Part 2/2 - Iain McGilchrist - "The Master and His Emissary"

I'm going to try and talk to you tonight about some ideas that I think have relevance to what I understand and I don't have a deep understanding of cause hips key the thing that of course I know best is his famous saying the territory the map is not the territory etc and I also discovered that I'm probably engaging in time-binding but you will see and I think how relevant the idea of the map and the territory becomes as I explained some of the ideas I'm here to talk to you about i think what i'm going to start with is a bit of a personal journey because it's sometimes it makes things easier to understand if you realize why it is that I ended up doing things especially if they're so formatively strange is to write a book about the difference between the two brain hemispheres and my scientific colleagues all stopped working on this topic a long time ago because they knew it was all rubbish and if I mentioned that I had an interest in lateralization their eyes would sort of glaze over with a mixture of boredom and pity and they would think what happened to poor Elmer Gilchrist well what happened was a sort of personal journey of a kind at school I was aware of a number of things about the world that I felt intuitively were true but they didn't follow from what I was being taught at school at all in fact they were probably incomprehensible in those terms strictly they were some ideas I can express quite succinctly the idea that the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts the idea that the world is not just inert and unresponsive to us particularly the natural world the idea that opposites tended to coincide as much as diverge that history moved in spirals rather than in linear trajectories and that the intellects tendency to abstract classify and generalize went in the precise opposite direction to the business of the cosmos as I perceived it which was all to do with embodiment differentiation and uniqueness so those were ideas that certainly went instilled into me and I don't think I read them anywhere in particular but they've stayed with me all my life and latterly I've discovered philosophers who will give me very good reasons for believing these things but I'm not sure that that's ever been why I believe them they were probably intuitions of what I suggest was going on in a part of the brain part of my mind that was observing understanding but not able to articulate because of my interest in this I well let me be frank I thought I was going to be ordained and become a monk and it's a jolly good thing for everybody including me that actually that's an idea I abandoned as I got to university and discovered I probably wasn't made out of the right stuff mm-hmm but I did go approach Oxford to read philosophy and theology and I went up for interview and my interviewers were Toni Quinton the philosopher and I because I had to do the entrance exam in a school subject which wasn't philosophy or theology I chose English almost at random and so I was examined by John Bailey who's nowadays best known as the husband of Iris Murdoch which is in fact a very distinguished literary critic in his own right what he's now died alas and christopher tolkien son of JRR who was destined to become my saxon tutor and they said look you can't do philosophy and theology it's not an honours degree you must do an honours degree well it makes me very strange in an error in which you can literally look it up get an honours degree in frisbee that you couldn't in 1971 in Oxford get an honours degree in philosophy in theology what Tony Quinton suggested was that I did PPE philosophy politics and economics but having not the slightest interest in either politics or economics I thought this was a bad idea and I was persuaded out to do English which I did um but I found there were certain problems with it I very much enjoyed my time and on the basis of it I got a fellowship at All Souls College Oxford as you've heard and I wanted to articulate their some of the problems I'd had with the business of academic liquid it seemed to me that people in the past who lived before me had written things because they wanted to communicate something a very deep and special importance and that that something was embodied in the work of art in the poem in whatever it might be in a piece of music of course or or a painting but in my case as a literary critic usually in a poem and apart from being embodied it was also implicit if you try to paraphrase it the meaning disappeared like explaining a joke it lost all its power and on top of that it was entirely unique if Hardy had not written poems if Hopkins had not written poems we couldn't have imagined them there'd be a hot hardy or Hopkins shaped hole in the universe where their work belongs and that's true I think of all great art that it can't be substituted or in any way it has a uniqueness about it so there's the work of art unique embodied and implicit and along comes the critic and turns it into something general abstract and explicit and it seemed to me this was a very odd thing to be doing that worked in the exact opposite end to the work of art and explain why sometimes when you came to criticize great writers and I thought of Sam Johnson in particular and Lawrence Stern and the poet Wordsworth all of them at the top of what they did in terms of essayist novelist and poet when you started to write about them you found that they were full of all sorts of imperfections but you couldn't see really where the greatness of them lay and that led me to write a book called against criticism which was published by Faber in 1982 and was unceremoniously pulped about a couple of years later and it's rather gratifying to find that if you now want to buy a copy of it there is one on 8 books at the moment going for one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two pounds in any case I while I was trying to articulate these ideas why is it that things are different when they're implicit from when they're explicit why is it that things are disembodied and decontextualized as soon as we start to think about them I was really struggling and trying to find ways of expressing it because language kept taking me back to the idea that no the whole is just the sum of the parts you take the thing out of the context it's still the same thing etc etcetera and I was sitting at lunch I had the good fortune to be sitting at lunch with a very fine sign ologist David Hawkes a great Chinese classical scholar and he was asking me very kindly about my work I explained my problem he said oh the Chinese have words for the things that you can't say in English which made me think and for a while I thought of becoming a Scientologist but I I have a tendency to become a sort of eternal student it probably wouldn't have been a good excursion at the time what really struck me was that was the problem was something to do with the mind-body relationship that their work of art even the literary work the poem was a very physical thing that it affected you physically and it was itself physical it could be several eyes it had an effect on your blood pressure on your pulse on your breathing it could make the hair stand up on your body it could bring tears to your eyes just in reading it and speaking it you could feel the skeletal musculature responding as in a kind of dance to the words so it was something wrong with this and I started to go back to my earlier interest in philosophy this time with psychology and I went to the various seminars on mind-body relationship but in brief I found them all to disembodied in their approach I could have sat in an NN seminar room in Oxford underground for years talking about embodiment without really getting there and of course in those days and probably still actually in Oxford and merleau-ponty was either unmentioned or certainly not a core part of what anyone would have considered it was all the rather to me arid tradition of anglo-american analytic philosophy but what struck me was the very practical work of Oliver Sacks and it was around the time that awakenings came out and if you haven't read it I do recommend it if you've seen the film that's got nothing to do with it largely because much of the beauty of it lies in its extensive footnotes which in those days he was allowed to put at the bottom of the page where I wanted to put mine and I found it a wonderful read and it inspired me that here was somebody who could write about embodied being that connected the mind and the brain and the body as one and I've determined that really the way to do this was to go off and study medicine and work at the interface between neurology and psychology so I did that and I ended up at the Maudsley where I was under the tutelage of Professor Alvin lachemann very great figure in the history of organic psychiatry in fact he wrote the classic text organic psychiatry and organic in those sort of slightly loaded idea because those days people thought there were sort of mental conditions and brain conditions but there but in any case it was looking at the brain roots of psychological state psychopathological states and during that period in which I was learning psychiatry um and I'd done a bit of neurology and neurosurgery very briefly before I went there at the Wessex neuro Centre and I was very interested in this whole business of the brain that's effect on on our thinking and particularly by the idea of lateralization partly because of some things I'd noticed in my patients anyway one day there was a poster up saying that a man I hadn't heard of dr. John cutting who was a member of the Institute of Psychiatry was going to give a lecture on the right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders now that intrigued me because in medical school and we'd learnt a lot about the left hemisphere but the right hemisphere didn't do anything it was a sort of bit like those maps in the old days where it said here be dragons that was nobody had any idea really what it was for probably it was the sort of companionship exercise and if anything went wrong with the left hemisphere the poorer right hemisphere which weren't much good for anything would step in and try and take over so I was intrigued that here was the psychiatrist's going to talk about the right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders and I went along and I could hardly believe what I heard it was a literally life-changing event and I could so easily have just had another cup of coffee but anyway there I was and what he was saying he just completed writing a book published by oup called the right cerebral hemisphere in psychiatric disorders you'll be amazed to learn and it's become a classic in its own right and what he talked about was which I hadn't heard in medical school that the right hemisphere had all sorts of qualities the reason I hadn't heard about them was because most medics are in a hurry I mean they're practical people they've got a lot to do and if somebody has a left hemisphere stroke quite often they can't speak and they can't move their hand and even a busy medic can spot that but what happened after a right hemisphere straight you went to the bedside and the patient said they were fine thank you and you sent them home actually it turned out that they were not find at all and that is much more difficult to rehabilitate people after right hemisphere strokes than after left hemisphere strokes even though the left hemisphere stroke involves loss of speech loss of use of the right hand for most people pretty critical anyway John had spent 20 years sitting at the bedside of people who'd had disorders of the right hemisphere and noting what happened to their world and the fact is that their whole world changed if I can give you a soundbite after losing faculties in the left hemisphere what happens is you can't utilize the world you can't manipulate the world using your right hand and using language but you can understand it fine what I'm saying is a bit of a generalization but it's broadly right and after a right hemisphere stroke or injury the world itself is completely different in many ways and some of the ones he mentioned were that you no longer can read implicit meaning you can't understand anything unless it's absolutely literally spelt out that after a right hemisphere stroke tone in the sense of both the way in which something is said the tone of voice in which it said and whether there's irony sarcasm humor all those things disappear you can't read faces or body language which is the other very important implicit ways in which we communicate in which we're in fact said to communicate more than we ever do by language he was saying the right hemisphere is interested in the unique case the left hemisphere wants to generalize from those unique cases and he said the right hemisphere is more in touch with the body it is actually the hammer that has the body image in it which is not just a visual image it's an image in all sensory modalities and it has richer connections with the limbic system and through that to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis which governs the body's autonomic responses all this was totally fascinating to me because what I realized was the right hemisphere can't speak but it sees all these things it sees the implicit it sees how the whole is not what is broken up into parts it sees things in context it sees things as embodied so afterwards I went up and had a few words with him and I lent him a copy of my book against Christian which he kindly read and found interesting and we worked together for a while on research projects which he very generously allowed me to take part in and it began the beginning well it was the beginning of my 20 year attempt to familiarize myself with the literature on hemisphere difference which was a difficult thing because most neuroscientists weren't interested in giving you any advice on it except not to touch it with a barge pole and when you actually went to the literature most of the stuff one had was going back a little in time because people had been frightened off the topic however I found that them there were animal ethologist who were interested in it and that gave me a lot to think about anyway in the middle of all this I was offered them a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins and I went over there to the neuroimaging lab and who worked on abnormalities of asymmetry in the brain and schizophrenia one of the interesting findings in schizophrenia is that the normal asymmetry of the brain is either reversed or absent and that was a fascinating thing in itself and I spent time imaging various areas of what's called hetero modal Association cortex which are the areas of the brain which are supposedly involved with the highest level at which we bring our experience to gathering consciousness and these are interestingly all in asymmetrical areas and they're all the areas that are particularly significantly aberrant if you like in schizophrenia while I was at Johns Hopkins I was thinking a lot about American life which differed from English life the first thing was I found that if I may say so in your company that sometimes I was misunderstood because what I was saying was ironic or implicit and a lot of people looked at me in a very puzzled way for Christ's long time then I realized I think I'd better drop that and just state exactly what I what I mean and I noticed also that in the university there were interesting handbooks being given around to the students I'm explaining how to date a member of the opposite sex now I do understand the worries that are behind this and they're very legitimate ones and I don't want to take away from that but it does seem to me that there's something up with the human race when one has to read a handbook on how to and as it were approached a member of the opposite sex but what I was getting at was that the seem to be a tendency because America was always the future whatever happens in America five years later it hits us in Europe I think my god and we're entering into the era of extraordinary explicitness about everything and abstraction generality so I was fascinated to receive an excited postcard from John cuttings was longer from email saying I've just read the most extraordinary book and you must read it immediately and and what was that book it was a book which just came out in the air I was in Hopkins 1992 a book called madness and modernism subtitled insanity in the light of modern art literature and thought by Lewis SAS SAS is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers and this book was the other changing point in my intellectual career I spent two years reading it thinking of about it and generating a review of it in one of the London journals the London Review of Books but in the process it completely altered the way I thought about many things it's an incredibly rich book if you don't know it again you must read it it's beautifully written it draws together psychology philosophy the arts in a way that is seldom achieved and I found it packed with insights so this set me thinking because what the thesis of this book was that there were very strong parallels between the phenomenology of schizophrenia and modern life modernism and its ways of thinking behaving and responding to the world now that was extraordinary because of course we haven't all suddenly developed schizophrenia but in terms of what I was working on in the brain and it's something that Lewis s hinted at in an appendix the right cerebral hemisphere is what is clearly not functioning properly in schizophrenia so another way of looking at we behave in a rather schizophrenic like way or think in such a way is that we are thinking in the way behaving in the way viewing the world in such a way as someone would who had damage to their right hemisphere and a sort of pathological overdrive of their left hemisphere I was electrified by this idea and immediately started thinking back through the work I'd done in the history of ideas and the history of literature to think how in other eras knowing what we know about the two hemispheres would one see them how would one see the evolution across time of a different preponderance were the times when things were more in balance whether even times when the right hemisphere as it were led it turned out that the world that's something I can comment on later but there were certainly times when things were very much more balanced and then they are now and so I wrote this very long hubristic book modestly entitled the last room his emissary the divided brain and the making of the Western world in which I run through the history of the Western world from the Greeks through to the Renaissance the Reformation the Enlightenment romanticism modernism and post-modernism absurd task of course in half a book 300 pages but what I do is to do it simply through the lens of what we have learnt about the two hemispheres now what have we learnt about the hemispheres the the internet is full of material of this kind and this one I put up with the health warning right and wrong and but it comes from one of the best websites actually but I'm afraid it's out of Bologna and there is actually only one one pairing there that is correct and I'll offer a free pizza to anyone who can spot it but basically at sorry free pizza for that man but actually all the others are complete and utter nonsense so forget just about everything you've heard about the division of the brain of course the first question is why is the brain divided at all it's not a question I'd ever heard anyone ask it's just assumed that there is almost as though embryology made it that way and that's the way it's got to remain but of course lots of things in embryology or in history as it were in the in the history of mankind were took a completely different form from the one in which they end up in the modern adult human being so there's a puzzle because here you see this rather lugubrious looking gentleman has allowed the top of his head to be taken off and the scalp peel down and his impatient for the procedure to be able but the here you see that the left hemisphere has been drawn aside to reveal the corpus callosum in the middle there which has a band of fibers that connects the hemisphere they're Bay's only 2% of neurons are actually directly connected across this structure and one of the puzzles about it is that over evolution the size of it in relation to the brain has got smaller not larger and that also much of its function is in fact inhibitory although excitatory neurons cross the the corpus callosum often glutamatergic which is an excitatory neurotransmitter they in most cases are then going to be mediated via at least some neurons which are inhibitory GABAergic neurons so this is a very interesting thought because if the brain exists to make connections that's its entire purpose and its entire power exists in doing so why have this bipartite stratagem and one I just put this up briefly to suggest that although connections across the brain are going to be important there are massively important tracks that unify each hemisphere as a unit on its own these are late myelinating they are highly developed they're very important for the developed human adult the uncinate fasciculus and the superior longitudinal fasciculus and when I say myelin 8 that means there she's in white myelin which is makes them transmit fast so these are like super highways of the brain and they are and the reason I put it up really is to illustrate that a hemisphere is not just a lot of little modules working on their own which is highly interconnected within itself much more so than it is connected with its opposite number and of course this goes with the knowledge we have from people who have had a hemisphere destroyed by disease or by surgery for epilepsy and in these cases a single hemisphere is able perfectly able to sustain the consciousness of a human being of course there are interesting things that happen as a result of that I'm not going to particularly go into those tonight some of them will be familiar to you this is really just to emphasize that the brain is asymmetrical and we're looking at it from the bottom here somebody once said to me what's that interesting white button on top of the brain it's not actually not execute white button on top of the brain it's the top of the brainstem so you're looking up your own spinal cord at the base of the brain and by a helpful anatomical convention the right hemisphere is on the left and the left is on the right and but what you see there is that if you compare the posterior part of the brain which is towards the bottom of the picture on the right and the left you'll see it's more extensive on the left it's more expanded and it's pushes back and over the midline and this was always said in medical school to be because of the important thing about humans is they have language and language has to be kept under one roof and it just happened to be under the roof of the left hemisphere and it's caused about well about it or not that's built and I will talk more about why it is later and what was not talked about in medical school was the biggest asymmetry in the brain which is actually in the right frontal cortex if you look at the top of the picture and compared at the front of the brain there the right hemisphere which as I say is on your left is broader and juts forward more than the counterpart on the left that was ignored largely because it was an embarrassment because of course we know the right hemisphere doesn't do anything so and this is the book in which I dared to suggest that there was something going on and the best 10 quid or $10 I think now the exchange rate is since brexit so best 10 dollars you will ever spend and so to begin with I I needed to get a bearing on this and I went back to the animal ethologists there are a lot of very good scientists there humbler people I think that some of the human neuroscientists human neuroscientists rather proud log and they don't like the fact that people do things like have an advert the Volvo car for your right brain Jacky we can't get that and so please don't touch it and but however animal ecologist us did what scientists pace to do which is to observe and record and have a think so they would did a lot of observing and recording and having a think and what they discovered was that bears and animals tend to use their right and left hemispheres for quite different things it's easy to spot this in many birds and in some animals when they have eyes on opposite sides of the head the reason being that the right eye wires across straight to the left hemisphere and the left across to the right hemisphere unfortunately it's not that simple in human beings because we have eyes on the front of our heads partly so that we can judge distances when swinging from branch to branch as I usually do on a Sunday afternoon and that process involves a business where the left visual field of each eye goes to the right hemisphere and the right visual field of each eye goes to the left so it's slightly more complicated anyway back to birds and animals you can actually see what they're doing and what was this big difference well they were solving a very important problem of survival they were solving sorry they were involved in a Darwinian solution to the conundrum how do I eat and stay alive and I know that doesn't look difficult here tonight but but it is actually a very difficult problem for most creatures because in order to eat or indeed to get things to manipulate pick up a twig to build a nest you've got to have a very narrowly focused very sharply focused attention to a tiny detail that seed against that background of grid whatever and if that's all you're doing while you're getting your lunch you'll soon become somebody else's so you have to have a different kind of attention at the exact same time which is broad open non-committed as to what it will find and the only way that can actually be achieved is by having two neuronal masses each capable of attention which means each capable of consciousness because attention is simply how you apply your consciousness to the world and able to do so differently at the same time that ladies and gentlemen in brief is my hypothesis as a way we have developed why all creatures that we have looked at have two separate neuronal masses and of course they've developed their own special I will come on to their own special qualities in human beings but broadly speaking that is a deep reason for a profound difference that lies at the heart of every living thing now that attention changes the world the reason I put this fellow up here by the way it is he's a called the common garden lizard is a bit bit bit of a shame he's rather a fine chap but anyway what he what he does is he looks out for predators well he's getting a fly and so you can experiment with him and what they did was they brought in an image of a predator and they put it on the side where the left where the left I would normally regard the thing and that left eyes of course feeding to the right hemisphere which is interested in watching out for the broad picture the broad sustained vigilance for predators but experimentally they taped over the left eye and what this guy does is even though he's spotted that by looking straight ahead he sees as the predator he tries to eye it with the left eye preferentially to the right hemisphere even though his left eye is not available and you can also see birds and animals using tools explain why that's significant using like sticks and they use the right sorry the right I the which means generate speaking to the left hemisphere in most of you Spurs they will do that even when doing so is more difficult even when it makes the task more difficult so there is a distinction I may come back to that now this is the place I left yesterday yes it was yesterday morning Canada we can't believe it anyway this is the place I left and this is a place called talisker on the Isle of Skye mmm those who know your whisky will recognize the name well anyway the name talisca is given by this sloping mountain which is behind my house because Telus care in Norse means the sloping rock and what that means is that this mountain meant something very specific to the Norseman that came there a thousand years ago which was that this Bay is notorious for shipwrecks and this was the landmark that meant safety or danger so it had very specific meaning to them we know also that there were pigs living in the shadow of it because their brock's are still there to this day and to them this mountain meant shelter and it meant the home of the gods in the 18th century travelers started to come and draw and paint and for them it was a many colored many textured form of beauty to geologists who started coming around the same time it is an extraordinary exemplary in fact example of columnar basalt formation and to a speculator it's a million bucks if you can get that basalt out over my dead body and to a physicists of course who knows really what things are it's 99.99% space and the rest of it is only probably there we don't know what it's like so all of those are perfectly real descript a mountain none of those is more real than any other they are each graphically valid experiences of that mountain and just saying well it's really just a lump of rock doesn't help at all because that's already loaded with all kinds of values of its own and there's a very very special way of thinking about it in fact you'd have to be pretty much autistic to think of it in that way so what it occurred to me rather late in the day because I was a bit slow on the uptake was this difference in attention is well changing literally because the world is only composed by our attention we only know the things that we do and we only know them by the way we attend to them and how we attempt to the changes what there is so these two hemispheres should subtend two completely different worlds does that make sense well how are we supposed to know what's what and where do you begin I rather like this picture by Asia because it suggests that there is no single truth that we can establish and then work forward immaculately down the road to truth and in an obsessional way making sure of each step before we go because everything begs its own foundations it's like that serpent that eats its tail we have to make a leap into understanding at some point we can't have a privileged path now the interesting thing about that it is that when you leap in depending on the attention you pay you will see certain things and not others and they will be the things that respond to the kind of attention you're paying so if you think this body this human body is a machine then you are modeling it on a machine when you come to look at it you find all sorts of aspects of it that seem mechanical of course you do because that's the way you're looking at it and the more you do that the less you see anything else and the more you think the machine model is brilliant and that will work with whatever model you start with because it helpfully obscures all the things that don't fit with the model and as they say to a man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail so how you start to look at the world really makes a difference the right hemisphere is as I say the one has this broad open attention but the left hemisphere has an attention to getting things and it controls for most of us the right hand with which we grasp things and its mode of vision is very narrow about three degrees out of the 360 arc is that I shouldn't say vision I should say attention the attentional arc is narrow and after a right hemisphere stroke people have what's called a pathological narrowing of the window of attention so for the left hemisphere a leads to B as my intention to get that insect means I grab it and pick it and eat it but for the right hemisphere that sees a whole complex interconnected living world a doesn't lead to be in fact it looks like it takes quite a detour and such as my uber had to take getting me back from lunch today and yes okay I'm going to suggest that one of the things that happens I'll explain what I mean by this is that the right hemisphere gives depth to life in every sense of that word depth Isaiah Berlin commented that depth is a very important idea that philosophers hardly ever deal with and nonetheless it can't be substituted by any other idea when you say that something is deep you don't just mean that it's clever or interesting or beautiful or special you mean something rather particular and in three very obvious ways depth disappears from the world when there is damage to the right hemisphere one who steps in space another is depth in time and I haven't got a lot of time to go into that sniper but I'm writing a book about it and depth in feeling in emotion so emotion and relationships the world becomes superficial vision becomes flattened as if virtual or on a screen and time becomes segmented into a series of stills it becomes digitalized rather than analogous and this illustrates at least the spatial aspect quite nicely it's from Gazzaniga and LeDoux here you have a patient before the split brain operation this was a an operation that was instigated in Caltech in the 1960s by Jo bogan and got Roger Sperry a Nobel Prize for the work he did on the patients who had the procedure because after this procedure which involved cutting the corpus callosum separating the two hemispheres it was possible to interrogate one hemisphere at a time and it was how we began to know something about hemisphere differences Sperry himself thought the two hemispheres not only that thought differently but actually had different personality characteristics and different values so that was an interesting observation which has gone out of fashion but is beginning to come back in again as we learn more anyway here you have a patient before the operation preoperative the top line so they've been asked to draw a cube and you can see that both the left hand and the right hand do a passable job representing a cube as it's experienced but after the operation it's only the left hand that gets input from the right hemisphere the right hand no longer gets input from the right hemisphere that would require the corpus callosum to be in tact and so the right hand just draws what a child draws what it knows a flattened out cube the hand that all its life has been drawing cubes can no longer do it now really it's awful to do this but because you're so kind as to invite me here and because I owe it to you to try and compress as much as I can into this I'm going to go very quickly through what the specific hemisphere differences are it'll sound extremely simplistic it will sound much too definite but believe me to make it substantiated and suitably NU'EST would require 600 pages fortunately I did that earlier so you can give so one of the main differences is between the known and the new and in each case abandoning the anatomically unhelpful convention I am putting the left on the left and the right on the right so in each of these dichotomies or dipoles if you like those they're not really dichotomies that I'm putting up there are dualities if you like of ways of thinking about the world if I had to talk to you about it in a quick and dirty fashion I'd say the right hemisphere is interested in the new and the left in what is already familiar this is this is a literal neuropsychological fact Elkin on goldberg a very famous american neuroscientist spent a decade researching this and can show that any new experience before it is conceptually dead before it is categorized pigeon-holed when it's still alive and in that moment of presencing is more experienced by the right hemisphere than the left and as it becomes familiar one of those it shifts over into the left hemisphere of course this follows partly from the fact that new things tend to come from the periphery and the right hemisphere sees the periphery another difference which goes with it is that the left hemisphere prefers what is certain the right what is possible Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the devil's advocate because it's always going but it might or it might not be the left hemisphere is going for God's sake I've got to make up my mind it's got to be black or white and you understand why that makes sense eeveelution really because if it's the one that's involved in manipulation in predation if it's got to get that thing before the next gets it then it's got to be quick in debt it's no good going well it looks like a rabbit but I suppose it could be a guinea pig and I've never liked the flavor of guinea pig so it's got to be you know so and one interesting way one could think about this philosophically as many disputes in philosophy are about whether you really take a view of trying to close down on a certainty or open up to a possibility and I would say that the left hemisphere helps to close down to a certainty and the right to open to a possibility I must say that we need both of these things we wouldn't get anywhere if everything was constantly new it's got to be familiar to us to some extent for us to be able to operate in the world we have to have a degree of certainty but we also need to be open to possibility so we need both that's why actually we've got both so to the this famous illustration will made famous by victim Stein and you know the right hemisphere is perfectly happy that this could be a duck or it could be a rabbit but the left hemisphere is not happy at all it's going make up your mind so one of the other differences which again sort of goes with this is that the right hemisphere is interested in flow and the left in fixity now flow is a fascinating topic about which I'm really interested and I'm writing at the moment but I can't go into it in great detail but basically flow is the right hemisphere suggestion that everything is changing everything is mutable nothing is fixed or certain but the left hemisphere is able to deal with things that are static and fixed now in everything from a molecule to a cell to a human being to a society we need a proper balance between flow and fixity fixity and everything ossifies too much flow too much change in this chaos so we need to have these things properly negotiated and in the phenomenological world they're both very important this illustrates what happens sometimes with the right posterior tumor or stroke you develop something called well they're actually the number of different syndromes but essentially there's one called pala nopsi which is quite interesting where the you see after images of things so you see this hand moving as a succession of trails rather than as a single flowing motion the right hemisphere tends to see things as a whole in the left as the parts I mean literally in terms of the body the left sees the body is composed of a hand an arm a chest that you know etc etc whereas the right hemisphere sees the body as a whole and in general the right hemisphere has what's known as I'm sure you know the sketched out perception whereas the left tends to do things Cyril II and analytically hands up anybody who knows this picture yes not everybody so it's worth putting up and anybody frankly puzzled as to what it shows yep yep okay and I'm going to step down for a second from the microphone here is its snout there's this ear there's its back hind legs from the war legs sniffing the ground in the shade of a tree now at very pleasingly there were a number of aha coming from you because that is what psychologists being an imaginative lot refer to as the aha moment at which you which you see the thing as a whole and you don't get that by going this little black spot is part of a dog this little black spot is part of shade you simply can't do it it's it's M it's got to be seen as a whole and when you have that pleasurable moment of insight which you also get in solving a mathematical problem doing a cryptic crossword or whatever it might be it actually excites the right superior temporal sulcus and the right amygdala it's the right hemisphere that sees the ghost out and this is just to demonstrate that there is a normal hierarchy of attention you see the whole first not the past most of us see the h's before the ease before before the AIDS um and this is a bit like you know you don't go home to your living room and go in and go a sofa a TV a lamps it's my living room you go in knowing what it is and you then direct your attention to what captures your attention so we generally see it this way around there is an exception to this which is in schizophrenia which is a right hemisphere deficit state in which people focus on the detail first so if you saw the ease and apes and please have a quiet word with me afterwards I have to say because I am a medic in my duty of care is that there are many other reasons why you might attend say please don't lose any sleep these are all drawings done by people with right hemisphere damage so on the left you see a person in the middle you see a bicycle where the pedals are larger than the wheels and the wheels are above the pail so the sense of how parts are laid and their relative size and position is lost and on the right that's a house we know that because it's got one of those pointy things on it but that's about the only way you tell so this is actually taken from a internet YouTube element made of a talk I gave at the Royal Society of Arts in London and which some of you wouldn't have seen but it really is to illustrate not only that the right hemisphere has this open sustained broad alertness to the world whereas the right that's what the left hemisphere is narrowing down to just looking at a detail but that actually when patients have damage to their right hemisphere the left half of space disappears not because there's anything wrong with their vision they can't they won't here they can hear they can see but they won't attend either orally or visually two things going on over on the left you want to talk to them you've got to come over to this side that's it extraordinary fact it's not that there's anything wrong as I say with the senses it's that the attention is simply absent and this applies to their own body they will not attend to the left side of their own body sometimes so extremis is they'll forget to dress it wash it or shave it so and that the opposite doesn't happen when you have a left hemisphere stroke because the right hemisphere still preserves in the right hemisphere if you remember gets the whole picture the left half is only interested in a bit of space it can manipulate where the right hand goes to get things another differences between the explicit and the implicit and I think I've been over that explicit and implicit is very very important because most of the things that really matter to us from love to religion to sex to humor to art all depend on being implicit when they're dragged into the spotlight of attention are dissected they become something completely different the left hemisphere abstracts from context with the right hemisphere sees things in a living context the left hemisphere tends to want to make general rules and put things into categories where the right hemisphere sees the unique case and there are some rather sad instances of this I know two that come from Switzerland one was of a farmer who before his right hemisphere stroke was able to tell each of his cows by name but afterwards couldn't only with difficulty tell account from a horse and and a woman who'd made it her life's work to know and write about all the birds in Switzerland after her stroke said simply in words that almost bring tears to one sighs all the birds look the same and essentially the left hemisphere is interested in the how the quality the kind of the nature of something its disposition and character rarely left is interested in how many there are and the right hemisphere is mainly more interested in animate things in inanimate the left hemisphere deals with both but it is the only hemisphere to deal with tools and machines so strongest is that evening left-handers who are in daily life using their right hemisphere to control their left hand and therefore their tools and machines nonetheless code tools and machines in the left hemisphere not in the right and there are six studies I know on this and one of them makes a complete distinction between inanimate in the left and animate in the right but it's more of a tendency than an absolute one the left hemisphere is curiously optimistic and the right not exactly pessimistic but more realistic so for example there's a procedure that's done in neurosurgery when you have to operate on the brain you may want to know beforehand where the speech area is now in most right-handers the speech area is it left frontal cortex in Broca's area that's 97% of cases but there are still 3 percent have it in the left and in left-handers 60 percent still have it in the left hemisphere and 40 in the right so before operating sometimes people carry out a procedure in which they inject sodium amytal into the carotid artery of one hemisphere at a time and for 15 minutes or so the other hemisphere that sort of the hemisphere that's anesthetize is more or less not functioning and so you can tell where speech comes from but some enterprising neuropsychologist thought while we're doing that let's give them a personality inventory to each hemisphere and give it also to relatives and friends and it turned out when they looked at the results that the left hemisphere had a very high opinion of itself and which wasn't shared by friends and relatives alas the right hemisphere had a slightly pessimistic view compared with others but it was at least more realistic and this is a real problem because for example after a right hemisphere stroke one of the reasons is hard to rehabilitate people if they're not aware of what then they can't do they don't know what it is they don't know and so that can be a huge stumbling block and one of the most extraordinary examples of this is the way it leads to denial I don't have a problem so this is something that pretty much any medic in this room will have experienced you you you go on a ward round in the morning and somebody's coming in the night with the right hemisphere stroke so you go to the bed and you say how are you and they say I'm fine thank you and you go that's very good I'm any problems nope any problem specifically moving your left arm for example no no not at all would you like to move it then please and they go there see and you say sort of word didn't see it did you know now afraid we didn't see it could you do that again oh those take the arm bring it round in front of them and say now move that and they say oh that that's not my arm that belongs to the bloke in the next bed and being serious these are not people who are mad it's just that the left hemisphere finds it very difficult to accept that there's anything wrong that might ring a few bells as I continue now the the overall most important one is the one that you've been waiting for and it is really intrinsic to the whole thing which is that the left hemispheres world is a virtual world it is a map of the world it is like a map simple maps are not better for having too much detail they are better for simplifying they show a few theoretical ideas but the reality of what the terrain on the ground is like is quite different from what's on that map and when things are present or as Heidegger would have said presence to us and he had to invent a verb and reason from the noun to suggest that there was this possibility of things presencing and it's not just being present which has a quite different sort of feel about it it's that the thing actually is immediately declaring itself to you and coming into being in your attention of it whereas a representin brief presentation is literally a presenting lot later something that happens afterwards so the left hand is always dealing with something that is beamed that as no longer alive or pertinent but is information that has been mapped and the right hemisphere with the immediacy of perceptual experience there's a lot to say about that but again you're getting a cook's to it well it's probably a very English expression Thomas Cook is a travel agent it goes back to the 18th century and you we said we say you get a cook stir it means you know sort of quick round the Mediterranean in seven days now so these are a little bit light relief in a way because I've been bit theoretical here is um drawings of a tree done by patients with different conditions and not in which they would experimentally had one or the other hemisphere suppressed so here we have a tree and you can see that the left hemispheres tree which is in the middle is not only only existing on the right which is rather nice but is also a deeply symbolic tree it's not actually like a tree is a rather withered whereas the right hemispheres tree on the right is a more flowing living thing which has a sense of the organic whole here you see the same thing with flowers which reduced to symmetrical geometric abstractions in the middle which is the left hemispheres version but still have the overall form of the whole on the right with the right hemisphere and this is to show depth as better done by the right hemisphere these are all by the left hemisphere and if you just concentrate for a moment on the right of the fourth column you will see what a person becomes the left hemisphere what a poor with a diagrammatic structure and that person that the whole of that lived human being becomes an incidental you can see on the left a few more flattened cubes which is a it just makes the point I made earlier now I want to make some reflections on Hemisphere and language just because you're I know very interested in that and and I want to just take you through quickly some ideas about it first of all language is not just in the absolute now go to the laws that happen very quickly and language is not just in the left hemisphere and so the story that it all had to be in that one place in the left hemisphere is wrong we know that lots of aspect of language subserved by the right hemisphere indirect meaning metaphor but also um prosody which is the intonation of the voice and any kind of meaning really which is non literal and explicit the left hemisphere has they both have semantics in the normal work add a sense of that word although the left hemisphere has more extensive semantics and the left hemisphere has very much more sophisticated syntax but it's certainly not a case of all being in the left hemisphere and indeed pragmatics which is how we really understand language the understanding of an utterance as a whole in context is very much right hemisphere driven so it's it's capable of understanding what a what an utterance means in context so for example I say it's a bit cold in here today and you think I'm offering with your left hemisphere interesting meteorological information but what I'm really saying with my right hemisphere to your right hemisphere is could we turn down the air conditioning a fraction because I I'm feeling frozen so actually that you don't have to do anything to it I'm feeling fine um but there are problems with that left parietal expansion being due to language you know remember I showed you that pier that bit of the brain does expand on the left in medical school it's all about language well first of all we know that you don't have to just put language in the left hemisphere lots of it's in the right so the idea that has to be an asymmetrical expansion doesn't wash anyway but get this we know that skulls of pre-linguistic man show that that expansion existed then and we also know from scanning bonobos chimpanzees gorillas that they have it and attempts to make them speak have not been successful they don't have a language so both hemispheres are actually involved in this business of language in different ways also it's been thought maybe that left hemisphere expansions to do with handedness but no it's there as I say in Apes that don't make tools and although some of them begin I suppose and but it really can't be the explanation of it and bizarrely is not actually an expansion this is really extraordinary thing it's not that the left hemisphere is expanded at all it's at the right hemisphere it has actually contracted contralaterally to it and we know something like 30 odd 36 or so genes that are involved in that process of asymmetry there and 32 of them are to do with making the right hemisphere contract and when there's a failure of a symmetry is not that you get to small regions as you get to large regions so actually having an asymmetry in which something contracts is is important so what was the underlying cause of this and what do we know about language well we know that 500,000 years ago long before anthropologists believe that could have been language Homo heidelbergensis had a big brain actually slightly bigger than ours and managed to do something rather more successful than we've done which to live together socially for hundreds of thousands of years without destroying the planet and so they lived as social animals how did they communicate the answer that's rather odd and but seems to be coming out of anthropology is through music there are two things you need for language one of them is the correct vocal apparatus but the other is control over ventilation or respiration over breathing now it would seem very difficult to know whether man at 500,000 years ago had the capacity for being able to speak but we know that they did and the reason we know that they did is that from looking at their skeletons nerves putting it simply get bigger when they have to do more work and if they pass through bone and they're bigger they have to make a bigger hole so there is a whole layer called the that is rather small in Apes and in animals that can't speak but it's large in humans and it was large in humans a long time ago and equally there are foramen are in the spine through which the nerves that give us control over our ribcage which enable us to speak long sentences or to see these are these were present we can tell from looking at the size of the foramina that they were there then and they're not now in the greater apes so the difference between us and them seems to be the capacity for language but without having language and what was that well the anthropologists say was music it was the ability to sing phrases long phrases and to be able to articulate and make and make sounds and through that we communicated one of the reasons we might think music came first is that music also is somewhat simpler in its syntax than language and in general there is a principle it's not an in violent one that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny which means that in each growing being we recapitulate some of our ancestry some of you will know others of you may be surprised to learn that in the utero in utero you had a handsome tail at one point which you then lost before being launched on the world so in as we know newborns are very good at music they're not good at language and their mothers instantaneously know how to respond to this in something called motherese which is a kind of language that has very large pinch excursions and is accompanied by rhythmic sounds and very vivid facial expressions so this musical communication is what babies and their mothers do all the time and the baby that can't understand language knows the mother's voice if from from from the moment it's born it can tell the mother from others and it also prefers hearing its own language spoken because in the utero it has heard its own language and therefore prefers to hear even though it hasn't learnt language things being read in that language so I know this isn't what Steven Pinker says who said that music is just an exaptation of language which is about as useful as pornography or cheesecake and I'd rather go with jean-jacques rousseau Alexander Humboldt and Otto Jespersen who all thought that the music was probably more important than language in terms of evolution and it also explained something that I learnt at school it was very odd which was that first of all poetry always used to be sung and that poetry came before prose that was a very odd thought indeed but in fact the Greeks called prose they had to find a special term for it because most communication Britain and and formal was in a kind of music or verse and they called the kind of written discursive language pesos logos which means the walking logos not the dancing logos and another thing you might think about is can animals communicate without language it's always been said to be you know we have language and we can communicate but animals can't but bonobos actually have highly sophisticated social arrangements with one another which they do manage without language killer whales can actually orchestrate attacks using musical sounds and pre-linguistic children as those of you who have toddlers will know can communicate their meanings quite emphatically without language stroke sufferers who have lost language are still even though the double disadvantage of living in a world that's geared to language and knowing that their listeners don't understand things and less sex who expressed in language they're still able to make their needs known and this is where we come to that slide this is Dan Everett in the Amazon with the Peter ha who are a tribe who do have a verbal language but they also communicate using music and they use music over very large distances because music can convey meaning in the forest to others who are hunting and it's quite specific and it is just done through pitch tone and using the mouse to make different sounds so what I would say is that language is not necessary for communication particularly in the I thou situation if you're in my presence language is not really the important thing and there are certain relationships those with lovers and those with patients that are very difficult done over the telephone but because a lot of the important information is simply phased out a lot of the tonal subtlety and of course you can't see the person and so on so you can't see that face you can't see what this pause means so we communicate very well face-to-face in ways that don't necessarily depend on language in fact language can be an impediment we go I don't know how to put it and I can't find the words and all the earth but when we are plotting together about it the third person the that that's over there or him that we don't like then having language is very important so we don't need language for communication but do we need it for thought well I think this is a problem of introspection when we introspect we think we need words in order to understand but in fact we don't many great mathematicians and scientists amongst them Vile Parle hey Einstein and calculate and others have seen answers to scientific problems or complex mathematical problems in a flash they had an aha moment in their right hemisphere and spent literally weeks or months explaining how they got there or more accurately how they didn't get there in language again pre-linguistic men as they say we're able to live together perfectly well without language and pigeons can do the most extraordinary things without language animals of various kind can but I'm very impressed by pigeons there's a lot of them around in Trafalgar Square and then I think and I have a new respect for pigeons after writing this book because I discovered that of course pigeons have to carve up the world they have to be able to think about things and put them in categories but they can do some rather sophisticated stuff they can pick out an individual face in a crowd they can actually categorize works of art and they can tell a money from a Picasso and they can generalize from that from a Picasso to a brach and so forth and and in England the son II called the Turner Prize which is annually offered and I sometimes think that if they had a few pigeons on it they make fewer mistakes but and also cup you know a cup can tell jazz from bark you might say how do we know that well they get rewarded with a puck by they hit the puck with their nose and they get a little pellet of food if they get it right so we know they can tell these things apart they can in fact tell the trout quintet from Muddy Waters apparently although I think that the experimenters must have had a bit of a sense of humor over that one anyway em also humans who have lost language don't lose theory of mind they're not incapable of understanding that someone else thinks something that I don't know and what they think as that and so they understand thoughts going on in other people's minds as well as their read without having the language and chimps can obviously think good reason about things but again they don't have language then there was the case of Jacques Lauda who was a professor of neurophysiology in Montpellier who had made a study of aphasic stroke the stroke that means that you cannot speak and afterwards he wrote a piece saying I can no longer say that language is important for thought because my thoughts were all there ready to go but I just couldn't find the words and interesting Li there are tribes like the moon ruku in the Amazon who have only one two three many and there are some of them that also speak Portuguese but they can solve certainly quite sophisticated mathematical problems up to the value of 80 and just as well as the Portuguese speaking ones and of course the Portuguese speaking ones have the whole language so again these things are not dependent on language so what it what does it do obviously it's not necessary for thought but it helps it helps to delineate areas of thought immeasurably and it helps us to communicate immeasurably more subtly but it's not for those things so what is it for well my suggestion to you is that language has a very intimate relationship with the hand language actually speaking arises in the brain right next to the area the right hand and as has been noticed in children Marcel kins born made this observation that children never babble without pointing and they never point without babbling it's thought also that actually speech comes from gestures of the hand robert chandran amazingly describes a woman who was born without limbs and yet when she speaks she can't stop her phantom limbs just stick you lating because it's so deep wired in the brain that these things connect with one another and syntax is thought to derive from movement of the limbs and of course in language we say I grasp it I understand it because ison in German compound in French comprehend which is to grasp something so there is a huge there's a whole slew of words in most languages that relate understanding to grasping something and therefore being able to manipulate it and one thing I thought might intrigue you is that Norman Geschwind a very great neurophysiologist and he said that probably we didn't have language for communication we had language in order to map the world in order to be able to use it I think that is a very profound remark so there's different kinds of language there's a language that brings precision and fixity which is mainly in the left hemisphere and there's a language that opens us up to what is beyond language which is really more important than anything which is metaphorical language and all language at base is metaphorical all language gets its meaning from metaphor if you know the work of somebody help me here like Aafrin Johnson metaphors we live by and philosophy in the flesh effectively they are pointing out that all language including and especially scientific and philosophical language is metaphorical in nature metaphors are not addressing for language a distraction they are actually the only way we can like a break out of the prison of language to the real world beyond it they are all rooted in the body even the word virtual comes from a man's strength even though we're material comes from wood you know here material so all these things are rooted in the body and the right hemispheres understanding use of language is embodied contextual rather than the detached now you've had a very long lecture and I'm just going to wind up in literally five minutes so I'm going to suggest I'm not going to talk at all about the second half from my book about the various developments through civilization I'm just going to ask you to do a thought experiment this thought experiment is suppose we'd stopped relying on the ways of looking at the world of thinking about the world that the right hemisphere enables and who got locked into thinking of a model which is conformity to the left hemispheres way of looking at the world what would that world look like well there'd be loss of the broader picture clearly knowledge would become replaced by information tokens or representations and wisdom would be right out because it's much too undependable personal and embodied and not easy to measure the we loss of the concepts of skill and judgment for the same reason and they'd be replaced by algorithms that a machine could carry out not well replaced but replaced and the beard simultaneous abstraction and reification we'd spend an awful lot of our lives in terribly rarefied staff endless managerial prose full of abstract nouns without any concrete reference and at the same time matter would be treated as mere lump and matter stuff there for us to exploit bureaucracy would have a field day because according to Peter Berger frame the sociologist and it depends on these things which are all essentially left hemisphere driven to be a loss of the sense of uniqueness which would be replaced by having to fill in a box and quantity would become the only criterion of measurement it would be hard to make a case for the quality of something and either/or would become the watchword what do you mean it's a bit of this and a that it doesn't fit in my box reasonableness would replace by rationality I just need to gloss that slightly in most languages there's a possibility of separating these things certainly in German there's a distinction to be made between fresh tunt which is more like rationality as I'm saying it and fern underst which is reason which used to be thought the chief aim of Education and the greatest achievement of the human mind and it was the bringing together of experience with the capacity to reason on the basis of that experience and but there are times when it is perfectly irrational to be rational and in the bedroom is a good start and and there are just plenty of places as you start to think about it where people are literally mad if they start to become over rational and DiMaggio wrote about a patient called Elliot who had to reason everything from first principles his life came to a standstill to be a failure of that distinctly uncommon thing these days common sense systems would be designed simply to maximize utility and social cohesion which depends very much on this empathic right frontal lobe in its ability to understand and communicate at a deeply empathic level with other beings would begin to be breakdown things would become less personal and the left hemisphere would feel that it couldn't control everything and would become paranoid paranoid psychosis when they happen after brain damage almost invariably happen after right hemisphere damage which is why in schizophrenia and there is often paranoia because there is a basically a right hemisphere failure and the left hemisphere overdraw drive therefore would be a lack of trust governance would want to have total control including DNA banks and CCTV cameras on every street corner and the general mode of intercourse would become that of anger and aggression because in fact the left hemisphere is not an emotive it is deeply emotive it gets very angry rather quickly in fact of all emotions anger is the most lateralized and it lateral eise's to the left we would see ourselves as the passive victims of other people's doings and it not me guv it's blocks the patient in the next bed art would become purely conceptual a visual art would start to lack a sense of depth of the be distorted or bizarre perspectives music would be reduced a little more than rhythm which is the only part of music that the left hemisphere is good at harmony and melody are highly dependent on the right hemisphere it's different in professional musicians but for most of us that is definitely the case and actually it's an interesting observation that harmony and perspective in space came in with the Renaissance and went out with the 20th century language would become diffused successive lacking in concrete reference like there's 25 lever arch files of procedures that I have signed off as having read but actually living somewhere recovered do we deliberate under casting of the sense of or wonder which just noise the pants off the left-hander so what do you mean you don't understand something it's just that we don't know enough yet but I think the wisdom of the right hemisphere the things are intrinsically unknowable intrinsically uncertain and intrinsically or inspiring flow would just become the infinite series of pieces instead of a living flow we'd be discarding all tacit forms of knowing life would become strangled by what de Tocqueville presently in 1830 whatever it was called a network of small complicated rules which will SAP the will of a people and we'd all as Descartes proudly said of himself become spectators rather than actors in the world sitting on the sofa with a six-pack and all this would be accompanied apparently by a dangerously unwarranted optimism now thank God we're not in that world but just imagine if we were thank you ladies and gentlemen

Channel: InstituteofGS

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Length: 80min 49sec (4849 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2016