The Wisdom Of Intuition - Iain McGilchrist | Modern Wisdom Podcast 455

as we master things they become less conscious to us the more we understand and the more we know the more we can allow that to fall below the level of explicit consciousness mcgill christ welcome to the show oh thank you very much chris delighted to be here what is the vision that you've got for your work because you've spent uh decades multiple decades researching and writing i'm interested by what the outcome is that's driven you to do this much work well the outcome remains to be seen but what has um driven me if you like and it is almost like feeling that i've been possessed by a demon that's driving me to write um against my will at times and and to complete exhaustion at times but i think that the serious point and it's an enormous project these two very long books but the point is can be said relatively simply that all my life and i mean you know certainly all my life since my early teens i felt that much of the picture that we are taught about the world or not so much taught as it were in school but just received from pundits and media and so on it's it's completely wrong this idea that the world is um completely unresponsive a lump of stuff for us to grab when we need it do what we please with and none of this actually has any meaning so we might as well just get on and be greedy um this seems to me to miss just about every significant point um that that i can feel about the business of existence which is extraordinary mysterious i mean first of all why is there anything what are we doing here and it's these questions who are we actually and i think at the moment just as an aside i think there's a very worrying extremely worrying and very rapid tendency to accentuate something that's been going on all my lifetime which is the idea of man as a machine what is the natural world um and the universe that surrounds it and what are we doing here in it i mean what's the relationship between us and whatever else there is so these are pretty fundamental questions you wouldn't expect me to give a very short answer but that's the what i've hoped to have done um is at least to have given people a lot to think about and very good confidence in institutions they often have themselves that this way of looking at the world is uh intellectually impoverished morally bankrupt and spiritually dead and that it's not something that they feel is at all um like the experience they have of being alive so it's it's on that sort of a scale i'm afraid which is why the second book that i just published the matter with things this is as you know a rather long book 1400 pages yes i think that's once once it's over a thousand i think it's technically a tome that's when you're allowed to refer to it as a tome but we're now making more uh rational rules around stuff that probably shouldn't have them what's the what's the common thread that ties all of the work together because it bridges theology philosophy psychology neuroscience all sorts of stuff what's this is there a common thread between those yes i think there is first of all i can't resist a little crack on the word tome because somebody wrote to me calling my book and i mean it was a an innocent missed type my tomb t-o-m-b uh which do you think that's actually kind of true yeah i felt like i've been dead because i felt i felt it kind of um um pretty much killed me anyway what is the common thread you you mentioned a number of threads and i suppose that they all the fact that they all seem to me coherent with one another rather than in competition with one another is one of the threads i've all my life moved backwards and forwards between um what would nowadays be thought of as rather separate even perhaps incompatible ways of thinking about and being in the world for example my father was a doctor his father was a doctor my other grandfather was a scientist and i was brought up with a very um you know i i think a live interest in curiosity about things scientific but then when um i got old enough to not just be a little sort of brain on legs but actually have feelings i in my teens i started to realize how very much this all left out and i studied much more what one what i call the humanities and then i got a fellowship in oxford in which i could research in the area of the philosophy of literature and philosophy more generally and i got interested in the mind body problem and that drew me to actually wanting to study medicine a long haul in this country uh six years before you're qualified and then another eight before you become a specialist in whatever it is at least um so i the thought there was that only by actually having experience of what happens when something goes wrong with somebody's brain and it affects their mind when something goes wrong with their mind and it affects their whole body can i really crack these interesting issues about how these various strands philosophy science and laterally physics although i'm no physicist but i have a lot of friends who um are willing to guide me and make sure i'm not saying things that don't make sense but the extraordinary thing is that all of these strands seem to me to be leading to a similar place a place which in fact for thousands of years the wisdom literature around the world has been leading one that is quite different from this image of ourselves or the universe as chaotic pointless purposeless meaningless uh and there to be exploited but instead something with which we have a natural um deep deep spiritual connection and which is beautiful rich complex and constantly unfolding and it's our purpose if you like to be part of that unfolding so that's really what holds it together and brings together as you say in the book this first third of it is mainly neuroscience but trying to show the philosophical implications of that the second section is epistemology how do we know anything and the third is metaphysics what is that what is there in this universe so i look at things like time and space and matter and consciousness but also things like values and the sense of the sacred and the idea of the coincidence of opposites which i think is a huge uh problem for us nowadays we don't understand that opposites often come together and we push further and further in one direction ignorantly thinking we'll get further away from something we're trying to avoid only to meet it um head on as we push too far in any one direction what's an example of that well there are many i suppose uh one other controversial one would be that just about every people's republic of whatever in its zeal for republicanism and freedom has created a tyranny in which the people are subjected to the most um draconian control and i think there are variations of this going on uh now uh in in the politics of the public sphere um in politics in the more sort of twitter sphere and i don't think we understand the way in which the beautiful and the ugly can come together by too much pursuing one we can find the other and they're never completely apart the good and the bad there are things that we think these this just is good um but there's nothing that just is good things are good only in a context when you take them out of the context or push them too far things become unbalanced they fall out of harmony and as in music you get a terrible discord so i think this is an idea we could do with them taking on board in in our modern world one of the things that i found interesting is you've been working at this for a long time and you suggested that your intuition around this lack of intuition and i guess a view of quite a sterile view of the world um that this has been something that's been bubbling under the surface for yourself for a long time which means it must have existed before you started working on it and yet yes i know it feels like a lot of the problems that we see that might have been around for a long time are quite easy to drop at the feet of big tech or of the super modern era you know last 10 to 30 years something like that um but it seems like this is a obviously a problem which has been going on for much longer than that yes it is um and in my earlier book um the master and his emissary which came out in 2009 so 12 and a half years ago now um the second half of the book i look through the history of western of the western world um looking at the way in which the balance between the take on the world of the two hemispheres we haven't really talked about that yet but um let me go straight to that that the brain is divided of course the two hemispheres work together but they also attend to the world in a different way and know and understand quite different things and once you see that you can begin to see what happens when things get out of balance out of kilter and there seems to be a tendency in civilization to begin interestingly rather well balanced and then to go out of balance further and further in the direction of privileging the left hemisphere which um spoiler alert is the less intelligent the less perceptive the less insightful of the two which doesn't make it pointless or bad it just means it ought to know its place and not try to be the master uh as in the the um the the narrative the myth that uh this the title the master and his ministry comes from so um yes i think it does go back much further but technology is a very interesting special case you can talk about technology going back thousands of years or you can talk about the first smelting of iron being technology and so on that's that's true in a way um but with many technologies and i think we see that very clearly now there is something marvelous in the technology up to a certain point but by extending it further and further we don't necessarily make it better we actually may make things considerably worse i mean there are everyday examples of this that as machines it becomes um the rigor for for a producer of a washing machine or whatever it is to put more and more and more controls on it it gets actually harder to use it and um cars now are so um overburdened with electronic um gizmos and gadgets that it's often very hard actually to control your own car the way you would like it it's so complex and so difficult to finesse that in fact um a much simpler car would be a much better thing to be driving so i mean that's just obviously on the very simple level but i think technology is no more no less than the extension of human control that's exactly what technology is and obviously to some degree to have some control over what happens around one is a good thing although even there the philosophy that you can sort things out um and you ought to be in control of them rather than um i think a wiser idea that you take what comes to you and take the advantages out of it rather than resisting it and trying to make it into something it isn't um but in any case to go back to what i was saying technology is the extension of human power to control the environment society people uh and this is neither in itself good nor bad i would say although it ought to give rise to a little bit of fear um in any case but it's how it's used and to what end and to have a sudden proliferation of the capacity to control um perhaps destroy nature and humanity um without any commensurate increase in wisdom is a huge problem for us i don't notice i was getting wiser in fact i i'd be prepared to say that this is probably the least wise civilization of which we have any record how would you define wisdom uh i wouldn't necessarily define it at all i think there are certain things if you don't know them when you see them um a definition is not going to help you and indeed that of course is the left hemisphere's idea well let's get this cut and dried and clear at the outset so what is the soul what is meant by god what is etcetera now the point is that in areas of very real experience that we all respond to there are things for which we don't have terms that can be simply defined but to ignore them just because we don't have those terms is extremely dangerous but let me not dodge your problem if i can in any way begin to answer it i think what i'd say it's the capacity to balance many different ways in which we come to know something about the world and not be simply um under the um sway of one of them so in the middle of the book i look at science reason intuition and imagination as probably the four ways that most people would come up with for saying how do we get to know something about reality how do we get to know anything that's truer than anything else and i think my conclusion there is that we've lost the balance we think that one of these or two at the most can answer all our questions and they can't we need to bring to bear a number of different strands of knowledge in order to have wisdom and i i won't go into the detail but in greek there were four or five important words for knowledge and um there was also separately wisdom sofia and they showed an enormous sophistication in their understanding of what these things were but nowadays we seem to think that if something is rationalistic in the way that a computer could follow it then we've achieved a full understanding of something but that actually very rarely leads to a full understanding indeed there is a condition in which people can only reach conclusions by reasoning about them not by experience and not by intuition and it's not that rare it's called schizophrenia and schizophrenia is of course the archetypal example of what used to be called madness and we used to say that people when they were mad lost their reason but in fact this has been pointed out schizophrenia is not a condition in which people have lost their reasons but have lost everything but their reason and they can only come to conclusions on a rational basis so um a thought comes into their head from their unconscious so they don't remember giving rise to it so somebody must be beaming thoughts into my head they hear a sound in the uh coming from the other side of the wall and they think somebody is there bugging me and so this is entirely rational but it is actually completely unlikely and the problem is they have no sense from experience and from intuition of what we should understand i i will stop this but i just want to make this point before doing so intuition has had a very bad rap lately because some um clever and entertaining psychologists pointed out that quite often it's mistaken which it is as i pointed out quite often uh reasoning can lead you to very mistaken conclusions if you lead your life only by reasoning you'll be a very strange person things won't work well um but these these occasions on which intuition doesn't work are much rarer than we think i make the um comparison with optical illusions which are fascinating and sometimes you can hardly believe your eyes as we say but i don't know anyone who after seeing a really good optical illusion says um that does it from now on i'm going to leave my life with my eyes shut uh no because most of the time you're asking a bloody good job and the same is true of intuition and one point that is worth just finishing on here is that if we have to argue explicitly and rationally for a conclusion only we can express only one line of thinking whereas in intuition we may bring together simultaneously and balance without even having to work through it explicitly many strands of knowledge the wisdom that we have gathered from experience and it's been argued and i very much support this that decision makers who are the head of important corporations whether private or governmental should be encouraged to use their intuition instead of reducing their intelligence by following programmatic algorithms i agree this is a tension that i've been feeling in myself and talking to friends about it's very interesting when you have a conversation that continues to crop up in different circumstances and it's always got this single thread that ties them all together and the one of the most common ones that i'm seeing at the moment is a a tension between cognition and intuition that maybe it's because of the age i'm at as well in early 30s a lot of the solutions that me and my friends found to problems throughout our 20s was to apply cerebral horsepower to it right that i'm going to just use more thinking and i'm going to think myself through this problem and then you realize that maybe that was a good tool that got you across one river but you're now trying to carry that boat across river across land to then get you something next and what's next for a lot of us i think is trying to feel and find more grace and play and being able to aggregate all of the experience that we've got and this maybe makes sense actually because when you're first starting out at something you need to be more deliberate because you don't have that intuition to fall back on and yet now exactly the situation that i'm finding myself in increasingly is i'm trying to switch off that rational thinking brain i'm trying to utilize as much intuition as i can well i mean obviously it's a common place that um that young people are more certain than their elders and are certain because they've worked it all out i mean in the old days people used to go to university in order to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age had thought and read an enormous amount but nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying well this seems to me to be um would be very funny if it weren't so completely tragic um it's destroying our society so yes as we get older we realize that there's far more to it than anything that can be just worked out like a logical puzzle and that only people with um fairly severe autistic tendencies fall into doing that so yes our intuitions are terribly terribly important and one of the things that used to be part of education was teaching people not in a i hope um in such a way as to suppress their interest in making something new but to enable them to make something new which was the history of their culture if you like the um tradition now i mean unfortunately we now think of tradition as clearly must be wrong silly explanations of people that didn't know what was happening didn't know enough and so on and so we can dispense with all that but the trouble is that when you do you become very rudderless and rather foolish and the things you come up with are not interesting or helpful innovations the point i would like to make is that tradition knowing the tradition is the only way in which you can evolve to something new traditions are always changing a tradition is like a river a river is as it were always there the river outside my house was there yesterday and i imagine it'll be there tomorrow but the water in it is changing all the time and it's moving on so this process is what we have as a society once we throw out all of it we negate it we rubbish it we have all kinds of more or indeed less sophisticated um thoughts about it then we lose the capacity for something to evolve a society a human society a civilization is more like a plant than a machine it with a plant if you want it to go somewhere you train it that way you you you lead it you don't cut it off at the root and stick it on a wall because that's where you want it to go it'll just die and fall off and we can't make these things these plants do what they don't want to do but what we can do is kill them a gardener as i often say can't make a plant can't even make a plant grow can only just allow a plant to flourish or not and at the moment we're not allowing that wonderful flowering of a civilization of culture of society instead we're killing it it does relate to a belief that we are able to reality is infinitely malleable because of our access to technological prowess if we can fly around the world if we can put a man on the moon if we can do whatever then why can't we dot dot dot there's a donald kingsbury quote which i love that says tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems throw away the solution yes and you get the problem back sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared often it is still there as strong as it ever was exactly yes um what can i say to anthony i disagree um what i think um you're referring to when you say we think we've got the answers to things is rather like the story of the sorcerer's apprentice which um was familiar to people of my great age because of a disney film called fantasia but uh it it's a it's an old um german myth um best preserved in the poem by goethe um in which um the apprentice of a sorcerer overhears the sorcerer um casting spells and getting things to come to life and do work for him and so when the master goes out and says would you mind sweeping the room while i'm out he thinks no i know the spell i'm going to get the broom and the bucket to clean the room but unfortunately having started it has no idea how to stop it well that's a a myth a and in the end nearly drowns except that the sorcerer comes back in the nick of time and it says the thing that the sort of the sort of apprentice doesn't know and stops the process so we're as foolish as the apprentice and just because you know how to make things happen doesn't mean you have understanding of them that could two completely different things and what i worry about is at the moment we increasingly have the power to interfere in what a human being is there are you know i don't want to um join with the most extremely um paranoid narratives but i think there is a very true and real and balanced um risk that we run of um robbing human beings of humanity turning them into what would only really be rather secondary machines because when we compare ourselves to machines we just find the machines do everything faster but that's because they had they didn't do any of the things that we do and so my very big worry um pretty much equal to the worry the overwhelming worry about whether there will be a world in which we can live in the future given how much we're doing to destroy it um my very real concern is that even if the world survived we would have actually succeeded in destroying humanity which is quite incredible because at the moment humanity is the most sophisticated outcome of uh evolution that we know it's a very heavy price to pay you know in order to save the world you have to destroy the things that you cared about within it well that's what we're doing whether we like it or not we're destroying the beauty and life of nature and we're destroying ourselves and our society there's a quote from confucius uh that edward slingalin put in trying not to try which i wanted to bring up earlier on about um the individual's requirement to balance this cognition and intuition this deliberateness in the beginning and the naturalness afterward in the early stages of training an aspiring confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts learn the precise angle at which to bow and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is entered to enter a room his sitting mat must always be perfectly straight all of this rigor and restraint however is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity indeed the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort and that's the deliberate to intuitive um tension that i think that we're playing with and then as you say it rolls out onto a civilizational level as well and what you've referred to uh is something we all have direct experience of um i have it as a doctor but if you're a chess player or a pilot you would have a similar um understanding which is that when you start out on this process you have to learn and memorize and think consciously about many many things but by the time you're a skillful physician or surgeon a skillful chess player or a skillful pilot you don't think like that because that would make you a very second-rate uh performer of whatever that skill is only being able to let go of that degree of control allows you to be the true expert and you know when somebody does one of these great feats like um the pilot who landed a plane on the hudson river um afterwards was asked how did you do it i don't know i just i just did it which is as much as to say that as we master things they become less conscious to us the more we understand and the more we know the more we can allow that to fall below the level of explicit consciousness and that explicit consciousness is not the hallmark of excellence or intelligence uh or understanding it's a regrettable thing that we have to do sometimes when there's a problem that we need to be able to do away with but as long as things don't uh bring up a problem of a new kind then we should not be thinking in that explicit way because we will we will react and respond poorly didn't you look at horse racing and isle of man uh superbike racing as well for this yes i did and it came to me rather than from my will rather nicely um somebody who is a physician who looks after the health of the tt races the race on this amazing natural course in the isle of man uh approached me with some observations about what he knew of the bikers who are traveling on ordinary roads with all the things like road repairs pop holes um walls sudden right angle bends and uh often achieve speeds of 200 miles an hour in doing so it is it's been i think with justice called the most dangerous sporting activity in the world but um they have to rely very very heavily on things that they mustn't um be clunkily consciously aware of they have to be able to master a lot of things unconsciously and the same thing happened to me with a man who had started his life as a worker with horses a trainer of horses he did a a phd in animal physiology he as a young man had a hundred criteria whereby he would be able to select a really excellent racehorse and then he found in his latter years that he was working as a tipster on these tracks and he was completely dumbfounded but i couldn't explain how it was that after looking at a horse for perhaps half a minute walking around in the in the circle before the race he was able to put um winning um bets on these things and to begin with he doubted himself and that would bring up the bookmakers and say why did i say that no no no make it something else and in the end they got so frustrated because his first guess was right and his second guess was wrong they just said to him just text us your first thought and don't talk about it or think about it after that and as long as he does that he makes um a salary in um six figures but if he starts thinking about it he's no better than chance isn't that beautiful it's it's genuinely it's kind of like real world magic you know this fact that you can aggregate all of this information and yet if someone forced you to try and concretize it into words you wouldn't have the first idea about why it was the case and another thing that you've identified there is this this tension uh within our own brains which is the subject of your first book so if someone hasn't been introduced to the um left and right brain split that we have and how that characterizes its thought patterns and behavior how would you explain that to someone well i i'd say that they've evolved for two purposes one the right hemisphere in order to enable us to understand as much of the complex experience that we have as possible and the other to enable us to use the world quickly to be able to grab stuff and manipulate the world so i sometimes say the left hemisphere enables us to apprehend the world in sense of grasping hold of it in fact it literally controls the right hand with which we grasp things um and the aspects of language not all of language but the bits where we say i've got it i've grasped it i've pinned it down and the right hemisphere not to apprehend but to comprehend the world and one way of thinking of this is that the left hemisphere schematizes um it's the hemispheres theory it has a theory about how things work um the right hand uh is not the hemisphere of theory so much as of experience it understands what it's seeing and if you are trying to navigate this world it's very often useful to have a map and the left hemisphere holds the map the trouble is that the left hemisphere encourages us to think that the map is the same thing as the world that is mapped but the world that is mapped is hundreds of thousands of times infinitely more complex than the map that doesn't make the map useless in fact what makes the map useful is it has very little information on it if it had too much information we couldn't use it but we have fallen into the habit of thinking that it's very impoverished schematized theoretical um dogmatic view of how the world works what people are and and all the rest that that that is the reality whereas in fact it's what is obscuring the reality so what we need to do is to get back to a situation where the right hemisphere is as it were the one that is in control or mastery of the situation that unfortunately the left hemisphere when it thinks it knows everything um things start to go wrong and and this was summed up in a saying that's attributed to einstein but certainly very much in his spirit the the rational mind is the faithful servant and the intuitive mind a precious gift we live in the society which honors the servant but has forgotten the gift and really the only purpose in the rational mind is if it can help us get to where that intuitive mind can make itself felt and interestingly in science although there's a lot of very plodding pedestrian uh serial thought that needs to go on all the great breakthroughs are not made by that process at all they're not made by the scientific method as it's called they are made actually as the stories of pretty much all great scientists including in perhaps most strikingly in the case of einstein come as intuitive insights that they often can't explain and then months later they do all the pedestrian work that shows them why they were in fact right there are many examples in my book so yes we need to balance these things but two things to say the first is that the left hemisphere sees this relationship as competitive as either or either the left hand side or the right hemisphere whereas the right hemisphere sees both and it knows that it needs the information the left hand the left hemisphere gives but it's just that it all that information means nothing unless it's taken up into a big picture and there it has its true value if you stop at where the left hemisphere is you're left with a bunch of meaningless fragments of senseless data which leads people who have stopped at that point to say oh the world's just made up of little bits that don't mean anything that's because their right hemisphere with which they could put together the context and see everything in context would be able to understand it so that's one point that they see things differently and the other is that the less you see the more you think you know this is actually a phenomenon in human psychology known as the dunning-kruger effect people who really don't know very much think they know everything as people begin to know more and more they see that they know less and less so probably the left hemisphere thinks it knows it all yes functionally how is this uh manifesting in the brain so you're talking about the fact that the left hemisphere sees almost an antagonistic sort of adversarial relationship with itself and the right and yet the right is able to work more cooperatively but functionally what does this mean for what's happening inside of our brains i don't know quite at what level you're saying functionally but i mean is there some sort of one-way one-way street from left to right well the right hemisphere communicates more and more quickly with the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere does with the right although for what the right hemisphere knows to be valuable it needs to get that information back to the right hemisphere um that's a very simple example but when you look at as i do at length in this new book um at the examples of patients and what they teach us what we see is that the left house who really understands next to nothing but thinks it knows everything so you get this extraordinary situation that somebody will deny something as absolutely barn door as that the left half of their body is paralyzed they will completely deny it and say no everything's fine and it all works and so on and so they're very good at denying and they just don't understand what it is the right hemisphere is talking about so when people lose um their right hemisphere through perhaps a stroke or an injury or much of the function of it at any rate they become incapable of understanding what's going on they don't know what people say what they mean what does what does the meaning of the way this person is talking or behaving they can as it were they've got a dictionary and they can look the words up and they've got rules of grammar but the thing doesn't really mean what it means because things only mean what they mean in a context and sometimes the context can completely change the meaning which is why sound bites from what somebody has said taken out of context and whizzed around the world should be treated with the contempt that they deserve not suddenly become um oh i see you say we can now wage war on this particular person you don't know in what context that was said or what other things that person uh believes or means what i have a slightly i i just have a slightly amusing example of the context changing things which i can't resist and which is cereal package so in the supermarket there are four sizes of cereal packets there's one called jumbo which means very large and then comes one called economy which means large then there comes one called family and that means medium and finally there's large which means small but anyway sorry about that chris carry on that sounds like something that rory sutherland would have told me so if you were to characterize uh somebody who only had access to the left brain and somebody who only had access to their right brain whether that be through a stroke or through an unfortunate piece of steel that's gone through the top of their head um how would their behavior differ well the person with the left hemisphere stroke would have obvious um impediments mainly and usually to do with speech and the use of the right hand and given that um depends what you mean by being right-handed because it's a matter of degree rather than absoluteness but 89 of us are probably right-handed so for most people a left hemisphere stroke has two obvious disadvantages communicating and grasping and however when there is a problem with the right hemisphere the whole of that person's world altars they as i say they cease to have proper empathy one of the hardest things for people caring for people after right hemisphere injuries or strokes is that they no longer seem to have empathy they don't sympathize they don't understand what other people mean they lose what in psychology is called theory of mind which means oh i see what's going on in that person's mind they no longer understand it um and they are really not able to function at more than a very simple mechanistic level but because they still have preserved speech and they still can use their right hand doctors have not paid that much attention to them historically they discharged them from hospital and say well you know thank goodness it wasn't a left hemisphere they're still functional they're just a functional [ __ ] if you like and you know great um epiphany or sort of aha moment for me was to come across the work of my colleague john cutting who had painstakingly sat at the bedside of patients who had things wrong with their right hemisphere and realized how just how crazy their world was the amazingly bizarre things that they believed and the things that they denied and the things they made up and once you realize that you see why it is true that the rehabilitation of somebody after a left hemisphere stroke but in which they may have lost their speech and used to the right hand is much easier than rehabilitating somebody after the right hemisphere is true have you got any idea why the brain would have developed in this way i don't understand why it would be adaptive to distribute differing characteristics based on some arbitrary contralateral line it's a very important and interesting question um in order to help us see what we're dealing with this is not something that arose in humans it's true in all animals we've looked at and i don't just mean mammals and i don't just mean animals in the normal sense also in insects and in worms and in the most ancient still surviving creature a cn anemone called nemesistelovic tenses which is 700 million years old it already and it's taken to be the first example of a neural net in any living creature its neural net is already asymmetrical 700 million years ago and every creature has this asymmetry now you might well say but why because the world isn't asymmetrical in that way it's it's it's it's um it sounds like a a big error but to me um i i think a lot of people would agree with me but my belief is that this arises because of the need to solve a very basic conundrum that all living things have how to get stuff including food and stuff that you can use like getting a twig to build a nest and all that but at the same time watch out for everything else that's going on so if you were just narrowly targeted on picking up a great piece of grain on the background of grit uh if you're a bird you know you you would soon end up being someone else's lunch while you got yours because you wouldn't be seeing the predators and you wouldn't be seeing um your family your con specifics with whom you should be sharing the food and so on so we need all creatures need to do two things at once keep a broad lookout and focus on a target so they need to focus on something that they get but be looking out for the predators and the whole of the rest of what's going on and that effectively runs all the way through two kinds of attention one very narrow very narrow three degrees probably out of 360 degrees so tiny like a little window on the world that's very sharply focused and the other seeing the broad picture sustained over many seconds or minutes so from one kind of attention the world seems to be made up of tiny unconnected fragments that are like little stabs in the world that somehow got to be connected to make sense whereas to the other hemisphere the right hemisphere the world is made up of things that are continuous that um that flow um that always change they're not made up of static snapshots but actually part of as i would say something like a flow or a river that are multiply multiply connected in fact ultimately connected to everything else um that you know where the stuff that is not explicit is important whereas the left hemisphere only understands the explicit meaning can't understand a joke can't understand a metaphor uh it takes everything very literally so if you if you look at that you can see that they give rise to in humans so two quite different worlds a meaningless heap of stuff for us to exploit and on the other hand a vast richly complex moving flowing tapestry of existence that has rich deep meaning into which we are connected so these are quite quite different versions of the world and what i do in in the matter with things is to discuss how we can use this information to help us decide what the reality is to some extent we can't know ultimate truth of course i don't suggest we can but we must make at least gradual decisions that certain things are truer than others otherwise we'd not know what to think or do we couldn't get out of bed so i'm really trying to help us decide what the world is like and how we should get to know it given the fact that you've just displayed two different worlds there the one that's predominantly left brain and one that's right brain the one that's right brain sounds significantly nicer to me that sounds lovely why is it then that we appear to have a bias of drifting toward the left both individually and specifically civilizationally as well brilliant question um individually i'm not sure that we do unless we belong to the society which is doing it so really the question is more about why do societies do this and then the individuals reflect the norms or the preferences that they think the society says right yep yep yep exactly but i don't think that it's um a good generalization that over a lifetime people become more reliant on their left hemisphere i'd say they give more and more reliance to their right hemisphere actually um although i believe the very end of life that process might maybe reverse it rather depends on the process that's causing dementia if we're talking about dementia anyway i don't want to get into all that um but the question why do civilizations go this way is is a very interesting one and um in the preface to the new edition of the master and his industry i point to about six ways it's only a very short essay it's about 15 pages long but i'd point to about six reasons that societies do this one of the most obvious is that using the left hemisphere um simply enables you to become [Music] good at grabbing things and as societies grow people see more and more power disposable to them and people who are interested in self-aggrandizement and the annexation of power psychopaths narcissists tend to drift to the top of civilizations and we can certainly see this being enacted for us in europe at the moment so does that um it makes us feel that we're we're good at grabbing and civilizations usually overextend themselves before they collapse they create an empire um and in this case i think the most dangerous thing is the um commercial empire of the west although we may begin to lose that soon but this business of having an empire thinking you can control large areas of the world feed straight into using the left hemisphere and also once you get outside of decisions that are being made within the context where they're relevant made by huge um governmental bodies perhaps for a whole empire literally across the world more and more it's impossible to make um the sort of decisions the wise decisions the balance decisions the right hemisphere would make because that would mean taking into account individual context everywhere so instead something is as is a rolled out which is a one-size-fits-all simple algorithmic thing where you can follow the rules tick the boxes and bingo we've killed a civilization and another thing is it's very very easy it to express the view of the left hemisphere it's money for old rope which is why it's so easy for clever dicks to come along and go no to believe that there's anything real except just stuff and machines and and thinking the idea that there's a perhaps a spirit or a soul that's just ridiculous it's so easy to argue that um because as it were the left hemisphere's picture which is the one that language is designed to put across doesn't talk about the weapons of language lends itself more towards that type of discussion yes except the language of poetry the language of myth the language of narrative the language of ritual these things actually express the powerful things that we crave that we feel are absent from the kind of electronic manual um out of which we're increasingly encouraged to speak nowadays the first one was it's easier it's more competitive the left brain seems to be better at competing the second one was that it seems to be better at coordinating and the third one was it seems to be better at communicating i suppose so yes i mean you could you could put that i mean it's not really better at communicating because communication is very subtle business when i speak to you you're taking in all the things my right hemisphere does which is to make my voice not sound like a computer generated so you're getting your tone of voice my facial expression my body language you're also getting jokes you're getting metaphors you're understanding what's going on so actually communication is much more the right hemispheres thing it's more effective at communicating at low resolutions though or definitely communicating at scale simplifying the world into a lower resolution version of what it is putting it out there easy to understand yeah i can see i mean those that's a satisfactory explanation i like uh easy ways to remember things so uh competition coordination and communication uh keeping those there is is gonna help help me to to do that rolling the clock forward are you optimistic about the future how do you feel um i call myself um a hopeful pessimist um actually quite often the truth can only be expressed in a paradox but what i mean by that is that i think to be hopeful is a duty and a virtue and a strength and we never know quite what's going to happen it's only the left hemisphere that thinks that kind of thing so i can't rule out that we may have as we have occasionally in the past a sudden change of direction which is happens extensively and fast fast enough to save us and to save the destruction of life on this planet but i'm not very hopeful because um technological changes are going on so fast um exponentially faster and putting power in the hands of the least um savory people um the least intelligent uh the most manipulative um and the people we don't want to be making decisions about our own future even if we wanted anyone to be making those decisions so the situation doesn't look good there are a number of reasons for thinking it might get better and one is that the message that i have is um something that seems to resonate with people at all stages of their life so if i travel in lecture which i've done rather less recently because of covid and i usually find that afterwards as many young people are sort of passionately asking me what do we do how can we help themselves in this situation um and of course i don't have a single ready answer but the fact that they see that there's a problem here and need to resist what's happening is incredibly important often just resisting a process or changing a process that you know has been bad is the most important thing for example if a patient comes to me and and clearly they're having problems and often you can see right away why they're having problems you can't tell them it's because you're doing this because if they knew that they probably wouldn't bother coming to you they're not ready to hear that so in fact what you have to do is lead them to a place where they see that something they're doing now is definitely wrong and get them to stop doing that so if we could actually just stop people pushing further and further down this cyborg path and re-humanize humanity this would be wonderful but to do that would require a degree of humility a degree of or or wonder before the world and a degree of compassion for people who don't agree with us rather than a kind of um high-handed narcissistic contempt so uh there's a little way to go i've been saying for a long time two emotions that i think are missing from my life and from lots of people's lives or in dread uh you know kind of the sensation that you get when you look up at the night sky it's this sort of insignificance it's beauty but it's also it's also sort of vast and unforgiving as well so there is ore and dread that both come up at the same time and yeah this the sacred searching for meaning finding out what it actually means to live a life here do we have moral obligations during our existence all of these big questions are things that i don't know progress it's regression not progression i think towards making people feel fulfilled with those now sadly we weren't able to run census data on people in you know 2000 bc or whatever around the battle of hastings but it certainly feels like the progress that we've seen technologically in terms of the rational worldview that we're trying to be given here is to explain everything away to make it into a more sterile easy to explain lower resolution environment but that doesn't take into account the fact that humans don't just need a formula that can explain some of the things that are going on in front of them they need to frame that in a broader narrative it needs to be part of what does this mean for the fact that this stuff exists what does it mean that the universe is this wide and this vast and that i am here and that i am able to observe the universe and i am able to know that i am an observer so on and so forth um so yeah i mean there's pockets there's small pockets here in austin there's a big sort of new age psychedelic community of people that are trying to that have discussions around these topics i think are very interesting but it very much does seem like splinter factions as opposed to a global movement yet yes i i think that my impression is that people are less and less satisfied with the inability to contact um the very real aspect of experience that we call the sacred the awe-inspiring and it's often been pointed out that in fact curiosity is he not necessarily the same as wonder in some senses it could be the opposite of wonder it's um how do i work out how this this how the clock work works here which is the opposite of the sense of wonder you know we don't say i'm curious what the meaning of life should be i'm curious if there is a god we we we wonder and and are or inspired by these these questions so i mean as kant famously said there are two great things that inspire all in us one is the uh starry heavens without us and the other is the moral law within and you mentioned uh the moral law and one of the things i i think is terribly important and towards the end of this latest book the matter with things emphasize is that one way of thinking about what we're getting wrong is that we've completely inverted the pyramid of values we we worship things like greed pleasure and manipulation which used to be thought of as really at the bottom of the heap uh with things like beauty goodness truth and the sense of the divine at the top instead we explain beauty goodness and truth oh they're really just ways of priests having power and you know all this kind of stuff well sexual selection well read read my book on those questions and i'm sure you have so um yeah these are the parts of the problem and i think that there is a hungering and a for something meatier more philosophically rich and deep than this very thin gruel that we've had at the moment which really almost an autistic child could come up with you know it's just a mechanism it's a piece of cloth right don't get fussed about it but there we are do you think that there's a moral obligation that people have while they're existing or do you think that there's a uh a north star or a vector sort of direction that people should be moving themselves toward i definitely think that life is a moral business and we make moral decisions all the time in fact um how we pay attention to things which is at the core of my understanding of the difference between the hemispheres since they attend to the world differently is a moral act how you attend as a moral act because it changes what it is you find in the world either you miss completely its richness its vulnerability its beauty um its capacity and and potential and or you or you are aware of those and equally it changes you so certain kinds of attention paid to the world impoverish the world and impoverish us they make us um cruel simple um uh blinkered people so how we attend is a is a moral act in itself and what we do is morally important i believe it is in a way [Music] the variety of individuals is that each of us can has the capacity to express another facet to unfold another facet of the infinitely complex hole that is this cosmos and um in something i've only got to come to grips with fairly recently in my uh intellectual history is um the kabbalah the the the judaic mystical literature in which one of the core images is that of vessels that have shattered which contain sparks of light from the divine and that it is a human um role during this life to piece together what has been shattered in order to make these vessels more beautiful than they were before they were broken i think that's very beautiful and it brings to mind for me this japanese art called kintsugi where if of ours has been broken it can be mended using lines of gold which make it more complex and more beautiful than it was before it was broken so i i can't obviously go into any more of that but just that hint suggests to me that actually yes our role here is profoundly moral and if we don't realize that that is a that's a moral failure in itself ian mcgill christ ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do where should they go well and to channelmegopis.com um and it's having a complete overhaul should be in its new form by the middle or end of april and uh yes thank you very much i appreciate you in i really really like the stuff that you do thank you thanks very much chris what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace you

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 47,850

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Iain McGilchrist, wisdom, psychiatrist, cognition, how to stop thinking and start feeling, feelings, feeling vs thinking, mindfulness practice

Id: 7Q6w82PxwM8

Length: 62min 11sec (3731 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2022