, this is worth a go, because if we don't
do it, this person's going to die , you know. And so, anyway, I think that drift towards
the administered, the soulless, the gray, generalized world is the way we're going.
>>Rick Archer: Are you optimistic, pessimistic? >>Iain McGilchrist: Well, I call myself a
hopeful pessimist, which means you should never lose hope. And I don't lose hope. Because
actually, none of us knows what the future contains. You know, I have complete crystal
ball failure . But on the other hand, when I look around me, it seems that things are
heading in a way I don't like; so, to that extent, I'm a pessimist. But I don't, I don't
want to say, you know, it's all up. But I think a degree of concern, a degree of fear,
would be a good thing in helping us to shift out of our complacency. So there we are.
>>Rick Archer: Some people think that things are just going to collapse more and more over
the next several years at least. And that then, out of the rubble, will arise a much
better culture, a much more enlightened civilization, but that this collapse is kind of necessary
because so many structures that dominate the world really would have no place in a more
enlightened civilization and somehow, rather, they're going to have to, you know, come to
an end in order for something better to take their place.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yeah. The only thing about that is that when the Roman civilization collapsed
in 410 AD, or whenever you like to place it, it took 1000 years really for civilization
in Europe to re-emerge as a kind of vibrant force. I'm not saying that the Dark Ages,
as we used to call them, were entirely barbaric. But effectively, civilization is not something
you can take for granted. And to be hacking away at its main institutions in the way we
are ha! I mean, it's so reckless. It is like pulling down statues. It is like, you know,
Islamic fundamentalists taking a pneumatic drill to an Assyrian winged bull, you know,
and that's what we're doing. We're just scrawling all over the history of the West and rubbishing
it, and not actually teaching people properly. So I'm kind of concerned about it. Very.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, I think reasonably. And actually, that brings up a couple of questions
here. That came in from listeners. One is from Bill in Oakland, California. When you
mentioned teaching people properly it reminded me of his question, he said, What do you think
a right-brain school curriculum would look like? Since it seems like the right hemisphere
is often concerned with personal inner knowledge and that it eludes the control that the left
hemisphere desires? It doesn't seem like right hemisphere knowledge is easily transferred
from teacher to student. >>Iain McGilchrist: A wonderful question,
a very, very good one. And there are a couple of two or three points to take, and I ll take
the last one first. It's, it depends how like everything to do with research here it s the
how that matters. And it's quite true that the sort of things that the right hemisphere
understands, can't be just put into a formula, which can then be learned and regurgitated
in an exam that is what we're now getting. And that is the typical left hemisphere idea.
But the right hemisphere s knowledge is communicated, as everything I know was communicated to me,
by inspired teachers. So one of the changes that would happen in a right-hemisphere-sort-of-congruent
school, would be that the teachers were not treated like functionaries in a bureaucracy
who had to instill some information into the children at nine o'clock on a Monday morning,
according to page 32 of a certain textbook. But we're actually encouraging them to think!
You know, because education is it's a clich to say that education is not about putting
things in, it's about drawing something out. And actually, what you're trying to do is
make the stuff that children have in them flourish. And that means clearing things away.
I often think being a teacher is like being a good gardener. You know, a gardener cannot
make a plant, and he can't make the plant grow. But the gardener can get out of the
way all the stuff that would choke that plant and make the conditions good for that plant
to do the flourishing. So in a way, you're mediating the flourishing of another individual.
And that's what a good teacher is doing. So one of the things that ought to happen is
the deregulation of that, which means deregulation of many, many things, not total deregulation
because that's the other extreme that you get from the left hemisphere: Oh, so you don't
want any rules at all? And nobody is accountable for it? No, that's not what I'm saying. What
I'm saying is, there is a degree of necessary monitoring, and there's a degree of accountability,
but there must be freedom too because otherwise, you kill the human spirit. So that's one thing.
Another is what the curriculum would contain. And we've become obsessed in a very left hemisphere
way with grabbing and getting, as you know, I mean, that's what the left hemisphere is
for. And so its main thing is that we should be teaching techniques to make people fit
into a large machine that will make money. Now that is not an education that is simply
not an education. Education is not teaching a rote skill or teaching information that
gets to be regurgitated. It's teaching a child to think, to use their imagination, to listen
to their intuitions, to argue all the time against what seems to be the fashionable story.
And to think we might be different. That's what's not happening. Children are being brainwashed
now, in the current education system. And in this country, you know, during this last
month or so, the government said, Oh, children can no longer need to be bothered with learning
poetry or studying poetry . And I was thinking, well, that's a very, very weird thing to be
saying in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. It's one of the reasons that I started reading
poetry on the internet every day for the last 120 days or whatever, is that actually, people
need soul food, and there's nothing simple, and there's nothing that's kind of a soft
option about the humanities; learning and understanding history is about putting yourself
in other people's position and understanding what they understood then, broadening your
mind not narrowing down what they did to whether they tick your boxes as good people. Learning
philosophy is not a soft option, it's the most difficult thing you can do. And, you
know, studying literature is not a soft option. It is if you just have to learn the six things
you need to know about Jane Austen, which seems to be what it's all about. But if you
really are going to understand literature, it means putting yourself into the mindset
of another person and experiencing the world through their eyes. And that is liberating
and beautiful, and intellectually challenging. And it also arms you for life. You know, if
we bring people out of school, and they haven't got the faculties to concentrate, to pay slow,
deep attention, to enter into other people's imaginative worlds, to question their own
dogmatisms all the time, even though they think they're perfectly correct. If we're
not doing that, we're letting civilization go. So thank you I can't remember your name
but thank you Bill. >>Rick Archer: It's hard not to think about
politics while you say this stuff, you know, because it seems that there are characteristics
of the different political persuasions that describe the different, the left brain, right
brain orientations. >>Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, well, maybe so:
but what people sometimes say to me is, so is the left hemisphere, kind of right-wing
and the right, left-wing. And I think if anything, it's the other way around, actually, but what
I would say is that you can be on the right in politics in a very right-brained way, as
well as in a very left-brained way. And you can be on the left-wing in politics in a very
left-brained way, as well as in a right-brained way. And in our country, the UK, which is
I know, quite different in its political spectrum from America, the left is enormously doctrinaire,
they've become what we call the authoritarian left, who have, you know, right opinions , and
anybody who disagrees with them deserves to be retrained in some sort of Maoist way. Well,
this is not a very good idea at all, and, you know, people on the right can be very
much more interested in individual flourishing, not just a corporate we have a tradition in
this country that the right-wing is on the side of the small guy, not on the size of
the corporations. And I took a test on the internet, which is an American test, but anyway,
it was interesting to me to find that I was in the most leftist quarter of the four things.
And it was because I had a great concern for the environment and didn't think that big
business should be allowed to take the liberties that it does. And so in that sense, I was
very much on the left. But in terms of, you know, do I think that socialist values should
be rammed down people's throats? no, I'm not on the left.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, that's interesting, because what you're saying is that we need
a more nuanced politics as we need a more nuanced perspective in all things. And that
it's too easy to fall into sort of the us and them , you know, polarized camp, of one
side or the other. >>Iain McGilchrist: That's exactly what the
left hemisphere does, it gives us and them . Whereas the right hemisphere is look, we're,
we're all part of this together . And that has consequences for how we talk as well.
I think it's much more important. Again, the right hemisphere understands that the way
in which something is done is more important even than what it is. And so I think that
rather than controlling what all the time, we ought to instill in people, what used to
exist in them, which is a sense of how it is appropriate to be, to talk, to live: we've
lost a kind of moral compass. We've lost, as you call it, the idea of the nuanced position.
And it's been replaced by simple-minded dogmatism and rule-following.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, here's a question that came in from Nick in London that relates to
this. And I think I'll preface it by asking you also about conspiracy theories. Our ability
to discern patterns helps us I m quoting this from an article I read our ability to discern
patterns helps us to construct internal narratives that give our lives meaning and make sense
of the world around us. Conspiracy theories hijack that ability by linking loosely connected
events into a semi-coherent narrative, usually through the assistance of a well-edited YouTube
video. The next question is, why do you think this time is characterized by claims to no
definitive truth? And the reason this question relates to the other thing I just read is:
if you talk to people who are into conspiracy theories, such as QAnon they are quite certain
that, you know, there are hundreds of 1000s of children in underground tunnels being victimized
by politicians and Hollywood celebrities, and you can't convince them otherwise. It's
like this fundamentalist certainty. So to repeat the next question, why do you think
this time is characterized by claims of some definitive truth?
>>Iain McGilchrist: Well, I think it's all part of the picture I describe of a way of
thinking, which is very typical of the left hemisphere. It's certain, the left hemisphere,
it s certain it's right, even when it's very obviously not. I mean, the most striking example
of this, which I give in the book, and, you know, sometimes mention when I'm speaking
about it, is a paralysis of the limb, which is denied. So that after right hemisphere
stroke, the person may have a left arm that they simply cannot move; but they will swear
that they are currently moving it and that it s absolutely fine. So if you can swear
that, and be absolutely immovably certain about it, then, yeah, you're going to believe
that politicians are victimizing children in underground tunnels. So I think that is
part of the problem you know those wonderful lines from Yeats s poem the Second Coming:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity And
now I see around me, you know, just that playing out that the most simple-minded views are
being violently pushed forward by people who are completely sure they know it - and therefore,
of course, don't know very much, because that's a very ignorant position to take. Whereas
people who can see that things are much, much more complicated than that are, you know,
being marginalized; because it's a society now in which if you're not 100% for us, you're
against us. If you want to say, Hey, look, there's some truth in what you say. But there's
also truth in something else I want to put to you , you will be shouted down.
>>Rick Archer: There is an amusing movie called Idiocracy that came out some years ago: it
was about this guy who was put into suspended animation as some kind of experiment. He was
supposed to be in there for a year. But something happened, and he was in there for 500 years.
And then he came out. And what had happened was that the sort of narrow-minded folks who
tended to procreate more than the nuanced you know, sort of, oh, well, maybe we should
wait until we're 40 kinds of people had completely come to dominate society, as well as the government.
And this guy had been put into suspended animation because he was considered absolutely middle-of-the-road
normal. But when he came out, he was a total genius, compared to everyone else. And he
ended up rising to the presidency. Interesting movie.
>>Iain McGilchrist: No, I mean, I, when I look at the quality of leaders now and compare
it with the quality of leaders in the years when I was a young man in the 60s and 70s,
in terms of their sophistication, their ability to see different points of view, just their
level of education apart from anything else, and the way in which they were able to talk
intelligently; and you look at the inarticulate dogmatic bunch of people who are running things
now, you just think what the hell happened here? . And it's all part of this decline
into this dogmatic left-hemisphere world that I'm trying to help people recognize for what
it is. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, I just reread Lincoln's
Gettysburg address yesterday, because a friend of mine was talking about it. And I wanted
to see how much of it I could remember. But I thought, wow, you know, if we had a politician
who could write like that, who could think like that? Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh
air? >>Iain McGilchrist: Oh, I know. Or you look
at the speeches of Burke or any of those great ... I mean, Gladstone while he was Prime Minister,
was also editing Homer. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to do! Of course, times have changed,
but, you know, you just think the thing that really strikes me is the level of you know,
we have contempt for people in the 19th century, they were so ignorant, and they were so, you
know but people worked so hard, the ordinary people in London, the working class people,
worked so hard. And they had one day off, which was Sunday. And they were so able to
follow something deep, that they were happy to stand, often outside a church where a certain
preacher was preaching, and listen for an hour or two hours, to theological ideas being
put across; so they would sacrifice their time and go there. And now, you know, we can
hardly sit on the sofa and watch something for more than a few minutes without going
oh, yeah . So it's worrying what's happening very, very, worrying. The dumbing down is
colossal. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. So what was that phrase
you used with regard to yourself you re an optimistic pessimist or a hopeful pessimist,
or something? What was it, a hopeful pessimist or some such thing?
>>Iain McGilchrist: A hopeful pessimist. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, so let's, let's brighten
it up a little bit and consider the potential, we'll come back, we ve taken a stab at it,
but consider the potential antidote to this dumbing down. One thing, one, one bright spot
I see, is that there is a kind of a global epidemic of interest in spirituality. Now,
that doesn't automatically mean that a person is going to become sensible. In fact, I know
a large percentage of spiritual people who are heavily into the kind of conspiracy theories
I just mentioned. But there is a sort of a, I think, perhaps a novel interest in enlightenment
awakening, and, and that is made more accessible by the Internet, which we haven't had before,
you know, a couple decades ago. And if spiritual awakening or enlightenment is everything it's
cracked up to be, perhaps even a small percentage of people who sincerely engage in it or pursue
it or achieve it will have an outsize impact on the rest of society and things will really
shift you know, the 100th monkey. Any thoughts on that?
>>Iain McGilchrist: Well, I think you're certainly right, that it is encouraging to see that
movement. And it's very encouraging to see lots of things that young people are enthusiastic
for. One of the things that strike me when I go which of course I don't, because of COVID,
now but when I go and speak at places, as many young people as old people like me come
up to me afterward and say, it's absolutely fascinating what can we do? you know, so people
are hungry for something new, beyond the kind of reductionist mechanistic view of the world
that is peddled to them. So that is all very good. Whether those people will rise to positions
of influence, I don't know; because, generally speaking, people who are enlightened go off
and do the equivalent of living in a cave, rather than becoming Prime Minister for very
good reasons. So yes, I mean, we could, but it would need the intervention of an overhaul
of education. So that education was something more like what education used to be ie, truly
educating people in a whole wealth of ideas that are their heritage, not just putting
them through the paces of something mechanical and making sure they get 95 out of 100 of
them right. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, I think, you know,
there's some hope there are some good signs there. Firstly, most of the people who are
interested in spiritual topics these days, have no desire to live in a cave, and are,
you know, living active lives in various ways. And even those who aren't explicitly interested
in spirituality, there's all kinds of interesting stuff going on. If you look at the Bioneers
conference, for instance, which is held every year in San Francisco, I believe, there are
so many initiatives that don't make the evening news that are signs of something really good
happening in terms of people, you know, want to change the world in a positive way. And
then obviously, the huge uprising that Greta Thunberg put in motion, you know, with her
school strikes and increased awareness of the environmental crisis and so on. So I don't
know, you know, it's a tug of war. We'll see who wins out. But, go ahead. You're about
to say something. >>Iain McGilchrist: I mean, I'm a great supporter
of the environmental movement, and I've spoken at Extinction Rebellion events, but I mean,
I'm a hopeful pessimist because I think the science tells us we've left it too late. I
know science is disputed. And so my hope is based on the idea that we don't know what
the certainties of the situation are there aren t any and we don't know what the future
may hold, and what we may be able to remedy. But I think it would be a great mistake to,
sort of sit back on one's laurels and say, oh, we'll find a way of sorting this out . Because
that's the typical left hemisphere in denial. You know, unless we go flat out to try and
remedy the situation, we re not going to manage it in time. You know, I say with great grief,
because I've got three children and two grandchildren so far, and, you know, I love them to bits
- and that's the world they're inheriting, you know.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. And so far, we are not going flat out to remedy the situation, we're
still kicking the can down the road. And, you know, half of the US Congress is in denial
that there is actually a global warming problem. So we can only hope.
>>Iain McGilchrist: I think a spiritual revolution is the most likely thing, actually. Because
I think that when things get really, really bad, it's what's needed for them to get better.
And people need to be shocked, really, into seeing how their lives have been drained of
meaning, drained of richness by the attitudes that have been foisted on them, actually,
by the public intellectuals by, you know, it s invidious for me to name names, but you
know who I mean, when I talk about some very popular public scientists, some very popular
public philosophers, who are enormously reductionist in their views. And that's a very simple point
of view to espouse; you don't really need to be thinking very hard, you just say it,
and then you appear smart, because you're not taken in by all these things that other
people get taken in by, and actually, you re not even smart enough to see that actually
there could be some truth in these things! And that's the theme of my book, to show why
it's not at all smart to adopt this cynical, reduced point of view, and why we need to
expand our horizons imaginatively. And that includes taking into account a cosmos that
is conscious. >>Rick Archer: You're probably referring to
like, you know, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens,
and all these sort of, what do they call them? No, new atheists or whatever. And if you listen
to what they say, and it's kind of interesting to listen to them, they're using straw man
arguments against sort of ridiculous aspects of spirituality, you know, which are easy
to knock down, but not really taking into consideration the sort of profound intrinsic,
you know, intelligence that seems to permeate and pervade all of the universe, if you actually
take a look. Is that what you're alluding to?
>>Iain McGilchrist: As I say, I'm not naming names. I think, so, no, I think this is a
development. But I'm glad that there's a lot of kickback. A lot of people are not really
convinced, at all, because they see that these are straw arguments. And there's a vast range
of points of view. And it's very easy to take hold of people who, you know, exemplify all
the things that I call the left hemisphere aspect of something; and the spiritual life
has its left hemisphere proponents, just as everything else does; and I'm not in favor
of them either. But that's not a reason to dismiss the extraordinary wisdom of people
for thousands of years, which has been coherent, about aspects of reality that are not out
of keeping at all with modern science or with reason.
>>Rick Archer: Very, very much true. I mean, you know, 100 years ago, physics was saying
things about reality that the common understanding still hasn't caught up with. You know, I don't
know if it will, but maybe it will. Maybe it just takes a while. Because that's not
obvious to our senses. I mean, we see a Newtonian world and we don't perceive the quantum mechanical
world, but you know, if you sort of rise to higher levels of spiritual development, you
do begin to see that world and function that way.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, I mean, I'm like many people a little wary of, of making too
easy comparisons between physics and spirituality. But on the other hand, I think that more sophisticated
comparisons exactly are hugely revealing. And what I believe I'm showing in the book
that I'm writing is that, much as you would expect, the most revealing aspects of modern
philosophy, the most revealing aspects of modern neuroscience, and the most revealing
aspects of physics lead us to similar conclusions; at least they do I'm thinking about neuroscience
if you accept my idea that there are important hemisphere differences that are manifest in
the ways we think and behave in the world, at the confluence of these three important
strands. And that's why it's a long book because I explore them in some depth. I don't just
kind of allude to them: and I make use of friends I have who are experts in these fields
to run things by them to make sure I'm on the right track when I say these things. So
anyway, there we are, you're about to say something.
>>Rick Archer: Oh well, your book sounds fantastic. If we do a second interview about that book,
I'll have to take a month off beforehand, so I can actually read the whole thing because
I'm sure it'd be very enriching. I'm afraid I didn't get to read your previous book in
preparation for this. But I did read all the other stuff you sent me and listened to many
hours of your talks. >>Iain McGilchrist: I always say about my
book The Master and his Emissary, that it's far too long, you know: that if I hadn't actually
written it, I'd never have had time to read it. But on the other hand, it contains, I
like to think, and I'm commonly told, so much that it couldn't really have been compressed
any more than it already is. >>Rick Archer: It must have been an incredibly
enriching experience just to write it. >>Iain McGilchrist: It was, yes, it was, that
was an interesting thing for me because I found it very, very hard to write. I'd been
gathering material and thinking about it for, you know, a decade or 15 years, and I was
still not able to write it. And it was only in the last few years, I was able to write
it. Now why can't I write this? And it was like that everything connected with everything
else, that everything I knew depended on explaining already something else that I had to explain,
and it s how to tackle the snake with a tail in its mouth. And I always gave up and I thought,
Well, you know it, so ,,, and nobody's going to read it so why not just die happy that
you've done this! And then something kept me going and wanting to write it. And in the
end, I did. And it was a very humbling experience because I realized that what I thought I knew
before writing was an outline of what I ended up saying, but a lot of the richness wasn't
there until I actually worked it out and wrote it down.
>>Rick Archer: As I'm sure is always the case, I mean, none of us would function very well
with either hemisphere impaired. >>Iain McGilchrist: No, exactly. As I always
say, it wouldn't be better if we all had a left hemisphere stroke , no.
>>Rick Archer: Want to loop back to something you said a few minutes ago, you were saying
that, you know, perhaps society will kind of crash and we'll realize, you know, we've
got to turn things around, it kind of reminded me of the phenomenon of an alcoholic bottoming
out. And they say, and sometimes people have to bottom out before they're gonna want to
look at themselves and get help. So maybe that's what society is in the process of doing.
And, you know, I mean, not all alcoholics manage to remain alive after bottoming out.
But you know, those who live to tell about it obviously do
>>Iain McGilchrist: Exactly right. I think it's a very good analogy. And you know, I
ve helped a lot of people with alcohol problems. But you're right, that some people don't ever
recover from rock bottom, but nobody seems to get better unless they hit rock bottom.
And that's an uncomfortable place to be, which sometimes means you, you lose your family,
you lose your livelihood, and you have to start again. And the equivalent of that, in
our case, would be that some human beings will survive. But much of what we think of
and take for granted as you know, civilized living, won't be there. We'll have to be much
less demanding, and much more in touch with the earth and much more focused on local communities.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. And one of the things that turns an alcoholic around is the realization
that they can't do it on their own. Nothing they have tried has worked. And maybe societally,
that's where we're heading for. We ll kind of realize and I think you said something
like this a little while ago, that all the things in which we put our trust have not
proven trustworthy, and that we need entirely different ways of thinking and doing things
in order to actually have a flourishing society. >>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, I think that is right.
And having things to trust and trusting is central to a flourishing society. And I think,
for reasons partly to do with the globalization of everything, on such a huge scale, nobody
really knows who or what they're dealing with most of the time. And so it's very hard to
trust. Whether society can actually manage without trust, I don't know. I can't remember
who the Chinese sage was, but he advised an emperor: there are three things that you need
for your people: guns, food, and trust, in that order of increasing importance. If you
have to do without one, do without the guns; if you have to do without the next one, do
without food; but without trust, you simply can't survive.
>>Rick Archer: Here's a quote from your writing, which happened to pop out at me here, the
left hemisphere cannot trust and is prone to paranoia. It needs to feel in control,
we would expect government to become obsessed with issues of security above all else, and
to seek total control. So that's related to what you're just saying.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Well, yeah; I mean, what I do right at the end of the book is imagine
what the world would look like if the left hemisphere was really the dominant deviser
of the way we think and behave. And most people read it and go, Oh, my God, that's where we're
at . >>Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, do you want to
elaborate on that? Or do we not need to, because we can see what we've got going on in the
world? Yeah, >>Iain McGilchrist: I mean, there are so many,
so many ways in which I think it's true. You know, our thinking has become decontextualized,
black-and-white, dogmatic. Everything has become more virtual, more purely cerebral.
We have no kind of tradition, spiritually or otherwise, in which to bed our beliefs,
our history, our lives. And that's a very important thing. It's, again, one of the things
that enables any civilization to flourish. And not having those things is dangerous.
So you know, there's so many things, it's what's happening in the arts, it's what's
happening in politics, the need for control, with everybody shuffling off responsibility
and saying, it's you that's at fault for all the things I suffer . Not ever saying, well,
maybe I could do a little bit better , which is a very right hemisphere mode; actually
the right hemisphere is very keen on taking responsibility and needs a little balancing
with the left, which doesn't take responsibility. So in depression, which is often a right frontal
overdrive condition, people believe that they are responsible for the ills of the world.
They think that and really, when they're psychotically depressed, I mean I had a patient who believed
he caused the war in Bosnia, you know; and another woman who was a middle-aged lawyer,
who thought she'd committed a murder in Wales that she'd seen on the television 700 miles
away, you know. And so people begin to think I'm responsible for all these things . And
in left hemisphere-dominant conditions, like schizophrenia, which is like a kind of overdrive
of the left hemisphere, a sort of hyper-technical way of looking at life, it's always somebody
else's fault. It just won't take responsibility; which is why when confronted with a paralyzed
limb, they go, Oh, that that doesn't belong to me, that belongs to that guy over there
. And that's the world we're living in; you know, everybody should be taught to take responsibility
from an early age. You can't always choose your but your responsibility is to deal with
them as well as you can. And you know, in psychiatry in alcoholism, the key thing is
you know the alcoholic will never get better as long as it s my wife, it's because of her
that I drink . No, no, mate. It's because of you that you drink and until you take 100%
responsibility for your state of things, even though other things in life affect you They
affect everybody. But the key thing is you take responsibility for what you do now about
this situation. And that's just not happening. Everybody's pointing the finger at somebody
else. >>Rick Archer: Hmm. So you just described
the left-brained society is one in which you abdicate responsibility for everything, you
blame it on all those you described as sort of an abnormal right brain situation in which
you take responsibility for things for which you're not responsible. Perhaps you could
say a bit more about what it would what a person or society would look like if they
were too right-brain dominant to the exclusion of the left, but also perhaps you could kind
of give us a picture of the ideal, in which both hemispheres, either in an individual
or society, are optimally balanced. >>Iain McGilchrist: Yes. There is no such
thing as, there never has been a right hemisphere-dominant society.
>>Rick Archer: If there were, what do you think it would look like?
>>Iain McGilchrist: It would look very balanced because what you have to remember is the master
is responsible for the emissary, appoints the emissary, and knows the emissary has a
job to do. So the master wants to work all the time, in partnership with the emissary.
That's why he has an emissary. >>Rick Archer: So it s one in which the emissary
knew his place and did his job and deferred to the Master, and the Master was really ultimately
calling the shots. >>Iain McGilchrist: Exactly, and or not exactly
calling the shots, but, you know, in a more sympathetic way, working synergistically with
the emissary. So it's not a matter of subjugation (that's the left hemisphere s power struggle
way of thinking, you know): you quoted earlier that there's a power struggle. And of course,
what I meant there was that the right hemisphere sees this as something that we should be working
together on; the left hemisphere sees it as a power struggle. It's like Satan in Paradise
Lost: he has this thing, he must have the power, not God you know? And that's the analogy
there. So when the right hemisphere is dominant, this can only happen in an individual, it
can only happen in individual pathology. And a good example of it is certain kinds of depression,
in which people become overwhelmed by other people s suffering, by feeling responsible
for it, and so forth. The picture is more complicated than that, and I can't hope to
do it without, you know >>Rick Archer: you gave a couple of examples,
you know, about the, yeah, the Bosnia guy and the lady who thought she murdered somebody
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yes, that's right. But actually what s complicated is that when it
becomes actually psychotic, the left hemisphere seems to be playing a different role in it.
But anyway, so, I haven't got time to go into all of that but you don't get societies like
that. You only get either balanced societies or societies that are unbalanced towards the
left. Because as I say, as long as the right hemisphere has a say, it will say, but I need
the left hemisphere to help me . And so when I say that there's been these three times
that the graph has changed, it's not that it's swung from right to left, it s swung
from perfect balance towards the left every time. So I would say, in this period of the,
you know, early Greek civilization around the sixth century BC, in and around the year
dot in Rome, in around the, you know, the beginning of the Renaissance, there was a
wonderful marriage of the, of everything, of, for example, the beginnings of science,
actually investigating what is really happening in the world in an empirical way, rather than
taking it out of a book or out of a story. There's also, you know, the beginnings of
drama or poetry, of music, of doing astronomy, of, you know, a civil society developing a
government that is democratic and or at least more democratic than anything that ever existed
before then. And you get this, this rather wonderful efflorescence of everything coming
from a working together of the technical mind along with the imagination. And you see the
same thing in Rome; you see the, you know, wonderful literature, the beginnings of Roman
law, which ensured a sort of stable society, a deep morality, an appreciation of nature,
all these things happening together, and then going into a terribly bureaucratic, abstracted,
militaristic, hierarchical way of thinking. And, you know, every time it starts off, okay:
and you know, to me, the great period is, you know it's fashionable for people who don't
really know what they're talking about to criticize the Renaissance, but there has been
very little in the history of the world to compare with it in terms of its actual humanity
you look at any other societies and civilization prior to it, they're not very humane, but
you get figures like Erasmus and More, and these wonderful people with a sense of, you
know, humor, of proportion, of the balance of the individual with the state, all that
kind of thing, of not being dogmatic, you know, but nonetheless, encouraging learning
and spirituality, you get a wonderful balance between the male and the female spirit there,
you get wonderful poetry, the beginnings of great science, you know, suddenly it all happens
in like 100 years. And then gradually, it gets fossilized, into a mechanistic worldview,
in which nothing has a place unless, as it were (let's name him) Dawkins can prove it
in a lab. Well, my dear friend Richard, there s very, very, very much more in the world
than can ever be proved in a lab. >>Rick Archer: Interesting. Now, I don't suppose
that any we could look back and say, Well, okay, there was this sudden flourishing that
we call the Renaissance, because this, that, and the other person did X, Y, and Z, it almost
seems more like it was something whose time had come. And it was a RE, it was a swing
of the pendulum back from the other extreme, and it was just time for, you know, more enlightened
age to dawn for a while. >>Iain McGilchrist: Well, it is, but as I
say, last time, it took 1000 years to come around. And, you know, we haven't got 1000
years, we've got like, seven, or something like that.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, since you just mentioned humor, I have to throw in a joke
here. And you also mentioned the Renaissance. So this is a Steven Wright joke. He went into
a restaurant, or a diner and the sign said, "Breakfast served any time". So he said, "Okay,
I'll have French toast during the Renaissance." >>Iain McGilchrist: [Laughs]
>>Rick Archer: Okay, so in our final minutes, throw in a joke every now and then, in our
final minutes. There's a question from Kenneth and a point I'd like you to touch on, and
then we'll wrap it up. Kenneth is located in the Netherlands. He said, "Some philosophers
like Kant and scientists like Donald Hoffman, explained that our perceptions are always
mediated by certain mental structures, but that these structures also limit our experience
of reality". Aside from Dan's question and Kenneth s question, I'm reminded of what they
say about psychedelics, that it sort of removes the limits, which otherwise, you know, we
need in other words to function, we can't deal with that much perceptional at once.
But anyway, how does your work relate to this distinction between experienced consciousness
and what's behind appearances? And related to this? If Oh, go ahead and comment on that.
Now ask you the second part. >>Iain McGilchrist: It's interesting, because
Kant is one case, Donald Hoffman may be a slightly different one. Because although he
says, consciousness is just an illusion he doesn't really mean that, because he actually
says, when I taste the taste of chocolate, that's the real deal, I m actually really
tasting the taste of chocolate . Now I know you can say, well, that's because what he
means by the real taste of chocolate is what your brain turns it into, and so on. And there's
no way we can possibly know or talk about what it would taste like without a brain.
So we end up somewhere in the sort of slightly fruitless dispute between idealists and realists.
And, as I may have said earlier, I can't remember, I adopt a position which is that of Schelling,
a very underrated philosopher, that, in fact, the idea that there is a sort of world out
there beyond our consciousness, and that there's another world inside, and they can never really
contact one another, is a false point of view. I certainly argue against this in my book.
It leads too easily into the idea of a sort of homunculus sitting on a cerebral sofa,
looking at images on a screen, which is all we can know of reality; but I take the view
that whatever reality is, consciousness is part of it, and that there is no ultimate
divide between my consciousness and what is, because what is, is in consciousness in any
case; so there are limits very, very severe limits on my consciousness, of course; I can
only see a tiny part of the whole, that's what it means to be a human being. But the
tiny part that I do see is real is not a fiction. It's true that our brains anticipate what
they may be going to experience, and so come up with things from memory. But these shouldn't
be confused with the idea that somehow there is no contact between consciousness and reality.
There's an Italian philosopher whose name and I'm getting to that stage in life, have
pity on me, well, names disappear, but it'll come to me in a minute [Riccardo Manzotti]
but who takes the view that when we are conscious of things in space around us, they are where
we see them to be, and our consciousness is with them. So that consciousness is not located
behind my eyes in my head but is something that actually is in the world and which I
have a kind of access to. I haven't explained that very well. It s a notoriously difficult
one to try and explain. But in the book, I take a slightly different view, as I say,
which wouldn't fit either with one understanding of what Donald Hoffman is saying and wouldn't
fit with Kant. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, well, I listened to a
couple of hours of talks, your interview with Tim Freke, and another talk or interview you
gave in which you kind of gave us a preview of your upcoming book. And when that book
is published, if you'd like we can do a whole interview on it, because it's a whole 'nother
batch of subject matter than what we've talked about today. But it was all fascinating stuff,
which I think we could really have a good conversation about. One final question: and
this kind of relates to Kenneth's question, and that is about acquired savant syndrome,
where people have a brain injury, and all of a sudden, they have this explosion of artistic
or mathematical or musical ability, often without any training in those fields. What
do you make of that? >>Iain McGilchrist: Well, like everyone else,
I'm utterly fascinated by it. I deal with that also, in this book. Because when, when
you look at acquired savant syndrome, following some form of injury, and there are, you know,
a dozen cases that I know of where there is a localized injury that gave rise to it, the
injury is pretty much always in the left hemisphere. So it looks like a release phenomenon of the
right hemisphere, in that something that is normally kept in check becomes more possible.
And there's some reason to believe this may be the case, because of the work of a man
called Alan Snyder in Sydney, who applied transcranial magnetic stimulation you can
do this to one hemisphere at a time, and depending on the frequency, you can either stimulate
or inhibit and he inhibited the left frontal cortex, and he inhibited the right frontal
cortex; and he had a control condition in which the person's brain was just functioning
in the normal way. And they were asked to approach and solve puzzles. And there's a
certain puzzle, called the nine-dot puzzle, which unless you've seen it solved, virtually
nobody can solve. And in the intact normal state, nobody could solve this puzzle; with
the right frontal cortex suppressed, they were no better, in fact, not as good. But
with the left frontal cortex suppressed 40% of them were able to solve the problem. And
that is staggering because that's a huge increase. So I think there's quite a lot in that, yes.
The difficulty is that autism in itself is very much more like a left hemisphere overdrive
syndrome. And I think this is a very complex picture, which has to do with changes we know
exist in the corpus callosum, the band of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres
at their base, in which there are a number of abnormalities in both schizophrenia and
autism it's not easy to describe without diagrams and so forth, but I do talk a bit about that
in this book. I haven't given a name to it: I'm calling it The Matter with Things, which
is a pun on several levels, but my editor hasn't yet heard that. At any rate, that's
what I'm calling it. He may have other ideas we'll see.
>>Rick Archer: Interesting. Well, we've jumped around a bit. And obviously, you know, we've
just taken a sampling of many, many different things that you have to offer, even in just
your first book, not to say your second one. But I hope it's given people, you know, an
adequate introduction to your work, because I think that people, many people who are listening
to this would enjoy exploring more deeply, I've certainly enjoyed exploring it in the
past week, and we'd like to explore a lot more. So as I said, you know, in the second
book is on the horizon, we can, we can do another one and talk about that if you'd like.
Let me just tell people about your websites a little bit. So you have the one website,
which is iainmcgilchrist.com. And I'll be linking to that. I'm just showing it on the
screen right now. And then you have something called Channel McGilchrist, which one can
browse for free; and if you wish to join, there's a fee for joining. And basically,
it includes access to recent interviews, discussion about your upcoming book, lectures, a discussion
forum, where various articles that I guess aren't available elsewhere, an opportunity
to ask you questions, and then a whole community of like-minded people that you can join and
interact with. >>Iain McGilchrist: I should point out that
it has a non-members area as well, which is free. So you can visit it and have a look;
it's a new venture, it's only been up for about a month, so it'll get more interesting.
But it's already pretty interesting, and quite a lot of people have joined. But there it
is anyway, I just wanted to say that. >>Rick Archer: So I'll link to that from your
page on batgap.com, as well as to your other website and to YouTube channel, which is,
has a bunch of interesting stuff, including those poems that you read every day. Okay,
yeah, yeah, it'd be nice to subscribe to that. I'd like to listen to you read a poem each
day. All right, well, thank you very much. And I've really enjoyed getting to know you
a bit and having this conversation. It's been really an honor for me.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Thank you, Rick. It's been great. And I hope we can talk again some
other time, and perhaps have a little more luck with the internet connection. But we'll
see! >>Rick Archer: Maybe next time, we'll figure
out how to get a wire going from your router to your computer, say that relying on Wi-Fi.
Yeah. So for those who are listening or watching, thank you for that. And we, if you want to
check out Batgap.com. And if you haven't done so already, you'll find a bunch of things
there that you might find interesting. There's an audio podcast of the program, you can sign
up for this email notification thing so that you get an email whenever I post a new interview.
There are several different ways in which the past interviews are indexed. And you can
explore that, categorically or most popular or, you know, various other ways chronologically,
alphabetically. And I'm actually building a quote section on the website now because
I keep coming across all these great quotes and I think they are organized in some way
so people can access them. So I've been working on that. And some other things just go to
the website and explore the menus and you'll see what's there. So thanks for listening
or watching. Thank you again. And enjoy the Isle of Skye. Go take a hike for me.
>>Iain McGilchrist: [Laughs] I'll take that in the nicest sense.
>>Rick Archer: No, yes, I mean that I can envision myself hiking those hills with you.
It'd be so much fun. So healthy breathing, breathing that fresh salt air.
>>Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, okay. >>Rick Archer: All right. Bye-bye. Thank you.
Thanks to all, bye-bye.
