Matter is a Relative Matter With Iain McGilchrist

[Music] so Ian I thought it would be great to start with a quote but I've heard you recite before and a quote that probably if Einstein were alive today may have written the blurb to go on the front of your book because it it seems to describe perfectly what your books all about them and the quote is the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant and the question you ask is have we lost sight of the sacred gift or have we lost our way with that it seems to be a very good and very very brief summary of what the master and it's mystery is is all about well yes and what Einstein is supposed to have gone on to say is that we honor the servant of the reason that we have forgotten the gift of intuition I mean in the book that I'm writing at the moment I do talk a lot more about reason and intuition head-on what what do are they useful for and of course they're both incredibly important and my message is certainly nothing to do with that we should stop being rational beings I think we're being extremely irrational and unreasonable beings by over trusting a kind of very narrow mechanistic rationalizing about everything in a way that in the past would never have been thought appropriate I mean one sees it in daily life in the way in which things like medical practice or a school university a run according to principles increasingly that are only those of an accountant they're not those which are harder to specify more intangible less measurable but are nonetheless a really important thing it was in medicine in teaching in learning so I I think I started that book really from reflecting what the heck is going on in our world and why is it that we seem to be confronted assembly paradoxes why is it that we for example prai's security saying much that we end up going into regions of the world and causing chaos which results in a huge escalation of danger forever but why do we so worried about bacteria in our daily life that we produce people who are extremely vulnerable to infection and so on and so forth yeah and they're everywhere you look and part of this is to do with this inability to understand things that are implicit [Music] perhaps I ought to go back a bit to where I was when I made the decision to study medicine yeah because I was 28 and I've been an academic in Oxford mainly interested in the area of philosophy and literature and I I got very interested in the mind-body problem for reasons to do with the study of literature it struck me that there was a poem there was something that was somebody taken trouble in the past to write to communicate something and it was absolutely unique if it hadn't existed you couldn't have invented it any more than you could have thought of your closest friend if you'd never met that friend yeah and it was also embodied in the very words that it was in you feel paraphrased it it just became a handful of dust and it was utterly implicit you know as soon as you made it explicit you ruined it yeah and then what did you do with it you've got a lot of clever people together in a seminar room and you turned this unique embodied implicit thing into something general abstract and it yeah and and it to cut a long story short I struck me there was a problem with our thinking in very much like brains in vats about things out there that were objects that didn't have any kind of embodied reality for us yeah and and that interested me in in what was going on in our brains mmm and so I've studied a studied medicine and I was very inspired by Oliver Sacks actually to do this his writing and principally awakenings extraordinary book and and to see what happened because that book shows what happens when something goes wrong with somebody's brain and it affects their whole world when something goes wrong in their mind and it affects their body yeah so these things are deeply closely connected so I studied medicine and went off into neurology and psychiatry which is the area of overlap and it was there that I started to ask myself why is the brain divided you know in medical school it was never I mean it was bet mentioned there it was you II looked at it intersection there's a but nobody said and the reason that this thing is in two hives like this no but nobody knew and nobody even asks the question mmm and then later for reasons I probably won't go into in detail now I learned that the two hemispheres have completely different ways of looking at the world yeah and there was a lot of nonsense talked about hemisphere difference that put serious scientists off the topic altogether I was told don't even touch this topic because it's Korea death this top psychology it does doesn't have any basis and yet when one came to look at scholarly research on people who'd had damage to one or other hemisphere you could see that they had completely different effects and depending on whether it was the left or the right hemisphere yeah and that was being a looked and ignored people say oh there aren't any really serious difference but I think what they were doing wrong was they were thinking of the brain as a machine and so they were asking the question who does have a machine what does it do yeah and they they said first of all well the left does reason and and language and the right does emotion and pictures and then they found that this was completely untrue because each hemisphere got involved in all those things yeah but the what they didn't seem to be asking was the question you would ask if part of a person which is how in what way do each does each hemisphere involved in these things and if you do that you find that each hemisphere is involved in reason language emotion there's your facial things all the rest every single thing that makes up parts of our lives just with a completely different take on it yeah that was the difference yeah and to begin with I could I couldn't quite see how staggeringly important there's what and then I realized the two halves of the brain are attending to the world in two different ways and we know that when you attend differently you see different things there are lots of clever demonstrations some of them made their own Brown and illusion yes that's on which show and they've gone into popular culture where you know if you're not expecting to see something you don't see it if you look with a certain kind of attention you see one thing if you look with another kind of attention you see something completely diff yeah and quite apart from those clever illustrations in our daily life when we look at things with a certain kind of attention we find a different kind of world from what is apparently the same world on a different day when we're attending to it when did that comes here was it was it just a moment of inspiration or was it a dissatisfaction with the explanation that the traditional view of the left and right brain was given I mean really what happened was that I heard a lecture mm-hmm by a man called John cutting who I consider the most interesting living psychiatrist and he he had done what no other physician had been doing which was looking at what happened after right hemisphere strokes everyone was focused on left hemisphere arrows and they thought well nothing serious happened somebody with the right hemisphere stroke because they can still use their right hand their languages usually unimpaired but actually it turns out that they're much more seriously impaired and harder to rehabilitate after a right hemisphere string hmm then after a left hemisphere stroke even though our for a left hemisphere stroke it's very probable that you won't be able to speak you won't be able to use your right hand now that surprises people yeah but what John was saying is when the left hemisphere is damaged you see these very obvious results but when the right hemisphere is damaged what you don't immediately see is that their whole experience of the world has changed and he he alerted me to some things in this lecture which rang about because he said the left hemisphere fails to understand the implicit meaning mmm it doesn't understand metaphor jokes irony sense of humor it takes things very literally in a sort of mechanical way it is less in touch with the body than the right hemisphere and literally the body image which is not just a visual image but an image in all senses in the brain of ourselves as embodied beings is in the right hemisphere and he was saying also that the general ideas as it were get collected abstractly in the left hemisphere but unique instances embodied concrete instances of things are better appreciated by the right hemisphere and at one go he had just told me something I'd been puzzling about for years which was clearly the reason I'd found it so difficult to explain in the first book I wrote was have called against criticism was my problem with what we were doing two works of literature yeah in the university was that the reason it was hard to explain was that it's the left hemisphere that does the talking it's my left hemisphere now that is speaking to you yeah and it has set up a kind of language that works well for it but it's much harder to convey the meanings and knowledge that the right hemisphere has you know often when you make something explicit you utterly change its nature you can see this with sex you can see it with religion you can see with jokes you can see it with poems you know and that when you disembodied something you actually change its reality for us on how we relate to yeah and that when you abstract and generalize something you've completely lost but was unique and special about it yeah I suppose the longer and the more precise you think you're becoming in fact the further away you could be actually having well that's right and you you're doing the rather paradoxical thing is you were destroying the thing that you're trying to examine yeah and the process of examining yeah and very often I think what we as a society have been tending to do in the last 150 years is increasingly to denature the world by our way of talking about it abstractly mechanically reductively and that we have not attended to because it's harder to see what has been lost and what as it were the part of us that understands the implicit knows now the implicit is enormous compared with the explicit the bit that we actually see explicitly in the center of our focus of consciousness is my new it's conservatively estimated to be much less than 5% of all the stuff that we win knowing and experiencing yeah and probably it's very very much less than that yeah so the unconscious mind which includes the whole of our bodies as well as the other parts of the brain and so forth is taking in a dealing with assessing and responding to the world knowing things as it were yeah that in our explicit that conscious mind we we've ruled out yeah we don't talk about them and we've said we we don't believe in them yeah so that actually skews the picture of what the world is who we are and how we relate yeah but for this to be the case it must be it must be true then that there was a time when it was very useful for us to rely on this left brain dominant and therefore we did more of it and it became a habit it became a habit we haven't been able to break and it's one that is leading us you know into the world what's ladders into the world we have today so so how did we lose how did we lose the balance you know because it would become so dominant how did that take place that's a very interesting and difficult question to answer and I don't think I've got a you know simple ant and but what I can say is that in the second half of my book the master in his emissary yeah and I look at the course of Western civilization through the lens of what we know about these societies in terms of the emphasis that might be laid on what the right have is frequency and what the left hemisphere comes and three times the the the Greek the Roman and I rained civilization starting at the Renaissance began with us with an incredibly fruitful harmony and marriage of these two ways of being and thinking yeah in other words the left and right working together as this but over time in each case not just in our own case what I would call the take of the left hemisphere solidified fossilized and became the normal way of thinking he has a result each of those civilizations collapse yeah and when they collapsed a lot of people would say they were absent for about a thousand years well we haven't got a thousand years no say no and so so this is the point we're at perhaps where where we have this you know society with the pursuit of happiness leading to people being dissatisfied often yeah or feeling like maybe the next thing to come is just around the corner so there's a yearling we often or or the the you know the quest for freedom yeah you know wanting to be free all the time but then being completely paranoid about security or you know are we safe when ending out being more surveyed and monitored and spied on than any society yeah in us time began exactly and in all ways probably from from walking in busy cities where everything's follows or even online where where it seems that's the case - yeah so so no doubt we'll have little chips in us the state will insist on these that he can track in our own interest so that if we get lost or yeah be able to find us so so how might we break that cycle of you know of feeling like the pursuit of happiness is something that we need to drive towards with that left brain dominance all the time of list of things we must do or things that we have the first thing to do is to understand what we're doing wrong yeah I mean there's a psychiatrist I know it's no good telling people what they must do I often know quite soon after meeting that it was a very good idea if they did several things yeah it's no good to say that yeah what you first need to do is to get people to the point where they see for themselves but what they're doing is not working and why so the evenings create the right condition they want to be clear well what I need to do is raise consciousness and that's what I I can't myself do very much I'm a single person nearing the end of his life and so I don't claim and can't to you know have solutions yeah but what I can do is to open people's eyes to what going on on how they're actually being deceived into their being Palm D'Or freely within a very very sad dwarfed impoverished version of life of the world compared with one we could happen that people in other cultures possibly still do to an extent although they're becoming westernize much too fast yeah and there's nothing wrong with Western culture Western culture has many things to be proud of but it's always about getting this balance between the right and left right and when I say balance they need to work together but the right hemisphere needs to be the one that as it were oversees the picture yeah because literally it sees the bigger picture yes literally the left hemisphere has a narrow beam focus of attention it's like a high-resolution lens that is looking around and picking up details and then wondering how do I put all that together yeah is the right hemisphere literally its attention is broad and sustained over time yeah and it's so therefore sees a bigger picture it also actually is interestingly quite clearly more intelligent yeah so you know there's been some very interesting research done recently on what happens to people after damage to parts of the brain in terms of their IQ yeah a lot of people might assume well the left hemisphere it may have its problems but it does all that sort of number crunching and actually a lot of the intelligent part of maths is to do with seeing analogies with pattern recognition yeah and goes on in the right hemisphere and actually I'm writing about that at the moment I mean most great mathematicians and scientists indeed when describing the discoveries don't describe a linear process yeah they describe an insight which ya then Einstein be another example it sounds very similar to music when you're describing that to me as well you know the mathematics of tone or the mathematics of sequences of notes yes this sounds like a very similar idea where you know the great mathematicians see things as you know the beauty in the in in the patterns rather than the numbers themselves in the comparison beauty is a good word because in fact extraordinarily frequently scientists a highly imaginative scientists not I'm not doing about just everyone who works in the lab but the people who have made the great breakthroughs a lot of them physicists and mathematicians consistently describe beauty as one of the guides to what it is that they're they're finding yeah you might think that the intelligence is largely dependent on this slightly boring accountant as yet the left hemisphere yeah but it isn't and when people have strokes and damage to the brain they got a serious 126 people who had had a measurable drop in IQ following a brain injury or stroke and extraordinarily almost all when you overlap them almost all the areas of interest in fact 96% are in the right hemisphere what about things like anxiety it seems that there's an increasing number of people today that are living a faster paced life and a more online life and a more complex life you know that was another thing I was thinking about actually about freedom of information the freedom and instant access of information means that we can learn anything or at least we can read anything at the touch of a button or screen which is marvelous in many ways in many ways but yet where does true wisdom come from if it's all instantly accessible and then gone and forgotten in a second well that wisdom has nothing to do with the acquiring of information now exactly and in fact a lot of people in the great wisdom traditions and seriously important philosophers said the wisdom has to do with stopping doing what you commonly mean by knowing things yes yes stopping that activity out books away exactly and I think there's a lot there in what you're asking I mean one of the difficulties is this linear thinking which depends on going for your target and getting things yeah there's the measuring the left hemisphere likes to know how much of something there is yeah it's not so interested in the quality of it was the right hemisphere appreciating the unique quality of something yeah those are the left hemisphere is assessing how much of this have we got and that's perfectly because in in in humans it has a particular function to do with language but in most animals its main function is getting food yeah its main function is manipulating the environment picking up things to build a shelter or a nest but food yeah and it's brilliant at that because what it does is it knows what it's after it spots it it locks onto target and it goes for it and gets it yeah and it's the left hemisphere that controls your right hand which most of us do the grass because yeah and it controls bits of language which we say oh I've grasped that it is it's the one that helps us grab an grass and it's made as powerful and wealthy yeah the trouble is that being powerful and wealthy hasn't made us happier yeah and many of the things that we think are going to make us happy in the end don't so the problem is partly the idea if only I could have this go there do that yeah that would make me happy yeah rather than seeing that in fact it's about a disposition it's not about a thing out there yeah there's about a disposition in here mm-hmm that is more comprehensible if you like to a right hemisphere take on the world yeah which is interested in how we relate yeah not in what we could engross yeah then you've got the problem that in a culture in which rivalry is exploited at the expense of cooperation it increases enormously anger aggression and anxiety yeah we're all highly competitive and there's a kind of view put about that actually that's how we intrinsically our tribe as our nature it's one nature the human nature is destructive aggressive competitive yeah I would be wrong to deny that that impulse is there hmm it quite clearly is but it's at least a strongly balanced given half a chance with something quite different which is the capacity for empathy cooperation and not so much interested in what I can get here but what we can do together yeah one another yeah and of course it's a cliche but it's certainly true that what brings people happiness is not the halving of things but the being in connection with other people in the right way yeah so our values are wrong and they're promoted they're fiercely being promoted by advertising and by ruthless policies of companies employing people to where it's always win win and defeat and meet and they're all dressed hmm this attitude will finish us off quickly I mean we've not got very long in my view I'm it's certainly a matter of decayed it worries me because thank you I have children yeah and I now have grandchildren yeah and what the world is going to be like for them unless we can see quickly yeah that we need not just to put a sticking-plaster on but think completely different yeah it's a change of heart it's not yet a different you see the left hemisphere okay I get there's a problem what was the fix I'd like eight bullet points yeah there now do them and then I'll go back to work as I always do and and I'm saying no that will never never work yeah the only thing that will work for any of us and for society it means a lot of us shifting grossly our our goals our values our thoughts about who we are why we're here and what we went through as a society in the civilization yeah whether we can cause such an enormous change without catastrophe I'm afraid I I I'm doubtful I think that such a big change to happen so fast would require something I don't like even to contemplate but life becoming so hard and and and so terrible because the collapse of a civilization and that we have to rethink and I I wish hope and pray that we can see something before it's too late [Music] it's not really that difficult it's difficult because and only because we are stuck as we are we like the way we are and actually the left hemisphere is literally in various ways more stuck in its yet once it gets on to something it locks onto it remember it's locking onto prey yeah it's got this thing that's my object that's my target and it it if you could just disengage it yeah but look there's everything else yeah it's such to choose to do that did you just choose that we can all choose to do that as we've all got it in here I mean the great thing is our brains are much more balanced than this way of looking at the world is making us think then yeah we're being deprived in fact by what we're told we're being deprived of the knowledge the experience and the understanding of a true fulfillment of the human potential in the mind and the brain yes instead we're being harmed off as I say well yeah sold up up we've been told actually we're just is ghastly competitive mechanical creatures yeah soon robots will be better at doing things than we are which is another in my view mistake yeah they will be very good at doing all sorts of things but they won't be very good at doing all the things of you yeah about human life and people say well how do you know that and partly because we need a body we need emotions we need things that we don't even understand how they work or where they come from yeah in order to experience these things we're not just computers yeah we're nothing like computer yes so what what might we do that in any sphere of influence we have whether it's a you know a group or a company or a government in terms of asking the right question about that change I mean you of course we're asking a very difficult question to which I don't have in video to answer partly we all have to in a famous phrase be the change we desire to see so I don't want although I do feel it's a difficult battle because of the way we're stuck where we are not because we haven't got pasady to change but because we we tend to get stuck on what we like here and now yeah um we can change and I don't want to overwhelm people by saying it can't be done and if we all actually individually made it our business to think hard about what our values are and how we express them yeah and what that means for our life and how we might live differently we'd probably have accomplished it yes and one of the things that would help or one of the things that doesn't help in its absence is nature one of the reasons I live in one of the very last relatively wild beautiful places left in Britain is that you feel an immediate contact with something which is which is palpable here most visitors who come here comment on it they say they can they can feel something which again is implicit it's hard to articulate yeah that they feed it very strong yeah of a sense that their relationship to the world alters yeah yeah they actually think differently about things they see things different yeah when you're in a natural setting you actually see that you are literally part of this world this nature with nature isn't a thing out there that is studied in nature classes oh yeah you go out and do or you control and manage you know the environment such a dastardly the environment it suggests it's something around you that isn't you yeah it should be banned the word is nature and it used to be Mother Nature not sure is feminine it is the the principle I think a sacred Prince yeah in in the world and you know if you loves hair you can't people of course you can't prove it Mary there are many good things in life that you can't prove if you've ever been in love prove to me that you were yeah there are many things one can see that it's hard to prove but they're not irrational yeah there are what I would go trans rash another reason doesn't deal with them that's not a problem because if you get it right you know that reason is incredibly valuable it will take you so far but no further yeah intuition is very valuable but it's not to be trusted just like that yeah and I always say people who reason well have better intuitions than those who don't yeah and people who have good practice of respecting intuitions use reason better yeah so there's a marriage again as a harmony that need we need to have yeah so if we could get that back and one of the things might be to to try to spend more time actually and if there are parks yeah in big towns thank god yeah for most people there are places you can go where you can go and walk in nature and we know from medical research this is a fashionable topic now yeah this actually does enormous ly improve not just people's levels of anxiety and depression which it very clearly does but has over longer periods improvements on things like blood pressure cancer rates and so forth yeah I mean all of that is at the moment at a somewhat speculative stage but it certainly has beneficial effects on the way we think yeah so there's this there's the health benefit that's clearly there there's you know there's the inspiration that comes from being in these kind of places yeah and then there's the removal of the blocks is it sounds like in a way is what you're describing if people can come here and sit or stand it's landscape and think I can feel something good yes is that is that a removal or you know a losing of the shroud that's over is the rest of the time is it just that we're able to see more clearly because of that do you think well I think that that image of a veil or a shroud as you say is really a good one in a way things are very quickly taken by what I would call the practices of the left hemisphere which wants to categorize pigeon-hole things that it understands where to put them and to string them together according to certain principles what it is is doing is is sort of managing things but it's making them no longer really present to us it represents the world and that word is fantastic because if you just think about it what it means is it's no longer present to you yeah it has being made present to artificially again after the event yes now if we live in a world that is constantly represented on a screen wherever it might be and it doesn't have to be on a screen we're representing reality all the time to ourselves yeah we're getting oh it's one of those yeah but if we could get back to the freshness of experience which is what many of the meditation techniques mindfulness yeah and the principles of Oriental was are about being present it's a shattering experience yeah because the world becomes alive again yeah and becomes marvelous again and is no longer stressing and pressuring you no longer feel I haven't got time I have what time I can't do this yeah do that anything because you your mind is being tormented by being asked to attend too far to him anything yeah and if you can stop that and it may require a bit of discipline about how you use technology yeah not being at the beck and call of it yeah then that is at least a good stuff yeah there's a great book called the winter of our discontent and it's not only a very entertaining and well-written book but the story is you know is that she with great opposition from the family decided that they were going to spend six months just a trial to see what it was like they were all going to go offline yeah and at the end of the period to cut a long story short her children who complained so badly about it said oh we don't want to go back to the way it was yeah yeah because what happened was that instead of somebody coming into a room and saying sort of dinner's ready in the game I'm busy sort of in it and not doing anything really it's community they started to do all kinds of things that they'd used to do but yeah and they make music together and they they laughed and they you know they just did stuff yes and went out and looked at things yeah and they found that it was revivifying yeah so and some people may say what it wouldn't work for me maybe I don't know but it's worth a try yeah and certainly just not being so dependent on one of the things about being here is I can't get a mobile signal yeah but and even when I'm away I don't give people my number because I never put the thing on I only have it for an emergency you know if I'm in a stuck situation then you know good I couldn't yeah but not being at that constant what you know what is it that we say in Britain people look at their phone every few minutes yeah yeah so luckily one can be without that one can just say I'm not gonna do that yes and it doesn't necessarily make you any less efficient yeah in fact it might make you much more efficient yeah so a simple thing but anyone anyone can actually do and again the choice the choice to say oh I'll do that'll try bats yes so that might be one well I think that's what I think education that's very important yes they want to sound like Tony Blair but what you said was undisputedly true education is very important yeah and how we chain people is the way we create the society of the future yeah and one thing I feel very sad about is that now compared to when I was at school so much of it is tram lined mmm-hmm the great thing I remember at school was that there was a lot of freedom for teachers to teach about what interested them and most of the classes were discussions they weren't sort of one-way right and mind you it might be hard to nowadays because people haven't learnt the discipline of sitting still and attending yeah and there might be more problems with actually controlling that situation so actually a fruitful conversation can occur yeah but that's got to happen and you know the the worst thing you can possibly do I mean getting back to something I was involved in teaching literature the worst thing you could possibly do is have the sort of situation where people believe there are you know six important things to say about George Eliot and you've got to get them into your your asset yeah it discourages original thinking which seems to be a rather important thing yes and of course it also substitutes information for true knowledge and understanding so again back through retaining information knowledge and information is pieces of stuff and this this is this is obviously a real preoccupation of you at the moment this stuff that valence things so this must be something that's there in your mind all the time at the moment as you're working on a new book well yes it is I'm writing a book at the moment which is I'm going to one day find out how to sum it up quickly but it basically what happen what I'm interested in is getting the focus away from things and objects to relationships mmm a simple I think comprehensible example is music yeah music is could be thought of as a thing in a way yeah but what is that thing let's inspect it indeed let's analyze it in order to find out what it's made of and how it works yeah perfect left brain stuff yeah well it's got notes what a notes there there there's sounds of a certain pitch but they don't mean anything at all and let's try taking two of them well neither of them means anything you can add with hundreds of things that don't mean anything to me so is it somewhere else maybe it's in the gaps between the notes the makers the harmony or the notes that make the melody yeah whatever but those gaps are just where nothing is happening yeah and yet this combination of those points with the gaps between them creates a completely new help an experience that can move you to tears yeah and can mean so much far from having no meaning it means enormous and one of the problems is that because we don't think that relationship is how we understand things and and understand meaning we're being told by people who only look at things that there is no meaning yeah world yeah I don't experience that yeah don't ask me to say what that meaning is anymore than to tell you when I say my my partner means so much to me yeah what does she mean yeah you don't expect me to answer that question oh and you don't expect me to answer when I say Mozart's G minor quintet you know means yeah means everything you know yeah any of it could you explain what it means to me well course I can and the same thing is true about life if you if you look at it in this break it up into bits and try and find out where the staff is you find it means precisely nothing yeah but if you see that it actually is a fantastically complex incredibly beautiful and constantly changing self-organizing rather like sort of a choreographed yeah piece of music yeah then you see what the meaning is I'm and this may sound very new age yes April so what I'm doing is actually starting from the basics let's look at what science can tell us because I am a scientist I believe powerfully in in the imaginative grasp of good science yeah and in what science can do to make our lives so much richer yes but it can't answer all our questions so you can answer a lot of very good ones yeah let's look at reason what it can do and again you know I'm great in reason I'm a great believer in being as clear as you can but no clearer yeah you know trying to be clearer than you can about something that's intrinsically not that kind of a thing will just make you fail to understand it yeah and I I'm a great believer in in in what one can argue rationally in fact my books are all full of that yeah I'm bad it has its limitations what is intuition well again sometimes it can be enormous ly informative and tells us things that are the other ways of finding out can't can't give us mm but it can also of course be completely wrong so it's knowing how to how to discriminate and how to use them together yeah and if you if you adopt these approaches you find that the world begins to look very much like what the right hemisphere sees it to be which is a combination of things in which all the stuff that the left hemisphere does has its place yeah it is in Einstein's expression it is doing its job as a faithful servant yes but it should never be the master yes and that is the only problem we have nothing wrong with the left hemisphere it's just making it into the master yeah it is the pathology yes and that's where we're at so we only need to start paying attention again to all the things that we've been told it's not smart to believe yes and and and not smart to give any kind of intellectual time or attention to yeah there should be more emphasis I think on the arts not as not through some dreary statistical survey of how many people have been got through the doors of something because often that means actually substituting something rather meretricious that will get your numbers up for what is seriously interesting yeah you have to accept that sometimes you're going to do something that makes people think and go not sure if I like that but gosh it's interesting yeah and come back to some more yeah yes so our business of chasing figures and let's get away from that and try and really engage with the power of of literature of drama of music and so forth at school and in our lives not just you know sometimes I get the impression from talking to sort of clever people who are doing terribly well in London yeah that's the real business of life is what they do and they're sitting in a very boring office under strip lighting fiddling with numbers yeah and then they come home all exhausted having at least done proper work and then they get entertained by going to the theatre yeah yeah this is completely back to front because those entertainments are the things that are actually telling you things about life enriching your life yeah it's the stuff you're doing in the day is not enriching yours or anybody else's life if you're on it yeah it may be enriching you in the sense of pouring figures into your bank account yeah but is that gonna make you happy yeah and I know it would be lovely to to say it does but all the evidence is it doesn't yeah and back to what you said before the importance of nature because as you were describing all of these things I'm also thinking about that and those in it you know the way you describe music and the way the landscape looks here outside your home they're they're very similar yes they can create the same emotion or or they can create the same inspiration well all of those things help to take us beyond our normal restrictive set of ways of thinking yes and that is really what their value is they they put us in touch with something that is other than us yeah it is beyond us and beyond the very limited set of things that we can never leave by just doing the normal things we do yes and the trouble is that we've somehow it's got around that if you're clever in other words very left hemisphere and actually less intelligent and less in fight cycle you don't even think about this in because then already Rick yeah but actually all those things if you attend to them are speaking to you about things that I think are very real and very important and indeed are not in any way in conflict actually with science the biological sciences have got a bit stuck in a time warp they're still very much in thrall to basically a 19th century mechanical world picture yeah which physics drops over a century again yep and in physics we're beginning to see that everything is in relationship that actually this very hard substance is hardly anything there there are things that are relating to one another doing something very much like as I was saying a sort of choreographed yeah a piece of music the the images are often used yet and by physicists as well as by them you know but it's yes these points do come very close and there's a sort of message that's often put about over people talk like that but of course no real physicists actually will countenance that there's any real coming together of that kind of a philosophical out look and what we really know for modern physics that is not you hmm I can I can give 30 to 40 examples of absolutely top physicists who would not throw their hands up in despair yeah there's quite an interesting that I just tell you a very little anecdote and three or four years ago I gave the Vice Chancellors lecture at a British University and because it was a named lecture I thought I'll do what I don't normally do which is write it down I normally speak off the cap yeah so I'd got my text and I arrived early was invited by the vice-chancellor to have a cup of tea and he introduced himself and said I'm a physicist and I thought Lord because he said but I I loved your book which actually a lot of physicists have written to me to say they find it particularly fascinating yeah which I didn't anticipate but in any case I thought oh gosh because in the text I'd written down I said at one point the right hemisphere creates a world in which it's almost like Schrodinger's cat doesn't have to be ever alive or dead yeah but the left hemisphere is the world in which it has to collapse into being alive or dead yeah and the vice-chancellor said I really enjoyed your book and I was thinking about it you know I think you could almost say that the right hemispheres world is like the one in which Schrodinger's cat doesn't have to be alive and the leftovers of the one in which it has to collapse in to be one or the other and so I went ahead said it at the lecture yeah and by the way I have that on the authority of your physicists face so huge round of applause well it was a very nice moment of an age yeah I mean there's a serious point there which is that you know the point about the observer effect on a wave that it then becomes particulate yes that in putting a certain kind of attention on to the phenomenon we actually change it yeah yeah and so that thing that a wave is less determinate yes and it's not necessarily in that point or not in that process but once it's been observed it then has to be located in that point yeah which again it that's our involvement in everything not separates who are not separate and outside of it yeah but actually are taking office yeah so the the universe out there yeah has you and me and our world in it and we have it in us too yeah it's a seamless structure yeah there are nodes that you like in it we don't we call things yes things are particularly obvious little hard nuggets of this stuff yeah and but there it's all a relative method yes that is a relative matter yeah well that seems like the perfect place to end I think it's sometimes I think it's all sup in a way at least everything everything we've just been talking about so thank you very much thank you you

Channel: LUSH

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Id: 1kAlwrnpHIs

Length: 48min 40sec (2920 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020