The Wisdom Of Intuition - Iain McGilchrist

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 #intuition #personalgrowth #performance - 00:00 Intro 00:22 Common Threads in Iain’s Work 09:00 Society’s Lack of Intuition 13:43 Defining Wisdom 18:45 Cognition v Intuition 31:59 Left & Right Sides of the Brain 36:52 Functionality of Brain Sections 51:50 Optimism for the Future 58:54 Our Moral Obligations 1:01:27 Where to Find Iain - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As we master things, they become less conscious to us. The more we understand and the more we know, the more we can allow that to fall below the level of explicit consciousness.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Ian McGilchrist, welcome to the show.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you very much, Chris. Delighted to be here.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  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 write against my will at times and to complete exhaustion at times. But I think the serious point, and it's an enormous project, these two very long books, but the point is can be said relatively simply, that all my life, and I mean, you know, certainly all my life since my early teens, I've felt that much of the picture that we are taught about the

• 1:20Speaker 00

  world, or not so much taught as we're in school, but just received from pundits and media and so on, is 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 extraordinarily mysterious. I mean, first of all, why is there anything?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  What are we doing here? And it's these questions, who are we actually? And I think at the moment, just as an aside, I think there's a very worrying, extremely worrying and very rapid tendency to accentuate something that's been going on all my lifetime, which is the idea of man as a machine. What is the natural world and the universe that surrounds it? And what are we doing here in it? I mean, what's the relationship between us and whatever else there is? So these are pretty fundamental questions. You wouldn't expect me to give a very short answer. But that's the, what I've hoped to have done

• 2:41Speaker 00

  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 at all 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've just published, The Matter With Things, is, as you know, a rather long book.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  1400 pages, yes.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  I think that's, once it's over 1000, 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, what's the common thread that ties all of the work together? Because it bridges theology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, all sorts of stuff. What's this, is there a common thread between those?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yes, I think there is. First of all, I can't resist a little crack on the word tome, because somebody wrote to me calling my book, and I mean, it was an innocent mist type, my tomb, T O M B.

• 4:01Chris Williamson?

  Did you think that's actually kind of true? Yeah, I felt like I've been dead as I'm writing this.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  That's about right, because I felt, I felt it had kind of pretty much killed me. Anyway, what is the common thread?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Well, you you mentioned a number of threads, and I suppose that they all, the fact that they all seem to me coherent with one another rather than in competition with one another is one of the threads. I've all my life moved backwards and forwards between what would nowadays be thought of as rather separate, even perhaps incompatible, ways of thinking about and being in the world. For example, my father was a doctor, his father was a doctor, my other grandfather was a scientist, and I was brought up with a very, you know, I think a live interest and curiosity about things scientific.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  But then when I got old enough to not just be a little sort of brain on legs, but actually have feelings, i.e. in 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 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.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  So the thought there was that only by actually having experience of what happens when something goes wrong with somebody's brain and it affects their mind, or 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.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  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, something with which we have a natural... Um, deep, deep spiritual connection and which is beautiful, rich, complex and constantly unfolding. And it's our purpose, if you like, to be part of that unfolding. So that's really the what holds it together and brings us together, as you say in the book, the first third of it is mainly neuroscience, but trying to show the philosophical implications of that. The second section is epistemology, how do we know anything? And the third is

• 6:59Speaker 00

  metaphysics. What is there? What is there in this universe? So I look at things like time and space and matter and consciousness, but also things like values and the sense of the sacred and the idea of the coincidence of opposites, which I think is a huge 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 head on as we push too far in any one direction.

• 7:31Chris Williamson?

  What's an example of that?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Well, there are many, I suppose. One other uncontroversial one would be that just about every people's republic of whatever, in its zeal for republicanism and freedom, has created a tyranny in which the people are subjected to the most draconian 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 Twitter sphere. And I don't think we understand the way in which the beautiful and the ugly can come together. By too much pursuing one, we can

• 8:19Speaker 00

  find the other, and they're never completely apart, the good and the bad. There are things that we think 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 world.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  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

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  like that. But it seems like this is a, obviously a problem which has been going on for much longer than that.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. And in my earlier book, The Master and His Emissary, 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 the Western world, looking at the way in which the balance between the take on the world of the two hemispheres, we haven't really talked about that yet, but 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

• 10:19Speaker 00

  things get out of balance, out of kilter. And there seems to be a tendency in civilization to begin, interestingly, rather well balanced, and then to go out of balance further and further in the direction of privileging the left hemisphere, which, spoiler alert, is the less intelligent, the less perceptive, the less insightful of the two, which doesn't make it pointless or bad, it just means it ought to know its place and not try to be the master, as in the narrative, the myth that the title of The Master and His Emissary comes from. So, yes, I think it does go back much further, but.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Technology is a very interesting special case. You can talk about technology going back thousands of years, or you can talk about the first smelting of iron being technology and so on. That's, that's true in a way. Um, but with many technologies, and I think we see that very clearly now, there is something marvelous in the technology up to a certain point. But by extending it further and further, we don't necessarily make it better. We actually may make things considerably worse. I mean, there are everyday examples of this, that as machines, um, it becomes um, de rigueur for, for a producer of a washing machine or whatever it is, to put more and more and more controls on it. It gets actually harder to use it.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  And um, uh, cars now are so um, overburdened with electronic um, uh, gizmos and gadgets, that it's often very hard actually to control your own car the way you would like it. It's so complex and so difficult to finesse, that in fact, um, a much simpler car would be a much better thing to be driving. So, I mean, that's just obviously on the very simple level, but I think technology is no more nor less than the extension of human control. That's exactly what technology is. And obviously to some degree, to have some control over what happens around one is a good thing.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Although even there, the philosophy that you can sort things out, um, and you ought to be in control of them rather than, um, I think a wiser idea that you take what comes to you and take the advantages out of it, rather than resisting it and trying to make it into something it isn't. Um, but in any case, to go back to what I was saying, technology is the extension of human power to control the environment, society, people. Uh, and this is neither in itself good nor bad, I would say, although it ought to give rise to a little bit of fear, um, i- i- in any case, but it's how it's used and to what end.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  And to have a sudden proliferation of the capacity to control, um, perhaps destroy nature and humanity, um.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Without any commensurate increase in wisdom is a huge problem for us. I don't notice us getting wiser. In fact, I'd be prepared to say that this is probably the least wise civilization of which we have any record.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  How would you define wisdom?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  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-handed side's idea. Well, let's get this cut and dried and clear at the outset. So what is the soul? What is meant by God? What is, etcetera? Now, the point is that in areas of very real experience that we all respond to, there are things for which we don't have terms that can be simply defined. But to ignore them just because we don't have those terms is extremely dangerous. But let me not dodge your problem if I can in any way begin to answer it.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  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 truer than anything else? And I think my conclusion there is that we've lost the balance. We think that one of these, or two at the most, can answer all our questions, and they can't. We need

• 15:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  But nowadays, we seem to think that if something is um rationalistic in the way that a computer could follow it, then we've achieved a full understanding of something. But that actually very rarely leads to a full understanding. Indeed, there is a condition in which people can only reach conclusions by reasoning about them, not by experience and not by intuition. And it's not that rare. It's called schizophrenia. And schizophrenia is, of course, the archetypal example of what used to be called madness. And we used to say that people, when they were mad, lost their reason. But in fact, as has been pointed out, schizophrenia is not a condition in which people have

• 16:26Speaker 00

  lost their reason, but have lost everything but their reason, and they can only come to conclusions on a rational basis. So um a thought comes into their head from their unconscious, so they don't remember giving rise to it. So somebody must be beaming thoughts into my head. They hear a sound in the uh uh uh 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 and from intuition of what we should understand. I I will stop this, but I just want to make this point before doing so. Intuition has had a very bad rap lately because some um clever and entertaining psychologists

• 17:11Speaker 00

  pointed out that quite often it's mistaken, which it is. As I pointed out, quite often, uh reasoning can lead you to very mistaken conclusions. If you lead your life only by reasoning, you'll be a very strange person, things won't work well. Um but these these occasions on which intuition doesn't work are much rarer than we think. I make the um comparison with optical illusions, which are fascinating, and sometimes you can hardly believe your eyes, as we say. But I don't know anyone who, after seeing a really good optical illusion, says, hmm, that does it. From now on, I'm going to leave my life with my eyes shut. Uh no, because most of the time, your eyes are doing a bloody good job. And the same is true of intuition.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And one point that is worth just finishing on here is that if we have to argue explicitly and rationally for a conclusion only, we can express only one line of thinking. Whereas in intuition, we may bring together simultaneously and balance without even having to work through it explicitly, many strands of knowledge, the wisdom that we have gathered from experience. And it's been argued, and I very much support this, that decision makers who are the head of important corporations, whether private or governmental, should be encouraged to use their intuition instead of reducing their intelligence by following programmatic

• 18:39Speaker 00

  algorithms.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  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 one of the most common ones that I'm seeing at the moment is a tension between cognition and intuition that maybe it's because of the age I'm at as well. In early 30s, a lot of the solutions that me and my friends found to problems throughout our 20s was to apply cerebral horsepower to it, right? That I'm going to just use more thinking and I'm going to think myself through this problem.

• 19:25Chris Williamson?

  And then you realise that maybe that was a good tool that got you across one river, but you're now trying to carry that boat across river, across 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

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  the situation that I'm finding myself in increasingly is I'm trying to switch off that rational thinking brain. I'm trying to utilise as much intuition as I can.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, obviously, it's a commonplace that that young people are more certain than their elders and are certain because they've worked it all out. I mean, in the old days, people used to go to university in order to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age, had thought and read an enormous amount. But nowadays, they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying. Well, this seems to me to be, 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.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  And that only people with fairly severe autistic tendencies fall into doing that. So, yes, our intuitions are terribly, terribly important. And one of the things that used to be part of education was teaching people, not in a, I hope, 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.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  Silly explanations of people that didn't know what was happening.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Didn't know enough and so on. And so we can dispense with all that. But the trouble is that when you do, you become very rudderless and rather foolish, and the things you come up with are not interesting or helpful innovations. The point I would like to make is that tradition, knowing the tradition is the only way in which you can evolve to something new. Traditions are always changing. A tradition is like a river. A river is, as it were, always there. The river outside my house was there yesterday, and I imagine it'll be there tomorrow. But the water in it is changing all the time, and it's moving on. So this process is what we have as a society.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  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 society, a human society, a civilization is more like a plant than a machine. It with a plant, if you want it to go somewhere, you train it that way, you lead it. You don't cut it off at the root and stick it on a wall because that's where you want it to go. It'll just die and fall off. And we can't make these things, these plants, do what they don't want to do. But what we can do is kill them. A gardener, as

• 23:08Speaker 00

  I often say, can't make a plant, can't even make a plant grow, can only just allow a plant to flourish or not. And at the moment, we're not allowing that wonderful flowering of a civilization, of culture, of society. Instead, we're killing it.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  It does relate to a belief that we are able to, the 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."

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yes. What can I say to add to that? I agree. What I think you're referring to when you say, "We think we've got the answers to things," is rather like the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, which 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 a poem by Goethe.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  In which the apprentice of a sorcerer overhears 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, would you mind sweeping the room while I'm out? He thinks, no, I know the spell. I'm going to get the broom and the bucket to clean the room. But unfortunately, having started it, has no idea how to stop it. Well, that's a myth, and in the end, nearly drowns, except that the sorcerer comes back in the nick of time and says the thing that the sorcerer's apprentice doesn't know and stops the process. So we're as foolish as the apprentice. And just because you know how to make things happen doesn't mean you have understanding of them. They're two completely different things.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  And what I worry about is that at the moment, we increasingly have the power to interfere in what a human being is. There are, you know, I don't want to join with the most extremely paranoid narratives, but I think there is 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 to machines, we just find that machines do everything faster. But that's because they didn't do any of the things that we do.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  And so my very big worry, pretty much equal to the worry, the overwhelming worry about whether there will be a world in which we can live in the future, given how much we're doing to destroy it. My very real concern is that even if the world survived, we would have actually succeeded in destroying humanity, which is quite incredible, because at the moment, humanity is the most sophisticated outcome of evolution that we know.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  But it's a very heavy price to pay, you know? In order to save the world, you have to destroy the things that you cared about within it.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Confucius that Edward Slingel and 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 to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort."

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  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 chess player or a skillful pilot, you don't think like that because that would make you a very second-rate performer of whatever that skill is. Only being able to let go of that degree of control allows you to be the true expert. And you know, when somebody

• 28:31Speaker 00

  does one of these great feats, like the pilot who landed a plane on the Hudson River, afterwards was asked, "How did you do it?" "I don't know. I just, I just did it." Which is as much as to say that... As we master things, they become less conscious to us. The more we understand and the more we know, the more we can allow that to fall below the level of explicit consciousness. And that explicit consciousness is not the hallmark of excellence or intelligence 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.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you look at horse racing and Isle of Man superbike racing as well for this?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yes, I did, and it came to me rather than from my will, rather than actually.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Somebody who is a physician who looks after the health of the TT racers that race on this amazing natural course in the Isle of Man approached me with some observations about what he knew of the bikers who are travelling on ordinary roads with all the things like road repairs, potholes, walls, sudden right angle bends, and often achieve speeds of 200 miles an hour in 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.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  They have to be able to master a lot of things unconsciously. And the same thing happened to me with a man who had started his life as a worker with horses, a trainer of horses. He did a PhD in animal physiology. He, as a young man, had 100 criteria whereby he would be able to select a really excellent racehorse. And then he found in his latter years that he was working as a tipster on these tracks and he was completely dumbfounded by it, couldn't explain how it was that after looking at a horse for perhaps half a minute, walking around in the in the circle before

• 31:05Speaker 00

  the race, he was able to put winning bets on these things. And to begin with, he doubted himself and then would ring up the bet bookmakers and say, why did I say that? No, no, no, make it something else. And in the end, they got so frustrated because his first guess was right and his second guess was wrong. They just said to him, just text us your first thought and don't talk about it or think about it after that. And as long as he does that, he makes a salary in six figures. But if he starts thinking about it, he's no better than chance.

• 31:39Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that beautiful? 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 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 behavior, how would you explain that to someone?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  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 with 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,

• 33:01Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  And 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 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.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, the left hemisphere, when it thinks it knows everything, things start to go wrong. And this was summed up in a saying that'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 a society which honours the servant but has forgotten the gift. And really, the only purpose in the rational mind is if it can help us get to where that intuitive mind can make itself felt. And interestingly, in science, although there's a lot of very plodding pedestrian serial thought that needs to go on, all the great breakthroughs are not made by that process at all.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  They're not made by the scientific method, as it's called. They are made, actually, as the stories of pretty much all great scientists, including in perhaps most strikingly, in the case of Einstein, come as intuitive insights that they often can't explain. And then, months later, they do all the pedestrian work that shows them why they were in fact right. There are many examples in my book. So, yes, we need to balance these things, but... Two things to say. The first is that the left hemisphere sees this relationship as competitive, as either or, either the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere. Whereas the right hemisphere sees both and, it knows that it needs the information the

• 35:54Speaker 00

  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 their right hemisphere, with which they could put together the context and see everything in context, would be able to understand it. So that's one point, that they see things differently. And the other is that the less you see, the more you think you know. This is actually a phenomenon in human psychology, known as the Dunning Kruger effect. People who really don't know very

• 36:38Speaker 00

  much think they know everything. As people begin to know more and more, they see that they know less and less. The problem is the left hemisphere thinks it knows it all.

• 36:47Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 37:10Speaker 00

  I don't know quite at what level you're saying functionally, but I mean...

• 37:13Chris Williamson?

  Is there some sort of one-way street from left to right?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Well, the right hemisphere communicates more and more quickly with the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere does with the right, although for what the right hemisphere... Knows to be valuable, it needs to get that information back to the right hemisphere. Um, that's a very simple example, but when you look at, as I do, at length in this new book, um, at the examples of patients and what they teach us, what we see is that the left hemisphere really understands next to nothing, but thinks it knows everything. So you get this extraordinary situation that somebody will deny something as absolutely barned

• 38:00Speaker 00

  door as that the left half of their body is paralyzed. They will completely deny it and say, no, everything's fine and it all works and so on. Um, so they're very good at denying and they just don't understand what it is the right hemisphere is talking about. So when people lose um their right hemisphere through perhaps a stroke or an injury or much of the function of it at any rate, they become incapable of understanding what's going on. They don't know what people say, what they mean, what does, what does the meaning of the way this person is talking or behaving? They can, as it were, they've got a dictionary and they can look the words up and they've got rules of grammar, but the thing doesn't really mean what it means, because things only mean what they mean

• 38:44Speaker 00

  in a context, and sometimes the context can completely change the meaning, which is why soundbites from what somebody has said, taken out of context and whizzed around the world, um, should be treated with the contempt that they deserve, not suddenly become, um, 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 uh believes or means.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  I have a slightly, for, I, I just have a slightly amusing example of the context changing things which I can't resist, um, which is cereal packets. So in the supermarket, there are four sizes of cereal packets. There's one called jumbo, which means very large, and then comes one called economy, which means large. Then there comes one called family, and that means medium. And finally, there's large, which means small. But anyway, sorry about that, Chris, carry on.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  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 their right brain, whether that be through a stroke or through an unfortunate piece of steel that's gone through the top of their head, how would their behaviour differ?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Well, the person with the left hemisphere stroke would have obvious impediments, mainly unusually 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 hemisphere stroke has two obvious disadvantages: communicating and grasping. However, when there is a problem with the right hemisphere, the whole of that person's world alters. As I say, they cease to have proper empathy. One of the hardest things for people caring for people after

• 40:46Speaker 00

  right hemisphere injuries or strokes is that they no longer seem to have empathy. They don't sympathise, they don't understand what other people mean. They lose what psychologists call "theory of mind", which means, "Oh, I see 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 them historically. They discharge them from hospital and say, "Well, you know, thank goodness it wasn't a left hemisphere stroke."

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  But they're still functional, they're just a functional asshole.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  If you like. And, you know, great...

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Epiphany or sort of aha moment for me was to come across the work of my colleague, John Cushing, 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 believed and the things that they denied and the things they made up. And once you realise that, you see why it is true that the rehabilitation of somebody after a left hemisphere stroke, but in which they may have lost their speech and useless right hand, is much easier than rehabilitating somebody after a right hemisphere stroke.

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea why the brain would have developed in this way? I don't understand why it would be adaptive to distribute differing characteristics based on some arbitrary contralateral line.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  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 animals in the normal sense, also in insects and in worms. And in the most ancient, still surviving creature, a sea anemone called Nemesis stellavectensis, 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

• 43:09Speaker 00

  neural net is already asymmetrical 700 million years ago. And every creature has this asymmetry. Now, you might well say, but why? Because the world isn't asymmetrical in that way. It's, it's, it's, it's, it sounds like a big error. But to me, I, I, I think a lot of people would agree with me, but my belief is that this arises because of the need to solve a very basic conundrum that all living things have, how to get stuff, including food and stuff that you can use, like getting a twig to build a nest and all that. But at the same time, Watch out for everything else that's going on. So if you were just narrowly targeted on picking up a great piece of grain on the background

• 43:54Speaker 00

  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, you wouldn't be seeing your family, your conspecifics, with whom you should be sharing the food and so on. So we need, all creatures need, to do two things at once, keep a broad lookout and focus on a target. So they need to 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 three hundred and sixty degrees, so tiny, like a little window on the world, that's very sharply focused.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  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 static snapshots, but actually part of, as I would say, something like a flow or a river, that are multiply, multiply connected, in fact, ultimately connected to everything else. That, you know, where the stuff that is not explicit is important, whereas the left hemisphere

• 45:21Speaker 00

  only understands the explicit meaning, can't understand a joke, can't understand a metaphor, takes everything very literally. So if you, if you look at that, you can see that they give rise, 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, a 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, in the matter we're thinking is to discuss how we can use this information to help us decide what the realities, to some extent, we can't know ultimate truth, of

• 46:06Speaker 00

  course, I don't suggest we can, but we must make... At these gradual decisions that certain things are truer than others. Otherwise, we'd not know what to think or do. We couldn't get out of bed. So I'm really trying to help us decide what the world is like and how we should get to know it.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  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 civilisationally as well?

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Brilliant question.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  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?

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  And then the individuals reflect the norms or the preferences that they think the society says that they should. Right, yep, yep, yep.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Exactly, but I don't think that it's

• 47:10Speaker 00

  a good generalisation that over a lifetime people become more reliant on their left hemisphere. I'd say they give more and more reliance to their right hemisphere, actually.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Although I believe at the very end of life that that process might maybe reverse. It rather depends on the process that's causing dementia, if we're talking about dementia. Anyway, I don't want to get into all that.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  But the question, why do civilisations go this way, is a very interesting one. And in the preface to the new edition of The Master and His Enmity, 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,

• 48:18Speaker 00

  psychopaths, narcissists, tend to drift to the top of civilisations. And we can certainly see this being enacted for us in Europe at the moment. So there's that.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  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 and thinking you can control large 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

• 49:13Speaker 00

  across the world, more and more it's impossible to make the sort of decisions, the wise decisions, the balanced decisions the right hemisphere would make, because that would mean taking into account individual context everywhere. So instead, something is, as they say, 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. Another thing is, it's very, very easy to express the view of the left hemisphere. It's money for old rope, which is why it's so easy for clever dicks to come along and go, to believe that there's anything real, except just stuff and machines and thinking.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  The idea that there's perhaps a spirit or a soul, that's just ridiculous. It's so easy to argue that, because as it were, the left hemisphere's picture, which is the one that language is designed to put across, doesn't talk about the things.

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  The weapon of language lends itself more towards that type of discussion, yes.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  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're increasingly encouraged to speak nowadays.

• 50:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  I suppose so, yes. I mean, you could 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 my right hemisphere does, which is to make my voice not sound like a computer 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.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  It's more effective at communicating at low resolutions, though, or definitely communicating at scale, simplifying the world into a lower resolution version of what it is, putting it out there, 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 help me to do that. Rolling the clock forward, are you optimistic about the future? How do you feel?

• 51:54Speaker 00

  I call myself a hopeful pessimist.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Actually, quite often, the truth can only be expressed in a paradox. But what I mean by that is that I think to be hopeful is a duty and a virtue and a strength. And we never know quite what's going to happen. It's only the left hemisphere that thinks that kind of thing. So I can't rule out that we may have, as we have occasionally in the past, a sudden change of direction, which is happens extensively and fast, fast enough to save us and to save the destruction of life on this planet. But I'm not very hopeful because.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Technological changes are going on so fast, exponentially faster and putting power in the hands of the least savoury people, 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 and lecture, which I've done rather less recently because of Covid,

• 53:31Speaker 00

  I usually find that afterwards, as many young people are sort of passionately asking me, what can we do? How can we help themselves in this situation?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  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 re-humanise humanity, this would be wonderful.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  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 there's a little way to go.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  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 that both come up at the same time. And yeah, this, the sacred searching for meaning, finding out what it actually means to live a life here. Do we have moral obligations during our existence? All of these big questions are things that, I don't know, progress, it's regression, not progression, I think, towards making

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  people feel fulfilled with those. Now, sadly, we weren't able to run census data on people in, you know, 2000 B.C. or whatever, around the Battle of Hastings. But it certainly feels like the progress that we've seen technologically in terms of the rational worldview that we're trying to be given here is to explain everything away, to make it into a more sterile, easy to explain, lower resolution environment. But that doesn't take into account the fact that humans don't just need a formula that can explain some of the things that are going on in front of them. They need to frame that in a broader narrative. It needs to be part of, what does this mean for the fact that this stuff exists? What does it mean that

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  the universe is this wide and this vast and that I am here and that I am able to observe the universe and I am able to know that I am an observer, so on and so forth. So yeah, I mean, there's pockets, there's small pockets here in Austin. There's a big sort of new age psychedelic community of people that are trying to, that have discussions around these topics that I think are very interesting. But it very much does seem like splinter factions as opposed to a global movement, yet.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  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 is not necessarily the same as wonder. In some senses, it could be the opposite of wonder. It's how do I work out how this, how the clockwork works here, which is the opposite of the sense of wonder. You know, we don't say, "I'm curious what the meaning of life should be. I'm curious if

• 57:20Speaker 00

  there is a God." We wonder and are awe-inspired by these questions. So, I mean, as Kant famously said, there are two great things that inspire all in us. One is the starry heavens without us, and the other is the moral law within. And you mentioned the moral law. And one of the things I think is terribly important, and towards the end of this latest book, The Matter of Things, emphasise, 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,

• 58:01Speaker 00

  pleasure, and manipulation, which used to be thought of as really at the bottom of the heap, with things like beauty, goodness, truth, and a sense of the divine at the top. Instead, we explain beauty, goodness, and truth. "Oh, they're really just ways of priests having power and, you know, all this kind of stuff." Well, sexual selection. Well, read my book on those questions. I'm sure you have. So, yeah, these are the parts of the problem. And I think that there is a hungering for something meatier, more philosophically rich and deep than this very thin gruel that we have had at the moment, which really

• 58:42Speaker 00

  almost an autistic child could come up with. You know, it's just a mechanism. It's a piece of clockwork. Don't get fussed about it. But there we are.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there's a moral obligation that people have while they're existing? Or do you think that there's a...

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  A north star or a vector sort of direction that people should be moving themselves toward?

• 59:11Speaker 00

  I definitely think that life is a moral business and that 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 impoverish the world and impoverish us. They make us cruel, simple, blinkered people.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  So how we attend is a moral act in itself. And what we do is morally important, I believe it is, in a way.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  The variety of individuals is that each of us can, has the capacity to express another facet, to unfold another facet of the infinitely complex whole 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 Judeo-mystical literature, in which one of the core images is that of vessels that have shattered, which contain sparks of light from the divine, and that it is a human role during this life to piece together

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  what has been shattered in order to make these vessels more beautiful than they were before they were broken. I think that's very beautiful. And it brings to mind for me this Japanese art called kintsugi, where if 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 go into any more of that, but just that hint suggests to me that actually, yes, our role here is profoundly moral. And if we don't realise that, that is a moral failure in itself.

• 1:01:27Chris Williamson?

  Ian McGilchrist, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Well, to channlemgilchrist.com. And it's having a complete overhaul, should be in its new form by the middle or end of April. And yes, thank you very much.

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you, Ian. I really, really like the stuff that you do. Thank you.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Thanks very much, Chris.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

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  With great power comes great deniability.

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  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.0 without parent.