"The Divided Brain" by Iain McGilchrist

well I think we'll get started this is an evening in English so there's no French translation of Ian's talk it's my very great pleasure to welcome your young McGilchrist to see ah spoke I think for the first time that he's spoken in France since the publication of the master in his emesis right that's right so in premier estas Poland that's very important and and and it's an illustration of the very broad range of speakers that CRO welcomes every weekend most weeks of the academic year and I'm delighted to see that so many people have come to listen to him because it's a very important message and he'll be able to give more of that message than I would never be able to hope to explain so my introduction is going to be very brief probably given the inquiries that I've been receiving over the last few months about this and related event tomorrow I almost believe that Ian McGilchrist doesn't need any introduction he's passionately interested readers tell me that they're great fans and they love the book and so on and so well I think he I'll give an introduction anyway because that's my task ian is a psychiatrist and the author of this impressively large and long book the master and his emissary the divided brain and the making of the Western world that much you know and if you so much as googled him you may have come across quite a large number of public talks given in various parts of the world including an extraordinary condensation of a talk given at the Royal Society of Arts which lasts in the version on YouTube 11 minutes and 3/4 I think something like at 11 minutes and 44 seconds or something like that and which gives you in a very small compass the-the-the the condensate of his of his of his book he was not always a psychiatrist and that's perhaps the first thing to say about Ian he was originally a literary scholar he studied English at Oxford he did rather well he was awarded a fellowship at All Souls which gives you the luxury of seven years where you can do more or less what you want including nothing and he interest he began by studying literary criticism in detail and found it rather wanting and decided that he would rather do something else and in particular and he will correct me if I'm wrong about this I think he discovered that literary criticism was somewhat destructive and what he wanted to do was to understand why he began by looking at the philosophy of mind and in particular the famous mind-body problem which has been with us since Descartes and didn't make much progress I think with the various Anglophone versions of that problem and turned instead shortly to phenomenology but eventually through in the academic towel trained as a doctor trained in medicine became a psychiatrist and over a very long period of time pursued a kind of double life if I understand this correctly of medical practice treating people with psychiatric and-and-and nurten and neuroses and psychoses and writing and researching the book which took him 20 years it was published in 2008 or 9 a new version was published this year it's a remarkable book it's had a huge effect on the public all over the world and and it's in in its a particularly important book for the understanding of the contemporary world he's gonna be saying more about this today for philosophical reasons and I'm by training a philosopher it interests me greatly because it provides us with a very different view of the soul from anything that people have floated as a hypotheses for explaining human thinking since Plato instead of giving us a unified soul unified by reason it provides us with a dual picture of the soul which needs complementarity but doesn't always achieve it I think the project and I think anybody who's read the book thinks that the project is enormous li absurdly ambitious and perhaps what's interesting is that in order to achieve that ambition it was necessary no doubt that somebody master several different disciplines and preferably very different disciplines at once in order to understand what's going on in our thinking today that makes the world such a complicated painful and and intractably incurable situation which we're living at the moment so I'll hand over the mic microphone would he's got his own Tim to Ian and allow him to explain the divided brain and its human meaning he will he himself will explain in what way his talk is perhaps slightly different from the one that was originally planned but I think we're going to benefit from that thank you yeah thank you very much hello bonsoir Monsieur Dan um excuse me you know Ruparel rate Paris on phone say Japan school compound rate Mira sitio para la notte a so shallow like a blonde common in shallow data be Jefferson Street cheese I don't think it'll give much pleasure anyway so yes I'm here really to talk about the book the mouse from his emissary and the thesis of it and why I wrote it and why I think it has meaning for all of us and there has been ups no that's not how you get to the next slide is it is going up and down instead of moving on to the next slide the physicist Paul Dirac was famous because whenever he went into the laboratory all the machines stopped working and I'm and I'm afraid I have the same effect on technology it's a kind of love-hate relationship we have and but in over history the twofold nature of the human being has been often commented on and here is your own countrymen Pascal the twofold nature of man is so evident that some have thought that we had two souls and there are similar comments by other philosophers including can't Goethe max Scheler and Beth song and so a number of people have noted this curious double nature of the human being over the years and this chimes with something to do I believe with the structure of what underlies our mind namely the human brain when I was in medical school it was never commented on that the brain is a divided structure I mean there it was it was divided but nobody said why is this entity that exists every to make connections why does it have a whopping great divided down the middle and here you see this rather lugubrious looking gentleman and not too happy at all about having his have meninges peeled back but here you see the structure of the brain and this will be a success for technology if we get this to work on it you can see in the middle there this this area the the left hemisphere has been pulled back to review the so called corpus callosum which connects the two hemispheres now although it contains a very long no fibers only about 2% of the neurons in the brain connect across the corpus callosum so there's a couple of interesting puzzles and oh yes this is a view of the brain looking from below so it's as though you were looking up your own spinal column at the base of the brain somebody once said to me what's that interesting white button in the middle of the brain but it's not a white button that's the top of the brainstem and in medical school it was pointed out that there was an enlargement here towards the back on the the left due to a helpful convention of neuroanatomy the left is on the right and the right is on the left it makes it easier for you to understand and this area here it was noted was expanded you can see it's broader here than on the right and that it juts somewhat back as soon as there's been an enlargement here and that was always said to be because of language and that's actually not true because for example gorillas bonobos chimpanzees also have this expansion but they don't have language but what was never mentioned was that this area up here is the most asymmetrical part of the whole human brain it's the right frontal cortex can you see it's much broader than on the left and again it juts forward and slightly over the midline as they've someone had got hold of the brain from below and given it a sharp twist a clockwise as a result of which is called yakovlev Ian's talk yakovlev Ian because yakovlev first described it now what's that about because if you wanted just to create more brain as we got apparently I'm told more advanced and you would have just expanded the brain symmetrically the box in which the brain is contained as human skull is symmetrical but the brain inside it is not so it's as though it's quite important that some bits are expanded on one side and some bits are expanded on the other why is that Oh No and then there is a third interesting point here we are looking at a slice through the brain an axial bit sorry a sagittal slice so you're looking from the side as though you cut the brain from the front to the back and on the left you see the brain of a dog and on the right you see a human brain now the thing that is of fascination to me is this area here is the corpus callosum that is the area that connects the two hemispheres but if you look at it it's not very different in size from the human one when you consider the enormous expansion of the human cortex in relation to that of the dog so there are three immediate puzzles that were to me fascinating when I studied medicine why is the brain divided at all why is it asymmetrical and why is the corpus callosum actually getting smaller in relation to the size of the brain rather than larger over human history and just to add to the mystery most of the traffic across the corpus callosum has an inhibitory effect rather than a permissive effect a lot of the fibers across the corpus callosum for the neuroscientists here are of course glutamatergic they're excitatory but they for a very large part of them are but on inhibitory GABAergic neurons and so the overall effect is to say keep out of this I'm dealing with it so there's an interesting thing going on about the relationships between the hemispheres now I thought this was something worth looking at and I'm glad to say that I'm not alone at the top is probably one of the most distinguished living British psychiatrist and neurosis Tim Crowe saying except in the light of lateralization nothing in human psychology or psychiatry makes any sense and below that is oh no gun token at boham in Germany who won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize which is German is most a prestigious prize for science for his work on lateralization in the brain so and he says hemispheric asymmetries pervade practically all major neural systems of the human brain there's hardly any perceptual cognitive or motor system that is not affected by left-right differences of at least some of its components so those are two enormous ly distinguished figures in their field unimpeachably worth listening to who clearly believe as I do that there is something here so when you hear people say are a synthesis of the brain left-right difference Nana doesn't mean anything it's all pop psychology tell them they just don't know enough yet now let me go on and there's a reason why people take this attitude because you can find on the internet a number of mmm helpful charts telling you what the difference between the right and left hemispheres are I've taken one of the better ones actually off the internet and I've retitled it right and wrong because with one exception everything on this list is wrong and I will offer a free pizza to anyone who can spot the one that is right also because I'm a Scot and rather mean I'm going to move on before you win the free pizza now I was advised very strongly by my seniors don't go near this topic it's career death don't talk about hemisphere differences and that's because all kinds of rather vulgar things that happened Volvo had produced a car for your right brain and of course once that sort of thing happens neuroscientists rather proud people they don't have anything to do with that but that didn't seem to me quite good enough and I spent 20 years basically researching and it issued in this book the most resembles fear published by Yale in 2009 and as Ronan was saying we had we published this year with a new introduction by me thank you I didn't pay this gentleman in fact I did in fact I don't even know who this gentleman is but he's very kind anyway and yes by a extraordinary coincidence he happens to have a copy of the book here but it costs about some 10 euros and it'll probably be the best purchase you ever make so how did I come to get more interested in this well to go back a bit as you heard I started a work in the field of English literature and this also was a bit of a sideways step because I went up to Oxford to study philosophy and theology because I thought the most interesting parts of philosophy were those that overlapped with theology and the most interesting parts of theology were those that overlapped with philosophy and my examiner said you're far too good to do that you can't possibly do that it's not an honours degree well in 1972 in Oxford philosophy and theology wasn't an honours degree nowadays you can get and this is a genuine fact you couldn't get an honours degree in frisbee but in those days you couldn't get an honours degree in theology and philosophy so I taken the entrance exam you had to sit an exam in a some sort of school subject to get in and I just happened to choose English and my examiners said well you team to do this rather well why don't you come and do that so I did and I loved it um but I found there was a curious problem with it and it's something like this if I put it very simply somebody in the past had written something very beautiful that they thought would have meaning for people who came after them and it's meaning lay in three aspects of it that were particularly important one was that it wasn't just abstract ideas but was embodied in the very words of the poem as music is embodied in the music and you appreciate music not just with your mind but with your body and you appreciate a poem with your body when you read poetry you're asked util musculature is reacting to it you're not aware of that your breathing changes your pulse rate changes your blood pressure changes the hair on your skin may stand up you may have tears in your eyes this is very embodied the second thing is that a work of literature is implicit as soon as you explain it you ruin it you know it's like explaining a joke once you've explained it it's no longer a joke and poems are like that once they've been explained they're no longer poems and actually all the really important things in life are like this sex is like that once it's put in the spotlight changes its nature love is like that religion is like that artists like that humor is like that and the third thing was that there was something unique about any successful work of art it couldn't be replaced by anything else let me try and think of a a French example perhaps Milan me if malhomme had never written you couldn't have imagined malhomme you could have imagined other parents but not his particular style and for me that was very very clear that there was something unique one of my favorite poets in English is Thomas Hardy who you may know of as a novelist or heard of as a novelist he's actually a much greater he's a great novelist he's a much greater poet he's one of the greatest Pope's in the English language and he's very unique he's eccentric I mean if his if he hadn't written there'd be a hardy shaped hole in the universe so so to cut a long story short works of art are embodied their implicit and they're unique and then in the seminar room we came along and what did we do we disembodied them we made them explicit and we generalized and categorized whatever we found and then we were surprised that we were left with a handful of dust now I left literature not because I don't like literature but I don't like operating on my friends in fact the English poet Ted Hughes read Kate English at Cambridge and he stopped after having a dream in which a fox came into his room and put it's bleeding paw on his essay and said why are you killing us so I thought well I don't want to be one of the murderers here but I at the same time something else was very interesting was going on I was thinking about what is it that's wrong with our approach to literature and my answer was really that in a way we divorced the mind and the body and as Ronan mentioned I then started going to all the philosophy seminars on the mind-body problem and I found their approach simply to disembodied and I wanted to do it in a more embodied way and what did that mean it meant studying medicine and seeing at firsthand what happens when something goes wrong with somebody's brain or body and it affects their mind and their person and what goes wrong when something happens to somebody's mind and issues in problems in the body at that moment Oliver Sacks had published his great book awakenings which if you haven't read it I very strongly recommend which managed to do something very beautiful which is to reflect philosophically on the meaning of illness and yet at the same time go maximally into the unique cases in front of him nobody has written better case studies not even Freud so I ended up deciding that I would have to study medicine I was 10 years older than most people when they started medicine but I thought I have to do it so I did it um and that took 6 years and then I studied neurology and neurosurgery a bit and then I went to the Maudsley Hospital London this is a big teaching hospital for psychiatry and there one day I was very busy and no I wasn't I was a lazy sod no I there was a day when somebody was giving a lecture and I thought I don't want to be bothered with that I've had too much did I get to have another cup of tea but in fact I went to this lecture what was this lecture called it was called the right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders and it was by an English author called John cutting who is not very well known but I think is the most interesting Anglophone psychiatrist still living because he's philosophically very astute and he had just published a book with Oxford University Press called the right cerebral hemisphere and psychiatric disorders and now that fascinated me because in medical school nobody really talked much about the right hemant stuff like language and moving the right hand was all done by the left hemisphere and you got the vague impression that the right hemisphere was just there as a kind of stuffing to stock to the left hemisphere falling over too much and so it was fascinating to hear that somebody was going to talk about the consequences of right cerebral hemisphere damage and he had sat at the bedside of patients for 20 years who'd had right cerebral hemisphere strokes or tumors and asked them about their reality now it may surprise you to know that it's harder to rehabilitate a person who has a lesion in their right hemisphere than in their left after a lesion in the left hemisphere people mostly are for a while at any rate unable to speak or use language and they have difficulty using their right hand pretty devastating stuff but actually once they're able to master that nothing much in the world has changed because understanding the world and the meaning of the world is not something the left hemisphere is involved in it's involved in doing something else which is manipulating the world and it's the right hemisphere that understands the meaning of the world and John had found that extraordinary distortions happen to reality when people had damaged the right hemisphere that didn't happen when they had damaged left and I couldn't believe my ears because what I heard him say in this lecture was three things that struck me one was that the right hemisphere is more in touch with the body than the left in other words it has more profuse connections with the cingulate cortex with the sorry the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis which governs the autonomic system of the body it contains the body image which is not just a visual image but a multi-modal image of the body number two the right hemisphere alone seems to understand implicit meaning it understands metaphor it understands irony it understands humor whereas the left hemisphere takes everything literally and thirdly the right hemisphere is interested in the unique case the left hemisphere doesn't notice uniqueness because its main job is categorizing now those were the three things that I'd noticed that we were getting wrong when we approached a work of art and it I suddenly had a lightbulb moment the reason I'd found it so hard to explain what was wrong was that it was the right hemisphere that understood what was wrong but the left hemisphere that controlled languages and the speech and I just found that the English language at any rate was very bad at explaining what I meant in fact I had a Chinese college who colleague I explained what I was doing he said ah now the Chinese have worse for all the things you're saying but most Western languages then so that was fascinating I went up to John after the lecture talked to him and said you know I want to talk to you about this I lent him a copy of my book which was called against criticism which was about what's wrong with a criticism in the academic world and we then did research together on lateralization of the brain I went to Johns Hopkins and researched on asymmetry in the brain in people with schizophrenia the the brain as I have explained as normal escapes normally asymmetrical but in people with schizophrenia often the asymmetry is either completely lacking or reversed and this seems to be linked with the deficits in skips vena so that's how I got into it and I spent 20 years studying the literature and finding out more about it and it's that that I'm going to now talk about now this of course is a brain scan and once you put on a brain scan your IQ goes up by about 20 points and except that this isn't a brain scan hands up those who spotted it wasn't a brain scan it is actually a scan of the oldest living creature it's called nematocysts it's 700 million years old and it lives off the Isle of Wight which is off the south coast of England where most of the people are about seven hundred million years old and it's and the interesting thing about this is this is the very oldest neural network the strip cheese is now beginning this is the very oldest neural network that we know of it is the origin of the neural networks and person who discovered it in in Heidelberg explains that this is the most primitive and the interesting thing about it is you can see that this is from front to back right and so you can see that on left and right the neuronal structures are different they engage differently with binding camp chemicals so already in the very earliest stages of the development of a neural network there are a symmetries now in fact there are a symmetries not just in the human brain but in every brain in the brains of mammals and the brains of birds the brains of reptiles amphibians in slugs in nematode worms in insects and even going back in history we can see in trilobite and from the fossils that they were asymmetrical in in important ways in their activity we know that because they have more bites on one side statistically than on the other and that actually is quite relevant to what the difference between the two halves of the neuro new the nervous system and what they're in existence for because there is an answer to the question why this is happening and I think it's fascinating it's that every creature has to learn how to solve a problem which is how to eat and stay alive and the that doesn't sound like much of a problem in Paris after all these days but it is a problem for most creatures because if you are going to eat and look after yourself like catch a seed on a background of grit and pebbles before another bird does or latch on to a rabbit or pick up a twig to build a nest anything in which you are just doing the basics of living and manipulating the environment you need very very narrowly focused extremely sharp targeted attention to a detail but if that's the only attention you pay you will become someone else's lunch well you're getting yours because you need to have the exact opposite at the same time you need to have broad open sustained vigilant attention to the whole picture and the only way you can do that since attention is simply the way in which you dispose your consciousness is to have two areas of consciousness and so Nature has solved this problem if you like by giving all creatures these two neuronal alternatives to attempt the world in two different ways now this is this is actually where I live and you can see my house and behind it you can see a mountain and that mountain this is on the Isle of Skye by the way it's already overrun with tourists so don't go there and that's and this mountain is called talisca and the reason it's called talisca is that that is the Norse word for sloping rock so what this means is we know that a thousand years ago the Norseman coming down to the west coast of scotland use this rock as a landmark from the sea so if to them what did this mountain mean it meant safety or danger because this is a dangerous Bay in which you could be shipwrecked we also know that a thousand years before them they were picked living there because we can see the remains of their dwellings which called brass and to them the mountain meant shelter and it also meant the home of the gods and then in the 18th century people started going there to look at the geology because it is an extraordinary fine example of columnar basalt and the 19th century people went there to paint and draw because it has a many textured many-colored shape and form of some beauty to develop her what does this mountain mean it means dollars to a physicist what does it mean it means 99.99% space and we don't really know what the other 0.01% is so these are all ways of attending to this mountain and they produce completely different results which of these is the real mountain there isn't a real mountain because they're all aspects of reality but what it tells you is how you attend changes what exists you're not aware that your attention is being alternated in this way between the broad picture and the narrow picture and so on because it's all done at a level below consciousness this red dot is well it's rather too large for its purpose but it's so that you can see where it is and this is the midbrain and in the tectum of the midbrain there is a meta control center which directs attention to right and left hemisphere at a millisecond a millisecond level and that all of course gives on outside of your awareness because if you were aware of it you wouldn't be able to get anything done now the problem here is that we try to build up a picture of the world the striptease advances don't worry I do have inhibitions say and that there is a problem about how you find out about reality you can't actually attend in one way first and go ah now I've got something definite to build on and I do a bit more and I build on that and build on that because it is a hermeneutic circle you have to jump in to this uncertain state of things out there at some point and what you find on that first jump will influence what you find on your second visit and so what you begin to find builds a kind of relatively fossilized version of the world according to that way of looking at it and it's like this picture of Ash's hands that each gives rise to the other and it's very important to remember that we therefore need to be alternating our way of thinking not getting stuck in one particular paradigm as I believe in the modern West we have so according to the left hemisphere life is to do with getting things it's the left hemisphere that controls the right hand with which I grab things and grasps them and in English we say I've grasped it so it you you've got an idea you've pinned it down and after all the roots of compounder from comprehend are' are to grasp something and it's the same in German big Lifan etc so this is the right hemisphere it controls vision which enables you to go to a target linearly directly and get it so a if you like lead to be that's the kind of system it understands but in reality is not like that and this is what the right hemisphere sees which is a picture in which a doesn't exactly lead to be and it's also living and changing and developing and massively interconnected now and people may say well it's all very gross of you to be talking about a hemisphere compared with another hemisphere it's not thought it's all about the little modules and units within the hemispheres that is certainly part of the truth but it's also true that as we now know the hem is most activity in the brain is to do with distributed networks which are very widely distributed often and the hemispheres are much much more interconnected sorry intra connected within themselves than they are interconnected between one another by a factor of about a hundred so here you see two of the sort of information superhighways in the brain the superior longitudinal long attitudinal fasciculus and the uncinate fasciculus which draw together areas of hetero modal association cortex and help us make sense of experience and I am concerned not with the fact that the two hemispheres have a lot in common they do but it's the things that they have different that are important you know if you're going to buy a car you might say well there's nothing to choose every car has four wheels it's got an engine it's got doors you know what's the difference well quite a lot actually and you know if I were to compare iEARN Stein with Donald Trump you might say well they're practically the same you know they've got a brain I think so anyway and they've got all this other stuff and you know there's no difference but sometimes it's the differences that really matter and so yes the hemispheres overlap a lot in what they do but I am interested in the ways in which they're different and the way in which we had got it wrong in the past was because we asked the wrong question we asked the question you would ask of a machine what does it do and in the old days they had this sort of idea that the left hemisphere did reason and language and the right hemisphere did pictures and emotions it was sort of given to painting pictures and slightly artistic temperament and but this of course turned out to wrong because both hemispheres are involved in everything that we do everything so they're both involved in reason both involved in language both involved in emotion both involved in fishery spatial things but just in different ways now if we thought of the brain not as a machine but as part of a person which it manifest is we'd have asked a more personal question what's it like in what way does it go about doing this task to what end with what values and if you ask those questions you find interesting ly different answers and I'm going to do something rather gross which is to summarize 20 years of research 600 pages of finely nuanced text and 2500 pieces of research paper and give you a little set of little bullet points that you can take home with you so don't take them too seriously but roughly speaking these are kind of important and in each case I've tried to put what the left hemisphere does on the left and what the right hemisphere does comparatively on the right so the left hemisphere is more at home with what it is what is known to it after all it's the one that is making decisions about action it's a rabbit I get it it's no good going so is it a rabbit or is it a penguin I don't know but you'll starve to death so things need to be known to the left hemisphere but you also need a hemisphere that is willing to say it might not be that actually it might be something else and it is the one that takes in new experience now Elkin on goldberg a famous american neuroscientist and colleagues have researched this over 10 years published research showing that every kind of new experience is first dealt with by the right hemisphere and once it becomes as we say in English able to be pigeonholed categorized put into a box then it goes to the left hemisphere which is more comfortable with what it knows then the left hemisphere is more keen on it likes black and white it likes it's either this or it's that it doesn't like possibility and if you like a lot of philosophy has been about whether we should close down to certainty or open up to possibility and the left hemisphere tends to close down to certainty and the right hemisphere to open up the possibility so when in this famous image those of you who like victim Stein will know it of the dark rabbit actually taken from a children's comic in Victorian England in the 1890s and the right hemisphere is happy with the idea that this is possibly a duck possibly a rabbit possibly both the left hemispheres meanwhile saying what the hell are you talking about make up your mind is it a duck or is it a rabbit this is a very profound thing about which I'm almost finished writing a twelve hundred page book and which is about the importance of flow and I'm not even going to begin to explain why that's important but I'm just going to advert to the fact that the left hemisphere sees things frozen fixed whereas the right hemisphere sees them constantly changing and this is sort of the difference between movement as it is in the world and the still frames of a cine film or the digitalization of motion and pleasingly for me you even have the word in French for a snapshot a cliche which for us means something that's already dead so we need both those things and sometimes when the right hemisphere is damaged you get a condition called either a kind of top Cyril Palin ops here which results in this kind of juddering motion because it's constantly fixing its attention then there is a distinction a hugely important distinction between the parts and the whole to which really if you like I've devoted most of my philosophical life the difference between the meaning of a gestalt and the meaning of the parts of it the left hemisphere sees the body as an arm and ear and egg and mouth and nose the right hemisphere sees the whole and where the pipes go this picture who have seen this picture before not too many does anyone not know what a nurse going on in this picture I won't ask you I won't ask you to come up and rest but I think it's rather hard at first sight but let me just explain it is a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground in the shade of a tree and I'll just come over for a moment now there is no way that you can look at that and go I think we've got a bit of shade a bit of path there and a bit of a dog there you have to see the hole and work towards the parts now actually in life that is what you do you don't go into your your living room at home and go oh a chair a light a TV set my living room you'd know exactly what you're dealing with and then your attention is caught by something that is important and that means that when people look at these figures normally they see a nation of four first before they see is an age that's called the hierarchy of attention and there's one exception to that which is in schizophrenia which simulates right hemisphere dysfunction so if you saw the ease and the eight first come and see me afterwards and no just to reassure you I have a doctor I will really know there are many other reasons why you might have seen the ease and the eighth's first and these are all drawn by people with right hemisphere deficits or tumors on the left you see a man or person in the middle you see a bicycle in which interestingly the wheels are smaller than the pedals and above the pedals so the sense of the whole shape has been lost and on the right you have a house and something rather interesting happens when you have a right hemisphere stroke and that's because the right hemisphere stroke is taking in the sorry the right hemisphere is taking in the whole of reality so when you are functioning with your right hemisphere you see the whole picture but when you're using only your left hemisphere you only see the right half of the world that's because the left hemisphere is not really interested in understanding the whole world it's only interested in the bit in which it can manipulate things grab things move things make things which is this half of reality and this means that patients who have right hemisphere stroke sometimes deny the existence of the left half of space they'll read only the right side of a book they'll talk to people only if they're on the right they this is not because there's anything wrong with their sight or their hearing all that's working fine they just don't attend and they don't believe there is a left side of their body they can feel it but they just don't believe it's there so they will forget to dress it forget to shave it and this is a still frame taken from the the cartoon animate which Ronan was describing if you want to see it not now please google and it'll put into YouTube RSA the Royal Society of Arts McGilchrist and animate and it'll come up so the next thing is that the left hemisphere understands the explicit it doesn't really understand the implicit so you know if I say it's hot in here today you using your right hemisphere now yes we really want to open a door or turn the heating down saying but the left hemisphere is kind of puzzled by my offering this unneeded meteorological information it doesn't understand the implied meaning and as I say most of what we do when we communicate is implicit 95% of all our communication is not actually explicit it's in what we don't say it's in we say things how he phrased them the tone of voice we use the facial expression the body language all of that the right hemisphere understands the left hemisphere relatively doesn't then there is the problem of the abstract versus the contextual so the left hemisphere takes things out of context now context is vitally important John Dewey one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived said the the big problem for philosophers is that they so often take things out of context and when you take something out of context it changes its nature everything important to you is denatured when it's taken out of context and put under a microscope or a spotlight and we don't remember that enough context is amusing because context can literally reverse the meaning of something let me give you an example in America there are four sizes of cereal packets there's one called jumbo and that means very large and then there's one called economy which means large then this one called family which means medium and finally this one called large which means small so you really need to pay attention to context then there is a distinction between the general and the unique the left hemisphere understands more the general case it lumps things together and sees the gross category it doesn't see the unique which is really rather more important and there are some really rather moving stories of people who had right hemisphere strokes one was a farmer who knew every one of his cows by name afterwards he could barely tell the difference between a cow and a horse and there was another woman in Switzerland who'd made it her job to over her life to get to know all the birds of Switzerland and after a right hemisphere stroke she said all the birds look the same so here we have the right hemisphere sort of seeing as it were the individual Sara and mark the left hemisphere seeing them in categories social partner food the left hemisphere is interested in how much the right hemisphere more in of what sort something that might ring a bell with you these days when discussions of everything seem to devolve on how much of something there is rather than of what quality it might be the left hemisphere tends to be fixed on the inanimate tools and machines code in the left hemisphere only this is so strong that even right-handers who sorry even left-handers who are using their right hemisphere in daily life to control their left hand and therefore to use tools and machines they still code tools and machines usually in the left hemisphere and this is another distinction the left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic the left hemisphere is slightly pessimistic but it's more realistic and there's a test that you have to do before you do neurosurgery in which you can anesthetize one half of the brain at a time and some clever psychologists thought well while we've got just one half of the person let's ask that one half some questions about itself and they say they gave them personality inventories to fill out and they gave the same inventories to family and friends and when they compared them they found that the left hemisphere had a very high opinion of itself and of its virtues whereas the right hemisphere seemed to be a little bit down on itself unnecessarily harsh on itself and this is very dramatic so any of you who any here are medics anybody who's a medic yeah so you will have seen all medics will have seen this it's a very common thing somebody has a right hemisphere stroke they come into hospital overnight on the ward round in the morning you go and visit them and you say you know how are you feeling and they say fine thank you you go oh that's good and any problems no no no any problems for example moving your left hand arm no no no well would you mind just showing me and then they go there is he is it but I don't see anything move is he and did you know no we didn't see anything move and then if you bring it round in front of them and say move that they go oh that that's not my Iran that belongs to the bloke in the next bed so these are not mad people these are people in denial nothing is wrong with the person when the left hemisphere is can in control and finally the most important distinction which is that between what is present as Heidegger said what presence is to us and what is represented I literally no longer present but present later something that is not any longer real and vivid and present for us this is the distinction between the map and a territory the map is much much simpler than the territory and its value lies in the fact that it is simple it wouldn't be a better map if it had all the detail about everything in it but you can't live in the map you mustn't mistake the real world for what the map says you must actually visit the real world and try to live there now here's a little bit of lighter entertainment here are some pictures drawn by people in three different states on the left the brain is intact in the middle the left hemisphere alone is drawing the right hemisphere has been suppressed and two things have happened first of all you notice rather nicely that the left half of the tree has been completely neglected only the right half of the tree is there and the other thing is it's become a purely symbolic tree it is no longer like a living tree but the tree on the right the one drawn by the right hemisphere still has the structure and flowing form of a tree the same thing is true of flowers here in the middle you see it reduced to a geometric structure or symbol the same thing here with desk really just showing you that depth which is something I haven't got time to go into right now unless somebody wants to ask me a question about it but the three-dimensional nature of the world is perceived by the right hemisphere it sees that desk in perspective whereas the left hemisphere in the middle column tends to flatten it out and here these are all done by people using only the left hemisphere I'll just draw your attention first to the column on the left which shows a cube flattened out in the way that a child might draw it so that you see all the sides and the fourth column along is a person reduced to a couple of rhomboids or a kind of steak this is what happens to humanity when the left hemispheres in control now the way we attend changes what happens and how we relate to the world the word attend comes from Latin ad tender E which means to reach out a hand to something now usually of course the left hemisphere will tell you when you reach out a hand it's to get something that's what it does got that one got that one I'm doing rather well but there is something else you can do with your hand you can reach it out to help to make contact to explore the world and even to bring something to life and here you see that symbolized in two famous pictures you won't need an introduction to the earlier one but this is from the Perry clays the on of the some savoring hora church in Istanbul do visit it if you're ever there now nowadays I think something strange has happened the left hemisphere is interested in what goes on inside a scheme of things that it has so here I want to this is a little bit difficult so if you've been napping peacefully wake up and have a little listen to what I'm about to say a very very nice piece of research was done in which people were asked to evaluate a series of propositions leading to a conclusion and so the famous example of this is all men are mortal Socrates as a man therefore Socrates is mortal but these all had a little bit of a twist one of the premises one of the two premises that lead to the conclusion was wrong and so they asked people in three conditions in the normal state with the left hemisphere only the right hemisphere only to answer the question were these were these true so the example I'm going to give is the one that they you one they use use ten of them but one was the UM all monkeys climb trees well this is not very controversial the porcupine is a monkey that is slightly more controversial and the conclusion porcupines climb trees well unfortunately actually porcupines some porcupine it's very annoying they do climb trees but these people doing the experiment neither the the people who set it in all the people who did it knew that this was going on in Russia in the 1990s they knew nothing ah so anyway they asked them so is this true now in the normal state they said well no not really because the for Cuba is not a monkey in the left hemisphere state the same people not different people that very same people on a different day said yes it's true practically all of them said it's true then asked why don't you know the porcupine is not a monkey is it yeah but that's what it says on this piece of paper in other words the internal structure trumped reality sorry to use that terrible verb trumped reality and when the right hemisphere is our sister but of course not because the porcupine is nothing like a monkey and they did this many times over and it always led to roughly speaking this result now this rings bells for me because we live in a world in which as it were it's what's on this piece of paper that matters not what actually happening out in the real world the left hemisphere is always examining is this consistent within my system of what I know not here's something new I actually have to come to terms with and might actually have to shift my paradigm now in this world in which we live we've lost the reasons that we would have known that we are living in a Hall of Mirrors the sorts of things that used to tell us that there's more to life than what goes on inside our system of thinking where things like the natural world and until the beginning of this century 95 percent of humanity or perhaps even more lived surrounded by the natural world now it might be hardly even half then there is a living culture which embodies a certain kind of traditional wisdom which is embodied in works of art and in the sayings of the way of thinking of a people that is all being for various reasons fragmented or lost then there is the body which also stands rather pleasantly over against our ideas we can have lots of ideas that we would like to have about reality but the body is something that we still have to reckon with the body is something very real we are as much body as we're anything else as human beings and then there is art which forgive me and my lifetime seems to have become over abstract over conceptual over clever rather than being devastatingly metaphorically powerful in ways that defy analysis and we seem to have lost the power of religion except in its most debased and perverted form of fundamentalism either in fundamental Christian it fundamentalist Christianity fundamentalist Islam fundamentalist anything fundamentalist atheism the nuances have been lost and the sense of something beyond has been lost so that as it were we live in a world in which reality is just painted on the screen and behind it there is nothing so we live in a world in which signs seem simply to refer to one another there's no reality beyond the sign that's a perfectly genuine photograph it hasn't been photoshopped now I'm going to end by just commenting on what it would be like if we lived in a left hemisphere world I believe what has happened is not that somehow our brains have evolved very quickly over a few hundred years into something else they haven't they will be slightly different because everything you do modifies your brain the structure and function of the brain is plastic it's in dialogue with the environment the environments infected by the brain the brain is affected by the environment but gross structural changes aren't happening and the analogy I would like to make is that it's more like this you get a radio set and you're terribly pleased with it and you listen to I don't know what the current popular channels are in France but you find two or three that you really enjoy and you listen to those and then after a while you find yourself settling into just listening to one channel all the time now that changes what you're picking up but the radio set hasn't changed at all it's not the hardware it's how you're using it do you get my meaning now if that is happening we're just listening to the paradigm of the left hemisphere that things have fragmented they're fixed that mechanical they're reductionist they only achieve wholeness by being put together mechanically by us what would the world look like well it would look something like this and there be loss of the broader picture of course knowledge would become replaced by information tokens or representations by algorithm sheets of paper procedures things like skill and judgment which are dependent on living a life and becoming wise would be much too human difficult to quantify and therefore would be neglected altogether they wouldn't fit into the form you have to return to management there'd be simultaneous abstraction and reification because the left hemisphere doesn't understand that matter and spirit are fused we are amphibian creatures and the left hemisphere can't cope if you remember with the duck rabbit it's got to be one or the other and so matter becomes lump and material just what Heidegger called resource to be exploited whereas our mental lives become somehow curiously rarefied full of abstractions and no longer properly embodied in the way that Melo Ponte would have wished us to see it bureaucracy would have a field day because according to Peter Berger famous sociologist the key features of bureaucracy are these and they are all sub served by the left hemisphere more than the right there'll be a loss of the sense of uniqueness things would become members of categories the quantity would become the only criterion by which we made judgments things would become black and white leading to endless disputes of a fruitless and uneducated kind between hordes of people screaming at one another because they only think any longer in black and white and out of context reasonableness would become replaced by rationality I don't know if there's a distinction in French this isn't really a hard and fast one in English but it's one I can make there is in German there is in Latin there is in Greek in Germany for examples as a distinction between pronounced and fished and Israel equivalent distinction in French Russian elite Arizona CIPA but any case reasonableness which is something in which mechanical reasoning is fused with experience with emotional understanding with social understanding in other words with a vision of life and used to be the whole purpose of an education that would become replaced by comprehensive okay okay merci p.m. and there be a failure of what we call common sense which is becoming much less common everyday systems would become to maximize utility there'd be a loss of social cohesion the right frontal lobe of the brain is particularly involved in bonding and social cohesion and it would not be being as effective as it should be things will become rather depersonalized the view sort of paranoia lack of trust need to trol everything because the left hemispheres purpose is to make things happen to control things to get things and if it can't control things it gets rather paranoid and it all paranoid psychosis that result from strokes or tumors in the brain almost all of them and it is staggeringly nearly all of them follow-on damage to the right hemisphere not damage to the left hemisphere and anger and aggression would become the key notes of public discourse because get this the left hemisphere is not unemotional at all and the most lateralized emotion of all is anger and it lateral eise's to the left hemisphere we'd be the passive victims of others doing you know have something wrong with my arm no no Blom's to the man in the next bed we'd be blaming others for our predicament all the time um art would become largely conceptual with a lack of sense of depth and distorted or bizarre perspectives music would reduce a little more than rhythms and melody and harmony for most of us are dependent on the right hemispheres perceptions language will become diffuse excessive and lacking in concrete reference there'll be a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder which just annoys the left-hander's so what do you mean you're in or something just means you don't understand it yet tomorrow we'll understand it that is not doing what it is you don't know and not knowing the extent of your ignorance after all we can't know how much we don't know unless we're already omniscient and flow would be reduced to just the sum of an infinite series of pieces that we're discarding of all tacit forms of knowing in favor of the explicit we'd be entangled in what de Tocqueville already in 1830 something referred to as a network of small complicated rules we'd be as Descartes proudly called himself a spectator rather than an actor in the theater of the world sitting on the sofa with our six-pack of beer or possibly in your case with a very nice bottle of Burgundy and and watching what's going on on the screen and all this would be accompanied by a dangerously unwarranted optimism well thank God we don't live in that world [Applause] that was excellent and brilliantly concluded we have some time a fair amount of time for questions I think we have a microphone that can move around a little bit with where did it go oh it's there right so we can we can use the microphone so if you want to ask a question do stand up and and try to keep the question relatively short it's much easier for the respondent to reply to a question which is so there are several people already thank you hello that I carry well the everything that you explain is related to reality but what happens if you distort reality for example taking drugs LSD cocaine or whatever you want what happens that there's the function of does the function remains the same or what happens then it's a good question and drugs of this kind of fact the whole brain they don't just affect one hemisphere you say not reality and I know what you mean but of course we don't really know exactly what reality is there's certainly a kind of reality that we must agree amongst ourselves is generally speaking the case and but I'm very struck by what happens to psychotic patients who have very unusual experiences and when you first meet a schizophrenic patient who believe something really quite improbable and there are intelligent people sometimes you sort of think well I can reason with them about that and show them evidence how this can't be the case absolutely impossible to do and the reason is not because they've lost their faculty is because what they're experiencing is entirely real for them it's not a kind of misperception it is how things are and even when they're well and you say do you still believe that there are little green men living in the garden shed or whatever it might be and they say well no and you said well why did you think it then well at the time I think the were so as it were they they don't really recognize that it's not real but I'm afraid and the short answer to your question is it doesn't split up drug-drug experiences don't split neatly into right and left but I do think that what happens is that there is probably a good deal of disinhibition so all kinds of things that are damping down sensory input are released and so we are seeing things that otherwise we wouldn't see and maybe we wouldn't be able to function if we could see those things all the time microphone is making its way thank you so I think from your Hall of Mirrors list you kind of were tiptoeing around what is caused kind of us to be more left brain sided can't speak but could you expand on that a little bit more about what's happened in society this made us use our left side more possibly and then also what the takeaways are more on what we're supposed to do about it who okay and you've just blown the next 40 minutes there I'll try to be very brief M yes well in the second half of the book of the mouse when his emissary I look at Western history from the Greeks through the Romans to the reffered sorry the Renaissance then the Reformation the Enlightenment romanticism the Industrial Revolution modernism and post-modernism and that takes a while but in it what I do is to outline the ways in which different peers in history we've had different preponderance --is of left hemisphere and right hemisphere input and if I can summarize three times in the West there have been moments of maximum fertility and fruitfulness of of ideas in which civilization thrived these were roughly speaking the sixth century BC in Greece around the dot as we say in in Rome the end of the Republic in the beginning of the empire and then the Renaissance in Italy France and and so on so what causes these shifts I think you would expect the answer to have many factors not just one and I'm not saying it happens because of the brain the brain is just a if you like another way of thinking about what is happening because what is happening is changing the brain the brain is changing what is happening but certain things you can point to one is that as a society gets more affluent and overextends itself so that it has an empire of a kind its relationship with the world changes so things have to be more rigid they have to be more hierarchical they have to be more fixed they have to be less individual they have to be more remote and you see changes in thinking and in art going on in in in in later Greece and in Rome as you get into the third and fourth centuries in which all the humanity if you like has been lost all the sense of proportion and the beauty has been driven out and everything is about faceless you see the marvellous depictions of human face living depictions in both Greek and Roman sculpture they become these staring blank faces as they we've gone thousands of years to a much more primitive culture and I'm afraid that since the Enlightenment which have to be very careful what I say in France because I'm sure you'd rather die than here let clear see small criticizes anyway but I don't think I'm the first person to have spotted that was a bit of a problem if I've been living at the time I would have thought this is wonderful but it's become hubristic it's become things like Richard Dawkins believing that we can solve everything through science we can't we don't know half of what we're dealing with so it's become a problem and it's become a problem because it rewards us it gives us results so it's made us very powerful we've got money we've got Goods we've raped and pillaged across the world grabbing resources felling trees poisoning the oceans in order to have stuff and be comfortable and that is the left hemispheres agenda and it makes you feel good for a while um so it's quite hard to resist and another thing is that it's very hard to defend the right hemispheres point of view as I discovered in writing the book against criticism defending the left hemispheres point of view is a piece of cake because it's very very simple it's just only making very simple elementary rationalistic statements but trying to explain that that's not enough is hard and then you have the fact that we have externalized out there a system that looks like the left hemispheres system so as I was saying in that Hall of Mirrors bit in the past we could look at nature and what it tells us we could look at the history of our culture we could look at what physical existence tells us and we would see that it was different from this theoretical construct but now when we look out of the window what do we see in many parts of the world we see rigid structures grid-like structures of cities made of steel and concrete that repel the human we live our lives that in remote communication with a two-dimensional screen this is all good and left-hemisphere stuff so I think those are all partly reasons thank you very much for this insightful talk I've once heard that the way we humans start interacting with technology and our mobile phones and our computers even more and more every day to hear me that this will alter the brain ultimately it could this be possible if so how drastic this change might be well thank you I think I understood you to say if this is happening could it actually alter the structure and function of the brain permanently as exactly yes well the answer is yes over long enough a period of time it can alter function quite quickly through epigenetic changes and we used to think that these things would take much longer than we now know they do because we know lots of ways in which changes can happen faster and can be substantially transmitted from generation to generation so yes we are all the time doing things to our brain I mean the trouble is that everything single thing you do alters your brain you know having a cheese sandwich watching a porn film it's all altering your brain so mind what you're doing because you're making yourself into a your solidifying a certain aspect of yourself through your experience so I suppose then people say so what we do about it and the gentleman behind you asked me that in a way of course that's a very very big question partly it's the left hemispheres question panic there's a problem we must fix it what are the eight bullet points that you can tell me that will solve the problem and of course I don't have a bullet points and if I did I wouldn't tell you what they were and partly because everyone needs to think about this take it away and digest it and come up with their own solutions which will be much better and more varied than the ones that I would give you know you were all individuals to quote a rather famous English film and called The Life of Brian I don't know if you remember this the Brian figure who's saying you don't need to follow me and you don't need to follow anyone you're all individuals thinking yes we are all individual and then this is one little bloke goes wait a minute I'm not anyway but I think we've all got to sort of be different about it but I think there are things we can do to be a little bit more serious I mean one would be we need to think about how we educate people and at the moment it's very technical and rigid and about shoving things into people rather than what education is about which is about bringing things out of people and making them grow and with it our education needs to prise the humanities much more because it's through the humanities through philosophy through the history of people through their literature that you understand humanity and what we are and where we're going if you don't really study these things you can easily be seduced by the most naive philosophical positions such as you know lots of my colleagues have that you know well quite clearly people of machines in a Christ they just do a little bit of philosophy before they start on their science courses all the medicine courses or whatever so I think that would be one one thing but this is very much embedded in our culture it's embedded in capitalism its embedded in the structure of bureaucracy that everything has to be recorded and monitored and controlled it's very hard to roll that back I just take a short moment to explain something that I didn't explain which was in the original title about the Russian leftenant this is a reference to a story called lieutenant kizhe by Geneon of a Russian writer in 1927 published this novel which I believe was turned into an opera and it's the story it's obviously a a satire on Soviet life but it's carefully couched in terms of the Czarist it's set back in the Czarist era and it's about the transcription of the names of people in a platoon in the Russian army in which somebody makes a mistake and invents as it were by mistake the name of a left tenant who is called left tenant kizhe and ever thereafter this person can't be lost from the system because he's now there and so on and this leftenant although he doesn't exist and this doesn't impede him at all from having a stellar career he is found to be a very reliable colleague his brave in action and he marries has children is promoted to rank of general M and finally that czar wants to meet this paragon of virtue but he can't be found anywhere meanwhile a poor left tenants in UKF who was missed off the list is wandering around the highways of Russia with a begging bowl trying to persuade people that although he's not on the list he really does exist he really is alive now of course that's marvelous and it's a parody of the left hemispheres way of doing things but it's real and when I wrote that I incorporated that in a talk I think somebody in America wrote to me and said this is a true story I have a friend who was who works her brother worked in a mine and there was a terrible mining accident and those the sister who was rung up and told your brother has died so she went to the hospital she went to the morgue she looked at the body and it was her brother so she meant to kiss him and she thought that's funny he's slightly warm for somebody who's been in the deep freeze and and she felt his pulse and she thought I think I can feel a very slow pulse so she went over to the nurse who was standing back there always must be obviously an official presence and she said you know I think my brother might still be alive to reach the nurse uttered the immortal response don't you worry about that my dear it says quite clearly on this piece of paper that he's dead and she didn't wasn't satisfied with this answer so she ran out into the corridor grabbed a passing doctor who came in gave him rather intracardiac adrenaline and he lives that was the story of the Russian left in it any more questions yeah yeah I wonder if there is you hold it brother close your mouth I'm terribly deaf yeah yeah okay yeah I yeah I wonder if the difference in functions between the the left and the right I mean I mean I mean especially to Canadian French okay the same okay yeah I wonder if there is a difference okay in different functions that the left and the right amygdala are doing amygdala there are a lot of differences between the left and right to make delay yes indeed and I say something about that in that book and also in more about it in the book that I'm currently writing but they it doesn't neatly follow precisely the picture I was painting because I was looking at the differences between the hemispheres overall but there are important differences between left and right amygdala what makes it quite complicated is that these differences are not necessarily the same in men and women and sometimes where a man uses the right amygdala the woman uses the left amygdala and it usually seems to be that way around in fact I mean I don't really want to get dragged into a conversation about this but I put it to you as a scientific finding that there are instances in which men and women process things differently and in every case that I know of and I footnoted about 35 of them in the book I'm writing the difference is that where men use the right hemisphere the left you the women used the left that surprises people because a lot of people think somehow that the right hemisphere is more female and the left hemisphere more male I kind of know what they're getting at but it isn't true testosterone causes the right hemisphere to expand in the uterus and the right hemisphere is larger than the left in males but it is the same size as the left in females and other physiological and anatomical differences but they all point in the same direction so that is a book I don't want to write and those are questions I don't want to be grilled on now because I won't be able to do justice to it and people will get excited and upset thank you very much this talk would you mind reciting what you meant when you said in the Hall of Mirrors part that we are away from art and religion because it seems to me that art is pretty present in everyday life and many people are believers good point and what I was because you must understand that everything that I've said is sort of almost grotesquely abbreviated so it's very much in order to fit things into now but the point I was making about art is and I think this is defensible is that in our time art has become unhelpfully cerebral it has become about ideas a lot at the time and has to be translated in order to have the point made so very often you go to an art gallery and there's a screed on the wall about what the artist meant by doing this piece of work now on the whole as it were Gorge on they didn't write a screed about what he was doing when he was painting you know and I listen to radio and there's a new performance commission by the BBC from a new composer and before it happens the composer comes on and talks for quarter of an hour about what he was doing when he was writing I don't mean making a cup of tea what he was thinking about you know what he was intending you know and again you know BAFF didn't say a damn thing about what he was doing but it doesn't matter so I think that we're dealing in art that works far too much at the explicit cerebral rationalistic left hemisphere level it's dealing in sort of explicit things rather than the implicit and the powerful art that I know and there is some modern art that is you can't say what it is that it's doing but it hits you somewhere very powerful so I that is the distinction about religion my distinction was says I I know England best England has always been a bit apathetic about religion really but most people would say they don't belong to a religion I mean in England I think 11% of the population say they belong to a religion so it's not many and in America a lot more people say they belong to religion but unfortunately they tend to belong to religions I must be careful what I say but there was a tendency to belong to religions that might be rather left hemisphere and their orientation i either is one truth which is in this book which is all very left hemisphere it's the word you know that's written down and that's right and and it's all about slightly improbable dogmas that you must believe whereas I you see I think belief is not a matter of cognitive assumptions it's not signing up to propositions it's about having a disposition towards the world and and unfortunately religion has become for a lot of people in the present era too much about you must believe in this holy book you must follow this set of rules that's not what I think religions about and it's certainly not what I meant by helping us out of the left hemisphere hole that we've dug for ourselves still quite a few hello can you hear me I can thank you for your brilliant presentation which is magnificent I am involved in international affairs and do you have I've read and I agree with so many things you said but because of this takeover you could say by mekin mechanism capitalism control the left hemisphere of the world right now aggression violence do you have any hope that some of the greater values that you can say you have said are embedded in the right hemisphere the values the concepts will be restored there was a period about right after World War two when this was prevalent maybe it was in reaction to the horrors but it's not present now and I wonder if you have any solution solutions and I think you should advise some of the leaders of the world well thank you so far I haven't received a text from trumpet but some thank you for that um what do I think about about whether there's hope I call myself a hopeful pessimist by which I mean looking at it it doesn't look good but I have hope because first of all only a fool predicts the future as Niels Bohr said that the the physicist prediction is very difficult particularly about the future if I find that too so I think that it's wise not to jump to conclusions again wherever I go and talk I find a large body of young people who come up to me afterwards and say that was so interesting what can we do how can I find out more bloody bloody blood so I think there's a hunger for thinking differently yeah so in a certain way I'm pushing it an open door and I think that things are changing clearly i yesterday i was speaking at the extinction rebellion event in London which is quite a major event I mean the whole loose in James's Park which is proximate to government was full of tents I mean the whole place and peaceful demonstrations that were very moving so people really are keen to do something different the question is have we got time of course in time things will change in the past thing has changed after the collapse of the Roman Empire it took a thousand years for civilization to re-establish itself we haven't got a thousand years we've barely got five you know can we do things fast enough and I think we can't because we too much love I love my comfortable life you know we'd have to change so radically so fast but it's not nothing is ever all or nothing the left hemisphere says it's all or nothing it's black or white I say no nothing is ever all or nothing so a lot may have to go there may be terrible times but they may actually be good for us because I believe that adversity is an incredibly important aspect of human flourishing without adversity one of the problems one of the reasons we're in this mess is we've tried to abolish adversity altogether but in fact we don't flourish when there's no adversity I tell you something fascinating I found recently there are all these eco domes I don't know what you call them in French but sort of environments that are enclosed in which there's one called the Eden Project in the South of England and they grow trees and things within protected environment yeah and they were the people who run these were very puzzled by the fact that although the conditions were ideal the trees kept falling over and these were trees that had no predators or problems but they they fell over and they discovered that the reason was they hadn't been stressed they need to be exposed to wind in order to put down proper roots well human beings are a bit like that please remember so there may be a very difficult time a very challenging time for all of us particularly the younger people in this room and I'm a grandfather you know so I really feel it but we can win through because human beings are fantastically resilient and human beings are wonderful actually they're not these depraved Apes that just want to kill one another there is an aspect of humanity that is very competitive that is true but that's also good but let me tell you this there's another side of humanity that is even more important which is very cooperative we wouldn't have got where we are without being cooperative in fact all species tend to help one another trees trend to help one another it's not true that nature is all about um enmity and and aggression anyway sorry yeah there are lots of other people want to ask questions so yeah yes good evening I would like to ask you about at some point you talked about the different all that if you made the list big list of differences between the left and the right and you put the known in the left hemisphere now does that imply I would tend to think no but this is my question does that imply that memory belongs to the left hemisphere more of course not but can you expand upon that and there are differences gross differences generally between left hemispheres memory and right hemispheres memory but memory is a huge liam you know diffuse thing which you know used to talk about it just being in the hippocampus but actually we now know that memory is very widely distributed and it also makes sense to talk about things like muscle and gut and even bone as having memory of experience so but certainly the central nervous system throughout has memory and what I think I would say is that the things that are more factual and abstracted from context are probably better dealt with by the left hemisphere those that are harder to pigeonhole summarize and ramify into complex lived contexts certain kinds of emotional or autobiographical memory are perhaps better dealt with by the right hemisphere but of course we need degrees of certainty we need degrees of everything we need degrees of both of these things all the time the difference is that the left hemisphere thinks we only need one the right hemisphere knows we need both and that's a crucial difference because we need either/or and we need both and so we need both either/or and both and we don't need either either/or or both at which would be the left hemisphere view I hope that's completely clear and this is the this is behind the myth of the master in his emissary the story is effectively of a wide spiritual master who realizes he can't deal with everything not just because he's limited because in fact it would be much better if he didn't get involved in certain things if he is to keep the broad perspective and so he delegates his brightest to go about and do certain kinds of activity for the good of the community but that bright person although bright doesn't know what it is he doesn't know and therefore thinks I'm the one that knows everything I'm the master and that's where we are now the left-hander thinks it's the master now there's something in psychology called the dunning-kruger effect and effectively what this means is the more you know the more you realize how little you know and the people who think they know everything know next to nothing and I can think of some prominent examples we've got time for just a few more I don't know but I'm not in charge of this I in the middle of him I was I was wondering if you could comment on the in your sort of left right brain terms the effect that social media or overuse of social media might be having on our brands on our behavior well I'll try and keep it very brief but you can imagine I'm not a fan I don't do it I call it antisocial media I think that it's damaging in a whole lot of ways speaking as a psychiatrist it hasn't increased people's well-being it's made them feel insecure it's made them feel distanced it's made them more competitive made them more anxious I think it's distracting the only important things in life come from prolonged slow deep thought and creating spaces in which you can have that is very important but if you're looking at your phone every few minutes you not a chance that you will live before you die so switch the bugger off there's some ladies here as well who need to have a go but I'm not but over the past few years we have achieved the greatest productivity we have increased the quality of life we have expanded as a species which you could say that as animals survival is one of our biggest goals so who is to say that the world last led by the left hemisphere and perhaps letting it play on and follow the cycles that we have had in the past is not the best path to go if so far we have achieved great advances with it ok I'm gonna have to be quick um I didn't agree that we have improved the quality of life it depends what you mean by the quality of life and it depends what you mean by life um obviously in certain very practical ways we are more comfortable we can conquer diseases but actually if you look at human happiness we were slightly happier 50 years ago when we didn't have most people didn't have many of the we now have and our expansion as a species has been at colossal unimaginable cost to every other aspect of the earth every other living thing and its beauty which is very important to us so that's all I'd say yes I'll be very brief you mentioned reification and pigeonholing as characteristics of how the left hemisphere processes things and I hope I'm not to hold down by my own experience but my whole life I'm from Venezuela which is of course an authoritarian heavily ideological state I have struggled to comprehend how people who are dogmatic ideologists who try to think they can control everything within their ideology struggle to grasp reality both when that ideology is in service of the state and both here for example abroad when people who confronted with a very human a very tragic a very real experience that I've known personally say well no because that doesn't fit into my ideology you don't have class conscience you're a bourgeois you are so is there a connection between the left hemispheres dominance and dogmatic ideology is the paper Catholic there is and people who are thinking in this way tend to be certain that they're right they tend to be dogmatic they tend not to see individuals with categories they tend to be cut off from feeling they tend to schematize and they can be very dismissive only somebody who is only partially attuned at all to other human beings can be so rigid and lacking in compassion as so many ideologues are thank you perhaps two more questions is that okay hi thank you so much I wanted to ask you about how depression and anxiety affect the hemispheres and how they work Oh lovely um not a brief one I'm afraid but let me do my best quick and dirty answer is anxiety doesn't relate so specifically generally to one or other hemisphere but it's a lot of anxiety disorders are exacerbated by left hemisphere overdrive if you like because it's about control and a lot of my patients one of the things that was central to their problem was their belief that they ought to be in control or that they had lost control and I was able to reassure them by pointing out that there was not a snowball's chance in hell that they could ever be in control of anything they never have been in control they never will be in control now start enjoying life by moving with the flow going with the DAO but not sitting there going it's got to be like this in which case of course you will live a very anxious life depression is very interesting from this point of view effectively depression tends to be an imbalance in which whatever should counterbalance the right frontal cortex which is very empathic is not working properly so if you like there's a an overemphasis on what the right hemispheres frontal cortex sees it sees suffering it feels suffering it feels connection and it tends to view even itself in a slightly negative way so although that is really very important part of being a human being it does need to be counterbalanced and when people are treated for depression you can see the left frontal activity becoming more prominent and balancing it a bit now when there are two ways in which this can happen because there are two things that very crudely balance the right frontal cortex one is the left frontal cortex obviously the other is the right posterior cortex because I haven't talked about this but the anterior and posterior cortex of the same hemisphere balance one another so if people have for example a stroke in the right posterior cortex that can mean again and over activity in the right frontal cortex and these two kinds have different qualities so when the right frontal sorry when the right posterior cortex is hyperactive and that's the cause then the patient has a kind of more abundant quality is hardly alive is kind of like the Living Dead but when the left frontal lobe is the problem and the right hemisphere as a whole is perfectly active then they have agitated depression because they they're still alive but they don't know how they can be alive or how to deal with being alive it will break a very good at least our or to talk but that's the bit in brief things thought my question was about like you you talked about how the brain is plastic and so it it's sort of adapts and changes so if you could elaborate a bit more on these two way relations it seems that you know Society and what we have around us changes the brain but at the same time the way in which our brains function shapes Society so could you elaborate a bit on how this relation well sound I mean I think I've made the point that this is this exists I mean I can talk about it at the technical level in terms of kindling and reinforcement of certain circuitry but that's perhaps not what you want I think my answer would be perhaps to read the book because in the second half of the book you know I talked about how culture and the brain interact and it is really too vast a question yeah yeah we will and it's really up to you it okay so I'll be brief my questions a little bit different it's related to what you were talking about in the beginning where you said that we can't learn and appreciate literature as such if we categorize it because it loses some of its essence and it's interesting because when I was doing my bachelor's I studied psychology and literature so I would like to ask you because I know that we categorize literature and try and really dissect the plays and the books that we read how would you teach it then how would I yeah how would you how would you propose or what would be a good way to teach literature to students well it would be something like the way I was suppose I was taught which was very good which was very human I'm not against all kinds of categorization of course it's one of the ways in which we understand anything is to say it's like other themes and to see similarities is important but to see differences is also very important and you can get carried away with the stream of this is August and/or this is romantic or this is whatever and not see the really crucial aspect of this particular person of this particular poem that is very special and you need to attend to it I suppose and now I'm going to have to wind up now so this is the last thing I'll say I think that one of the things we need to do is to listen and I don't mean just listen to others talking but that's very important but to listen to what everything is saying so it's what nature is saying to us what works of art is saying to us not to be too quick to dive in with our clever ideas too much criticism is to do with I've had a bright idea in which you actually get between the listener the viewer and the work of art sharing off instead of getting out of the way the work of a critic is to clear things away like Michelangelo clearing the marble away so that suddenly there's a living human being thank you [Applause]

Channel: Sciences Po

Views: 23,801

Rating: 4.9064937 out of 5

Keywords: Sciences Po, University, étudiants, Student, Iain McGilchrist, discussion, research

Id: JMfybIoFxH8

Length: 108min 21sec (6501 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020