The One You Feed - Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Yet Connected Brain

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Stressed by Holiday Expectations?Join Eric and The One You Feed Community for a FREE online gathering on November 30th at 8pm Eastern Time. (Recording will be available for 72 hours)In this free live event, Eric will teach a Spiritual Habit that will allow you to release these types of stress and touch into a deeper feeling of wholeness, peace, steadiness, and presence. Register Now!Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, author, lecturer, and former Oxford Literary Scholar. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mold, and in turn is molded by, our minds and brains.Today Iain and Eric discuss his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Iain McGilchrist and I Discuss The Divided yet Connected Brain and …His book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western WorldThat creativity requires resistanceThe differences between the two hemispheres of our brainHow distinctions are important but divisions are invented by usThe ways our brain hemispheres work togetherThat our world is currently dominated by left brain hemisphere thinkingThe ways we might address the crises we face as a species and worldHow he responds to the critics of a right brain/left brain theoryThe ways in which our hemispheres are connected and work togetherThe difference between our two hemispheres isn’t as much what they do but how they do itThe 8 portals our brain uses to get information about the worldThe 4 powers we have to arrive at truthIain McGilchrist Links:Iain’s WebsiteTwitterFacebookUpstart: The fast and easy way to get a personal loan to consolidate, lower your interest rate, and pay off your debt. Go to www.upstart.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Iain McGilchrist, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Whole Brain Living with Dr. Jill Bolte TaylorLessons About the Brain with Lisa Feldman BarrettSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the things that worries me in this world is that we are losing our respect both for science and for reason. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ian McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, writer, lecturer, and former Oxford literary scholar. He's the author of many books, including the one Eric and Ian discuss here, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Hi, Ian. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks, Eric. Great to be here. It is a real pleasure to have you on. You are the author of a book called The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and you have a great new two-volume book coming out shortly also that really expands these topics greatly. Your book has been so influential. It's the sort of thing in, you know, reading for this podcast, you know, I've been doing this seven and a half years and I've read 500 books.

And your book is very, very often referenced. So it's really great to have you here. And we're going to get into your work here in a second. But let's start like we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. There's a couple of quite separate angles, really, to think about this. One is, I think, the one that probably I reckon you're expecting me to take and inviting me to take, which is, you know, how do I relate this to my experience? You know, do I recognize this? And if so, what do I do about it? But the other is to make some reflections on the whole way it's set up, which is the idea of opposites. Yes. And one of the things I argue in the new book, it may sound a bit strange,

is that opposites tend to coincide and that things that look like they're negative sometimes are not, and so on. So if I could just briefly address both of those, please, or whichever you'd prefer me to. Both are great. I mean, you're talking to a dedicated Zen practitioner. So I am all about your ideas around the opposites coexisting. So take it wherever feels like you'd like to take it. Okay. Well, in that case, let me just jump in and talk about that. As you say, it's an ancient idea that is certainly very prevalent in Oriental philosophy and Zen. It's also present in Hinduism, it's present actually in medieval Christianity.

Some of the great mystics that we don't read anything like enough and aren't known enough in the West were very paradoxical in the way in which they talked and seemed to be saying things that to the modern mind seem like, how can both those things be true? And I also discovered more recently the Kabbalah, the body of mystical thought of Judaism, which completely blew me away. So these ideas have been, in any case, crystallizing thoughts in my mind for a very long time, which is that often we seem in the modern world, for example, to be beset by paradoxes. We set out to do one thing and we achieve exactly the opposite of it. To give a few

concrete examples, we want so much to protect our children that we actually rob them of the chance to experience any kind of risk. And in doing so, we make them more vulnerable. We protect ourselves from bacteria with all kinds of media that will sanitize our environment. And in doing so, we knock out our immune system and become vulnerable to infection. We take huge steps to protect society from the dangers of drugs, and we make very little impact on drug use. But in doing so, we create a fertile field for organized crime. I could go on and on, but there are many things, and some of them are very topical, that in the modern political sphere, one sees people

who advocate a world in which obviously what they want is greater justice, greater compassion, greater understanding. And they do it with such lack of understanding, such lack of compassion, and such lack of justice, that they completely undermine what it is they're setting out to do. So we see this all around us. That's in a very practical way. There's a thing called hormesis, which I don't know if you are familiar with the concept. It's actually a concept from chemistry.

But what it means is that sometimes a tiny bit of something that's damaging, it's actually very helpful. I'll just give one example. Those who looked after Biosphere 2, which is an enormous geodome that protects an environment, and they wanted to see how plants and trees and animals worked in this environment. And one thing that puzzled them very much was why trees kept falling over before they'd even achieved maturity. And it turns out that for trees to thrive, they need winds, they need to be stressed. If they're not stressed, they don't grow. And of course, there are many human, I don't

need to unpack them probably for your listeners, but they will see them for themselves. So there's all that going on. But also at a deeper level, the level of Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, one of the very earliest of all the Greek philosophers, 6th century BC. I mean, he is very much in the tradition that I would associate with Taoism and with Zen of paradoxical injunctions, the way up is the way down, you know, all these things. And that by changing, it remains the same. An extraordinary remark, which turns out to be totally central to all living creatures and living organisms. So I see all this as very important. And one other thing is that I think the element of resistance is essential, as in the story of the trees.

So one thing I've become very clear on, and it's a thread that runs through many of the great philosophers I admire, particularly Schelling, the early 19th century German philosopher, is the idea that actually creativity requires resistance. And in some ways, this is rather like the idea that you can't move without friction. Friction is what stops movement, okay? But actually, without some friction, you can't move at all. So we need something over against to help whatever it is come into being. It's always this coming

together of opposites that are fulfilling one another, in some ways frustrating one another, but in doing so, spurring them onwards, as Nietzsche pointed out, to greater and greater achievements and greater, greater fulfillment of themselves. So those are some brief comments on the structure of this idea that there's a thing that's good and a thing that's bad and they oppose one another. I'd like to problematize that before saying anything further. Well, I was fairly certain knowing you and your work that you might come right in and be like, you know, that's a very dualistic left hemisphere type parable. Yeah. of over-reliance on one or the other is. I won't give away the conclusion,

although most listeners probably know where we're headed with this. But how would you set this up? How would you start this conversation for somebody who's kind of coming in cold to your work? Okay. Well, I'd ask a few very simple questions. They relate to facts that are well-known to many of your listeners and viewers, but may not be to some others. The first is that the brain is asymmetrical. Why? Because the skull ain't, and the world that it's encompassing is

all around. Why is the brain asymmetrical? Why is it divided in two? Why is there a whopping great divide right down the middle of the brain with only, I mean, a large number, but proportionately a very small number, about 2% of neurons actually crossing from one hemisphere into the other. If the brain's all about making connections, what the hell is that about? Why is it that when we look at all living creatures that we've ever looked at, right down to the most ancient living creature, which is a life form called Nemethostella vectensis, 700 million years old, a kind of sea anemone, described by Thomas Holstein at Heidelberg, who imaged it as the origin, the most ancient forebear of the neuronal system of vertebrates.

Why is that already asymmetrical? And my answer to that in brief, and I don't know a better one, is that all living creatures have to do two completely opposed things at the same time, coming back to opposites and how they fulfill one another or complement one another. An example I've used so many times that I'd be a rich man if I was paid a penny, but here it goes. A bird feeding on seed on a bed of gravel has to be able to pick out accurately and swiftly a seed from a piece of grit. To do that, it needs very highly focused, but also extremely precise and targeted attention. So it's targeted, it knows what it wants. It's very narrow beam, and it's highly precise. But if that's the only attention

it's paying, then at the same time, it will become someone else's lunch while it's highly precise. But if that's the only attention it's paying, then at the same time it will become someone else's lunch while it's getting its own because it needs to have the precise opposite attention. An uncommitted attention for anything, it doesn't know what. It might be a friend, it might be a foe, it might be its offspring, it might be its mate. That attention needs to be very broad, open,

and it needs to be vigilant and sustained, not piecemeal from second to second, this bit, that bit, the other bit. Now, that just gives your listeners, those who don't know my work, a little flavor of the idea that there are these two kinds of attention. And to begin with, when I learned about it, I thought, well, that's interesting, but is it that important? Isn't attention just another cognitive function? So steeped was I in the tradition in which I'd been trained. I was also enough of a philosopher to realize that attention changes the world. The way we attend to things changes what it is that we find there. The same set of things attended to one way looks entirely

different attended to another, you know, in a homely way. We can all experience this that, you know, on one day, the world seems like a wonderful, glorious, awe-inspiring, beautiful place. On another, it seems like a crock of shit. And you go, what happened? What's changed? Well, actually, not much except the way you look at it. And this is also true when it comes to the world of ideas. If we teach people that the world is a pointless, senseless, purposeless mechanism that is best understood by taking it apart and seeing what it's made of,

as if we are trying to understand a bicycle in the garage, then we will see the world as pointless, senseless, made up of little bits, but, you know, what the hell are we doing here with it? Whereas if you instead see it as something that is fundamentally living and an organism that can't be just summarized by taking it apart, in fact, if you take it apart, you kill it, and you can't make it again by putting the parts together. In fact, the parts may be an artifact of the way you look at it.

I mean, in essence, I argue that there are only holes. There are holes that are parts of other holes, that is true. But in the body, the body is not made up of a liver and a heart and lungs and so on that are put together. The body starts as a single mass, and then what we call the parts differentiate within the whole. And you can see the cosmos as a whole, I would say, as a living being in which one of the drives is differentiation. But differentiation doesn't mean fragmentation. A very important distinction I make is that between distinction and division. Distinctions are important important but divisions are invented by us. So that's a little bit of that. Now how does that impact on the way we

see the world? In brief, if you see it as made up of little bits then you see that the world is composed of things you already recognize. Oh it's a seed, oh it's a bit of grit. It goes in my little box, my category, my pigeonhole of seeds, bits of grit, etc. It's made up of familiar bits that are isolated, can be fixed. They're not moving about. They're not living or changing or flowing. They're just there they are. And it's your job to make the world by putting them together in a way that makes sense. These bits have been taken out of context. And context makes every difference of all the things that matter to us like a poem, a musical note, somebody you love,

a religious experience, it doesn't mean anything when it's taken out of context, it's only what it is in the context, right? They're abstracted, they're no longer embodied, they're no longer experienced by the whole of us in an embodied way, but experienced only by the mind in a very cerebral way. They lack uniqueness because they've become general. They're inanimate because they've been stopped and killed by the process of fixing them with a Gorgon stare. And what's more, they're representations of something that used to be present. After all,

the word represent literally means present again later, when it's actually no longer present. And we've got so used to living in a representation of the world, which is according to our scheme, our map, our theory, that we're no longer aware of the immediacy of experience as it actually comes into being for us through the attention we pay to it yep and indeed i argue that we come to be who we are through the responses that the world makes to us and the choices we make in the world I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason

bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To sort of elaborate a little bit there, we know that there's two hemispheres in the brain. We know that they are connected, but not as connected as we might think. Why is this? And we know that by looking at the world through those certain ways, the left brain being the, hey, I pick out the little bit of food from the grit. The right brain is I've got a broader awareness.

I can sort of take in that there's a tree over there and the sky's over there and I'm watching, you know, the whole thing. And that ideally those two things come together to make a whole person, a whole bird. things come together to make a whole person, a whole bird, and the best version of those things, a bird, a person, would be where those two hemispheres are working very closely together. And if you look at our world, your argument is that we see a world that has come to be dominated largely by left hemisphere thinking. You're absolutely right that we need both. And the reason they are separate is there needs to be enough division that they can actually sustain two completely different modes of attention to the world and therefore two versions of the world coming into being. Of course, we're not aware of that.

It all happens below the level of consciousness. If we were conscious of it, we would be stumped. I mean, we wouldn't be able to move. We'd be like, which one do I attend to? So that's all happening seamlessly. But it's division and union, another theme of my new book, that we need separation, but we need the separation not to be in the service of division and they do go their own way, but that they work together.

Now, here comes the interesting point. One of them understands the need for the other. The right hemisphere, the one that takes the broad view, the view of the world as ultimately always interconnected, always changing, always flowing, always living, sees the need for occasionally taking knows less, thinks it knows more. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. That is a very important point, which is in many, many religious traditions, as you know. And indeed, I found that this image of an arrogant servant that thinks it knows everything, trying to usurp a master who is a spiritual leader who understands far more and appointed his emissary to do certain business for him. This image is present in Chinese, in Indian philosophy,

but also in the native myths of North America, in Aboriginal culture. It's there all over because we intuit that there's something in the brain. David Bohm, the physicist, wrote about this very brilliantly, that there's a kind of thinking that tells you, it's okay, I'm just doing this. I'm not really doing anything. You're in control. But actually, it wants to control you, as he says, and it is controlling us now. So what we need is a working together, but not in a symmetrical way. One of these knows far more than the other. And it hasn't got a voice, interestingly.

The right hemisphere doesn't speak. The left hemisphere, for most of us, is the one that does speech. So it knows far more, but articulating it is harder. And I've spent most of my life in one book after another trying to articulate what it is I believe the right hemisphere sees. When I started out, before I read medicine and studied neurology and neuroscience, I didn't know that that's what I was doing. In an earlier life, I wrote about the philosophy of art and literature, but what I was actually doing was articulating this thing that is very hard to say, which is

what the right hemisphere gets and what Zen understands. So we need these two things, but we need them to work in a certain relationship in which the very good servant is a good servant, but it's a very bad master. And once it becomes the master or thinks it's got the mastery, then things start to go very badly wrong. And that I believe is where we're at now. So we live, in my view, in a world in which we've forgotten about these more sophisticated visions, in which indeed a thing and its opposite come together, in which everything is actually unique. There is no such thing as a generality, except in your mind you generalize, it helps you see shapes and patterns. But there are no two people no two blades of grass anywhere in this

world that are the same they're all unique that there is nothing that is actually ultimately unconnected to everything else that when you start as john muir said if you pick out one thing you find it ultimately connected to everything else in the cosmos and of course you can for the purposes of argument, very easily isolate something. And I'm not saying that's not a very useful thing to do. All I'm saying is, it's a very bad mistake to think that that's how the world is. It's just a tool. And one of the ways you could sum up the difference is that the left hemisphere knows how to manipulate the world, but really has very little understanding of it. Whereas the right hemisphere understands the world

and is not particularly interested in manipulating it. Somebody has to. It's delegated that to the emissary. That's the emissary in my title of my first or earlier book, The Master and His Emissary. The left hemisphere does the bureaucracy, the admin, the manipulation. But the right hemisphere is the one that is meantime preoccupied with helping us understand

what it is that we're doing. And in my new book, what I do is I ask some very, very basic questions. I say, okay, we've got a huge crisis on our hands. Nobody would deny that. I mean, it could well finish us off. No question. But even if we could find in time solutions to the myriad problems that beset us through misuse or manipulation or grabbing our lack of understanding of what nature is, it would do us no good. Because we just carry on being the same disgruntled, unhappy, selfish, narcissistic beings that created the mess in the first place so actually the important first step is to rethink who we are what the world is and how the two relate and it seems to me that is our task and if we can actually reimagine what a human being is get back in touch with what all the great wisdom traditions have said, the philosophers have said, what indeed modern neurology, in my view,

tells us, if we can get back to that and see the world no longer as a predictable, pointless mechanism, but as something that has drives in it and is in fact probabilistic and never certain or fixed, as modern physics tells us, we would start understand that our role in the world and our ways of responding to it have to be very different a lot of people

see want me to provide a quick fix and i think the thinking behind it goes like this oh my god the world's in a complete mess there may not be one in 10 years time and i'm very comfortable with the way things used to be How can we get that back again? And what they really want is just to carry on business as usual But my message is there is no such thing as business as usual Because it was thinking like that that got us into this mess in the first place. So we have to Do some hard thinking about who we are and I think think that, you know, for a civilization to founder, and it may be sadly that that's what we're witnessing,

this is when people wake up and start to think about what on earth they're doing on this planet and doing with it. So there may be some very hard lessons ahead. I don't like to think about that because I have children and even grandchildren of whom I'm deeply fond. But, you know, times ahead are just not going to be simple. And adopting the right hemisphere's position is not, by the way, a nice, easy, cozy, hippie-like panacea. Oh, everything will just be so lovely because it will all be interconnected

and everybody will see it. It's not like that because the right hemisphere, yes, is able to see that more beautiful picture. I absolutely don't deny it. But it also shows that the path to it is rigorous, as it is in all the religious traditions, that self-discipline is required, that blaming other people for the way you are will never get you anywhere. That in other words, some self-knowledge and self-discipline and some

hard times are required. And I'm not holding myself up as anybody to follow on this. I was, I was bad boy as the rest of you. But I'm just saying, I'm not, I'm not actually, of you. But I'm just saying, I'm not, I'm not actually, I'm not saying that what I've got is an easy answer. Thank you for all that. And I have children too. And same thing. I look towards the future and it's a little bit scary. Although I think every generation does that to some degree. So I kind of am like, well, it definitely does seem worse now than say in my parents or grandparents age. But the other thing that I wanted to say is I just wanted to very briefly hit an objection that a lot of people make to this right brain, left brain thing. You know, some listeners may have already heard it and been like, eh,

whatever. And you know, hopefully they're still around. And the general argument is either one of two things. I'm sure you've heard all variations of it, but one seems to be that's a pop psychology idea. You know, we had drawing on the right side of the brain, we had riding your Peloton on the right side of the brain, on and on and on. And the other is that, you know, the more we know about modern neuroscience, the more we know that things work in networks, that there is connection going on. And you can't just say, well, like, this little part of the brain does this, because large parts of the brain are involved in a lot of different things. How would you sort of answer those two things? Both of those are beautiful things to bring up because they help me. Let's take the second one first. The two most

massively interconnected networks in the brain are the left and right hemispheres within one another. They're massively, by orders of magnitude, more interconnected than they are connected across the corpus callosum with one another. And a lot of that interaction is actually inhibitory when they do interact. So it's fascinating. These are, and it's good that we're now thinking not in tiny modules, but in big networks, because it's big networks I'm talking about. Yeah. And there's good that we are now thinking not in tiny modules, but in big networks, because it's big networks I'm talking about. Yeah. And there's a lot of perfectly conventional neuroscience that will demonstrate that when you alter one part of a large network, it has distant effects on other parts of the same network. This was first described in the 19th century. And it's very well known to neurologists.

It's called the aschesis. But anyway, there we are. And we now know that there are these vast white hemisphere tracts, which are the superhighways of the brain that connect the posterior part of each hemisphere with the frontal lobe. So that is fine. The pop psychology is where, of course, I usually have to start because you can imagine that I've been researching this now for 35 years and a lot of my friends in neurology said, don't go there because it's toxic. You know, everybody knows this is pop psychology and so on. However, unfortunately, a grotesque oversimplification,

because, of course, I'm not saying that all that stuff was right. In fact, the first thing I have to do is say rid your minds of all the crap Ola you've heard about and I sometimes put up a slide when I'm lecturing which is quite one of the better ones actually off the internet and we're about 20 of these things and I go there was one thing in this list that is just about okay all the other 19 are complete rubbish. So you have to rid your mind of any of that. It's not about what the brain does in each of its hemispheres, it's the how. So it's perfectly true that, you know, we used to say language in the left hemisphere, reason in the left hemisphere, emotion in the right hemisphere, pictures in the right hemisphere.

We now know that both hemispheres contribute to language very importantly. In fact, probably the single most important part of language, pragmatics, what an utterance actually means in context is very strongly right hemisphere dependent. Reason is very importantly right hemisphere dependent as well as left, including deduction, deductive logic pictures both hemispheres do them emotions both hemispheres have them depth of emotion the right hemisphere is much better at but certain rather superficial emotions such as anger irritability and disgust are very strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere in fact the most lateralized emotion is anger there's a big literature on this and it lateralizes largely to the left hemisphere. In fact, the most lateralized emotion is anger. There's a big literature on this

and it lateralizes largely to the left hemisphere. So I'm undoing all of that. But what I am saying is that coming back to attention, there is a way of doing these things, a way of approaching the whole idea of understanding something. And the two ways of the two hemispheres are extraordinarily coherent. And I put a lot of evidence into the first part of The Martian and His Hemisphere, as you know. And in the new book, I have massively expanded that.

So I reference, and unlike many people who write at great speed, I have had the leisure of a long time to look into these papers. And I actually have read them. And there are 5,800 papers that I reference. And I'm not saying I've read every single one from beginning to end. That would probably take longer than I have years in a life. But what I certainly have done is I have read at least the gist of the papers. I've looked at them and sometimes looked at them in great detail.

And, you know, amazingly, what I found is that often things have been referenced and repeatedly referenced, sometimes many, many, many times. And they say the opposite of what people have referenced them to say when you look at it, actually. So, no, I'm a great believer in actually doing the science, getting down to the nitty gritty. I'm a great believer in actually doing the science, getting down to the nitty gritty. And the story I tell is a very, very much more sophisticated and complicated one than the pop science one, which I can't wait to see the back of. And fortunately, the message is getting out there. And a lot of people, particularly in, I would like to say, the more imaginative end, the sort of the great figures in neuroscience and neuropsychology, some of them, Ramachandran, Howard Gardner, Yark Panksepp, really names to conjure with, Colvin Trevathan, who knows more about hemispheres than almost any living person, have said, you know, McGilchrist is onto something important

here. And I have a lot of support from such people. I agree that people who've never really bothered to look at the literature, it's self-fulfilling because if you heard that it's all baloney, then you don't bother to spend time looking at it. And if you think your colleagues will criticise you for getting involved, then you certainly don't even go there. So an awful lot of people don't really know

what they're talking about when they rubbish it. They haven't actually looked. I would ask them, well, you read my work first and then see, because I think you might get a wee surprise, as we say in the water, the border here. LAUGHTER I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus,

does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the new book, you talk about eight ways of, how would you say it, apprehending the world, interacting with the world? You know, I'm talking about attention, perception, judgments. Yes, I call them portals. Yeah.

And the reason I call them portals, not paths, is that the book's divided into three parts. And the first one is in neuropsychology, pretty much. And that's about the portals, the ways we get access to any information. The second part is how do we understand it, epistemology, what do we do with it? And that's where the paths come in. And I look at reason, science, intuition, and imagination and say, we probably need all of these. And they have left hemisphere and right hemisphere aspects. In every case, the right hemisphere aspects, including in science and reason are more important, but we need them all, not just one. And in the last part of the book is metaphysics. So if we take that approach, what have we got in the cosmos? What is space?

What is time? What is value? What is matter? What is consciousness? So, but to come back to your point, the portals, yes, I mentioned about, it's actually seven, I think, but attention is primary. Perception, because after all, if you don't attend to things you don't perceive them and often if you don't perceive them you don't attend to them but they're not the same thing you can attend without perceiving and you can perceive without attending but they are not the same thing but they're related strongly then with the judgments we make on perception and judgments are inevitable because a percept doesn't come to you naive, like blank. You automatically take already a judgment of what you're likely to be going to

be seeing here to it. So your judgments affect both what you can see and what you do see in terms of what you make of it. And then I would say that comes what I call apprehension, which is the ability to use that information, to grasp it and take it and use it. Then there is emotional and social intelligence, which by no means as fringe as they sometimes are made to sound. In fact, they are probably every bit as important, if not more so, for the business of living than cognitive intelligence. Then cognitive intelligence. And finally, creativity, since what we see in the world is often something that we create. I don't mean to say that we just make it up willfully out of nothing, but that the results of what we find are in part something we have brought to the party.

You know what I mean? Yes. So these various portals, I think what I do is I think they contain some fascinating clinical material. You know, if people want to have their socks blown off by just seeing what can happen to a person when their right hemisphere, and usually it's the big changes come when their right hemisphere is not working, the big changes to when their right hemisphere is not working, the big changes to their understanding of the world, that is, then there's wonderful clinical material here that will astonish anybody. How a human being who is not in any sense crazy

is led to believe all kinds of bizarre things about themselves, their bodies, other people, the world, what's being said, and so on. And these have resonances with things that any attentive reader will see in the public sphere around them happening now, as though the whole social sphere in which we operate, the pop intellectual sphere that is the media and the world in which we encounter one another, for the most part these days, it reflects many of these strange aberrations, delusions, or illusions. And the subtitle of my new book is Our Brains, Our Delusions,

and the Unmaking of the World. And what you're saying is that if you look at our delusions, perhaps a lot of our cultural delusions, a lot of what's happening. They resemble what you see in the clinical literature of somebody who has had damage to the right hemisphere. Exactly. That is right. And if you have damage to the left hemisphere, they lose speech, often lose the use of the right hand, often devastating things for the majority of us. It's easier to rehabilitate somebody than after a right hemisphere stroke in which they can still use their right hand and they can still speak because their understanding has gone. And what I really show with all these portals that I've just mentioned, apart from apprehension,

the business of using and manipulating the world of which the left hemisphere is much better, the right hemisphere is in every case superior. It's attention, it's perception, it's judgments formed on those, it's intelligent, including IQ, cognitive intelligence, good old-fashioned, what most people in the street mean by intelligence, more dependent on the right than on the left. That may surprise some people. So that's what I have to say about that in the first part of the book, in brief. It takes a few hundred pages, but there it is. Let's jump to the middle section briefly. You talk about four powers we have to arrive at truth. And I think these four are interesting because the first two, most everybody's going to be like, yep, okay, good. Yep, I'm down

with that. The second two might need a little bit more explanation. So let's talk about these four powers to arrive at truth. Okay, well, I'll try and do that as succinctly and briefly as I can. I have three chapters on science, three on reason and three on intuition and imagination taken together. And on the first two, you're right. Most people go, yep, I think I buy that. They're very important. And indeed they are and one of the things that worries me in this world is that we are losing our respect both for science and for reason yes and that's in part that science has become less scientific than it could be by becoming dogmatic and not actually just dealing with empirical findings and reason has become less reasonable than it could be by being something

like a set of algorithms that a computer could follow. But that's not what for thousands of years people have meant by reason. It's bringing together logic with understanding of the world, of people, of what is meant, of all the subtle stuff, all the implicit stuff that is not spelt out in a way that a computer picks up. It's what a good judge has. You know, a good judge should be somebody who can put the law, experience and everything together and make a wise judgment. Context again. Context again. And nothing upsets me more than people who reject science because it doesn't happen to fit the theory they've got about the world. They may have a little theory

that is the way they want the world to be. And then when science shows, actually, it's not like that. They go, no, no, no, there's something wrong with the science. That is very upsetting to me. So I think that we should listen to science. we should listen to reason, but I would like science to be more scientific and reason to be more reasonable. I explain what I mean by that in the book. And I think that they both have vast strengths, but they can't answer all our questions. You know, science can't tell us what love is. It can tell us what chemicals go off in the brain, but it still can't tell us what love is. The things that reason can't reach are not necessarily irrational. Reason can't explain to me why C major quintet of Schubert is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and why it could powerfully change my life. But it's not irrational. It's just

trans-rational. It's super-rational. It simply isn't confined to what reason tells us, which doesn't make reason or science unvaluable. They just have the limits. And then we come to intuition and imagination. And what I argue is that intuition has had a bit of a bad rap through a very left hemisphere take on it. And I try to redress that balance. Intuition can be mistaken, certainly. But many scientific conclusions and conclusions of reasoning can be mistaken. They can lead us to places that in the end we will find are mistaken. So there is no royal road.

And if you just disattend entirely to your intuitions, you will be a much stupider person. And we're invited at the moment not to pay attention to any of our intuitions because some very clever psychologists who love this kind of thing, they've made their reputations on it, find very specific cases in which your intuition will lead you astray. Usually the reason is that actually most of the time the intuition underlying that will serve you very well. But on this occasion, it doesn't. And this is an exact equivalent of optical illusions. In the book, I show the famous checkerboard illusion. It's so extraordinary that nobody who sees it believes it, that two squares on a checkerboard, one of them looks dark grey and the other one looks just off-white. And the more you look at them, you cannot believe that they are in fact the exact same colour, but they are. And it can be demonstrated very simply by drawing a bar between them. They are the same colour. between them. They are the same color. But I've never heard anyone go, oh, well, right, after that, that does it. I'm not going to open my eyes. I'm not going to use my eyes because they can deceive me. Yeah. Okay. So I'm saying there are intuitive illusions. They can deceive you. But there's

masses of evidence that intuitions make you smarter. And indeed, a great German jurist says in talking about how organizations should work, that they should maximize the use of intuition by their employees. Because reasoning about something narrows you down to one single point at a time and often neglects all the things that can't easily be articulated, but that your intuition can bring into play. It can bring into play 18 factors and balance them, rather like the judge, if you have good intuitions. And what I always say is these things are at war with one another. People who reason well have better intuitions than those who don't. And people who use their intuitions well know how to reason better than

people who don't. And then perhaps I could just say something briefly about imagination. I don't know whether we've got time, but it's so important. Imagination, I believe, is not the way we turn away from the world, but the way we turn away from the world, but the way in which we access the world. And without it, we can't access it. It takes imagination to see what is in front of us. Imagination is the very opposite of fantasy. And this is a distinction that was made by various 18th century philosophers,

more excessively by Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was a very important point for them. The imagination was what first put you in touch with something you thought you knew, but really had never seen before. A rock, a river, a waterfall, a lake, a mountain. These things required the imagination to access them. Without them, you didn't see them. You just saw your representation of them in your mind. I just think think because it's amusing, I like a little anecdote here that comes from Tolkien's College at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of English at Merton College, Oxford for a while. The fellows of the college were very tired of guests being brought

into dinner by other fellows of the college and fawning on the great man. Oh, Professor Tolkien. One day a guest was brought in and was introduced to the great man. Oh, Professor Tolkien, your works are so full of imagination. And from behind a newspaper, a grumpy mathematician was heard going, imagination? Imagination? Made it all up

that sort of in a way puts its finger on part of the problem that actually in order to understand something you have to go and meet it i'm actually arguing against the idea of making it all up fantasy but what i do argue is that imagination is very much like what the right hemisphere of the brain does it has an intuition or if you like a part perception an inkling a feeling about something that something's there to which it responds is drawn closer to it sees more and it was therefore a reverberation between whatever is, as we say out there, problematic phrase, and what is equally problematic in here, that these things reverberate with one another. And that is what I am getting at there, that there is neither just a world out there that that's the way it is and get the facts or, you know, miss the bus. Nor is it the case that, oh, well, well you know since we take part in whatever it is

we make it all up you know kind of naive post-modernism i reject both of these positions they're both the opposite of what i'm arguing for which there is a real something and that is accessible to us but only through a process of reverberative interaction, of opening oneself to it, of being attentive, listening, actively receptive in a sort of way that you as a Zen practitioner will understand exactly what I mean by that, actively receptive to the world, that this is how the world comes into being in a less mistaken way. I do talk about truth, but I say there is such a thing as truth

we can't ever really fully access it, but we can certainly know that some things are more on the path to truth than others. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ian, I really appreciate your time and getting a chance to talk with you about these important ideas. Thank you very much. And I'm afraid I never properly answered your first question. You want to take a run at it now? Not really. Okay.

It would take five minutes. I don't think we've got five minutes. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me on. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the

show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts