The Divided Brain, The Humanities, and AI with Dr. Iain McGilchrist

good good morning everyone and and good afternoon to Dr M Migel Christ um I'm Patrick mclusky I'm the editor of Dakota Digital review um this is I brought a different publication than last time so if you'd like to pick some up they're over there um anyway welcome to today's event The Divided brain the humanities and artificial intelligence with Dr Ian mcgilchrist who is joining us from Scotland uh this discussion is sponsored by the Northern Plains ethics Institute for a public forum ndsu's College of Arts and Sciences triology University the Dakota Digital Academy and Crosswinds Institute a special thanks to professor kulie and his students here who watched the posted interview of Dr Migel Christ which was conducted by today's moderators uh Michael Robinson a professor of psychology Todd Pringle who is completing his his doctorate in Psychology um and as uh Todd mentioned Professor K students submitted questions uh which we will pose during the discussion uh Ian melr started his career as a literary scholar at Oxford University and then became a medical doctor psychiatrist and neuroscientist he is now the world-renowned author of two books um one is the master in his emissary uh the divider brain and the making of the Western World the second book which came out a few years ago the matter with things and this is actually one book if you don't have dumbbells you can just buy it and you know can use that it's our brains our delusions and the unmaking of the world uh million words Al together but absolutely brilliant and worthwhile uh worthwhile reading um anyway uh also I'll let our moderators begin and enjoy the discussion uh hi I'm Michael Robinson in Psychology Professor psychology and me and Todd got the chance to interview inan uh a month ago or so um and we're just uh doing a followup uh okay so this uh we'll start with some student questions um you're obviously very knowledgeable when it comes to both hemispheres of the brain and many other things how did you develop such a novel perspective of the two hemispheres and their processing modes and the interaction of of the hemispheres with culture and so forth that's a question to me yeah guess yeah a little bit of uh maybe your history and how you were able to combine different uh studies that sure sure no I can I can I can say something about that um just before I start I'd like to um unburden the audience from the feeling of a million words it is actually 591 th000 Words which is already an enormous number but it's slightly more manageable than a million anyway um yeah well I suppose it was because of philosophical questions that interested me since um I was a teenager really and uh they led me through the study of the humanities to wonder what we were doing in the University when we were for example um dealing with supposedly helping to understand the work of literature and um I wrote a book about why I thought we got that process wrong called against criticism which was like uh taking an enormous Gun and shooting your foot off um and uh I decided that that was the time to disappear from the academy no I I'm joking what happened was that what happened was that um I saw that there was something about the way we thought and indeed the way we think generally as a culture now which was disembodied uh decontextualized abstract categorized and uh as it were um to do with types not to do with individual cases unfortunately when it comes to works of art or even people that you know they're not well represented by just taking a box of a category they're actually unique and so we miss the uniqueness and we miss the context and we miss what is really very important that a lot of meaning is not explicit it's implicit and when I had trained in medicine in order to understand the Mind Body relationship better because I thought it's too disembodied the way the philosophers do this for me uh I I I found that in fact the hemispheres are different in which ways which cast light on the problem I had been writing about and thinking about ever since which is that the right hemisphere alone seems to understand implicit meaning the right hemisphere alone seems to understand the unique case rather than simply the type or category and the right hemisphere alone seems to understand context and context changes everything um I I sometimes I excuse me for doing this I'm just going to uh tell you a little American joke okay so in America there are four sizes of cereal packets yeah the the first of all is is jumbo which means very large then there is economy which means large then there comes family which means medium and finally there's large which means small so you see that context completely changes the meaning of anything and these are ideas that have haunted me philosophically and led to the work that I've done uh trying to cast light on the way our society looks at the world and looks at human beings and I realized that if at the moment as I believe we are listening mainly to the less intelligent less imaginative left hemisphere with its simple schema rather than engaging with the real complexity of Life had there been other times when we had got the balance better and that's the substance of the second half of the master in his Emissary in which I reviewed the main turning points in the history of ideas from the Greeks through the Romans through our own history from the Renaissance onward so that is in essence how I came from a background in the humanities to writing about this topic in Neuroscience now in our talk you talked about your work at Bethlehem Royal um with uh where you looked at uh you know what people's professions were and you noticed a preponderance of Engineers and and philosophers um with some pathologies um and that's the context that's the context of the question the question is around you know do you think an engineering education inculcates the left hemisphere dominance and and if I could sort of more broadly te it up um is a so all of almost everybody here our future engineering students are spending four five six years in a world where there is a right answer and there's a mechanistic process to get down to that right answer um and then they're going to go out into the world and and live in a a space and a and a um career uh and a work product you know that reinforces that to what to what extent do you think the engineering education um might be a strong driver of left hemisphere dominance or and this is also question that you have in the workplace about engineers are they made or born um when if you get an engineering degree does that mean you you um you got a bunch of engineering programming and now you can think like an engineer or is it really you survived the cut filter and you were one to begin with and those that didn't graduate uh um weren't um but generally speaking um what are your thoughts on the education system and stem education and engineering education for um driving left hemisphere dominance yeah it's a good question me the only facts I have here are that when I looked at patients who developed a psychosis in their late teens or early 20s typically a time when they were at University the two most popular subjects being studied by people who had a a schizophrenic uh episode or diagnosis were Engineering in philosophy as you've mentioned I suspect that it's like many things a mixture of being born and being made um and one of the reasons for thinking that it might be likely that people are naturally inclined to take these degree courses if they already have a certain cast of mind is that we think that if you look back at the history the early developmental history and certainly the the through teens to adulthood history of development of individuals who develop a psychosis you can see signs in retrospect of what was coming so I think that and we know that there is to an extent a genetic basis for schizophrenia uh and there is a genetic basis for autism which also in some of its manifestations is um rather similarly Technical and um people with autism are often very good at dealing with explicit and Technical matters but less good at dealing with um imprecise um intuitive um implicit matters so I think there is a a two-way thing there um and it slightly worries me that in our mainstream education the humanities which are you know the clues in the name helping us to understand what it means to be a human human being through studying literature history philosophy and things that help us to think intelligently about what a human being is and what the world is these are being downplayed in favor of what a really much more Technical Training in stem subjects so I hope that's an acceptable answer to that question I have a question that's related to that question uh less about education and certain majors and more about the kinds of occupations that uh say somebody who's left hemisphere dominant would gravitate toward and would reinforce those Tendencies um the word politician came up um in that context uh do any thoughts on the sorts of occupations that would be occupied by people who are U too too left hemisphere J in their style well accepting that without wanting to unpack that that phrase but um accepting it for the time being I think that they're more inclined towards Administration than politics Administration is very much a matter of developing linear procedures of the kind the left hemisphere is more at home with um and following those and having rules as it were for situations and generalities of people rather than individual cases so I think um a politician uh some people have thought that politicians have a degree of psychopathy or sociopathy if you like uh in them and and that may be true um as do quite probably the the CEOs of large corporations but I think they're different kind of animal they're um it's more about uh me me me and and about um performing uh the sort of things that actually the engineer is not necessarily so good at I must say one of the terribly interesting things for me has been that of course lots of people have written to me from all walks of life to tell me how much my work is meant to them and you know these include people such as a long-distance Lorry driver in Australia and a laboratory cleaner in Oxford but also um politicians and judges and so on psychologist philosophers but one group that is very interesting is Engineers who write to me and say you know after reading your book I suddenly realize a whole lot of things about my life that I haven't understood and now I kind of get it and since reading your book my wife tells me that I'm I'm a better person to be married to and my job is going better and so on so there's something going on there with Engineers who certainly are not without insight into what it is I'm talking about so and I know you you cite short I in the book um who's done a work on Need for power right and I got the feel I got the feeling that this the the left hemisphere had sort of a need for power and to sort of instantiate own vision of reality on the social situation um but but you're you're linking the left brain style more to um like you say Administration and bureaucracy and things like that so yes does power does power fit into the the calculus yes it does but I think the people who get filtered out of politics are people with any degree of decent reticence um it it it tends to be people who are great performers and somewhat histrionic and and this is a different um group but certainly in terms of the values espoused by the hemispheres the left hemisphere's principal value is to be able to control an Administration is in fact a man matter of control uh its whole um evolutionary coming about if you like is in order to help us manipulate the world um and this may not mean actually um Power in the very straightforward sense though it often does mean that but in an ability to determine and control outcomes so uh you know that I I talk about values in my in my work as I get older and approach death I think values become more and more important to me they're often not talked about um because they're not technical but actually the values for which we live and towards which we are attracted both as individuals and as a society make a huge difference to what our lives are like and whether they're fulfilling or not and I'm talking and writing at the moment lectures um in Oxford Cambridge London and in various places Across America in which some of what I will talk about is this question of values that it's not just a matter of power power is at the bottom if you like of the values power for what is the next question and that brings you back to other values what are the values you want power in order to pursue and they can't just be more power and so we come back to the good old values of goodness and beauty and Truth which I fear in my lifetime have become degraded and despised but are not only essential to a fulfilled human life but to a fulfilling Human Society the the next one is more of a statement than a question it is is he a fan of Dr Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park you remember the original Jurassic Park the uh the wealthy uh Visionary who created the park and decided to wake up dinosaurs um you more to the point to the line of his to his famous line from the movie um well this I I don't think that yeah Dr Ian Malcolm isn't the prietor he's uh he's the mathematician right um looking around at at at faces that are like there was a a Jurassic Park movie from the 1990s um anyway yeah Dr Ian Malcolm is the uh mathematician who was questioning things and so his line was your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could they didn't stop to think if they should and then the student stated um that we are pushing forward quicker than we should causing us to leave the Dow um more than we already have and and this is an engineering ethics class and um some of them uh um are you know highly highly engaged in the work and some of them um don't know what to make of of philosophy and that sort of thing and I was in their position many uh years ago but many of them are going to go work on AI models uh even the mechanical engineers future mechanical engineers by working on mechatronics and instantiating AI models into humanoid robots and um there's a lot of questions around should we um that uh you know this generation is going to be facing is there any in in the context of that non- question knowing you have a captive audience of future Engineers learning about ethics um is there any uh direct wisdom you want to share well first of all um I don't know who wrote that question but um I I love them I I I I I absolutely subscribe to the sentiment that we're pushing on faster than we know what we're doing and we are not observing the natural flow and movement of the da but are forcing the pace in the most extraordinary way um how organisms survive is by testing something a little and and then perhaps being able to push it a little bit further and so on but they don't take um extraordinary steps that could completely um upend a civilization and uh could cause enormous grief to humanity um without being sure up to point of what it is they're going to say is enough and that yeah that's okay but before we go any further let's think about what we're doing I mean the trouble is that in a world that's highly competitive there's a bit of a zero some game you know in which um the feeling is if we don't push this then someone else will and there's only one end to that which is um that we will destroy ourselves I believe so I think that the wiser voices are those who say we need to reflect on what we're doing and what our values are what we're trying to achieve here and often of course what we try to achieve is not what we end by achieving that's one of the lessons of history and one of the lessons of life so I'm a natural pragmatist I think what we need is not more power which is what a I gives us I mean that's all it gives us is more power but more wisdom and I don't think any machine will ever give us wisdom in fact I think the wage of wisdom is to distance yourself from the mechanistic and the mechanical world and for once allow a much richer world of spirit and Humanity to speak to you so in brief that's my my position on on that I I'm ashamed to add that I I've never seen Jurassic Park but um it's not because I don't think it would be interesting it's just frankly lack of time really there are so many films and so many books if I swivel the camera around you'd see this book which is just my workspace not my library absolutely filled with stacks of books about 300 on the floors and the tables I just don't have enough time I have a question question that I think relates to the power stuff but uh maybe we'll succeed this time um so are you wary of people who are especially confident who sort of go about things as if they know the complexities of life or I mean do you think that self-confidence in a sense is is an illusion uh a mistake essentially let's see if I have any other oh yeah the followup is are there any other qualities that that you would sort of gravitate toward among human beings um that are perhaps better qualities to have yes well of course we need a degree of self-belief um and indeed no culture can survive without self-belief which is one of the things that worries me about the way we're disemboweling ourselves as a culture and committing suicide effectively but um but it is the value of the left hemisphere the left hemisphere is always right uh it never crosses its mind that it might be at fault it's always someone else's fault if something goes wrong and I'm not speaking just metaphorically here uh in in my work you you'll see many cases of people who after a right hemisphere stroke therefore relying on their left hemisphere are completely convinced that everything is fine that a paralyzed arm is not paralyzed it's working fine and if you force them to acknowledge that this thing cannot be moved they will then say well it's not my arm it belongs to you Doctor or it belongs to that person on the other side of the W or whatever it may be so the left hemisphere is super super confident and when one hemisphere at time can be isolated psychologist have administered a um a psychological questionnaire a a character profile questionnaire to uh the person one hemisphere at a time and also to their relatives and friends and what this reveals is that left hemisphere has a very high opinion of itself compared with that held by everyone else whereas the right hemisphere has a slightly more tarnished view of itself than is held by other people although it's more realistic but overconfidence is of course um dangerous and we know uh you can gather this without doing psychological research but nonetheless there is something known to psychologist as the Dunning Krueger effect which basically states that those who don't know very much think they know everything and those who know a lot realize how very little they know so an excess of self-confidence is is very dangerous and is of course a delusion um there are no certainties in this world except one that anyone who believes or a certainties is certainly wrong so that that's that's that's the way the way it is and I'm also rare of people who are absolutely certain about any matter um including spiritual matters I I I have to respect their experience and so forth but there's always a question mark in my mind of what's being ignored what's being ruled out by people who are completely certain about things so the way I was trained was to be able to see one side of a question and then answer the argue the other side of the question at least as forcefully and I think that's a good training in classical Greek um I'm not expecting you to be fluent in classical Greek but but there is there is a a sentence structure which goes men on the one hand death on the other and this equally harmonious ability to see that there are two sides to every question was a very important aspect of the founding of that philosophically incredibly subtle civilization so um the answer in short to the first part of the question is yes I do mistrust people who have excessive self-confidence the values I respect in people and I think would immeasurably enhance the quality of Our Lives as as a society and as a human race would be if we were able to ReDiscover three important things compassion for others rather than constant aggression anger self-righteousness um narcissism but actually a bit of understanding that other people aren't necessarily stupid because they hold a different view from you a second would be to be able to appreciate the awe and wonder that's in the world rather than thinking all the time about how very clever we are and the the bit that we understand is small compared with what we don't understand as William James said our knowledge is a Dro but our ignor ignorance is an ocean and I I think that those are rather an important um qualities for anyone really a bit of humility basically a sense of awe and a sense of compassion so I'm going paraphrase this question a little bit um so I mean the whole whole thesis of of your book master in the hemisphere even in the title The the right hemisphere when things are in Balance the right hemisphere uh you know is in charge so to speak in the left hemisphere is doing a good job to help find things and and and take action in the world and that we have gotten out of that balance with this artificial world that we create uh that created this feedback loop uh and if we don't get out of a left hemispheric imbalance it could be the Doom of our civilization um but the question uh is an interesting one is while a in your thesis a balanced hemispheric approach is really kind of a right hemisphere as the true leader is there and you you've talked about whether it's TMS or stroke victims I mean where people actually have a seriously reduced left hemisphere how how that manifests but um curious and and and what this question is getting at I think is culturally is it possible to have a right hemispheric dominant culture the way we have a left hemispheric dominant culture but to an extreme to a is there is there a pathology uh of uh relying too little on the left in theory there could of course but actually what happens is this never occurs because there is this important difference the right hemisphere understands the importance of what it is the left knows and welcomes it and reincorporates it into what it knows that is the proper Dynamic of the relationship but but it doesn't it's not reflected because the left hemisphere doesn't understand the importance of what the right hemisphere knows which is very much more than it understands and therefore thinks it knows the whole scoop and it it takes on the mtle of the master when it really hasn't got the knowledge or the character to be able to take on that role that is the meaning in the title of my earlier book The Master and his Emissary and and interestingly I found it in [Music] um in in a legend of the onandaga people who are part of the iro nation in America uh and long long before um any neurologists came along and knew much about the he two hemispheres they have a myth about the relationship between two brothers an unequal relationship between one that one might call the good brother and the other brother who is okay as long as he he's kept under the surveillance of the wiser other brother they have this difficult relationship they mustn't get too close because otherwise the good Brother's work will be as it were spoiled by the by the the less good brother but they have to be close to a certain degree otherwise the the less good brother the one that's called Flint um will will run away with things and cause damage so in some ways this is rather like the structure of the brain because the Corpus colossum enables um both communication and inhibition between the hemispheres and getting this balance right is quite an interesting process I might just add though that there's one or two interesting things have come up recently where if you suppress the left frontal loobe particularly the left medial frontal loobe um there's the several lines of evidence on this now you can find that the brain has has talents or capacities that in the normal state it doesn't have this can be done either by TMS the normal way trans cranial magnetic simulation or by a number of other techniques in which you temporarily disable One hemisphere at a time but what you find then is that um if you like Savor talents talents that are only occasionally um come to the FL sometimes after an head injury usually an injury to the left frontal lobe where people suddenly have insight into the solution to problems I suddenly become a certain kind of math genius and so forth so it is interesting I hold the view for what it's worth that the brain doesn't emit Consciousness it doesn't even transmit Consciousness so much as it permits Consciousness in other words it forms and shapes consciousness which comes through it and that therefore the the the business of the brain is largely about filtering it's about filtering things out and if you damage that filter then some things come through that don't normally come through for most of us in our daily lives so people are able to have sometimes knowledge of a kind that we call parapsychological if they have had a front left uh um left frontal Lo injury so and correct me if I'm wrong but is it fair to say that there's a certain um almost like an anti-intellectualism in your arguments uh are are you sort of moving for um human beings sort of living in a more spontaneous or or instinctive manner than they currently do well um there's some truth in that I certainly wouldn't call myself anti-intellectual it would be a bit of a conundrum um for me uh but and people often say to me you know for somebody who um seems to Champion the right hemisphere a lot of your work is enormously left hemispheric by which they mean um uh I do a lot of hard science and I write intelligible logical Pros but I never said that there was something wrong with the left hemisphere it's important it's just that it should never be the one that takes over and rules the roost so um you know as I sometimes say the left hemisphere is my second favorite hemisphere you know I wouldn't be without it so I I I know what's being got out there but I think you know what's interesting is that when you come to look at the history as I have done of discoveries major discoveries by scientists and mathematicians and sometimes also philosophers they are made partially in an intuitive way they do a certain amount of sort of donkey work um but it's not doing the donkey work that gets them to their goal it's a sudden Insight in which things are reconfigured and if they aren't a ble to listen to their intuitions and see new forms or Galan as the Germans say which means a whole that cannot be decomposed into its parts without significant loss unless they're able to see those things as well as do simple procedural work they won't become great scientists or mathematicians so I'm definitely not against intellectuals though I think sometimes intellectuals can be and what's best described as clever slies I they're clever all right but they don't really know how to use what they've learned and come to some very silly conclusions about what would be good for Humanity so I I can't resist but Chase one one squirrel uh at at the risk of losing everybody but I'm super curious as a psychiatrist um there's a therapy method uh that's got a lot of traction in the US I'm not I'm not sure if it's made it over the Atlantic and a psychodynamic um uh sort of Neo neopian approach um but the process itself makes me think of inner hemispheric stuff and I'm super curious if you've heard of EMDR which is used as a oh yes trauma I know I I've worked with the MDR therapists yes so um for for for the audience the roughly speaking if you if if you have a trauma PTSD one of the things very very simply uh there's more to it than this obviously but you do a eye movement back and forth you do a sort of controlled cat um and there's and there's ways to do it with your body as well while you're sort of reliving and processing the trauma um that's giving you PTSD and empirically there's a lot of people that absolutely swear by and it's gotten a lot of traction and and I've struggled with the psychodynamic framing of it and I can't help but think are you doing some sort of um visual spatial in interner hemispheric processing by going through the Hemi Fields Back forth and if that's if they can somehow uh um I don't know sort of lubricate a kind of interaction to deal with what might be a discordance between the hemispheres on the actual traumatic event or do you have any thoughts in that matter and and if not we'll get off this H squirrel chasing no no I certainly do as I say I I have myself had patients who I've recommended EMDR to and they've done very well with it um interestingly York panp who unfortunately died a couple of years ago but was the world's greatest Authority on effective Neuroscience um himself um had an experience after which he had EMDR and he said it worked wonderfully well on him he wasn't really interested and to be very Frank nor am I in psychodynamic explanations of it I think that's probably barking up the wrong tree what we you know is that um there is a if you like a switch in the tegmentum of the midbrain which is not the middle of the brain but is the name for the top part of the brain stem um which uh on a millisecond to millisecond level is um sending stimula to one or other hemisphere and I think that what happens in trauma is that the right hemisphere is very powerfully um fired up and eventually becomes stuck and they're only two alternatives for it um and these can be seen in following a patient with PTSD that often there's an early phase of dysfunction because of as where um un unfed emotional release and then it can be followed by a period of cold attachment in which because it's too painful all afct is cut off now these are both extreme positions and for health one doesn't want either to be swamped by um unhelpful emotions or to be cut off from emotion but I think that what the this IM movement uh process does is to it's a bit like if I may put it this way and I'm not being disrespectful it's a bit like kicking the washing machine you know it doesn't go you give it a boot and ah it's working again we don't really know what happened there but I think that what it was released it was no longer stuck so the ptsc patient is stuck as it were with a dysfunctional relationship with the right Hemisphere and because of this need to keep going backwards and forwards between with the hemispheric switch it is freeing it up again that's that's all I can say about it and that's a speculation but all we have at the moment is speculations and I think it's as good a speculation as any so this is related to the last question which is are there ways of sort of restoring or more useful collaboration between the two hemispheres um for example could you speak less or speak more slowly or could you expose yourself to Eastern philosophy or are there other ways of sort of creating a more healthy relationship between the two hemispheres yes absolutely um and and I think I I detect somebody who who knows that the answer is in that question that there are some of the answer so in learning meditation or mindfulness meditation particularly one of the features is stilling um the chatter of the left hemisphere you know what's known as monkey mind and uh that process of stopping constantly commenting on making judgments about um and and verbalizing about what one's experiencing and that whole process is disruptive of being there with experience and and one distinction I make between the right and left hemispheres is that broadly speaking the right hemisphere allows us to be in the presence of something or that thing to presence to us to use a sort of philosophical language there whereas the left hemisphere deals in representations which literally means being present after the fact when they're actually no longer present and the digest of the left hemisphere into ideas that it's already familiar with yes I know about this yes I read something about that no I think I know about this and the combination of preformed Concepts and language has to be stilled if one's to be able to regain that business of Simply being in the presence of the world so um bang on whoever it was who who who said um Eastern philosophies and Eastern practices I think these are very important I think actually that mindfulness meditation should be taught in schools um and I think it should become part of the practice of most people there are other things one can do which are if you're lucky enough as I am to live surrounded by dramaticly beautiful nature to spend time in it but you know even if there's just a park nearby where you can go and see things growing and doing their natural thing and switch off from your phone from your busy schedule from your mind from the rest of what's going on and be present to the natural world that helps enormously I think spending time to listen to music and read poetry thoughtfully mindfully not rushing through it because you've got an appointment not trying to combine listening to music with writing um a piece of work but actually spending the time with whatever it is it will be amply rewarded by what it speaks to you I think half the the difficulty is that we are always crowding out the mental Space by doing the chalking whereas really the art of approaching a kind of wise way of living a life is to allow the world to speak to you and hear for the first time what's going on and sometimes that really does take discipline not to rush in to a conclusion but to suspend making a judgment about what exactly is going on here and listening and attending and if you do that then you will find that things do speak to you at first perhaps slightly more tentatively and more difficult to pick up but over time that voice can be strengthened and I think that is that is something very important yes thank you very much for a very good question so this question relates to emotions in the hemispheres and I'm going to broaden the question a bit so so you talked about the left hemispheres you know is more is more likely to express emotions and with things like anger I mean it's the agentic side the D energic side it's the one taking action in the world it's going to get frustrated if it can't re achieve its goals and it's going want to energize the body to burst through those things make sense the right hemisphere um is the relation the empathetic um grief and sadness are more likely to manifest with the right hemisphere um but anger rage uh you know grief and even you know despair from a great loss I mean these can be very debilitating emotions um is knowing um to some extent understanding where these emotions are coming from hemispherically does that inform what somebody can do for an emotional regulation standpoint point if they're in a state of profound grief that's that's too devastating or they or they are prone to uh anger management issues is there is is is there a hack or is there a deep wisdom that comes from knowing that this is actually from one side of your brain I wouldn't say it was a hack um and obviously if you're in the throws of a a devastatingly powerful emotion through a grievous loss or whatever it may be um probably nothing I can say will think of it like this will will help at that moment but I think that in incorporating into one's world picture that certain you see the idea used to be that the left hemisphere was cool and rational and dependable and the left hemisphere was emotional and irrational but Crea all of that is complete sorry I don't know how over here we use swear words quite a lot but I think Americans are much more polite but anyway um this isot probably pretty good um so none of this is true um but what there is is a difference in the way in which they contribute to reason and a difference in the kind of emotional spectrum and the spectrum that attached to the left hemisphere is as you say is that of of anger self-righteousness um um kind of um self-justification narcissistic sort of frame of mind and if one realizes what that is in one's less troubled moments that might help one to move away from it seeing that it's neither intelligent nor productive and will only succeed in trapping you into a place that is unproductive one of the things that um people you know speaking as a psychiatrist people often feel is they mustn't let go of their anger um because somehow they're excusing someone else um but who are you hurting by your anger only yourself who would you benefit by forgiving them only yourself if you want to look after yourself these are things that one was taught when one was young but thought that's all Pious nonsense but actually is correct is forgive people let things go don't hang on tenaciously to the sense that you've been wronged if you have a long enough life you'll be wrong many times um and you'll no doubt wrong other people so it's really coming to a more balanced view of what we what we know who we are and what we can do and once you get into the relation the idea of actually this is not just an object of hatred but is somebody that um I can relate to who's another human being who also suffers and their behavior may be caused by that suffering we just don't know what's going on inside another person's head or another person's life then that is a a good step forward do you think that the people who move to urban areas tend to be more um left like lateralized or sort leftish in their style and um and versus people and I know you live in a very rural area there in I love Scott are there people people who sort of gravitate to more rural areas are they does that reinforce sort of a more sort of right hemispheric mode of living with the world well I think yes it does somewhat I mean if you imagine until 1800 100 C certainly and perhaps even slightly later almost everyone in the world would live in close proximity to the Natural World the habitat would be thrust into and grown out of the rather the the the the natural world it's a very very odd State of Affairs that we've got that we've become removed from it and you know even when you think of cities like ancient Athens and ancient Rome these were tiny and and you could see from the walls the countryside coming right up to the walls nowadays it would be rather like going on a holiday to some romantic rural Village So This Modern megalopolis is a very odd thing and we're not really designed for it so I believe yes that it does help one to reintegrate that right Hemisphere and the some some reason to believe that left hemisphere way of thinking is incubated by being surrounded by an entirely artificial rigid rectilinear non-living landscape and uh so yes what more can I say Dr melis thank you so much thanks everyone for joining us today we really appreciate it and if you ever want to drop by in North Dakota please do um there's a Resurgence of right hemispheric thinking going on all across the straet I'm sure you would enjoy uh but thank you so much for taking the time today oh thank you thank you too thank you very much I hope it's been of Interest anyway thanks a lot yeah yeah thank you very much

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

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Length: 50min 50sec (3050 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024