Modern Wisdom - #455 - Iain McGilchrist - The Wisdom Of Intuition

Episode Date: April 2, 2022

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, author and a former Oxford literary scholar. Modern society praises rationality as the pinnacle destination we should all aim for. Tradition and intuition are seen as a silly, inaccurate, hokey approach for which we have more precise solutions now. Iain has identified that neuroscience, philosophy, theology and psychology don't always agree with this though. Expect to learn why the modern world is so obsessed with cognition, why deliberateness makes less sense the more experienced you are, what happens if someone loses one half of their brain, what horse racing experts and Isle of Man motorcyclists can teach us about intuition and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on everything from BioOptimizers at https://magbreakthrough.com/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Matter With Things - https://amzn.to/3qNfdYG Check out Iain's website - https://channelmcgilchrist.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show my guest today is Ian McGillcrest, he's a psychiatrist, author and former Oxford literary scholar. Modern society praises rationality as the pinnacle destination that we should all aim for. Tradition and intuition are seen as silly, inaccurate, hokey approaches for which we have much more precise solutions now. Ian has identified that neuroscience, philosophy, theology and psychology don't always agree with this though. Expect to learn why the modern world is so obsessed with cognition, why deliberateness makes less sense than more experienced you are, what happens if someone loses one half of their brain,

what horse racing experts and aisle of man motorcycl motorcycles can teach us about intuition and much more. This conversation about the tension between thinking and feeling, cognition and intuition has been something that I've been playing with for ages and Ian is the perfect guy to sit down with and have this conversation. He's got this sort of gorgeous, grand father-esque British accent wisdom thing going on. He's awesome. He's awesome. You're going to absolutely love this. Don't forget that if you want to join the modern wisdom locals community with over 3,000 people who are interested in the same things that you are and have interesting conversations,

plus get access to exclusive Q&A live streams and behind the scenes information, head to modernwisdom.locals.com. You can sign up for free and if you want to support the show, you can do it through there as well. Modernwisdom.locals.com. But now, please welcome Ian McGillcrest. Music Ian McGill, what come to the show? Thank you very much Chris, delighted to be here. What is the vision that you've got for your work? Because you've spent 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 driven me, if you like, and it is almost like feeling that I've been possessed by a demon that's driving me to ride against my will at times, and to complete exhaustion at times. But I think the serious point, and it's an enormous project,

that it is two very long books. But the point 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 have taught about the world, or not so much taught as we're in school, but just received from pandits and media and so on. It's completely wrong. This idea that the world is 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.

This seems to me to miss just about every significant point 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, this is 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 and the universe that surrounds it?

And what are we doing here, any of it? I mean, what's the relationship between us and whatever else that 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 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 intellectually impoverished,

morally bankrupt and spiritually dead and that it's not something that they feel is a tool like the experience they have of being alive. So 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, is as you know, a rather long book. 1400 pages, yes. I think that's 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 rational rules around stuff that probably shouldn't have them. What's the common thread that ties all of the work together because it bridges theology,

philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, all sorts of stuff? 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 tomb because somebody wrote to me calling my book, I mean, it was an innocent mist type, my tomb, T-A-M-B. Which you think that's actually kind of true.

Yeah, I've felt like I've been dead as I'm writing this. Is that about right? I felt it had kind of pretty much killed me. Anyway, what is the common thread? Well, 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 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, you know, I think, a live interest in curiosity about things scientific. But then when I got old enough to, not just be a little sort of brain on legs, but actually have feelings, IE and my teens, I started to realise how very much this all left out

and I studied much more 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 body problem and that drew me to actually wanting to study medicine a long haul in this country six years before you're qualified and then another eight before you become a specialist in whatever it is at least. So I 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. Well 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 latterly physics, although I'm no physicist, but I have a lot of friends who 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, and there to be exploited. But instead, with which we have a natural 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, the first, the 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 that 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 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 hand on as we push too far in any one direction. What's an example of that? Well there are many I suppose one other controversial one would be that just about every people's Republic of whatever, and it's

a zeal for republicanism and freedom, has created a tyranny in which the people are subjected to the most deconent control. And I think there are variations of this going on now in the politics of the public sphere, in politics in the more sort of tritosphere, 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 this, this just is good. 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 taking on board in our modern work. One of the things that I find 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, 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, 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. But it seems like this is obviously a problem which has been going on for much longer than that. Yes, it is. And in my earlier book, the Master in His Emistry, which came out in 2009, so 12 and a half years ago now. The second half of the book, I look through the history of Western, of the Western world, looking at a way in which the balance between the take on the world of the two hemispheres, we haven't really talked about that yet, but 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 the 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 spoiler alert is the less intelligent, the less perceptive, the less insightful of the two. Which doesn't make it point to the sword bad,

it just means it ought to know its place and not try to be the master as in the narrative, the myth that the title of the master and his imagery comes from. So yes, I think it does go back much further, but technology is a very interesting and 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 true in a way. But with many technology,

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 as machines, it becomes a derigur 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 cars now are so overburdened with electronic gizmos and gadgets. 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

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 or no less than the extension of human control. That's exactly what technology is and obviously it's a 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 and you want to be in control of them, rather than 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. 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. And this is neither in itself good nor bad, I would say, or there it ought

to give rise to a little bit of fear in any case. But it's how it's used into what end, and to have a sudden proliferation of the capacities of control, perhaps destroy nature and humanity. Without any commensurate increase in wisdom is a huge problem for us. I don't notice I was getting wise. In fact, 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? I wouldn't necessarily define it at all. I think there are certain things if you don't know them when you see them, a definition is not going to help you.

And indeed that, of course, is the left-handestive 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 the world, etc. 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, it's 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 under the 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 true or anything else? And I think my conclusion there is that we've lost the balance.

We think that one of these, or two of 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 won't go into the detail, but in Greek there were four or five important words for knowledge. And there was also separately wisdom, Sophia. And they showed an enormous sophistication in their understanding of what these things were. 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 you speak on 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 reason, but in fact this has been pointed out. Schizophrenia is not a condition in which people have lost their reason, but have lost everything but their reason, and they can only come to conclusions on a rational basis. So 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 coming from the other side of the wall and they think somebody is there bugging me and so on. This is entirely rational, but it is

actually completely unlikely and the problem is they have no sense from experience or from intuition of what we should understand. I will stop this, but I just want to make this point before doing so. Intuition has had a very bad rap lately because clever and entertaining psychologists pointed out that quite often it's mistaken, which it is. As I pointed out quite often, reasoning can lead you to a very mistaken conclusion. So if you lead your life only about reasoning, you'll be a very strange person things won't work well. But these these occasions on which intuition doesn't work are much rarer than we think. I make the 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 that does it from now on I'll give you leave my life with my eyes shut. No, because most of the time

you're asking a bloody good job. And the same is true of intuition. And one point that it's 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 at the head of important corporations, whether private or governmental should be encouraged to use their intuition instead of reducing their intelligence by following pro-grammatic 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 attention 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 a river,

across lands 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, 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 young people are more certain than their elders and are certain because they've worked at all out. I mean, in the old days, people used to go to university in order to learn from people who 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, would be very funny if it weren't so completely tragic. It's destroying our society. So yes, as we get older, we realise that there's far more

to it than anything that can be just worked out like a logical puzzle and that only people with fairly severe autistic tendencies fall into doing that. So, yes, our interest in the terribly terribly important, and one of the things that used to be part of education was teaching people, not in a, I hope, 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 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 ruddulous 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 knowing the tradition is the only way in which you can evolve for something new. Traditions are always changing. A tradition is like a river. A river, 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 thoughts about it, then we lose the capacity for something to evolve. A human society, a civilisation is more like a plant than a machine. With a plant, if you wanted to go somewhere, you train it that way, you lead it, you don't cut it off at the root and stick it on a wall because that's where you wanted to go, it 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, not 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 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. What can I say to answer that? I

do agree. What I think your referency when you say we think we've got the answers to things is rather like the story of the sources apprentice which was familiar to people of my great age because of a Disney film called Fantasia. But it's an old German myth, best preserved in the poem by Gertr. In which the apprentice of a Sorcerer over here is the Sorcerer casting spells

and getting things to come to life and do work for him. And so when the master goes out and says, what am I sweeping the room while I'm out? She 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, it has no idea how to stop it. Well, that's a myth.

And in the end, nearly drowns, except the sorcerer comes back in the nick of time and says the thing that the source of the sources of print it doesn't know and stops the process. So we're a foolish as the apprentice and just because you know how to make things happen doesn't mean you have understanding of them that could too completely different things and what I worry about is that the moment we increasingly have the power to interfere in what a human being is, there are, I don't want to join with the most

extremely paranoid narratives, but I think there was a very true and real and balanced risk that we run of robbing human beings of humanity, turning them into what would only really be rather second rate machines, because when we compare ourselves machines, we just find the machines do everything faster, but that's because they didn't do any of the things that we do. And so my very big worry, pretty much equal to the worry, the overwhelming worry about whether the will be a world in which we can live in the future, given how much we're doing to destroy it. My very real concern is that even if the world survived, we would have actually succeeded in destroying humanity, which is quite incredible, because the moment humanity is the most sophisticated outcome of evolution that we know.

But to very heavy price to pay, in order to save the world, you have to destroy the things that you cared about within it. But 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 that Edward Slingelon put in trying not to try, which I wanted to bring up earlier on about 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 into and to 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 tension that I think that we're playing with. And then, as you say, it rolls out onto a civilizational level as well. Yes. And what you've referred to is something we all have direct experience of. I have it

as a doctor, but if you're a chess player or a pilot, you would have a similar 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 chest player or a skillful pilot, you don't think like that, because that would make you a very second rate performer

of what a blood 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 the pilot who landed a plane on the Hudson River, afterwards was asked how to do it, do it, I don't know, I just did it, which is as much as to say that do it, I don't know, 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 forward low the level of explicit consciousness. And that explicit consciousness is not the whole mark of excellence or intelligence 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 bring up a problem of a new kind, then we should not be thinking in that explicit way, because we will react and respond poorly. Didn't you look at horse racing and Isle of Man's super bike racing as well for this? Yes, I did, and it came to me rather than from my will, rather than actually. Somebody who is a physician who looked after the health of the TT races, the race on this amazing natural course on the Isle of Man approach 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, walls, sudden right-angle bends, and often achieve speeds of 200 miles an hour and doing so. It's been, I think, with justice called the most dangerous sporting activity in the world. But they have to rely very, very heavily on things that they mustn't be clunkily, consciously aware of. They have to be able to master a lot of things unfonestly. 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 PhD in animal physiology. He, as a young man, had a hundred criteria whereby he would be able to select a really excellent race horse. And then he found in his last years that he was working as a ticster on these tracks. And he was completely unfounded by it, couldn't explain how it was that after looking at a horse for perhaps half a minute walking around in the circle before

the race, he was able to put winning bets on these things. And to begin with, he doubted himself and would ring 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 So they just said to him just Texas your first thought and don't talk about it or think about it after that And as long as he does that he makes a salary in six figures And if you start thinking about it, he's no better than chance Isn't that beautiful? It's it's genuine. 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 tension within our own brains, which is the subject of your first book. So if someone hasn't been introduced to the left and right brain split that we have and how that characterizes its thought patterns and behaviour, how would you explain that to someone? Well, 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 a sense of grasping hold of it. In fact, it literally controls the right hand of which we grasp things 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. It's the hemisphere of theory. It has a theory about how things work. And the right hemisphere 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 this very impoverished, schematized, theoretical, dogmatic view of how the world works, what people are, and all the rest. 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. Unfortunately, the left hemisphere, when it thinks it knows everything, things start to go wrong. And this was summed up in saying that it's attributed to Einstein, and certainly very much in his spirit, that the rational mind is a 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 you can help us get to where that intuitive mind can make Itself felt and interestingly in science although there's a lot of very prodding pedestrian 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 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 effect, 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 hemisphere or the right hemisphere. Whereas the right hemisphere sees both end, it knows that it needs the information the left hemisphere gives. But it's just that 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 they're 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 left-hemp is 15-thinks it knows it all. Yes. Functionally, how is this 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 what level you're saying functionally, but I mean, is there some sort of one way, one way, straight 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. There's a very simple example, but when you look at, as I do, it lengthen this new book

at the examples of patients and what they teach us. What we see is that the left house really understands the next and nothing, but thinks it knows everything. So you get this extraordinary situation that somebody will deny something as absolutely bound or as that the left half of their body is paralyzed. It will completely denied and say no, everything's fine and it all works and so on. 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 their right hemisphere through perhaps a stroke or an injury or much of the functional bit at any rate, They become incapable of understanding what's going on. They don't know what people say, what they mean, what does the meaning of the way this person is talking or behaving? They can, as it were, they've got addiction to it 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, oh, I see, so 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 believes or means. What? I have a slightly, I just have a slightly amusing example of the context changing things which I can't resist, which is serial packets. So in the supermarket, there are four sizes of serial packets. One called jumbo, which means serial packets. So in the supermarket there are four sizes of serial packets. 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 Kerrio. That sounds like something that Rory Sutherland would have told me. So if you were to characterize somebody who only had access to the left brain and somebody who only had access to the right brain, whether that be through a stroke or through an unfortunate piece of steel that's gone through the top of their head, how would their behavior differ? Well, the person with the left hemisphere stroke would have obvious impediments, mainly and usually to do with speech and the use of the right hand and given that 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-hymnist is through because two obvious disadvantages, communicating and grasping. However, when there is a problem with the right-hymnist fear, the whole of that person's world, altars, as I see, they cease to have proper empathy.

One of the hardest things for people caring for people after the right hemisphere injuries were stroke. 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 a YC, what's going on in that person's mind. They no longer understand it. 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 the historically they discharged them from hospital and say well you know thank goodness it wasn't a left hemisphere. But it's still functional. It's just a functional arcel. If you like, and you know, great 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 realised just how crazy their world was, the amazingly bizarre things that they believe and the things that they denied and the things they made up.

And when she realised that, you see why it is true that the rehabilitation of somebody after a left hemisphere stroke, in which they may have lost their speech and used the right hand, is much easier than rehabilitating somebody after a right hemisphere stroke. 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 that some arbitrary, contralateral line.

It's a very important and interesting question. 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 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 sea in eminent called nemesis-delevec 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 sounds like a big error, but to me, 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 the stuff that you can use, like getting a trick 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, if you're a bird, you know, you would soon end up being someone else's lunch while you've got yours because you wouldn't be seeing the predators. And you wouldn't be seeing your family, your cons 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 the target. So they need to be able 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, the 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 flow, that always change, they're not made up of things that are continuous, that flow, that always change, that aren't made up of static snapshots, but actually part of, as I say, something like a flow or a river, that are multi-peamultively connected, in fact ultimately connected to everything else, 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, takes everything very literally. So if you look at that, you can see that they give rise to in humans to 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, and to which we are connected.

So these are quite, quite different versions of the world. And what I do in the matter we're thinking 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 use this information to help us decide what the reality is. To some extent we can't know ultimate truth, of course, I didn't suggest we can. But we must make these gradual decisions that certain things are true and others. Otherwise, we do 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, civilizational as well. Brilliant question. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But I don't think that it's a good

generalization that over a lifetime people become more reliant on their left hemisphere. I would say they give more and more reliance to their right hemisphere, actually. Although I believe at the very end of life that process may be 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. But the question why do civilizations go this way is a very interesting one. And in the preface to the new edition of the Master in his Endistry, I point to about six ways. It's only a very short essay.

It's about 15 pages long, but I point to about six reasons that societies do this. One of the most obvious is that using the left hemisphere, simply enables you to become 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?

It makes us feel that we're good at grabbing and civilizations usually overextend themselves before they collapse, they create an empire. And in this case, I think the most dangerous thing is the commercial empire of the West, although we may begin to lose that soon. But this business of having an empire, thinking you can control our areas of the world, feeds 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 governmental bodies, perhaps for a whole empire, literally across the world, more and more it's impossible to make the sort of decisions, the wise decisions, the balanced decisions, the right hand that's who it would make. Because that would mean taking into account individual context everywhere. So instead, something is as it is 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 to express the view of the left hemisphere. It's money for for old rope, which is why it's so easy for clever dicks to come along and go.

So, to believe that there's anything real except just stuff and machines and thinking, the idea that there's perhaps a spirit or a soul, that's just ridiculous. It's so easy to argue that, because that's where the left hemisphere's picture, which is the one that language is designed to put across, doesn't talk about the things. The weapon of language lends itself more toward 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 out of which we are increasingly encouraged to speak

nowadays. So, 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. You could put that. I mean, it's not really better at communicating, because communication is a very subtle business. When I speak to you, you're taking in all the things

by right hemisphere dance, which is to make my voice not found, I can't compute that generated. So you're getting my 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 hemisphere's thing. It's more effective at communicating at low resolutions, though, or at definitely communicating at scale, simplifying the world into a lower resolution version of what it is, putting it out there, easier to understand.

Yeah, I can see, I mean, those, that's a satisfactory explanation. I like easy ways to remember things. So competition, coordination, and communication, keeping those, there is gonna help me to do that. Rolling the clock forward, are you optimistic about the future? How do you feel? I call myself a hopeful pessimist. 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 any 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, it happens extensively and fast enough to save us and to save the destruction of life on this planet. But I'm not very hopeful because technological changes are going on so fast, exponentially faster and put in power in the hands of the least savory people, the least intelligent the least intelligent, the most manipulative, 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 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, I usually find that afterwards as many young people are sort of passionate, they are asking me what do we do, how can we help themselves in this situation. 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 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 have bothered 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 rehumanize humanity. This would be wonderful, but to do that would require a degree of humility, a degree of awe or wonder before the world, and a degree of compassion for people who don't agree with us rather than a kind of

high-handed narcissistic contempt. So, this is 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 are awe and dread. 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 awe and dread that both come up at the same time. And yeah, 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, 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 broad 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 the I am here and the I am able to observe the universe and I am able to know that I am an observer, so on and so forth? So yeah, I mean, there's pockets, there's small pockets here in Austin, there's a big sort of new age-slash psychedelic community of people that are trying to, that have discussions around these topics that I think are very interesting, but it very much does seem like splinter factions as opposed to a global movement yet. Yes, I think that my impression is that people are less and less satisfied with the inability to contact 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, as he not necessarily the same as wonder, in some sense it could be the opposite of wonder. It's, how do I work out how this, how the clockwork works here?

Well, it's 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 wonder and are are or inspired by these questions. So I mean, as Kant famously said, there are two great things that inspire all in us. One is the Stari heavens without us and the other is the moral law within. And you mentioned there the moral law. And one of the things 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 worship things like greed, pleasure and manipulation, which used to be sort of as really at the bottom of the heap, with things like beauty goodness, truth and the sense of the divine at the top. Instead, we explain beauty goodness and truth, are there really just ways of priests having power and all this kind of stuff, sexual selection. Read my book on those questions. I'm sure you have. So, these are the parts of the problem.

And I think that there is a hindering and for something more philosophically rich and deep, than this very thin gruel that we have 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 clock, don't get fast at first. 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 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, 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 is a moral act, because it changes what it is you find in the world. Either you miss completely its richness, its vulnerability, its beauty, its capacity and potential, or you are aware of those, and equally it changes you. So certain kinds of attention paid to the world, in poverty to the world and in poverty to us, they make

us a simple, blinker people. So how we attend is a moral act in itself. And what we do is morally important, I believe it is in a way the variety of individuals is that each of us can has a capacity to express another facet, to unfold another facet of the infinitely complex hole that is this cosmos. And in something I've only got to come to grips with fairly recently in my intellectual history is the Kabbalah, the the Dudai mystical literature in which one of the core images is a vessel that contains sparks of light from the divine and that it is a human 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. It brings to mind for me this Japanese art called Kinsugi, where if a vase 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 can't obviously give into any more of that, but just that hint suggests to me that actually yes, our role here is profoundly moral, if we don't realize that that is a less number of figuring it so. In McGilchrist ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do where should they go. Well to channel McGilchrist and it's having a complete overhaul should be in its new form by the middle of end of April. And yes, thank you very much. I appreciate you in. I really, really like the stuff that you do. Thank you.

Thanks very much Chris. you