Iain McGilchrist, 'We Need to Act'

[Music] ian welcome back thank you very much it's good to be back maybe people watching will be familiar with your work you've been on rebel wisdom a few times your work ties together neuroscience psychology philosophy and culture in a really interesting way we've talked about your work being really really important as a kind of synthesis vision and this conversation now we're having for a slightly different reason do you want to you want to explain sort of why we're having this conversation now well i think partly because i share a very general fear of the way in which our society is moving towards highly undesirable ends and i feel i must say something about it because it also meshes very much with my hemisphere hypothesis in fact what i see is the domination of a way of thinking of the left hemisphere which is relatively simple and and simply aims to help us grab things and get them but not to understand them and i'm worried that that is the direction in which we're going and in the master and his emissary i said we looked like sleepwalkers who were shuffling our way towards the abyss and in the whatever it is 13 years since i wrote that i just feel that we are much much closer to that abyss and unless we wake up we will fall to destruction so in a way you're wanting to sound the alarm in a more urgent way than you have before yes not in an alarmist way i hope but really just to say what i see and why i think it's very important could you outline why you think things are getting so serious there's a few of them and they're interrelated one which should definitely not be underrated is is the um proposed limitations on free speech free speech is an extraordinarily important and rather rare thing for a culture to be able to embrace and it was bought by our previous generations our forebears at the price of often life and limb and suffering and we're now handing it away it seems to me or prepared to according to some people this is not a good thing however you disapprove of certain things being said free speech means nothing unless it means that people are free to say things you don't like otherwise it's not free speech so that's inevitably going to be the case but what i think history shows us is not only that society stagnates becomes something like the old soviet union where people were afraid to speak out against policies against the doctrines and so forth so it becomes less creative it becomes um hellish to live in but also that it's a it's a start on something that is very past that is very worrying hannah aaron said that when you say that a point of view is not worth questioning or not rather not worth questioning but not to be questioned you have a tyranny and i hear people now saying that certain things cannot be questioned that means we are in a tyranny already our civilization has fought for this not to happen and we mustn't allow it to happen by default and how do you link this to your philosophy around the the different brain hemispheres one is that the the left hemisphere sees usually only one simple view of something and it believes it is always right i mean you may that may sound rather like a general remark but i've often described uh patients with right hemispheres strokes who simply cannot be moved away from a belief that is obviously false and in the new book that came out less than a year ago the matter with things the first part of the book i look at how close to the truth the left and right hemisphere are and mistaken beliefs delusions hallucinations the serious ones the persistent ones are much commoner when the right hemisphere is damaged and the left hemisphere is trying to construct a reality it also tends to get very angry and very self-righteous about what it believes it doesn't see more than one side of a question it has no sense of nuance of the being well something in this is good but there's something in this that isn't and that also will go from almost any point of view you care to take so we need to have a grown-up conversation not just scream and shout at one another and be rude effectively in this world picture nothing has meaning it is the random collision of elements of matter and the world is made up of these fragments of matter that are isolated from one another that are essentially static until given a push by us that are decontextualized abstract disembodied whatever it is that we're thinking about is taken out of context and loses any of its subtlety complexity or news the right hemisphere however sees that everything is ultimately connected that things are never static and fixed but are evolving and changing that they they move and create complexity beauty and order out of their being and that this is something that can never be disembodied and turned into a process that a machine could do so effectively a lot of our thinking has gone towards the idea that we are kind of faulty machines not that the machines are very faulty versions of a human being that can do certain things more quickly but has none of the complexity the depth or the meaning that is the important part of a human life and you mentioned freedom of speech what are the other issues that you think are really leading us towards well the the the war on anything that might uh accuracy restrict our freedom um this comes from people who are themselves extremely keen on limiting other people's freedom as i've mentioned that already but curiously there is a war on things that are in a way could be seen from the left-handers point of view because the left hemisphere is the one that seeks power that manipulates it's the one that enables us to grab and get controls the right hand from its point of view anything that stands in the way of its will is some kind of unwelcome constraint that would be better if we didn't have what are these things they are things as simple as and as powerful and important as as nature as the body as intuition imagination uh spiritual meaning all these things threaten to limit the gold setting and gold getting if you like left hemisphere whereas viewed from another point of view these are the very things that enable us to be fulfilled we are fulfilled not by denying nature but by embracing our part in it not by denying the body but welcoming and accepting the fact that we are with all its richness embodied beings that death is not some kind of terrible um destruction of the meaning of life but is an important part of what we mean by life throughout its length that um you know intuitions that imagination the art and the things that give us these deep insights integrate the great symbols and myths that our civilization has produced and other civilizations have produced that these are not there to limit us but to help us find our way and to fulfill ourselves and this is sort of reminiscent of a really fascinating conversation that we hosted a little while ago with paul kingsnorth and mary harrington talking about and they really summarized it as the war on limitation which we put out as the war on reality and it goes further i mean i would very much subscribe to that view by the way um that it is a war on reality and what makes that clear is that two important ways not the only ways but two important ways in which we come to have a sense of what is more true than at least it's opposite uh science and reason and though in my writing i always try to show that there are proper limits to what science can answer the proper limits to what reason can achieve that they are nonetheless of inestimable value and anyone who attacks them is a fool and an enemy of civilization this is one these two parts of science and reason are two very important ways by which we can gauge that our thinking our direction of movement is in accord with some kind of a truth and once you throw them out everything is up for grabs and then the people who shout loudest and are most insistent that other people must not offer their opinions will find themselves disenfranchised we really will be and i think fairly soon in a in a tyranny at least of um thought taking over the academic world and taking over the public world in which people speak about the important issues we'll all be reduced to melting platitudes do you feel that things are getting worse i'm afraid to do yes yes and you know you get people now saying that science is is in some way a tyranny that reason is a tyranny that they're a plot that they are [Music] somehow to be suspected the only bit i agree with is as i say that neither of them can claim to be able to answer all our questions and we need to take into account also intuition and imagination the interesting thing is that when you look at great scientists often their discoveries were made very often using intuition the best work of mathematicians and scientists is often very clearly from their descriptions of it a matter of intuition based on some early hard work but nonetheless the fruition is creative and comes from the imagination and is often accompanied by a sense of beauty interestingly so there is no great divide between science and reason on the one hand and intuition and imagination on the other absolutely not they work together and the divide is between those who mechanize science and reason and mechanize our imagination and forbid our intuitions on the one hand and those who celebrate the intuitive power the creative power the imaginative power of all of those powers is it the problem they're not even able to perceive what's going on because of the the split in our perception i think a lot of people are very able to perceive it which is why when i write people respond and say oh wow that's an aha moment i realized what is happening all around me i hadn't words to to express it but really it's um it's something that happens in in many different ways it's exhibited in many different ways for example in business um things are more micro controlled and micro managed than they used to be it's less easy to allow people the degree of freedom that they can do what they want if you don't allow people that freedom there will be less and less creative thought coming out and science has become less creative it's taken steps down previously well known paths but it's been it's not just my point but it's made been made by a number of people that there was an enormously creative period in the first half of the 20th century and on just into the 60s and 70s but that recently the great insights the great things that move things forward have not been uh possible and partly once again it's to do with um the the way in which we we work so if you allow somebody to be able to be free to think whatever they think not police it not say what's the point in that but allow it to develop some of the times your trust will be misplaced of course but if you don't take that risk you will always achieve only mediocrity because micro managing micro controlling which is where we are now will only produce sameness mediocrity and stereotyped behaviors and it's interesting that now even the so-called you know i think illiberal but nonetheless um call themselves liberal fringe who [Music] think of themselves as opposed to stereotypes and very much in favor of diversity are producing a mental world in which we are more and more beholden to stereotypes and in which diversity is being diminished i mean for example in the past it was well established and well known to most people that there's a very wide range of of characters of men and women and it didn't mean that because you were not a typical man or a typical woman you were the wrong sex that's to say that there is only one kind of entirely stereotyped male and female anyone else needs to swap boxes i mean there are and i have looked after occasional individuals and they are not common who have a very very strong feeling that they need to be to have a sex change but what's happened recently is this idea has has run wild with damaging consequences i think especially to children but in general but also in our way of thinking about one of the most important and life-enhancing things about life which is the differences that there are between the sexes whether you are heterosexual or not and what do you think we can actually do about this i have said this so many times before that i have to just repeat myself there aren't a set of simple things we can do what we need to be as aware of where we're going and i don't think we've explored fully the awfulness of where we're going and i'd like to do that actually with you but as to what we do about it no steps taken with the same mindset we have now will work in other words they won't help us change our mindset they will simply superficially change some things we do we'll emphasize some things and not others and i'm not saying that wouldn't have an effect it's just that what i'm talking about here is a whole different way of looking at the world and i really do think that we need to make that change and one of the ways i believe this can happen is by seeing what it is we are doing by opening people's eyes you know as i say i think people have a deep sense of disquiet about the way the world is going they they see the the intrusion and obtrusion of mechanisms the banishment of humor of life and the the banishment of i mean i worry about young people can they really have that carefree sense that young people always used to be able to access are their lives now so fettered and rule-bound and hobbled by policies and principles that they can't just be themselves i fear so because you know the research shows that young people have massively increased levels of anxiety gloom depression suicidal thinking um feelings of loneliness because of the way we now think it's not because of one thing that happened it wasn't that business when we put people in tower blocks or whatever i mean that was just part of the fragmentation of society which we pursue at the moment in all kinds of ways some of these things can be reversed and you know improving the way in which we we conceive a community and we house a community is laudable stopping poisoning the seas stopping deforesting the world stopping persecuting indigenous people and destroying their way of life all these things are very important goals don't get me wrong but in a way they could be seen as a set of bullet points that if only we achieve those we can carry on being the hubristic greedy people that we are which is ultimately the cause of our unhappiness that happiness actually comes from a sense of partly humility about what a human being can know and be not the sense that we know it all now and as long as we have enough power to change things we will change them for better we don't know that i mean of course we can't reverse the tide of technology but we need to be incredibly careful about how we use technology and even whether we use certain kinds of technology at all yeah you talked about younger people losing their sense of joy aviv their sense of freedom and that for me seems intimately linked to social media this sense that we're all on show we're kind of in some ways observing each other constantly moderating our behavior by what everyone else is doing so in this sort of hall of mirrors that we've created do you think that's a big part of it i do think it's an enormous part of it the loss of spontaneity the ability just to not examine everything one is saying and thinking and this again links very much with the difference between the hemispheres this i actually call the left hemispheres generated world a hall of mirrors because it doesn't see anything outside of what it itself has created it's it's this tiny area of our mental life which is the bit of which we are now conscious which has been estimated to be less than half a percent of all that we know and experience that awareness doesn't know about anything outside of what it is aware of and that the sense that there are other things outside used to come to us from closeness to the natural world you know until quite recently most people live surrounded by nature now that is not the case it comes from a sense of cultural history with stories and myths that are passed down which are repositories of wisdom it comes because we are no longer in touch with the body which tells us about things that are not under the control of our very self-conscious mind and it leads in the end into schizophrenia what schizophrenics describe is a paralysis in which they have to think out the simplest things like standing up or sitting down and their thoughts are constantly imaging their thoughts so they can't break out of this loop of virtuality now that seems to me that is what because i argue at great length in both in the most and it's emissary but more in the matter of things the schizophrenia represents to some degree an exaggeration of the left hemisphere's world and a diminution of the contribution made by the right hemisphere and it leads to this highly self-conscious um abstracted decontextualized disembodied picture of the world which schizophrenic subjects described time and again and they say also very poignantly they say i seem to lack something that everyone else has which is the ability to see things spontaneously and actually what it boils down to is having common sense and having a bit of a sense of humor sense of humor comes from a sense of proportion and if you can't exercise sense of humor and if you don't exercise sense of humor then things will become disproportionate so it's um it's something very profound that we're messing with when we make everything that we do have to be something that's thought out deliberately and subjected to a kind of thought control experiment will this past master or will i suddenly become an untouchable because that's what happens so it's a very cruel world first of all it's not at all an intelligent world or an imaginative world so the people who seem to shout the loudest seems to see only one thing and never that the other person might have a point of view that this needs to be talked about in shades of meaning and um not the imagination to see beyond their own point so it's very harmful and it also takes up an awful lot of people's time and attention which is not consolidated attention as you might pay to a great work of art for perhaps an hour but a kind of fragmented attention which is exactly what the left hemisphere's world is made of i look at this i look at that target i look at the next target it's looking for targets all the time whereas the right hemisphere literally has a quite different kind of attention and no neurologist in the world would dispute this it sees the periphery of attention the whole broad field and it sees it in depth where the left hemisphere tends to see a two-dimensional screen on which things are projected so the sense of the depth and the broad has been lost and i think that's also important because we don't understand first of all the degree to which we importantly belong to a society and owe something to the society that helped to create us and even if we think we are rebels and even if we think that we reject everything from our society that's absolutely fine but that point of view is itself something that has come out of one's one culture the possibility to do that and the will to do that but if we don't understand uh enmeshment with other living beings including non-human beings i would say very very importantly and we so in space as it were we don't see ourselves as ramifying into a hole which is larger than ourselves and knows more than we do but also we don't see it in time we've we've time sliced time has become very thin it's this moment now where i am but this moment came from many others and will lead to many others in the future in that sense it's more like a melody than anything else you don't make a melody we're putting together a note and another note but it's a flow and burke made this very important point that the society was not just a a a an association of people but it was the association of those people now with those who lived in the past and those who would come to live in the future which is why in many stable societies other than our own present one people pay attention to what the elders thought to what um the traditions that they inherited have to say about this this means that instead of being like a rudderless ship that can be blown anyway by whatever wind happens to spring up they have some point to refer to you this may sound conservative but it doesn't have to be at all um i believe that the way we make progress is not by cutting off the strain of life the stem from which we grow and then finding ourselves with nothing to feed us and no idea of where we should be but it is from that growing flexible trainable organism that the next steps come so the tradition if you want to call it that is always growing and changing but doing so in a way that has meaning at the time rather than abstract fiats from somebody who is intolerant and says this is what we must do i think the first thing to say when people say this is what we must do is well maybe or maybe not in fact people don't say that enough what you're sketching out feels like a a parallel with what john bovaki talks about which is a sense of domicide which he describes as a sense of losing one's home effectively losing one's home in a sort of more cosmic sense that we we we're sort of strangers in our own bland now precisely and that is what i talked about in the master in his emissary as having forfeited the sense of belonging and and pointed out that the root of the word belonging is the same as the root for longing which is the sense of being connected to something but stretched away from it and we have no sense of that tethering to a place to a time to a collection of those that we love to our own place in this cosmos instead we see ourselves as as um completely um like vagrants in the universe with no place that which has meaning for us and no place of connection with what came before or after and that is the consequence of this fragmenting driven attention of the left hemisphere looking for the next step forward which will make it more powerful you see the thing about technology is i mean as i say technology is only about increasing power which is you know that is what technology does and that of course is is important but it's not the point of life to become more and more powerful what gives meaning to life and gives it a sense of direction and purpose is all the sorts of things that technology can't help us with but may actually imperil which are these more emotionally rich spiritually rich embodied elements of our existence that we've already discussed i mean you've sketched out the problem you've sketched out the problem very much in your books what is what do you think we can do i mean becoming aware of the problem might be might be one thing but how do we rebalance well i do think i would like to stress the idea that we need to wake up you know i talked about like it like zombies walking towards the abyss so we are becoming increasingly more zombie-like uh interestingly by the way um patients with schizophrenia describe either themselves as becoming zombie-like or other people as becoming zombie-like and again this is to do with decline of the right hemispheres grasp of what's going on so that's the world we're in now we're we're shuffling towards this abyss i believe so the first thing is we need to wake up and see where we are and i believe from the experience of really enormous numbers of people who've written to me about um my work that it it can change people's lives by opening their eyes to what's going on and so people say really very very moving things like there's something here that i knew was going on but i had no way to put my finger on it or to express it or the courage to talk about it but you've given me all those things now as a psychiatrist i know that somebody who comes to me and i say well what would you what what problems you encountering what would you like us to try and work on and they say well i have no problems you know i'm doing fine well i'd say fine and we don't need to talk any further but it it's only when people say i i understand what i'm doing i'm constantly mistaking this i'm taking the wrong making the wrong reaction to this kind of thing and then we look at why and change it but the first thing is the person must be aware that there is a need to change and when i was training as a psychiatrist i thought i was terrifically bright and i had experience and you know all that kind of illusion and so when people came to me i would feel after talking them to them for an hour or allowing them to talk to me for an hour that i knew an enormous amount about them and could actually say probably what the call of the problem was and i made the mistake of saying it and was never accepted oh no no no no because of course if they were in the right place to see that now they probably may have arrived there anyway um but then i would send them to ce therapists and so on and then i'd review them and in six months or nine months they would say you know i i had a great breakthrough i realized now that what i've been doing is this and what i need to do is that and you know it was exactly what i'd said to them on the first day so i then learned don't say those things we leave the picture open must be kind of frustrating but once again it's frustrating when you ask the left-handers wants to know what do we do panic panic something's going wrong i need to fix it and what they really mean is i need to put a sticking plaster on it and then that will cease to be a problem it's like how many fingers in a dike can you put but what we need to do is to somehow divert the water not just keep sticking fingers in type speaking classes on on cancers we need to eradicate the underlying problem and that is to do with this mechanical way of thinking which we are embedding in our culture more and more with every passing month the idea that really we are defective machines we are not anything like machines and in one of the chapters in um the matter with things i look at the differences between a living organism and a machine and i make about eight substantive points of difference that are when you see them you think of course and they are very important because at the very moment when physics started to realize that the universe is not mechanical and can't be accounted for in mechanistic terms and indeed can't be accounted for without taking into the picture the consciousness of the observer at the same time that that was happening biology was moving away from a human vision and espousing an utterly mechanistic one i think we're now seeing the end thank god of that dreadful era of the um sort of reductionist post-darwinians who were not speaking at all in the spirit of darwin i mean in writing i've read a lot of darwin's own writing and he's a wonderfully humble man who is not at all this dictatorial figure who's got it all worked out and knows what's going on i remember when we talked before you talked about how anger lateralizes to the left hemisphere and if we're in a much more angry fragmented short attention span society is that another function of the the split that you're talking about well i think anger has become almost the most dominant timbre of discourse in [Music] the social media and even in the public sphere anger and intolerance and a sense of self-righteousness accompanied by a sense of disgust with anybody who is different now what's interesting is that from a neuropsychological point of view it's certainly not true that the left hemisphere is people used to think is unemotional it has emotions and the emotions it is particularly responsible for anger and disgust and it also goes with a sense of self-righteousness the left hemisphere when things have been pointed out to it that it gets wrong or it hasn't hasn't been able to do them it will flatly deny that there is any problem because it is always right you know and those who know my work will know the really extraordinary cases of people deny that a limb uh if their right hemisphere is paralyzed they have a left paralyzed limb they will deny altogether that it's paralyzed if you point out that it is their limb they will deny it's theirs they will say it belongs to someone else belongs to you doctor nothing to do with me because the left hemisphere is always right and it gets furious when challenged it's very superficial and it does jump to conclusions now again the old wrong way of conceiving the left and right hemispheres and i have to say that everything that we used to think is basically wrong and one has to start again that's what my last 30 years of work have been about but one of those cliches was that the right hemisphere might sort of jump to conclusions but the left was dependable you know and rational and reasonable but actually the left hemisphere is not reasonable in its attitudes and is not actually the one that is solid and dependable the right hemisphere is much more solid and dependable it's much more in touch with reality the left hemisphere is the one that jumps to conclusions so when daniel kahneman talks about his type 1 and type 2 thinking and differentiates between a more a slightly slower but more thorough deliberative mode of assessing the world and a more impulsive and rash and possibly mistaken but maybe at times right way of looking at the world people have said so is the impulsive one the right hemisphere and the more deliberative one the left house the answer is completely the other way around i mean in fact i think what he's doing is not talking about the two different hemispheres but talking more about the upper parts of the brain in contrast to the if you like the inferior parts of the brain that were evolved more more primitive earlier earlier on in evolution so anyway it doesn't really matter but but i just mention it because it's it's significant that people misunderstand this so when people are immutable in their attachment to an idea are angry and self-righteous about it and disparage and are disgusted by anybody who could disagree with them for me as a neuroscientist and as a psychiatrist that is alarm bells these people are going somewhere we do not want to follow them and it's exactly the mindset of the puritans and i have no desire to emulate puritanism or the similar phenomenon which has occurred also in the history of islam [Music] and has re-occurred recently there have been periods in which music and dance and so on have been celebrated in islam by sufism but there are also periods in which it is highly disapproved of humor is disapproved of um and anything that is not stateable in literal words is disapproved of and that we're getting there to that puritanical highly left hemisphere-dominated way of thinking and i'm very struck by reading accounts of the puritan reformers in the low countries because we have descriptions by the english ambassador who was there long letters that he wrote back to london about what he saw and they are electrifying and i've actually put up part of them on my website channel mcgill chris for people to read but in short what he shows is that quite a small number of people went through the town destroying statues smashing stained glass windows burning manuscripts destroying paintings and they worked very methodically and they were a small group and the rest of people who could be 10 000 people lined the streets and just looked on they didn't do anything so sometimes a group of people that have this left hemisphere drive to that truth as they see it people who think they have the truth are very worrying people because whatever truth is i do believe there is such a thing as truth we can never attain full certainty about what it is but we can never by the same take and give up trying to seek after it so you think we're in a kind of new puritanism now i certainly do um and it's very disturbing because it will lead to prohibition of texts and destruction of texts and destruction of our culture we're already seeing people asking for imagery perhaps from the last three or four hundred years to be taken out of colleges out of buildings and so on i i'm not sympathetic to this and i think that actually it causes offence whatever it is only to the degree that people say this is offensive you should feel offended by this and then people go oh yes it's offensive but i don't think that in the natural course of things without that rhetoric people would have necessarily seen it as defensive at all i think we should start pushing back against untested ideas with profound consequences for our future happiness sense of being fulfilled human beings and for the future of our culture we should not be allowing our children to be indoctrinated into a set of beliefs that are really have been made popular only in the last 10 years and are around the world considered most peculiar they were never part of any thriving culture we should push back against beliefs that we are just machines that the universe is not conscious but is in fact simply reductionist and purely material holy material and so it's more about pushing back against ideas and once those ideas become much less important in the public sphere people will find things that follow out from them on a whole range of issues i mean i can sometimes say we need to teach children differently for example we need to we need to train all children say that not one of them leaves school without being trained how to see one side of an argument and then argue against the point of view that they have just stated as their own point of view to be able to do that is enormously important and in the past the aim of education was partly to produce somebody who could give graded ascent and graded dissent to almost any idea we've lost that so to get that back into our culture would be important to value more highly than non-technical purely technical subjects in school those that lead to a more rounded humane spiritual account of a human being they were called the humanities they're now considered less important because they don't have an obvious utility but the left hemisphere has got us into the mess we're in by always pursuing utility and utility is not the only thing that we need to be aware of of course in order to live we need to be able to utilize things we need to be able to get food we need to be able to build shelter but that is only part of the story of what a life is for and what a life is about and we're finding that now in the despair the nihilism the depression the anxiety the rootlessness the loneliness that is expressed so touchingly so movingly by particularly young people nowadays what have we done to them in so many ways we need to stop doing it ian thank you very much thank you [Music]

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 133,607

Keywords:

Id: 686heq5QFPk

Length: 41min 48sec (2508 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022