Why the world is anxious | John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist and on neuroscience and creativity

[Music] yes and we could say something a bit about intuition i suppose um because it's very important actually it's received a rather a bad rap in recent years due to the ingenious machinations of various um psychologists who love finding what i call intuitive illusions which are equivalent to optical illusions you know they that you look at you think it can't be right but actually it can be proven it is but as i've often said i don't know that after seeing a really good optical illusion anybody said right that does it after this i'm never going to trust my eyes again you've got to trust your eyes if you're going to live and the encouragement not to use intuition it's one of the most pernicious aspects of modern culture of course it can be mistaken but so can the simplistic following of algorithmic procedures that the computer which is logical reason is the blending of the ability to think in logical terms with experience and what is drawn from experience which is all the richness that comes from being a human being not a machine and i think that the real reason they don't trust intuition is um that a lot of it is an unconscious process a hundred percent and i'm thinking you know there was a very interesting experiment where they showed a group of people chinese idiograms and then next week they said we're going to show you some new ones and some old ones tell us the ones you saw last week hopeless then they repeated the experiment but the second week they said when you look at the shapes you'll find that some please you more than others just tell us which ones please you and the ones that pleased them were the ones they'd seen the week before so the knowledge was there at an unconscious level but that's mistrusted by the left hemisphere because it's not in control no not only not in control but it's the one that has this spotlight of attention the fundamental difference as you remember is goes back to the ways in which the two hemispheres attend to the world for evolutionary reasons one of them is intent on getting and grabbing a detail in order to stay alive but the other is intent on seeing the whole of the rest of the picture because if you didn't you'd be very vulnerable you wouldn't understand anything else going on in the world so we have to have these two types of attention but the left hemisphere spotlight means that it only sees it's it's literally something like 3 out of 360 degrees of the attentional arc so imagine a stage on which just a tiny spotlight but everything else yeah that was going on in that world all the other actors all the rest of the scenery wasn't visible and as far as the left hemisphere is concerned one of the very early chapters i i showed astonishing evidence from individuals who had damage to the right hemisphere that something that doesn't exist in their attentional field doesn't exist not only doesn't exist now by the way but never existed before and can't be imagined to exist in the future so an amazing early german or possibly austrian um neurologist singular describes um a number of patients who'd had right hemisphere strokes and what he points out is something very subtle it's known that they deny the left half of their body and the left half of space and all kinds of things very strange now that arm not mine if it's paralyzed in any way it's perfectly okay as far as i'm concerned i mean denial and the non-existent but when they were questioned about the left side they just froze and and wouldn't answer any questions and then he noticed that if it was suggested to them that they once had an arm on that side that moved and they totally blanked that and denied it and they couldn't project that they could ever have one again so this is really very remarkable what it means is that as far as the left hemisphere is concerned but not as far as the right hemispheres have had a broad attention what is not attended to simply doesn't exist never existed yeah and that's philosophically fascinating well it's very true of science isn't it because um you remember that story about the man who's going down the street and he sees a guy looking looking around he says can i help he says yes i i dropped my key yeah and he looks for a time with the guy and he says well um you sure you dropped it here and the guy said no no i dropped it down the alley over there and he said well why are we looking here he says the light's better and that seems to me to sum up a lot of science it's behaviorism isn't it you say what's out here in the light you know and that will dominate psychology for 70 years it's insanity behaviorism is one of the most desired illusions that could ever obstruct humanity as as galen strawson a prominent america i'm sorry english angular american um analytic philosopher the mainstream says one of the weirdest things that could ever happen to deny the inwardness of experience because of course you can only do that using the inwardness of your experience so yes but what i wanted to say is that we know that the vast majority and i mean less than half a percent of what the brain is doing taking in and knowing about is present to consciousness and that we do a lot of very sophisticated things not only mostly why we're not conscious of them but we do them better when we're not conscious of them which i think was what you were driving at when you're like doing a tow doing your shoelaces up if you think about it because much more difficult but you know there's a prominent um german jurist the head of a max planck institute who who says that institutions should encourage their employees wherever possible to make decisions intuitively not just because we know very well that creative decisions are only ever good creative decisions are only made intuitively which doesn't mean you don't think at all that's not my point you do thinking you do a lot of work you gather evidence but you allow your intuitions to guide you to the conclusion you don't force it and and the the interesting thing there is he points out that when you speak and when you think explicitly out loud you can only be thinking of one thing at the time yeah which is so obvious frankly that you collapse all that you know this one thing that you're saying right now whereas in your intuitive unconscious mind you are bringing together twenty thirty a thousand strands from memory from experience about how these things tend to go and what patterns you and we're told now you mustn't trust that um and i think part of the worry is that we will jump to conclusions actually in the way that the left hemisphere does you know we'll make quick and dirty judgments but actually it turns out we're not that stupid but tell me why why does the left hemisphere jump to conclusions i don't i can't go well it's part of its desire for fixity certainty and getting something i mean perhaps it would help for i mean not everybody here will have read the master in his emissary so they may still be at the stage of thinking that all this right left stuff is that nonsense that was talked about in pop psychology until i wrote the most of this embassy but the stuff that followed the roger sperry nobel prize well you got simplified for a long time well sperry was a very very great man and a great philosopher as well as uh and interestingly like me came to science from the humanities but he got his nobel prize for his work on hemisphere difference that's absolutely right but the pop culture vulgarized it and got it wrong and also in the early stages of any scientific enterprise people you know make generalizations that seem at that point in knowledge to be right and then part of the whole point of science is that it progresses so you let go of those and you find better ones what you don't know is oh well all that stuff they said it's not right so there can't be any differences at all why would you ever think that there are obvious differences i mean why is the brain structured like that why do people who have damage to one hemisphere rather than the other have predictably quite different experiences of the world of course there are differences it's just working out what they are and that's hard work nobody wanted to do it i was muggins i did the hard work and you know what one sees just very briefly if i can do something that is really horrible just to try and summarize summarize something very subtle in very short a few words if you focus very narrowly on things with the intent of grabbing them you price certainty you price fixity stasis because it makes it easier to grab you see things as disparate fragmented atomistic you see things as out of context as disembodied you tend to abstract them and think of them as instances of a category you tend to see them as two-dimensional they're in a kind of mental space not in the embodied space and you see them as if functionally inanimate and if you see them in with the left hemisphere that's the picture of the world it's exactly the picture that has dominated popular science and popular um philosophy in the public arena for a couple of hundred years an atomistic mechanistic universe that means nothing is going nowhere and doing nothing and only moves when as newton suggested it's all static until something comes from outside and gives it a push we now know that nothing at all is static everything is moving every single particle in the entire universe is always moving so this is the start on another vision that of the right hemisphere in which nothing is ever fully certain as we now know not not just because we don't know enough but because it's intrinsically uncertain that everything is fundamentally connected ultimately to everything else that it is flowing and changing all the time never fixed and graspable like that that is always changed by being part of a context that it is embodied that it is um something that is often implicit in the sense of can only be understood unconsciously not just with the spotlight of consciousness and is animate so you've got a completely different kind of a world and one way of looking at it is the right hemisphere sees the world as it presences as it is present to us as it becomes something we are aware of whereas the left hemisphere sees its own diagram schema map representation and that reference i like the way you i think you sort of hyphenate hyphenate re-presentation exactly you take reality and then you re-present it in a form that's acceptable to the left hemisphere and what it suggests is that it's present again when it no longer is present i mean it's a kind of oxymoron representation but really it's the best the left hemisphere can do it has an abstract idea of something and it puts it in place of the thing and i don't know what you think but nowadays when i listen to a lot of public discourse i think what has happened to people's trust in experience what's happened to that gra intelligent grasp of what's going on around them with human understanding with emotional and social intelligence as well as cognitive intelligence all of which are more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left as i demonstrated [Music] but what's happened to that we seem to be thinking only in terms of scheme as theories about what they're rather saying well let's just have a look do you think it's because the world is a very anxious place at the moment and that anxiety pushes us into stereotypes which i know creatively but pushes us also into the left hemisphere more anxious we are the more we look for certainty you know if you want certainty then you take a revelatory approach religion because then you've got something which is immutable it's settled for all time you know which does not produce very good religion i think well the great enemy of religion and of science is dogma and dogma is rigid thinking and saying we know it's right because it says so in this book that's not actually how science works it's not how religion works and then they're not incompatible they're not in any way um incompatible with one another at all they're both rather different they take different attitudes but they're both should be at their best honest uncertain attempts to get closer to what really is yeah and answering the question what really is is what my book no matter what things to go back to your first question why did i write the book it's an attempt to say i think we can get somewhere nearer this and certainly we can get away from this very limited distraction so tell us now assuming that most of the people here have a fairly good grasp of the hemisphere idea um tell me how you developed that in these new uh 1500 pages how do you structure that yes well extremely briefly um what i think i need to do is to demonstrate first of all that if we're talking about what is real and the two hemispheres produce two different pictures of reality we have to be able to be able to judge between them so part one of the book is showing just how different the grasp or the ability to understand of the two hemispheres is to the basic stuff of experience what do i mean by the basic stuff i mean how do we gather anything about the world before we start reasoning about it or doing science on it we do so by our attention we do it by perception we do it by the judgments that we already form on perception because we never just perceive something but we already think it is or something and those processes are all interrelated and then we we bring to bear our emotional and social intelligence our cognitive intelligence and our creativity on understanding what is going on here and what i demonstrate in every case looking at literature about individuals but also broad tests and studies in normal in normal individuals as well as in those who've had brain damage that effectively all of these things attention perception judgment intelligence of every kind and creativity are better served not only served that's not my point but better served and in some cases very largely as you said by the right hemisphere now what why is that important you might say well i don't really care which hemisphere i mean that is in the end irrelevant what important is the actual intelligence or the creativity but what i think it contributes is something really kind of significant in the history of philosophy because in the past all we could do when we look back across the history of philosophy is say at this time people thought this at another time they thought that or even at the same time often in greece one group of philosophers thought there's one thought that and you have to go well take your pick i believe we can do better than take your pig because we can see the stamp the hallmark of what the left hemisphere would make of this situation and we know now incontrovertibly that the left hemisphere is just less vertical it's not always mistaken it's not that it doesn't contribute something we do much better when we have both hemispheres working i don't wish for a mass right and left hemisphere stroke for the population on the whole i believe the brain is structured this way for a reason but the left hemisphere must be in service to the right in other words it should be informing the right in the way that a computer informs a human being but doesn't actually make the decisions about the work because only somebody who lives in the world can do that but we're now privileging both through our addiction to machines and through this machine-like way of thinking we're privileging this extremely impoverished unintelligent vision over the imaginative intelligent insightful one and if we're going to survive number one we'll need to change and number two even if we could survive by a series of flukes and brilliant pieces of technology it wouldn't do us any good because we'd still be these limited narcissistic unhappy anxious miserable specimens you're describing because we believe in this vision of the world and of what humanity is and of how we relate to one another and what we should be doing here in this world i'll give you a wonderful example of the left hemisphere when they're talking about consciousness right well you know everybody knows one thing for sure right now which is that they're sort of sitting here um listening or not listening to us everybody knows that that's their experience and yet the evolutionary biologists will say oh no no consciousness is simply a byproduct of chemical reaction you know it doesn't it doesn't matter they say it's an epic phenomenon i mean that is insanity when you think of descartes at least descartes says you know i'm i'm here i think therefore i'm here yes you

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Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021