The Master and His Emissary: Conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist

well I have a question I guess I'd like to know a little bit more about why you specifically chose the title the master and the emissary yeah that that's to meterics plain what I believe to be the relationship is Union hemispheres and they like most other things in life they're in equal and asymmetrical and that one of the brain hemispheres sees more than the other that is the one that I've designated the most it mm-hmm and it was the right hemisphere mm-hmm that's a weird inversion because people often think of the left hemisphere is the one that's like dominant they do they do traditionally that's been the case but as is becoming ever clearer the right hemisphere this has been a real steep learning curve for some people but the variety emma sphere is in many ways more reliable sees more understands more than the left hemisphere is like a sort of hybrid high functioning bureaucrat in a way mm-hmm and the idea of the story was simply that certain matters needed to be delegated not only because as it were the master couldn't do everything he needed an emissary to go abroad and do some of it but also that he must not get involved with a certain point of view otherwise he'd lose what it was that he did to see so that's what I'm really saying there is that there's a good reason why evolutionarily speaking the two brain hemispheres are separate and when you say doesn't get involved what's the advantage of that that detachment from the involvement well it's it rimoni cahal you who you know is a great history ologist yeah and one of his findings was in primates are more inhibitory in neurons than in any other animals and there are more in humans and than in any other primate and there are many and that's proposed speaking proportionally proportionately and there are more kinds as well so we think that about 25% of the entire cortex is is inhibitory right so it's a very strong effect and the corpus callosum seems to be very largely in the end inhibiting function in the other hemisphere and that is I think because over time the two hemispheres have had to specialize there are reasons why actually it can't be I'm not going to go into now but I was talking about just a few days ago that the evolutionary psychiatry meeting but there are reasons why the corpus callosum has had to become more selective and to inhibit quite a lot of what's going on in the other hemisphere because it enables the two to do distinct things mhm and of course they have to work together but usually good teamwork doesn't mean everyone trying to do the same role right so differentiation is very important for two elements to work together and inhibition is one way of doing that so effectively the two takes on the world if you like that the hemispheres have are not easily compatible right and we're not aware of that because at a level below consciousness there's a meta control center that is bringing them together so in ordinary experience we don't feel we're in two different worlds but effectively we are and they have different qualities and different goals different values different different takes on what is important in the in the world and what meeting or whatever so let me let me ask you about I've got I've developed a conceptual scheme for for thinking about the relationship between the two hemispheres and I'm kind of I've been curious about what you think about it and how it might map on to or not your your ideas so I've been really interested in the orienting reflex and discovered by so club I think back in about 1962 right he was a student of Laureus and the orienting reflex is manifested when something at least in their terminology something unpredictable happened i've thought much more recently than it's actually when something undesired happened happens and the laboratory constraints obscured that and that turned out to actually be important but good um so and i kind of put together the ideas the orang ting reflex with some of the things I learned from Jung Jung's observations on the function of art and dreams so imagine that you have a conceptual scheme laid out right we could say that it's it's it's linguistically media its enforced on the world and then there are exceptions to that to that conceptual scheme those are anomalies that are unexpected and the orienting reflex Orient's you towards those yes and so those are things that aren't fading property in your conceptual scheme that you have to figure out you know the first thing you do is react defensively essentially because it might be dangerous yeah and then your exploratory systems are activated yes so and the exploratory systems first of all our enhanced attention from an attentional perspective but then and this is where the art issue sort of creeps into it it's the idea would be something like the right hemisphere generates an imaginative landscape of possibility that could map that anomaly so you can kind of experience that it's at night you know like say you're sitting alone at night it's 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning you're kind of tired maybe you're in an unfamiliar place and there's a noise that happens that shouldn't happen in another room yep you can play with that so for example if you open the door slightly and put your hand in to turn on the light and you watch what happens your mind will fill with imaginative representations of what might be a route is right so it's like the the the landscape of anomaly will be populated with something like imaginative demons yes and that's a first pass approximation and it seems to me that that's a right hemispheric function and then that as you explore further that imaginative domain which which circumscribes what might be is restrained and constrained and constrained and constrained until you get what it actually is and that's specialized and realized it's something like that yeah does that seem like a reasonable what do you think about that I love that host of reasons one is you mentioned defense and one of the ideas behind my hypothesis is the right hemisphere is on the lookout for predators right whereas the left hemisphere is looking for prey and this has been confirmed in many species of things I'd never heard second part amphibians and mammals yes [Music] so and you're in left hemispheric mode you're more in predator Morgan Williams well I mean of course we are not lizards or toads or marmoset or whatever but in animals generally speaking yeah this is the case getting in grasping and after all our left hemisphere is the one that controls the grasping head is left hemisphere and exploring which you mentioned yeah is more right hemisphere and when the when a frontal function is deficient people often go into warm somatic mode of the hand of that side and the left hand it's usually exploratory motions meaningless ones but trying to explore the environment and with the right hand its grasping pointlessly at things so they as where they're automatic thing is with the with the left hand the right hemisphere to explore with the right hand the left hemisphere to grasp so when you said exploratory and you said defense and you said also opening up to possibilities these are all aspects or the way the right hemisphere I often say the right hemisphere opens up to possibilities right whereas the left hemisphere wants to close down to a certainty right and you need chaos an order and and you know I loved in your talk you talked about a chaos and order but if I may say so you seemed and maybe you'd like to gloss that a little you seem to suggest that it would be good we can't get rid of chaos but you've seemed to imply that would be better if we could whereas my view is that chaos and order are necessary to one another and there is a proper sort of harmony balance okay I think that's that's as deep a question as you could possibly ask I would say because I'm saying some of them I would say there's a central theological issue there and yes you there's the you know in Genesis the proper environment of humanity is construed as a garden yes and so I see that as the optimal balance of chaos and order nice nature is flourish isn't it prolific and is chaotic yeah then if you add harmony to that you garden yes where you live in the garden you're supposed to tend the garden okay so now the garden is created it's a walled space yes even as a walled space yeah Ferriday side so it's a walled garden that's it now the thing is as soon as you make a wall you try to keep what's outside out but you can't because the boundaries between things are permeable so if you're going to have reality and you're gonna have a bounded space you're gonna have a snake in the garden yes now then the question is what the hell should you do about that make the walls so high that no snake can possibly get in or should or should you allow for the possibility of snakes but make yourself strong enough so that you can contend with them and I think there's there's an answer there that goes deep to the question of even maybe why the theological question of why God allowed evil to exist in the world I agree with you it's like well do you make people safe or strong and strong is better and safe might not be commensurate with being like it might not be possible to exist and to be safe well our existence is predicated on the fact that we dies well what's never safe well it's certainly bounded yeah this inevitably wrapped up with you sort of finitude yeah there's this there's a lovely lovely Jewish idea and ancient ideas one of the most profound ideas I've ever come across and so it's a kind of a Zen koan and here it is is that so it's a question about the classic attributes of God omniscient omnipresent and omnipotent hmm what is it being with those three attributes Locke mm-hmm what kind of question is that the answer is limitation yeah and the second answer is that's the justification for being is that the unlimited lacks the limited exactly and so because a limited is us for anything to come into existence there needs to be an element of resistance and so things are never predicated on one pole of what is always a dipole right everything is has that type oh yes it is and it's imaged in the yin-yang idea but it seems to me very important because in our culture we often seem to suppose that certain things are just good and other things are just bad and it'd be good if we could get rid of the bad ones but actually by pursuing certain good things that are good within measure too far they become bad not so cool right but now let's go back to your a normally thing because Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the unnormal yes yes and so I think that that's a very important point because there are two ways you can react to an anomaly one is to and both have to be explored one is to try and prove that it's not really an anomaly and therefore you can carry on with things as normal yes and the other is hopeful that's that you hope that that's it that's the that's the typical left hemisphere approach doesn't want anything to have to shift yeah and quite reasonably you don't want to be chaotically shifting if you're onto a good thing too stressful exactly it takes too much work it and you might actually be mistaken in a way it's perfectly correct to be wary but it's not correct to be so wary that you blot out anomalies and there's a lot of evidence as I'm sure you know that the left hemisphere simply blocks out everything that doesn't fit with its take it doesn't see it acting at all right so it's there's a hugely important element in the right hemisphere going hang on but there may be another way of thinking that will accommodate this better and actually good science needs yes to be skeptical about anomalies otherwise the be chaos it also needs to be able to shift when an anomaly is rightly large enough right right or there is quite a lot of them and they don't really fit very well into this exactly yes yes so there's there's another observation that Jung made which I loved I love this observation he was trying to account for radical personality transformation right and so his idea was this and I think it's it's it's commensurate with the ideas of inhibition between the two hemispheres so let's imagine the left is habitually inhibiting the function of the right to keep fear under control it does that all sorts of ways but so imagine that the right is reacting to anomalies and it's aggregating them okay the left can't deal with them so the right is aggregating anomalies and maybe that's starting to manifest itself and nightmarish dreams for examples like that these normally sir piling up it's indication that you're on shifting sand well so then imagine that the right hemisphere aggregates anomalies and then it starts to detect patterns in the anomalies and so now it starts to generate what you might consider a counter hypothesis and the left psychosis if that counter hypothesis gets to the point where the total sum in some sense of the anomalies plus the already mapped territory can be mapped by that new pattern then at some point it will shift yes and the person will kick into a new yes now it's like a piagetian stage transition except more dramatic it is and what a fusion stage transition is also like and subsumes those is regalian Alf fable the idea that a thing is opposed by something else but when it when there is a synthesis it's not that one of them is annihilated right there both transformed and taken up into the new hole which embraces what before looks like look like an opposition okay so here's a question for you you know when I read Thomas Kuhn I was reading to a PSA at the same time and I knew that PSA was aware of codes work by the way and the problem I had with cone and the interpretation interpreters of Kuhn is they don't seem to get something who interpret Kuhn has a moral relativist in some sense yeah you don't seem to get the idea of increased generalizability of a plan so let's say I have a theory and a bunch of anomalies accrue and I have to wipe out the theory and so then I wipe out the theory and I incorporate the anomalies and now I have another theories yeah it's a descent into chaos that's my estimation okay old story so the anomaly yeah disruption is the mythical descent into chaos yes and then you reconfigure the theory with the chaos and you come up with a better theory yes okay the reservoir is it better and the answer is what accounts for everything that the previous theory accounted for plus the anomaly exactly so there's progress always yes exactly but Kuhn is often read as stating that there is no progress that you know there's incommensurate paradigms and you had a just shift between them but yeah there isn't there is a cumulative knowledge in some sense well I think one thing that when we probably would both agree about is that we don't buy as a story that you know because nothing can be demonstrated definitively utterly to be the there is no truth I mean I think we both believe that there are truths things that are truer than other things and indeed if the actor well we couldn't even talk correctly if we did exam and even to say that there are no truths is itself a truth statement which is it's truer than the statement there are truths so everybody automatically has choose whether they know it or not yes because while you and you said why I don't think it's not only that you can't talk you can't even see no because you don't know how to point you wouldn't know how to discriminate what's coming into your brain so it's inevitable and I think we would agree about that but I think that may be a slight point of difference between us in that I'm very willing to embrace the idea of uncertainty and Isis I may be wrong perhaps you could expand on that but sometimes you come across as as a man who has certainties this well it's a peculiar kind of certainty I'm certain that standing on the border between order and chaos is a good idea that's a weird exactly because that you need to be in this sort of slightly unstable position yes you have to you have to be what would you say encountering as much uncertainty as you can voluntarily tolerate yes I think that's equivalent to vygotsky's zone of proximal development I'm sorry so when we talked a little bit earlier about the idea of an instinct for meaning yeah so I think what meaning is it's it's it's the elaborated form of the orienting reflex but what meaning does its function its biological function which I think is more real in some sense than any other biological function is to tell you when you're in the place where you've balanced the stability let's say of your left hemisphere systems with the exploratory capacity of your right so that not only are you master of your domain but you're expanding that domain simultaneous it and when you I think that when you're there yeah it's a it's a it's a kind of a metaphysical place in some sense that you're imbued with a sense of meaning and purpose and that's an indication that you actually optimized your neurological function yes and the perhaps we could gloss the idea of purpose because I think there's a difference between people get very confused I think about the idea of purpose particularly whether there's a problem that suggesting there is a purpose and I believe there is a purpose or there are purposes to the cosmos not just to my and suggest that somehow it's all been predetermined by God but this is to misunderstand the nature of time that there are time static slices and God as there and he's sorted it all out and the whole thing's just unfolding as birdsong says like a ladies fan being unfurl is extremely boring and and and and an entirely static and non creative universe but actually something is at stake things are unfolding they have overall a direction but actually exactly what that direction is isn't know what it looks like and it's a fool who says anything positive about the nature of God but but I'm not convinced that God is omniscient and omnipotent either I think God is in the process of is becoming God is not only just becoming but is becoming epidemic yeah so being and becoming more becoming I think becoming is the important thing why do you think that I mean it's also a strange segue I mean I'm not criticizing but I'm curious what what drove you to that conclusion an awful lot of thing is really and I think that everything is is a process in fact I'm writing a book called there are no things oh there are processes yes and there are patterns patterns yes well I think music is so powerful music is one of the most mysterious and wonderful things in the universe and I don't think it's at all foolish of people to have thought that the you know planetary motions were kind of music I think it is a very important insight now the music you know I've thought and I've said this in public lectures that music is the most representative of the Arts it is the world's music describes how those patterns should be arranged you're using representative in a very different way no depends on what you mean by represent so it's representing the ultimate reality of the cosmos what I would like to say that presentative inner that it's not representing anything it is actually when we're in the presence of music something is coming into being which is which is at the core of the whole cosmic process and I think that's what love music they do and I mean I'm hardly any originality in the idea cause lots of physicists say this they're the sort of the movements of atoms and the movements of planets and so forth are more like a dance or more like music than they are like things bumping into it right and so a lot of things there's patterns that people have made into tools I agree with you and tools of what the left hemisphere is always looking for it's always like insanity didn't pass right it rare phase processes that if you it's all a matter of time every single thing including the mountain behind my house if you were able to which is billions of years old if you were able to take and as it were a series of like a time-lapse camera you'd see the thing morphing and changing and flowing everything flows as Heraclitus once said everything flows it's just a question of over the time period that you consider it temple it's a question of the tenure and so taking time out of things and considering them in the abstract deracinated from context particularly from the flow and from the context of time changes them into something else and I think that what in brief what Plato has done and what a lot of the history of more recent Christianity has done is to thing if I God and heaven perfect states that are unaltered and so on and I think that it is an ever evermore wonderfully self self exploring self actualizing process that requires a degree of opposition you know as a stream in order to have the movement and the and the ideas and patterns in it that when I experienced it's hard to describe these experience but when I've contemplated death deeply it has struck me as a as a fundamental repair mechanism like it's part of the mechanism by which new things that are better are brought in to be absolute and I mean you see that in your own being yes of course without death you couldn't live yes because you're dying the things about you that aren't right even though the physiological level are dying all the time they are unfortunately you also completely die which is unfortunate side but more more cosmically speaking it does seem to me that death is the is its I don't know man it's I've had intuitions or intimations the death is the friend of being and that's like it's hard to get my head around that I completely agree with you and indeed that's been said by many many many ways of people than myself I think that's right that death is predicated on life but also is it it shouldn't be seen as a sort of something that's negative it's it's a necessary stage in the process of being becoming what it is and since everything is ramified since nothing is just isolated you and i may look as though feel as though but as you often eloquently say we all have in time we come from a place but also as a culture we have history we can't detach ourselves from it we're expressions of it but we're also inevitably dependent as all organisms are on the environment where I end and where the great environment begins is a I didn't like the word environment it's not a nature it's just something that's always been born whereas environments there's something around me from which I'm separate but but anyway all of that is close to yes yes so I would see us as like an eddy in a stream or like a wave in the sea that is never set for Schrodinger life is really I mean the comings together of physics with with this with the process philosophy is a very strong when does that book come out when I finished writing oh yeah and I I'm very worried that it's getting bigger and is you know all the time I'm writing it I'm seeing more and more of things that I am really must get to know more about and it's an ever receding well it's a danger of a book that I know that aims at something fundamental because I never run you never hit the proper boundaries that's it I need that wool mhm yes yeah well I also had experiences I would say that when I was trying to understand their imaginative experiences when I was trying to understand let's say the necessity of evil hmm no because that's also a fundamental theological conundrum and yeah a metaphysical conundrum you know why is it that being is constituted such that evil is allowed to exist and it's even chromosomes what critique of of Alyosha's christianity essentially what kind of God would allow for this sort of thing that's the ancient question yeah it's an ancient question and I mean part of what I thought but I mean I thought about the adversarial I went to that which is that you need a challenge because you don't you're not forced to bring forth what you could bring forth without a challenge and the greater the thing that you're supposed to bring forth the greater the challenge has to be yeah I need an adversary something like that but then I also thought that um it would it's possible that that that being being requires limitation you might say optimal being requires free choice I know I'm going through a lot of things quickly free choice requires the real distinction between good and evil is that you don't have choice well so maybe it's possible to set up a world where evil is a possibility but where it isn't something that has to be manifest you know where it's an option open to you and a real option and it has to be and the challenge that was presented to you but it's something that you can not you can not move towards if you soul if you so desire and that seems to me to be something like the ethical ethical requirement that that's the fundamental ethical requirement to avoid evil I'm sure doesn't mean it shouldn't exist that's not the same issue there it isn't it isn't and I wonder what could recast it as the need for other nurse and God needs something other and that other if it's not going to be just part of God has got to be free otherwise there will be no creation I mean the the nature that there is some other than than God it may in the end come from and come back to right that God well with that divine essence all that whatever but there's a wonderful thing I can't figure out either like in the Christian idea there's the end of time where the the evil is separated from God from yeah and I think about that as a metaphysical well you might think if it's a form of like imagines it's a form of perfection a form of striving for perfection you fragment yourself yes you challenge yourself yeah throw what's not worthy into the fire elastic something like that and so what it what you end up with retained is much better than what you started with through the trials something like that well that sounds a bit like the dialectical process that we were talking it right and you have alluded to a couple of very good Jewish myths and there's one in the lurin Kabbalah about the creation which I don't if you know it but it's it's absolutely riveting to me and the idea is that the primary being aims off the ground of all being and needs something other to come into being the creation and that creation what does that aims off do was his first act is it to stretch out a hand and make something not a big the first act is to withdraw to create a place in which there can be something other than paint off and so the first stage is called sim summon is sounds- as so many creative things do with draw and then in that space there are vessels and a spark comes out of aims off and falls into the vessels and they all shatter and that's called sefirot okay yes you right yes and then there is the third stage repair in which what has just been fragmented is restored into something greater and so this process carries on and it's in my terms very like what happens with the hemispheres the right hemisphere is the one that is first accepting it is sort of actively receptive if you can put it that way to whatever is new you were talking about Hammond gobo cancer and and then whatever that is is then sort of processed by the left hemisphere at the next stage in two categories so it's bit of that yeah try to understand it but of course whatever it is is much bigger than any of the categories so they all break down and it gets restored in the right hemisphere into a new hole that the tikkun the repair mm-hmm right tik kuf tik right right right right and I think that the the kind of easy way of thinking about it is learning a piece of music you'll first of all attracted to it as a whole you then realize that you need to practice that piece of bar 28 and you realize that you know it 64 there's a return to the dominant or something and then actually when you go on stage you've got to just forget all about that but it's not that that work was lost it's just that it's no longer present right right

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 308,791

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: xtf4FDlpPZ8

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018