Iain McGilchrist - The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

welcome to the how to academy um my name is david malone and it's my very great pleasure to interview ian mcgilchrist um the author of the master and his emissary which i think it's fair to say ian caused something of a storm did it not um well well it's it's gathered a bit of it's like a rolling wave um let's start with with um why you wrote it because it took you 14 years that's an awful chunk of someone's life to devote to a project when you were you know you had a full-time job what was it that what were you trying to solve what was it you were trying to do well it goes back a bit to my pre-medical career when i was at oxford teaching english and i was always interested in philosophy that was what i was originally going to be reading but i had to do it with politics and economics i didn't want to do that but um i wrote a book about the problems with writing criticism what it does to literature and if i explain very briefly what that is it'll set the rest in context um in a nutshell i read a book called against criticism and my problem in a sentence was that people in the past had gone to trouble to create something that was completely unique was implicit in the words it wasn't something that could be spelt out because it like a joke it would just disappear if you did and it was embodied it wasn't just an intellectual message it had physical effects on you an emotional impact on you and we came along in our seminar rooms in oxford and turned this unique implicit embodied thing into something that was general explicit and basically abstract and it seemed to me that there was a problem here because the context had changed and with it the whole meaning of the work about so we thought we were examining it but we weren't we were examining a very different representation of it now cut to i got interested in the mind body points and so did a lot of philosophy philosophy on that but i found basically that the philosophers were just all too disembodied in their approach to it and i thought i'd better have a more embodied approach and that was to study medicine and get into the area of overlap something like all of the sex between neurology and psychiatry so again cut forward i did six years of training um i got to the mordsley hospital um after doing a bit of neurology and neurosurgery and then i at that hospital i got very interested in things that were to do with the question of the difference between the right and the left side of the brain and um at the time it was considered a complete no-no because it you know people had it had been of interest in the 60s and 70s after the first split brain operations but then it had turned into a kind of pop psychology topic and everyone had said well all the things we used to say are not true it's not true that you know there's language in one hemisphere and emotion in the other and that they all do everything so um but i was still intrigued by it they all said look don't don't investigate this please don't investigate it because it'll be career death however one day i saw a poster for a lecture by a colleague john cutting who just published a book called right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders and i almost didn't go to it it was a life-changing event for me and i almost thought now i'm gonna sit and read one of the journals and have a cup of tea and in fact i went to the talk and i heard some staggeringly interesting things from this man he'd spent 20 years sitting at the bedside of people who had right hemispheres strokes and what he discovered or tumors or whatever damage to the right hemisphere and what he discovered was that whereas when you have a left hemisphere stroke it's very obvious it affects your right hand which for most people is quite important and it usually affects speech if you have right hemisphere damage it's not that you can't grapple with the world manipulate it by talking about it instructing it and grabbing it but you just don't understand it so what he was explaining was that the grounds of the understanding of the world giving it meaning comes largely from the right hemisphere he didn't put it in those terms but that's what i've come to understand over the last two or three decades right and what it is started talking about something embodied and did you mean sort of like there's a poem or a painting and there it is in its wholeness and then the academics come along and they sort of when they say well we're going to understand it we're going to analyze it sounds as as if you were saying that they in their effort to analyze it they sort of picked it apart they dissected and killed it is that what you mean okay that that is partly what i mean when i said embodied i meant two things really one was um it just there as it was that you couldn't improve it you couldn't paraphrase it you couldn't somehow substitute a piece of text for that poem for that piece of music for that painting whatever it might be so it just stood where it was and expressed itself the best that it could be so in that sense it was embodied in in its in its embodiment as a being that has a relationship with you as an embodied being it wasn't just a message in my head it was another resonant being in the world and i resonated with it and it resonated with me because i believe that everything actually that's another story has a kind of reverberative effect nothing is one way in this world and the other thing was it literally it affects your body so you're reading a poem by wordsworth and when you come to see it you can feel it if you become aware of it that the movement of the verse is actually affecting your breathing your heart rate your blood pressure can make your hair stand on end can make tears come to your eyes and you can feel the muscles in your limbs contracting and relaxing in rhythm with whatever you're hearing so it's very an embodied experience in that sense so those were the things i meant and did you think that was being lost somehow in the sort of i felt that in the process of dissecting it a message had been a purely cerebral message had been taken out of context so you know i mean an example i give is there's this rather wonderful line is it in macbeth i can't remember but somewhere in shakespeare where somebody says there is no art to read the mind's construction in the face and when you hear it in the theater sort of chill runs down your back but if you say what does it mean it means it's hard to tell what somebody's thinking by looking at them you know and suddenly that's completely gone i mean the whole thing has just been destroyed you know and uh so there's meaning that is bound up in poetry because it's saying seven or eight things to you in different modalities it's not just sending a message that a computer could understand by putting access to a lexicon together with a grammar and it's all that the implicit the not said the kind of hinted the tone very important the tone um and the rhyme and the rhythm and all the rest all this was being kind of as it were cleaned out of the way in the effort to find out what this thing is and i'm not i must say that i'm not against the analysis of a poem for example in against criticism i actually spent a lot of time with the concordance words with looking at how often he used certain words because i think it's very significant but the problem with the process was that we thought we understood it by the analysis whereas my view is the analysis adds a little bit of richness but then we need to take that information back into a big picture in which it first has true meaning and this is actually how we understand a communication when you say something to me um yes the left hemisphere is very busy with semantics and syntax but actually it's the right hemisphere that understands what you're really getting at by the meaning of what you're uttering okay so you brought up the two hemispheres because that that's that's what you started to look at even even though all your colleagues said no don't do it it's it's the intellectual it's professional death if you do and you ignore them anyway so so let's let's talk about about the the the core of of what you've you've been writing wrote about in that book which is that that the there are i don't know how you put it there are the two hemispheres the left and the right but europe pains to say that it's not that you know the left hemisphere does does accountancy and the right hemisphere does pretty paintings that's not what you're saying not why are there two two minds and how would you describe the difference well i my theory and i don't know a better one that accounts for the the findings um and i should say what the findings are first at the outset a that the brain is divided at all why a question i never heard asked in my training the brain after all is just there to make connections so why is it whoppingly divided all neural systems like this secondly why is it asymmetrical because the world that it's there to interpret is not asymmetrical and thirdly why is the only band that connects the two hemisphere the not the only but the major band that connects the two hemispheres a lot of its function in humans is inhibitory it's you know some of it obviously is giving information exchange of information but a lot of it is saying you keep out of this i'm dealing with it so it seemed on the face of it there was something different going on here and when you do neurology and you look at patients you can see that you know if you have a lesion in the brain in one place and you have another patient with a lesion in the brain in the exact mirror image place the things they experience are wholly different so the idea that there are no significant differences is just a non-starter so i wanted to know what are they and the theory that i think helps to explain this and i as i say i don't know a better one is that all living creatures have to work out how to juggle two on the face of it completely contrary tasks and at the same time one is to pay very narrowly focused attention to something that they want to get get that seed get that rabbit pick up that twig in order to build a nest feed all the usual kind of business of just staying alive but if that's the only kind of attention that very precisely targeted attention to one detail and and it's really about three degrees of the arc of attention when that's going on anything else could be happening all around you you you don't see the predator you don't see your mates who are waiting you know to be fed and and all the rest so in fact it we we're all of us and this goes right the way back to the most ancient neural network we know 700 million years old in a sea anemone which still lives off the isle of wight um as i say it's probably around the average age of the isle of wight inhabited and it it it has this asymmetrical network so there's something fundamental here and it's just not good enough to say oh it doesn't mean anything and i got my my clue to what the difference was when i heard john cutting say three things that rang a bell with what i've just been saying about embodiment implicitness and um uh uniqueness which was that the right hemisphere understands the unique the left doesn't discriminate so well it lumps things in categories that's one the right hemisphere understands implicit meaning that's to say all the things that are going on your posture your your facial expressions the tone of your voice all the things that you're deliberately not saying as well as things you are saying all that richness the left hemisphere is more like a machine it goes i see he says this in my book it says that means x and the other thing is the connection with the body the left hemisphere is simply more abstracted it takes things out of context and one of those contexts is the human body the right hemisphere just has more profuse connections with the autonomic nervous system with the place in the brain the cortex part of the cortex um where the cognitive and emotional brain come together and and therefore to embodiment and it also has the body image in it so these three differences i suddenly realized well of course why did it take me so long to write that book and it's so difficult to articulate because the things i wanted to say were the things that the right hemisphere understood but i had to say them with my left hemisphere which alone has speech my right hand is there can't talk it's gagged but it's saying there's more than that than you're noticing if you like that's very interesting so you you mentioned in passing the presumably both hemispheres understand language but are you saying it's only the left hemisphere that can has control over saying something speech is different thing from language yes so in um languages contribute to quite widely in all people from both hemispheres but for most right-handers 97 of them speeches in the left hemisphere end of story right and even in left-handers 60 is in the left hemisphere but speech is one of those things that is it can be relocated but it's a hard one to do whereas the normal functioning of language understanding goes on in both hemispheres actually both so both sides both hemispheres are understanding but only the left hemisphere has the microphone yes and more than that the right hemisphere is much better understanding the left hemisphere is much better at procedure and this is true in mathematics to the left hand is very good at doing procedures that the understanding of what you're actually doing in mathematics is better understood in the right hemisphere and the same is true of language so it's got a sophisticated rule book and it says the procedures are and i interpret it like this the right hemisphere says yes but actually on this occasion it means the exact opposite because he's being ironic you see what i mean so um is it fair to say the left hemisphere is a little more literal-minded it certainly is that is one of the distinctions yes and that is not a small thing because um and i you know this is a an argued about area but it seems to me pretty clear from a massive research um that the left hemisphere is not so good as the right at understanding metaphor unless it's a cliche you say all babies are angels left-handed says fine with that but if you say um a cloud is a pregnant ghost left hemisphere's like can't find that um so so metaphor is really what the right hemisphere is much better than i'm saying now listen all our meaning is actually metaphorical you know this is something that's been well written about principally by lakov and johnson over the years but basically all meaning comes from a metaphor of something embodied that we do and even scientific language and philosophical language is actually highly reliant on metaphor you know even if i say if i say immaterial well materia is from originally martyr the mother uh and it then came to mean wood so you're starting from things that are very metaphorical and then you're getting into an abstract concept and all our language is like this when you break it down abstract let me just ask you a couple more things about this left and right you said that the right is it's got more connections with your emotions and with the body does it have more connections with the outside world or is that the left hemisphere no you're right it is the right hemisphere and of course both hemispheres are involved in perceiving ridiculous to suggest they're not but when it comes to making sense of the world the left hemisphere tends to rely on its theory so it has a theory which it's developed and it wants the things to be consistent with the theory and if they're not consistent with the theory it either literally doesn't seem to see them or if it sees them it ignores them or denies them whereas the right hemisphere is what ramachandran calls the devil's advocate it's the one that's actually looking for possibly this is not like that and so the way i think of it is that the right hemisphere is saying well let me check that by looking out the window and seeing if that really is the case it may say so on this piece of paper but that's not good enough for me right is that is that related then to the the famous experiments where someone had had a stroke in their right hemisphere so they're relying very much on the left and where they denied that their own arm was theirs they're very very striking it's not even an experiment really i mean it's it's a natural finding which probably anyone trained in medicine will have seen at some stage in their training which is tell us about it okay well i mean obviously when you've got um a left hemisphere stroke you can't move your right arm and all the rest and if you ask people with a left hemisphere stroke they're tearful and they know this thing's wrong but if you ask somebody with a right hemisphere stroke you know you you come on the wall down in the morning mr x came in in the night following a right hemisphere stroke and he's got a hemiplegia so in other words his left arm is not working and you say how are you and he says fine you know you go oh that's great um no problems for example moving your arm then no no no your left arm too yeah yeah yeah well would you like to do it for me and we go sort of yeah there you are and actually nothing moves and if you grab hold of the arm and bring it around in front of him and say move that he says oh that's not my arm that belongs to the chap in the bed over there that's exactly and these people are not there hasn't been any mental impairment these are they're as good as everything they did in life was beforehand there's just something weird going on it's what happens when the right hemisphere is knocked out and eventually most people get back considerable part of this functioning but that's just a very dramatic case of all the sorts of things that go missing which are the sense of connectedness um the sense the understanding of what another person is really thinking um what we call theory of mind understanding that what they're thinking or knowing may be different from what you're thinking or knowing and classically this is a thing that is not there in autism but is there in the neurotypical population and that's a very big generalization but classically that's the case um so being able to understand things the meaning the connection seeing that everything is in a context and when you take it out of its context you don't understand it better having grasped it typical left hemisphere thing it controls the right hand the grass having got hold of it yanked it out of the context taking the heart ripping it out of the body going now what is this lump of meat you know the best place to understand it is where it was in the context and so you know this is very important stuff you you are painting like the left hemisphere as being um the sort of the cartoon scientist yes i very very much dislike and normally reject the idea of the brain as a computer but in one because i don't believe it is at all like a computer but in one sense the left hemisphere is rather like your personal computer in that it can do certain procedures very well and much faster than you can but you're the one that gathers the data and poses the problem you give it to the left chemistry and it goes oh good more of that we do spew out the data but it doesn't actually understand what the data mean you like taking your data from the computer interpret it again in the real world out of which your question arose so in that sense the left hemisphere is kind of has a kind of mechanical smartness but it doesn't have true insight imagination understanding all the things that are so important in a human and can't really be put into an algorithm okay can we talk about the relationship because we're talking about the left hemisphere in the right hemisphere and then and then the person what do you see as the relationship because um is it are there two different conscience consciousnesses inside a person's head um like two sort of badly conjoined twins who spend their time threatening what's the relationship between me and the two hemispheres it's an awfully good question and of course as you are probably aware people have taken different points of view about it obviously when you when you're getting on with the business of life you're not aware that different areas of your consciousness are taking in a different version of the world perhaps i should just gloss that phrase you see the point about attention that i referred to earlier that you have this piecemeal fragmented very narrow attention you have this very broad vigilant sustained attention is that they yield a different version of the world so actually in a different experiential world one is mysteriously made up of bits that don't seem to relate you've got to work out how to put them together um you're not really in relation with it it's like an object that you're fiddling with or examining in your lab whereas for the right hemisphere you've got a world that is already pregnant with meaning and understanding because it's the basis of your experience and and it carries all that with it so um as far as whether there are two consciousnesses some people have said there are but in ordinary circumstances there's not there's one seamless consciousness that i have but it becomes obvious as soon as you knock one out and you can experimentally knock a hemisphere out for 15-20 minutes when you do that it's quite clear that the person doesn't lose consciousness half their brain is switched off but they've still got consciousness and that consciousness is significantly different if it's in the left or the right hemisphere and you can get people to do experiments like draw things answer the questions things talk about themselves the left hemisphere the right hemisphere and the reliable considerable differences so we don't notice that they're different because they're blended below the level of awareness as we lead our lives headlong but if experimentally or through an accident of nature one of them gets knocked out then you suddenly realize there are two here and after the first split brain operations which were done in the 60s in california to relieve intractable epilepsy and it was a very successful procedure it enabled people to examine the two hemispheres and when they were first severed they were in conflict with one another you know one of them would one of them would take money out of the pocket and the other one would take it back and put it back in the pocket or a woman went through the cupboard to get out a dress the other hand takes it puts it back and takes out a different one so life was quite complex for the first few weeks and months but after a while again the human being as a whole takes over and uh you know it all gets uh as it were reunified and the way i look at it is that it's not that conscious there's a sort of question in science which is how is it all brought together how is conscience consciousness unified um and my answer to that is it doesn't have to be unified consciousness is seamless but what happens in these very peculiar situations is that the as it were the flow the united flow is like a river that goes around an island and then it meets again after the island and carries on and if you sample it on either side of the island you think oh there's two flows here but actually they're all part of one flow right but then so that that's the that's the image the theory you have a theory of mind um how and it sounds like some people could be more left hemisphere and some are i mean we've obviously got all of us got both um but some people are you i suppose i mean i think i've worked for the left hemisphere from your description i've definitely worked for a few left hemispheres in my time um how is that relationship always been the same is it the same in every culture or or has it changed because your description of the left hemisphere sounds uncannily like parts of our present culture which are problematic the box together that's right that's right and they don't tend to be substantive parts of other cultures um what got me going apart from john cuttings fantastic research and i joined him and we did some research together on hemisphere differences but the other real influence on me was the american psychologist louis sass s a double s at rutgers who around the time i was beginning to formulate my ideas published a book called madness and modernism i think it's subtitled insanity in the light of modern art literature and thought and his it's a long book but it's a beautifully written book and you know anyone who hasn't read it treat yourself to it madness and modernism in it his overall thesis is to take 30 perhaps 20 30 phenomena that are typical of schizophrenia and then show that they're also typical of modern culture now it's very convincing and he knows his stuff so you can't really deny that there's something there but it's very unlikely that we've all got schizophrenia in fact it's impossible so the interesting thing to me is that when people have schizophrenia they behave very like they've had a left sorry a right hemisphere stroke they there was going to be exaggerated left hemisphere overdrive and i think what sas was pointing to was not schizophrenia but left hemisphere overdrive relying too much on a certain really very simplistic mechanistic reductionist analytic way of viewing the world and not paying attention to what this in a way much more hard to articulate view of the world is in which things are seamlessly connected nothing is ever completely divorced from anything else in which things are flowing and changing all the time they can't be pinned down and they can't be just isolated and put into boxes and in which something is living and has qualities and uniqueness whereas in the left hemisphere this is all as in some sort of you know high functioning bureaucracy there were little bureaus and little categories of people who fill in a p 37 and a p 92 and that's a little bit of it you know caricature but that's the sort of way the left hemisphere tends to view the same thing that the right hemisphere sees as living complex and and not to be reduced in this way then is there some sense in which our sort of very scientific culture has it sounds like our scientific culture is to use your terminology much more left hemisphere so it's it's it's done splendid things i mean you know builds better bridges um is it was it your is it your feeling that there's a that we need to address the balance between the two sides sort of the technological scientific versus well yes i definitely wouldn't use those terms um but there is a balance that needs to be redressed absolutely that's between the left and the right hemisphere partly because um you know for reasons i could expand on if you want but it'll take a while but the left hemisphere has evolved into something that is very efficient at theorizing doing projections plans and maps but is not very good on what is the reality that is now being mapped so it's actually not going to be more reliable that's not its job its job is for the right hammers to say what would happen if we did this what would it look like and overlay it with a map but you start believing the map is the world well not only is the map very very much simpler than the world that's why it's helpful actually it'd be no good if it was as complex as the world it was mapping but you've also just missed out on most of what the brain needs to be understanding so science is a very interesting case because i've looked into this in writing the book i'm doing at the moment and it's absolutely clear that science and mathematics depend to a very strong to very high degree on being able to think in images to see analogies to allow things to remain uncertain until an intuition comes to you that gives what what's called a gestalt an overall form that makes sense of things and if you hear the accounts of pretty much any great mathematician or scientist they didn't follow the scientific method um as george gaylord simpson says who was one of the founders of the so-called modern synthesis which is the kind of mainstream view of genetics um hardly any great scientist ever followed the scientific method but you see the trouble is that now the way it's taught and the way it's done in enormous scientific hen houses and industrial factories of science is it's all split up into little bits people who work away on a tiny fragment and they do it entirely linearly and they have to as it will be able to say at the outset what it is they're going to find before they start or they won't really get funding and all this is actually hostile to the life of the mind science is an adventure science is imaginative that's why i love it in fact you know until i got to university i was very very keen to do science and then i realized actually there's other very important things as well but you know having been there again in science i can say that really the interesting stuff is to do with yes you have to be careful you have to be you have to rely a lot on empirical data but that's exactly what the left hemisphere doesn't do if it has data that it doesn't like because it don't fit the paradigm just goes must be wrong they must have cheated on the experiment the phenomenon doesn't exist can't do because it says in my book it's like this now that's left hemisphere as it were slant on science mechanistic stuck in set because one of the things about the left hemisphere is it's sticky once it gets hold of something don't let go of it so it's very conventional but again most great scientists were actually mavericks in a way they struck out on something else because they'd seen a discrepancy there was something there that didn't fit that's actually how we discovered or how we discovered but how as it were copernicus and so on discovered that probably we rotate round the sun so it's the ability not to throw away the details obviously you don't want to keep changing your theory with every detail that comes up because it may just be a one-off finding but it's finding the balance it's always finding the balance always between the analytic and the synthetic and the synthetic is a technical term in philosophy meaning the putting together not artificial yeah i know you know that but i'm just saying um and so we need the balance between these two but they're not of equal value because the way i see it is the right hemisphere has the first take on things before it's jumped to conclusions the left hand side jumps to conclusions much more than the right hemisphere in some ways it's much less renewables judgments are not so good they're hastier they're cruder and it gets angrier if it's challenged and the right hemisphere often says well maybe i might not be right here it's very happy with uncertainty and ambiguity which is actually the way you make progress in art or science so it has the first as it were pre-conceptual take and then immediately the left hemisphere goes i got it it's one of those and yes thanks for that that put that one there and it's pigeon-holed everything and then what it should be doing is giving that back to the right hemisphere the right hemisphere saying oh i see what you've done with it but now that you've done that that's very helpful because i can put it together now you've unpacked it i can put it together into a new enriched hole so it always goes from the right to the left and back to the right and what's not happening in science in politics in the world we live in in general is that three-part stage three-part process we get as far as the second stage where we've broken everything up and we go well search me doesn't seem to have any meaning doesn't seem to have any purpose it's just a lot of little bits i mean we're nothing more than a few molecules in a you know swimming about in the soup so that that is that's where you end up i'm afraid um because and get this the right hemisphere is much more critical for intelligence than the left-handers which people might think oh i've heard the right hemisphere's creative but the left hemisphere must be very intelligent because it does all that analysis it actually does all that analysis because it's not terribly bright but it's very good at doing certain procedures so if you actually look at brain scan this has been done on about 130 patients who had a pre-morbid iq test before they had their stroke they had an iq test and then they have an iq test after their stroke in the cases where there was a substantial loss of iq practically all the cases the stroke was in the right hemisphere the major part of the script sorry when you say it's got to be this three part that it goes from the right yeah pulls it to the left the left unpacks it and sort of does a lot of analysis and should send it back yeah but you said it should suggesting that you think it's not why why not is there something about the left hemisphere which means that it doesn't well i think there are a lot of things about why it doesn't happen um i mean the image in the title of my book the master in his emissary is that the emissary is somebody who is sent to do administrative business on behalf of a master that has a wise overview and knows that he shouldn't get involved in that detail or he won't be able to keep the wise overview but the point of the emissary is to come back and report to the master without doing that the whole exercise is in vain but the trouble is that the problem with the left hemisphere is that because it only sees things inside a kind of hermetically sealed container in which all its ideas are nicely organized it doesn't know what it is it doesn't know that is the crucial problem the unknown unknowns so if you don't know what it is you're missing then you don't look for it that's number one number two is if you think in this way for a while things seem to be rather good because the left hemisphere is the one that enables you to grab enables you to administrate to engineer to mine to take to build what you want but it has no understanding of what all this actually adds up to so for a while it makes you high and mighty makes you powerful makes you rich and i think this has happened in the west three times and that's the second half of my book once in greece again in rome in the end of the roman empire and i think it's happening now the the left hemisphere has for some for its own reasons decided not to pay much attention to the right hemisphere i mean there was that theory wasn't there i remember reading it where people actually said oh the right hemisphere nothing happens in there it's just a spare tire um it's hilarious and that sounds like something the left hemisphere would say well it's what i call left hemisphere chauvinism you leave me to this you leave this to me you know don't worry your pretty head i've got it all sorted out but it's that's not the case so yeah i think the reason it has happened and tends to happen in fact in all civilizations is that they overreach themselves they they get they get flabby and soft and and want everything their way they no longer make sacrifices they no longer think in the broad term they become monolithic they become unimaginative and they exhaust the resources of the natural world a wonderful book on this called immoderate greatness which i very much recommend and very short book only 80 pages but it shows how six factors have repeatedly seen for the end of a civilization and each of them are sort of things that the left hemisphere view on life would accelerate so there's a kind of unholy s sort of synthesis or synergy between something that grows into an empire and the work of the left hemisphere and then it falls apart and that's that's oversimplifying a 300-page tract but you know they do these things in a certain sense it's a culture which has become enamored of the left hemisphere where the left hemisphere and its view of the world has somehow shouted down the right hemisphere exactly and a very very good image because if you remember the right hemisphere first of all knows so much that it's very very hard to articulate using the left hemisphere's tools of you know serial sentences which is why it takes me a long time to write my books because i'm trying to do the right hemispheres work in the left hemisphere's terms and and so yes it does shout it down and it's so it's money for old rope because if you take a purely mechanistic materialistic view it's so easy to go all these people who think it's more complex than that they just haven't thought enough you know they really could think straight and weren't so muddle-headed they'd realize that it's all perfectly simple i can tell you what it is you know i've got once you start knowing it all well not only are you a pain to everybody around you but you'll also stop doing good science or good philosophy or anything else you talked about moments of intuition just briefly before we um go to some there's a thousand questions i'm afraid we're going to be here all night you talked about intuition i mean um intuition is one of those words which um a lot of um particularly um ai scientists they don't like as if it doesn't really exist it's like the tooth fairy do you think intuition is a real thing and that the the the right hemisphere at least does has a situation both hemispheres are capable of it but it does depend like most useful things on on the right hemisphere it's one of the areas of my book as i look at the legitimate claims of reason and why it's valuable and what its limits are the legitimate claims of intuition uh and and what its values are and what what its limitations are and the same for imagination and for science so i look at these four parts really if you like that all need to be brought into operation if you're really going to help one another understand things but unfortunately usually it's no more than one or two of these things was brought in and at the moment because it doesn't compute intuition and imagination gets a sort of uh you know bad publicity and scientists are very keen it's quite funny actually to watch them um going through the motions of trying to discredit them but unfortunately science uh doesn't stop just because people don't like what it finds and there's a massive information now on how very important it is which a lot of people in the past before the science would have was done could have told you was the case but it's always very helpful to have the science um showing you the cold facts um i'm gonna go to some of the questions and there's one from lucy rolls she said do you think that this your theory is why there are all the problems with ai that they can't translate the right brain into logic well i think i think that is yes i mean broadly i do think that is a problem i should think ai people would say that they can quite possibly simulate um what goes on in the right hemisphere by doing millions and millions and millions of calculations so a grand chess master [Music] actually only looks at about six possible things on the board and then moves on to the next table and so on but the computer is just very very fast so it's not intelligent it doesn't have any in society let me have a does that we had that one before what does that tend to lead to and so on so it's looking at all covering all the bases and that's just a very long way around doing it's like face recognition technology um you know i can recognize your face but it's nothing to do with measuring the you know the distance between your pupils and all that sort of thing but then with facial recognition technology it's more like that so i think that is one of the problems yes um but even more is that it shouldn't be called intelligence it just isn't intelligent it's artificial stupidity that goes very very very fast and it's therefore very useful exactly like the left hemisphere very useful don't knock it it's the it's the servant or the emissary and as long as it's happy to fulfill that role it's fine it's when it thinks it knows what's going on and it calls a shot that's when things go badly wrong um it does suggest then there's a question from peony um on this sort of this topic that if you can't put the right brain into an algorithm would that have rather bad implications for artificial intelligence i suppose it might we be in the situation where they can put the left hemisphere into into an ai and then let that loose on the world but without any right hemisphere well i mean certainly at the moment that is very much what's happening so we allow computers to make decisions about things they should never be making decisions they should only be offering data on which a human with the vastly more sophisticated range of things that can understand feel and experience makes the judgment based on you know some additional information that has been furnished by the computer so i think that is a problem and of course it's not unbiased so computers contain the biases of the people who built them and we know about this internet search engines and so forth one very amusing case which comes from a friend of mine who is a brilliant naturalist and she is dyslexic and she asks siri to how do you spell tearful which is the name for a male kite or falcon and siri said what's all this about gender it shouldn't make any difference so you know that's what that's where we're going into a sort of completely unsophisticated world in which all the decisions are made by a geek somewhere in silicon valley or china who put it into the machine yesterday um there's a question from someone who remains anonymous basically saying do you think the left hemisphere has taken control of the uk's educational system with its sort of you know testing and um and do you think this is having a it's and decreasing the arts is this going to have a bad effect on development of imagination and empathy in children i know you're quite i very much believe that i i really couldn't couldn't add to that except you know to to flesh it out but basically i think that in a nutshell is right that we are thinking far too much in terms of narrow systems the putting of information into children rather than the training of a mind to think critically to see both sides of a question not to see in black and white terms you know to think flexibly to think your way into a play a poem a novel to do music all these things are not add-ons you know the sort of feeling that the arts are very nice but really it's all about sitting in goldman sachs making money that's the real world but it's not the real world that's a fantasy abstraction even the money's abstract even economists don't understand how it works in which certain people enrich themselves at the expense of other people but what's real is the thing they consider to the entertainment they go to afterwards when they go to the royal opera house and here one of the most staggering things that they'll ever encounter in their life you know it's a very very strange world i'd just like to add before you ask another question i just want to say about the the lady who asked the question about um computers the great thing to remember is exactly what i said that they're very good servants there's nothing wrong with them they're not intelligent they are just very very helpful and as long as we don't expect them to take over from us and do our jobs as long as they stay as modestly effective tools that can speed things up for us fine but that would be the right hemispheres to take the left hemisphere's take is no no no i'm the master and i think the aicp people want their machines to be you know no human beings are just failed machines whereas machines are just incredibly unsophisticated representations of one aspect of one part of the human brain will asks are there ways to hack one's balance between left and right hemisphere several people have asked this it's are there things that you can do to to redress this balance in yourself well i think the first thing to do is to be aware of it um and i know that sounds a bit disappointing but this is probably the most important thing because once you start to see it a lot of people have written to me saying after i've read your book i mean it's a very very common thing i see the whole world completely differently so my reactions to everything are now different so in fact the book sorry this is not a sales pitch but reading it and understanding it and feeling your way into it will automatically redress that balance in your mind but there are in a very kind of you know sticking plaster sense some things one can do i mean the important things would be to reform education um to stop constantly banging on about how we ought to be getting more like machines and starting thinking about how we can make better people rather than better machines um but certain things like mindfulness i think you know mindfulness that i know is a bit of a cliche but it's actually a very you know it's also a thousands of years old technique that has developed because it does help induce a state in which the right hemisphere's attention is on the world non-judgmental not trying to do something with it articulate about it but being there with it which is the first step on actually understanding it and on being alive you know you can go from the cradle to the grave obsessed by your schema of how things are living entirely in your head and never really have been there at all which is pretty tragic because we only get one crack at this is my belief um there's a question from andrew schumann um and several people have asked this sort of thing saying look is there a relationship between this theory left and right and genderedness between is there a difference between male and female and if there is does that say something to the idea that the world as it's currently constructed has been so largely built by men and not women the proper answer is it would take quite a while but i'll try and um do the headlines um there is no mileage whatever in the idea that the left hemisphere is male and the right hemisphere female i know why people sometimes say that but actually when you do neuropsychological profiles of men and women never mind when you actually look at neuroanatomical neurophysiological measures they practically all show that where there's a difference women rely more on their left hemisphere and men more on their right hemispheres so i might as well just get rid of that one and there's a lot more detail about that in the book that i'm writing and don't shoot the pianist you know i mean that just is what's true um men and women's brains are different yep no question about that what that tells us i don't know i think the more interesting things is differences in psychology which certainly do exist um and i don't like any kind of um cut and dried view that you know the reason our civilization is bad is because of man uh you could argue the reason we have the civilization is because of a lot of extraordinarily talented men in the past who did also make sacrifices so it's not just a simple story however at the moment i do think that because women are just not so keen on the narrative the reductionist narrative i think and apparently that's because often they their emotional lives are somewhat richer than many men's men cut themselves off a lot from their emotions perhaps have to you know perhaps from the point of view of development that has been one of the things that's happened and women also whether you like it or not are more important in bringing up our young so they're already very much embedded in a world that is not like that so i think their point of view is enormously valuable at the moment but please don't reduce it to it's all the fault of men or the left hemispheres male in the right hemisphere's female it just is not like that at all um question from annie coleman um is your view that we've become too much a world of specialists and that we what we need are more polymaths who can see the context the bigger picture i suppose that gets back to education again being somebody who is constantly chastised for sort of spanning different areas i suppose i'm bound to say yes and i i do think that's right i mean i think we need it as always it's a balance you need specialists world needs specialists but as many people have pointed out the knowledge that comes from specialists like the knowledge that comes from consulting the left hemisphere is only valuable once it's taken back into the big picture and enriches it so really there is never it should never stop at a specialism and nobody should be so specialized they don't really know about what's going on in the other silos around them what's more i think if people were fully educated they wouldn't be able just to do a technical education they would have to do some history philosophy literature music as well as you know in the past that was the case until until probably the 50s most scientists would have had a pretty all-round humanist education but now we get people who have never actually had the benefit of that and so the combination of that with explosion of knowledge um greater desire to kind of get ahead in a very narrow field means that yes specialism is rife and i'm not knocking it in itself but it shouldn't be dominant and it is now dominant we do need polymaths yes very much fair yes um do you um i'm just looking at some yes this is the one i think um do you think that this is from gary goldberg um are there moral and ethical implications when considering the the direction of a culture that's dominated by the left hemisphere definitely yes thank you gary um um gary's a professor of medicine in america i think um unless there's another gary goldberg but i very strongly do believe that yes and um there's some very interesting work being done by david hecht at ucl university college london um in which he has illuminated quite how much anti-semitism psychopathic self-behavior tends to be more driven by the left hemisphere and more communitarian thinking if you like more um selfless thinking we need a balance of course we need competition and collaboration that's how nature has worked well and it wouldn't do well if it only had one or the other we need both unification and division together we need those two things to be unified not separated but yes there are moral implications because the left hemisphere is much more about grabbing and getting and about the ego whereas the right hemisphere has a much better sense of the self which is not the same thing the ego is the sort of very much me against the rest of the world establishing myself as a power as a child but when you become a fully mature adult you should have a more of a sense of yourself which is not just junked from society at large but emerges from society gets its meaning from society and gives back to society um there's a question here which you can't possibly answer in the two minutes we have left but it's it's matt boyd saying well how how why has the left brain been taking over i suppose it is why why is it done it why does it bother the the right brain hasn't taken over the world no well um as you say i can't quite do it in two minutes but um if you are but i do do it very briefly and succinctly in the introduction to the revised edition of the master in his industry which came out about a year ago there is a new introduction by myself reflecting on things that have come up and things i would have stressed if i'd known about how they would be taken and one of them is to answer that question i think there are probably seven reasons but a few of them i've already mentioned one is that it's money for old rope it's very easy another is it makes you makes you rich and powerful um it um it's um it's turned since the 18th century has turned the world that one would have gone to for a touchstone against which to test the ideas being given to you by the left hemisphere the world that we live in it's turned it into something much more like the left hemisphere's own interior world it's projected it outwards onto the world the world in which most urban people certainly live is very dominated by imagery and a style and a feel that comes from the left hemisphere so there is no longer that balance available in life which there always was until very recently because it's only very recently that such an enormous amount of the world's population lives in an entirely urban setting it's got to remember that even even athens was not a very big place in in the 6th century bc it was tiny um ian i'm sorry we've run out of time i wish you could carry on talking or evening i would listen to you um if we're still on i just wanted to um say thank you very much um and i wish read more time and i look forward very much to your next book hurry up and write it up and get it finished we're all waiting i'm doing my best thank you so much david you're very good to talk to thank you you

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

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Length: 59min 35sec (3575 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020