The Wisdom Of Intuition - Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist 0:00 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.

Chris Williamson 0:15 (wind blowing) Iain McGilchrist, welcome to the show.

Iain McGilchrist 0:19 Oh, thank you very much, Chris. Delighted to be here.

Chris Williamson 0:22 What is the vision that you've got for your work? Because you've spent, uh, decades, multiple decades researching and writing. I'm interested by what the outcome is that's driven you to do this much work.

Iain McGilchrist 0:39 Well, the outcome remains to be seen. But what, what has, um, uh, driven me, if you like, uh, and it is almost like feeling that I've been possessed by a demon that's driving me to write (laughs) , um, against my will at times, um, and to complete exhaustion at times. But, uh, I think the, 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, um, life since my early teens, I've felt that much of the picture that we are taught about the world or, or not so much taught as it were in school, but just received from pundits and media and so on, is, is completely wrong. This idea that the world is, um, completely unresponsive, a lump of stuff for us to grab when we need it, do what we please with, and that none of this actually has any meaning, so we might as well just get on and be greedy. Um, (laughs) , this seems to me to, um, miss just about every significant (laughs) point, um, that, that I, that I can feel about the business of existence, which is extraordinary mysterious. I mean, first of all, why is there anything? What are we doing here? And it's these questions, who are we actually? And I think at the moment, just as an aside, um, 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. W- what is the natural world, um, and the universe that surrounds it, and what are we doing here in it? I mean, what's the relationship between us and whatever else there is? So these are pretty fundamental questions. You wouldn't expect me to give a (laughs) very short answer, but that's the... What I've hoped to have done, um, is at least to have given people a lot to think about and very good confidence in intuitions they often have themselves, that this way of looking at the world is, uh, intellectually impoverished, morally bankrupt, and spiritually dead. Uh, and that it's not something that they feel is at all, um, like the experience they have of being alive. So it's, it's, 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, is, as you know, a rather long book.

Chris Williamson 3:17 1400 pages, yes.

Iain McGilchrist 3:20 Yes. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 3:20 I think that's... Once, uh, once it's over 1,000, I think it's technically a tome. That's when you're allowed to refer to it as a tome.

Iain McGilchrist 3:26 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 3:27 But we're now making more, uh-

Iain McGilchrist 3:28 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 3:28 ... 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-

Iain McGilchrist 3:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 3:45 ... between those?

Iain McGilchrist 3:47 Yes, I think there is. First of all, I can't resist a little crack on the word tome, because (laughs) somebody wrote to me calling my book, and I mean, it was a- an innocent missed type, um, My Tomb, T-O-M-B.

Chris Williamson 4:00 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 4:00 Uh, which means the title-

Chris Williamson 4:01 Did you think... That's actually kind of true, yeah. I've felt like I've been dead as I'm writing this.

Iain McGilchrist 4:04 It's about right, because I felt, I felt it had kind of, um, um, pretty much killed me. Anyway-

Chris Williamson 4:10 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 4:10 ... what is the common thread? 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, um, what would nowadays be thought of as rather separate, even perhaps incompatible ways of thinking about and being in the world. For example, um, my father, um, was a doctor, his father was a doctor, my other grandfather was a, a scientist, and I was brought up with a very, um, you know, I think alive interest and curiosity about things scientific. But then when, um, I got old enough to, uh (laughs) , uh, not just be a little sort of brain on legs but actually have feelings, i.e. in my teens, I started to realize how very much this all bleft out, and I studied much more what, um, what I call the humanities. And then I got a, a fellowship in Oxford in which I could research in the area of 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, a long haul in this country, uh, six years before you're qualified, and then another eight before you become a specialist in whatever it is, at least. Um, so I, I... The thought there was that only by actually having experience of what happens when something goes wrong with somebody's brain and it affects their mind, 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, um, are willing to guide me and make sure I'm not saying things that don't make sense. But the, the extraordinary thing is that all of these strands seem to me to be leading to a similar place, a place which in fact for thousands of years, the wisdom literature around the world has been leading. One that is quite different from this image of, uh, ourselves or the universe as chaotic, pointless, purposeless, meaningless, uh, and there to be exploited. But instead, something with which we have a natural, um, deep, deep spiritual connection, and which is beautiful, rich, complex, and constantly unfolding. And it's our purpose, if you like, to be part of that unfolding. So that's really the ... what holds it together and brings together, as you say, in the book, there's a first third of it is mainly neuroscience, but trying to show the philosophical implications of that. The second section is epistemology, how do we know anything? And the third is metaphysics, what is there, (laughs) what, 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 a sense of the sacred and the idea of the coincidence of opposites, which I think is a huge, uh, problem for us nowadays. We don't understand that opposites often come together and we push further and further in one direction, ignorantly thinking we'll get further away from something we're trying to avoid, only to meet it, um, head on as we push too far in any one direction.

Chris Williamson 7:31 What's an example of that?

Iain McGilchrist 7:35 Well, there are many, I suppose. Uh, one rather 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 (laughs) , um, the, the, the most, um, uh, uh, draconian control. And I think there are variations of this going on, uh, now, uh, in, in the pol- politics of the public sphere, um, in politics in the more sort of Twitter sphere. Um, and I don't think we understand the way in which the beautiful and the ugly can come together. By too much pursuing one, we can find the other, and we ... they're never completely apart, the good and the bad. There are things that we think these, this just is good, um, but there's nothing that just is good. Things are good only in a context. When you take them out of the context or push them too far, things become unbalanced. They fall out of harmony. And as in music, you get a terrible discord. Uh, so I think the, this is an idea we could do with, um, taking on board in, in our modern world.

Chris Williamson 8:48 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

Chris Williamson 9:00 view of the world, um, that this has been something that's been bubbling under the surface for yourself for a long time, which means it must have existed before you started working on it. And yet-

Iain McGilchrist 9:11 Yes.

Chris Williamson 9:11 ... I, I don't know, it feels like a lot of the problems that we see that might have been around for a long time are quite easy to drop at the feet of big tech or of the super modern era, you know, last 10 to 30 years, something like that. Um, but it seems like this is a, obviously a problem which has been going on for much longer than that.

Iain McGilchrist 9:36 Yes, it is. Um, and in my earlier book, um, The Master and His Emissary, which came out in 2009, so, uh, 12 and a half years ago now, um, the second half of the book, I look through the history of Western, of the Western world, um, looking at the way in which the balance between the take on the world of the two hemispheres, we haven't really talked about that yet, but, um, let me go straight to that. That the brain is divided. It ... Of course, the two hemispheres work together, but they also attend to the world in a different way and know and understand quite different things. And once you see that, you can begin to see what happens when things get out of balance, out of kilter. And there seems to be a tendency in civilization to begin, interestingly, rather well-balanced, and then to go out of balance further and further in the direction of privileging the left hemisphere, which, um, spoiler alert, is the less intelligent, the less perceptive, the less insightful of the two. Which doesn't make it pointless or bad, it just means it ought to know its place and not try to be the master, uh, as in the, the, um, the n- the narrative, the myth that, uh, this, the title The Master and His Emissary comes from. So, um, yes, I think it does go back much further. But technology is a very interesting special case. You can talk about technology going back thousands of years, or you can talk about the first smelting of iron being technology and so on. That's, that's true in a way. Um, but with many technologies, and I think we see that very clearly now, there is something marvelous in the technology up to a certain point, but by extending it further and further, we don't necessarily make it better. We actually may make things considerably worse. I mean, there are everyday examples of this, that as machines, um, 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 (laughs) . 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 ob- obviously on a very simple level, but I think technology is no more or 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. Although even there, the philosophy that you can sort things out, um, and that you want 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. And to have a sudden proliferation of the capacity to control, um, perhaps destroy nature and humanity, um, without any commensurate increase in wisdom is a huge (laughs) problem for us. I don't notice us getting wiser. In fact, I, I, I'd be prepared to say that this is probably the least wise, um, civilization of which we have

Iain McGilchrist 13:43 any record.

Chris Williamson 13:44 How would you define wisdom?

Iain McGilchrist 13:48 Uh, I wouldn't necessarily define it at all. I think there are certain things, if you don't know them when you see them, um, a definition is not gonna help you. And indeed, that of course is the left hemisphere's idea. Well, let's get this cut and dried and clear at the outset. So what is the soul? What is meant by God? What is ... et cetera. 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, um, if I can, uh, in any way begin to answer it. I think what I'd say, it's the capacity to balance many different ways in which we come to know something about the world and not be simply, um, under the, um, uh, sway of, of one of them. So in the middle of the book, I look at science, reason, intuition, and imagination as probably the four ways that most people would come up with for saying how do we get to know something about reality, how do we get to know anything that's truer than anything else. And I think my conclusion there is that we've lost the balance. We think that one of these, or two at the most, can answer all our questions, and they can't. We need to bring to bear a number of different strands of knowledge in order to have wisdom. And I, I won't go into the detail, but in Greek, there were, uh, four or five important words for knowledge. Uh, and, um, there was also separately wisdom, sophia, and they showed an enormous sophistication in their understanding of what these things were. 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 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, i- i- coming fr- 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, the problem is they have no sense from experience or from intuition of what we should understand. Uh, I, I will, uh, 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 have 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 said, "Hmm, that does it. From now on, I'm going to live my life with my eyes shut." Uh, no, because most of the time, you're asking a bloody good job. And the same is true of intuition. And one point that is worth just finishing on here is that...... if we have to argue explicitly and rationally for a conclusion only, we can express only one line of thinking. Whereas in intuition, we may bring together, simultaneously, and balance, without even having to work through it explicitly, many strands of knowledge, the wisdom that we have gathered from experience. And it, it's been argued, and I very much support this, that, um, decision makers who are at the head of important corporations, whether private or governmental, should be encouraged to use their intuition instead of reducing their intelligence by following programmatic, um, algorithms.

Chris Williamson 18:41 I agree. This is a tension that I've been feeling in myself and

Chris Williamson 18:45 talking to friends about. It's very interesting when you have a conversation that continues to crop up in different circumstances, and it's always got this single thread that ties them all together. And the, one of the most common ones that I'm seeing at the moment is a, uh, a tension between cognition and intuition that maybe it's because of the age I'm at as well, in early 30s, um, 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-

Iain McGilchrist 19:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:22 ... thinking, and I'm going to think myself through this problem. Uh, and then you realize that maybe that was a good tool that got you across one river, but you're now trying to carry that boat across river, ac- across land to then get you something next. And what's next for a lot of us, I think, is trying to feel and find more grace and play and, um, 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-

Iain McGilchrist 20:00 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 20:00 ... the situation that I'm finding myself in increasingly is, I'm trying to switch off that rational thinking brain. I'm trying to-

Iain McGilchrist 20:08 Yes.

Chris Williamson 20:08 ... utilize as much intuition as I can.

Iain McGilchrist 20:13 Well, I mean, obviously it's a commonplace that, um, that young people are more certain than their elders, and are certain because they've worked it all out. (laughs) 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 (laughs) to be, um, it would be very funny if it weren't so completely tragic. Um, it's destroying our society. So yes, as we get older, we realize that there's far more to it than anything that can be just worked out like a, a logical puzzle. And, uh, only people with, um, fairly severe autistic tendencies, um, fall into doing that. So, yes, our intuitions are terribly, terribly important. And one of the things that used to be part of education was teaching people, not in a, I hope, um, in such a way as to suppress their i- interest in making something new, but to enable them to make something new, which was the history of their culture, the, if you like, the, um, tradition. Now, I mean, unfortunately, we now think of tradition as clearly must be wrong simply because-

Chris Williamson 21:36 Silly explanations of people that didn't know what was happening.

Iain McGilchrist 21:40 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, uh, this process is what we have as a society. Once we throw out all of it, we negate it, we rubbish it, we have all kinds of, um, more or indeed less sophisticated, um, thoughts about it, then we lose the capacity for something to evolve. A society, a human society, a civilization is more like a plant than a machine. It, it, with a plant, if you want it to go somewhere, you train it that way. You, you, you, you lead it. You don't cut it off at the root and stick it on a wall 'cause that's where you want it to go. It'll just die and fall off. And we can't make these things, these plants do what they don't want to do. But what we can do is kill them. A gardener, as I often say, can't make a plant, can't even make a plant grow. Can only just allow a plant to flourish or not. And at the moment, we're not allowing that wonderful flowering of a civilization, of culture, of society. Instead, we're killing it.

Chris Williamson 23:27 It does relate to a belief that we are able to... Uh, 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, 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-"

Iain McGilchrist 23:53 Yes.

Chris Williamson 23:53 "... and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often, it is still there, as strong as it ever was."

Iain McGilchrist 24:02 ... exactly. Yes. Um, what can I say to add to that? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 24:08 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 24:08 I, I completely agree. Um, what I think, um, you're referring to when you say we think we've got the answers to things is rather like the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which, um, was familiar to people of my great age because of a Disney film called Fantasia. (laughs) But, uh, it, it's a, it's an old, um, German myth, um, best preserved in a poem by Goethe, um, in which, um, uh, uh the apprentice of a sorcerer overhears the sorcerer, um, casting spells and getting things to come to life and do work for him. And so when the master goes out and says, "Would you mind sweeping the room while I'm out?" He thinks, "No, I know the spell. I'm going to get the broom and the bucket to clean the room." But unfortunately, having started it, has no idea how to stop it. Well, that's a, a myth, uh, and, and in the end, nearly drowns, except that the sorcerer comes back in the nick of time and says the thing that the sorc- that the sorcerer's apprentice doesn't know and stops the process. So we're, um, 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. And what I worry about is, 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, um, join with the most extremely, um, paranoid, uh, narratives, but I think there is a very true and real and balanced, um, uh, uh, uh, risk that we run of, um, robbing human beings of humanity, turning them into what would only really be rather second-rate machines. Because when we compare ourselves with machines, we just find that machines do everything faster. But that's because they had- they didn't do any of the things that we do. A- a- and so my very big worry, um, uh, pretty much equal to the worry, the overwhelming worry about whether there will be a world in, in which we can live in the future, uh, given how much we're doing to destroy it, um, my very real concern is that even if the world survived, we would have actually succeeded in destroying humanity, which is quite incredible, because at the moment, humanity is the most sophisticated outcome of, uh, evolution that we know.

Chris Williamson 26:36 That'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.

Iain McGilchrist 26:43 Well, that's what we're doing, whether we like it or not. We're destroying (laughs) the beauty and life of nature, and we're destroying ourselves and our society.

Chris Williamson 26:51 There's a quote from Confucius, uh, that Edward Slingerland put in Trying Not to Try, which I, I wanted to bring up earlier on about-

Iain McGilchrist 26:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 26:59 ... um, the individual's requirement to balance this cognition and intuition, this deliberateness in the beginning and the naturalness afterward. "In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the lengths of the steps with which he is ent- to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort." And that's the deliberate-to-intuitive, um, tension that I think that we're playing with. And then, as you say, it rolls out onto a civilizational level as well.

Iain McGilchrist 27:47 Yes. And what you've referred to, uh, is something we all have direct experience of. Um, I have it as a doctor, but if you're a chess player or a pilot, you would have a similar, um, understanding, which is that when you start out on this process, you have to learn and memorize and think consciously about many, many things. But by the time you're a skillful physician or surgeon, a skillful chess player, or a skillful pilot, you don't think like that, because that would make you a very second-rate, uh, performer of whatever that skill is. Only being able to let go of that degree of control allows you to be the true expert. And, you know, when somebody does one of these great feats, like, um, the pilot who landed a plane on the Hudson River, um, afterwards was asked, "How did you do it?" said, "I don't know, I just, I just did it." Which is as much as to say that as we master things, they become less conscious to us. The more we understand and the more we know, the more we can allow that to fall below the level of explicit consciousness. And that explicit consciousness is not the hallmark of excellence or intelligence, uh, or understanding. It's a regrettable thing that we have to do sometimes when there's a problem that we need to be able to do away with. But as long as things don't, uh, bring up a problem of a new kind, then we should not be thinking in that explicit way, 'cause we will, we will react and respond poorly.

Chris Williamson 29:26 Didn't you look at horse racing and Isle of Man, uh, Superbike racing as well for this?

Iain McGilchrist 29:34 Yes, I did, and it came to me rather than, uh, from my will (laughs) , rather nicely. Um, somebody who is a physician who looks after the health of the TT races, the, the race on th- this amazing natural course in the Isle of Man, uh, approached me with some observations about what he knew of the, the, the bikers who are traveling on ordinary roads with all the things like road repairs, potholes, um, walls (laughs) , sudden right angle bends, and, uh, often achieve speeds of 200 miles an hour in doing so. It, it's, it's, it's been, I think, with justice called the most dangerous sporting activity in the world.... but, um, they have to rely very, very heavily on things that they mustn't, um, be clunkily, consciously aware of. They have to be able to master a lot of things unconsciously. And the same thing happened to me with a man who had started his life as, um, a- a- a y- a worker with horses, a trainer of horses. He did a, um, a PhD in Animal Physiology. He, as a young man, had 100 criteria whereby he would be able to select a really excellent race horse. And then he found in his latter years that he was working as a tipster on these tracks, and he was completely dumbfounded, but he couldn't explain how it was that after looking at a horse for perhaps half a minute walking around in the, in the circle before the race, he was able to put, um, winning, um, bets on these things. And to begin with, he doubted himself and then, and would ring up the bet, uh, bookmakers and say, "Um, wh- 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 that they just said to him, "Just text us your first thought and don't talk about it or think about it after that." And as long as he does that, he makes, um, a salary in, um, six figures. But if you start thinking about it, he's no better than chance.

Chris Williamson 31:39 Isn't that beautiful? Now, it's- it's genuinely-

Iain McGilchrist 31:42 It is.

Chris Williamson 31:42 It's kind of like real-world magic. You know? This fact that you can-

Iain McGilchrist 31:46 No, it's great. Yes.

Chris Williamson 31:46 ... 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

Chris Williamson 31:59 you-

Iain McGilchrist 31:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:59 ... that you've identified there is this, this tension, uh, within our own brains, which is the subject of your first book. So if someone hasn't been introduced to the, um, left and right brain split that we have and how that-

Iain McGilchrist 32:13 Mm.

Chris Williamson 32:13 ... characterizes its thought patterns and behavior, how would you explain that to someone?

Iain McGilchrist 32:20 Well, I, I, I'd say that they've evolved for two purposes. One, the right hemisphere, in order to ab- 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, um, and manipulate the world. So I sometimes say the left hemisphere enables us to apprehend the world in the sense of grasping hold of it. In fact, it literally controls the right hand with which we grasp things, um, and the aspects of language. Not all of language, but the bits where we say, "I've got it, I've grasped it, I've pinned it down." Um, and the right hemisphere, not to apprehend, but to comprehend the world. And one way of thinking of this is that the left hemisphere schematizes. Um, i- it's the hemisphere of theory. It has a theory about how things work. Um, the right hemisphere, uh, is not the hemisphere of theory so much as of experience. It understands what it's seeing. And if you are trying to navigate this world, it's very often useful to have a map, and the left hemisphere holds the map. The trouble is that the left hemisphere encourages us to think that the map is the same thing as the world that is mapped. But the world as is mapped is hundreds of thousands of times infinitely more complex than the map. 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, um, dogmatic, uh, view of how the world works, what people are, and- and all the rest, th- th- that that is the reality. Whereas, in fact, it's what is obscuring the reality. So, uh, uh, 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. The, unfortunately, the left hemisphere, when it thinks it knows everything, um, uh, things start to go wrong. And- and this was s- uh, summed up in a, 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 the society which honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift. And really the only purpose in the rational mind is if it can help us get to where that intuitive mind can make, um, itself felt. And interestingly, in science, although there's a lot of very plodding, pedestrian, uh, serial thought that needs to go on, all the great breakthroughs are not made by that process at all. They're not made by the scientific method, as it's called. They are made, actually, as the, the stories of pretty much all great scientists, including, and perhaps most strikingly in the case of Einstein, come as intuitive insights that they often can't explain. And then months later, they do all the pedestrian work that shows them why they were, in effect, right. There are many examples in my book. So yes, we need to balance these things. But w- o- 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 left-hand, the left hemisphere gives, but it's just that it, all that information means nothing unless it's taken up into a big picture. And there, it has its true value. If you stop at where the left hemisphere is, you're left with a bunch of meaningless fragments of senseless data, which leads people who have stopped at that point to say, "Oh, the world's just made up of little bits that don't mean anything."

Chris Williamson 36:15 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 36:15 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. Uh, uh, this is actually a phenomenon in, in human psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who really don't know very much think they know everything. Uh, as people begin to know more and more, they see that they know less and less, so...

Chris Williamson 36:45 Functionally-

Iain McGilchrist 36:46 The problem is the left hemisphere thinks it knows it all.

Chris Williamson 36:48 Yes. Functionally, how is this, uh, manifesting

Chris Williamson 36:52 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 f- like functionally, what does this mean for what's happening inside of our brains?

Iain McGilchrist 37:10 I don't know quite at what level you're saying "functionally," but I mean... I mean, to give an example-

Chris Williamson 37:14 Is there some sort of one-way, one-way street from left to right?

Iain McGilchrist 37:21 W- well, the- there i- uh, 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, uh, uh, knows to be valuable, it needs to get that information back to the right hemisphere (laughs) . Um, that's a very simple example. But when you look at, as I do at, 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 bandore 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.

Chris Williamson 38:16 Mm-hmm.

Iain McGilchrist 38:16 So when people lose, um, their right hemisphere through perhaps a stroke or an injury or much of the function of it at any rate, they become incapable of understanding what's going on. They don't know what people say, what they mean, what does, what does the meaning of the way this person is talking or behaving? They can, as it were, they've got a dictionary, and they can look the words up, and they've got rules of grammar, but the thing doesn't really mean what it means, because things only mean what they mean in a context, and sometimes the context can completely change the meaning.

Chris Williamson 38:48 Yeah.

Iain McGilchrist 38:48 Which is why sound bites from what somebody has said taken out of context and whizzed round the world, um, should be treated with the contempt that they deserve, not suddenly become, um, a, "Oh, I see, so we can now, uh, 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. I have a slightly f-

Chris Williamson 39:11 What if-

Iain McGilchrist 39:14 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 th- 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.

Chris Williamson 39:35 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 39:36 But anyway, s- sorry about that, Chris. Carry on.

Chris Williamson 39:40 (laughs) That sounds like something that Rory Sutherland would've told me. Uh, so if you were to-

Iain McGilchrist 39:45 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 39:45 ... characterize, uh, somebody who only had access to their left brain and somebody who only had access to their right brain, whether that be through a stroke or through an unfortunate piece of-

Iain McGilchrist 39:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:55 ... steel that's gone through the top of their head, um-

Iain McGilchrist 39:57 Yes.

Chris Williamson 39:57 ... how would, how would their behavior differ?

Iain McGilchrist 40:01 Well, the person with the left hemisphere stroke would have obvious, um, impediments, m- m- mainly and usually to do with speech and the use of the right hand. And given that, um, it depends what you mean by being right-handed, 'cause 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. Um, however, uh, when there is a problem with the right hemisphere, the whole of that person's world alters. They, as I say, they cease to have proper empathy. One of the hardest things for people caring for people after right hemisphere injuries or strokes is that they no longer seem to have empathy. They don't sympathize. They don't understand what other people mean. They lose what in psychology is called theory of mind, which means, "Oh, I see what's going on in that person's mind." They no longer understand it, um, and they are really not able to function at more than a very simple mechanistic level. But because they still have preserved speech and they still can use their right hand, doctors have not paid that much attention to them historically. They discharge them from hospital and say, "Well, you know, thank goodness it wasn't a left hemisphere stroke." So they-

Chris Williamson 41:22 But they're, they're still functional.

Iain McGilchrist 41:23 ... people don't-

Chris Williamson 41:23 They're just a functional asshole.

Iain McGilchrist 41:26 Uh, (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 41:27 (laughs)

Iain McGilchrist 41:27 ... if you like. Um, and, you know, a great, um, epiphany or, or, or sort of aha moment for me was to come across the work of my colleague John Cutting, who had painstakingly sat, um, at the bedside of patients who had things wrong with their right hemisphere and realized how, just how crazy their world was-

Chris Williamson 41:48 Yeah.

Iain McGilchrist 41:49 ... the amazingly bizarre things that they believed and the things that they denied and the things they made up. And once you realize that, you see why it is true that the rehabilitation of somebody after a left hemisphere stroke, but in which they may have lost their speech and use of the right hand, is much easier than rehabilitating somebody after a right hemisphere stroke.

Chris Williamson 42:13 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.

Iain McGilchrist 42:30 It's a very important and interesting question. Um, in order to help us see what we're dealing with, this is not something that arose in humans. It's true in all animals we've looked at, and I don't just mean mammals, uh, and I don't just mean, uh, animals in the normal sense. Also in insects and in, um, worms and i- in the most ancient still surviving creature, a sea anemone called Nemastella vectensis, which is 700 million years old, it already... and it's taken to be the first example of a neural net in any living creature. Its neural net is already asymmetrical, 700 million years ago, and e- every creature has this asymmetry. Now you might well say, but why, because the world isn't asymmetrical in that way. It's, it, it, it's, um, it sounds like a, a big error, but to me, um, I, I think a lot of people would agree with me, but my belief is that this arises because of the need to solve a very basic conundrum that all living things have, how to get stuff, in- 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 gr- piece of grain on a background of grit, uh, if you're a bird, you know, y- y- y- y- you would soon end up being someone else's lunch while you got yours because you wouldn't be seeing the predators, and you wouldn't be seeing, um, y- y- 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 360 degrees. They're tiny, like a little window on the world, but it's very sharply focused. And the other, seeing the broad picture sustained over many, uh, seconds or minutes. So from one kind of attention, the world seems to be made up of tiny unconnected fragments that are like little stabs in the world that somehow got to be connected to make sense. Whereas to the other hemisphere, the right hemisphere, the world is made up of things that are continuous, that, um, that flow, um, that always change. They're not made up of static snapshots, but actually part of, as I would say, something like a flow or a river that are multiply, multiply connected. In fact, ultimately connected to everything else, um, the, you know, where the stuff that is not explicit is important. Whereas the left hemisphere only understands the explicit meaning, can't understand a joke, can't understand a metaphor, uh, takes everything very literally. So if you, if you look at that, you can see that they give rise to, in humans, they're two quite different worlds, a meaningless heap of stuff for us to exploit, and on the other hand, a vast, richly complex, uh, moving, flowing tapestry of existence that has rich, deep meaning into which we are connected. So these are quite, quite different versions of the world, and what I do in, in The Matter With Things is to discuss how we can use this information to help us decide what the realities, to some extent, we can't know ultimate truth, of course, I don't suggest we can, but we must make at least gradual decisions that certain things are truer than others. Otherwise we'd not know what to think or do. We couldn't get out of bed. So I'm really trying to help us decide what the world is like and how we should get to know it.

Chris Williamson 46:24 Given the fact that you've just displayed two different worlds there, the one that's predominantly left brain and one that's right brain, the one that's right brain sounds significantly nicer to me, that sounds lovely. Why is it then that we appear to have a bias of drifting toward the left, both individually and specifically civilizationally as well?

Iain McGilchrist 46:46 It was a brilliant question. Um, individually, I'm not sure that we do, um, unless we belong to the society which is doing it. So really the question is more about why do societies do this?

Chris Williamson 46:59 And then the individuals reflect-

Iain McGilchrist 47:01 Um, I think that-

Chris Williamson 47:01 ... the norms or the preferences that they think the society says-

Iain McGilchrist 47:04 Of the-

Chris Williamson 47:04 .... that they should. Right. Yep, yep, yep.

Iain McGilchrist 47:07 E- e- exactly. But I don't think that it's, um, a good generalization that over a lifetime people become more reliant on their left hemisphere. I would say they give more and more reliance to their right hemisphere, actually. Um, although I believe the very end of life that, that process may be reversed, it rather depends on the, the process that's causing dementia, if we're talking about dementia. Anyway, I don't want to get into all that. Um, but the question, why do civilizations go this way is, is a very interesting one. And, um, in the preface to the new edition of The Master and His Emissary, I point to about six... well, 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, um, simply enables you to become, um, good at grabbing things. And as societies grow, um, people see more and more power disposable to them, and people who are interested in self-aggrandizement and the annexation of power, psychopaths, narcissists, tend to drift to the top of civilizations. And we can certainly see this being enacted for us in Europe at the moment. So there's that. Um-It makes us feel that we're, we're good at grabbing. And civilizations usually overextend themselves before they collapse. They create an empire. Um, and in this case, I think the most dangerous thing is the, um, commercial empire, uh, 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, um, governmental bodies, perhaps for a whole empire literally across the world, more and more it's impossible to make, um, the sort of decisions, the wise decisions, the balanced decisions the right hemisphere would make, 'cause that would mean taking into account individual contexts everywhere. So instead something is, as I 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. And another thing is, is it's very, very easy i- to express the view of the left hemisphere. It's money for old rope, which is why it's so easy for clever dicks to come along and go, "No, to believe that there's anything real except just stuff and machines and the, and thinking ... The idea that there's a, a, perhaps a spirit or a soul, that's just ridiculous." It, it's so easy to argue that, um, because as it were, the left hemisphere's picture, which is the one that language is designed (laughs) to put across, doesn't talk about those things. But we nonetheless know that-

Chris Williamson 50:11 Uh, the weapon of language lends itself more towards that type of discussion, yes.

Iain McGilchrist 50:18 Except the language of poetry, the language of myth, the language of narrative, the language of ritual. These things actually express the powerful things that we crave, that we feel are absent from the kind of electronic manual, um, out of which we are increasingly encouraged to speak nowadays.

Chris Williamson 50:37 The first one was it's easier t- it's more competitive. The left brain seems to be better-

Iain McGilchrist 50:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:43 ... at, 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.

Iain McGilchrist 50:52 Yes. I suppose so, yes. I mean, you could s- you could put that. I, I mean, it's not really better at communicating, 'cause 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-

Chris Williamson 51:07 Yes, yes.

Iain McGilchrist 51:07 ... computer-generated. Uh, 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.

Chris Williamson 51:21 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, uh, easy ways to remember things, so, uh, competition, coordination, and communication, uh, keeping those there is, is gonna-

Iain McGilchrist 51:44 (laughs) Okay.

Chris Williamson 51:45 ... help, help me to, to do that.

Iain McGilchrist 51:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:48 Rolling the clock forward, are

Chris Williamson 51:50 you optimistic-

Iain McGilchrist 51:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:51 ... about the future? How do you feel?

Iain McGilchrist 51:54 Um, I call myself, um, a, a, a hopeful pessimist. Um, actually, quite often the truth can only be expressed (laughs) 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, uh, fast enough to save us and to save the destruction of life on this planet. But I'm not very hopeful because, um, technological changes are going on so fast, um, exponentially faster and putting power in the hands of the least, um, savory people, um, the least intelligent, uh, the most manipulative, um, and the people we don't want to be making decisions about our own future, even if we wanted anyone to be making those decisions. So, the situation doesn't look good. There are a number of reasons for thinking it might get better, and one is that the message that I have is, um, something that seems to resonate with people at all stages of their life. So, if I travel and lecture, which I've done rather less recently because of COVID, um, I usually find that afterwards, there's many young people who are sort of passionately asking me, "What can we do? How can we (laughs) help yourselves in this situation?" Um, and of course, I don't have a single ready answer, but the fact that they see that there's a problem here and need to resist what's happening is incredibly important. Often just resisting a process or changing a process that you know has been bad is the most important thing. For example, if a patient comes to me, um, 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," 'cause if they knew that, they probably wouldn't have bothered coming to you. They, they're not ready to hear that. So in fact, what you have to do is lead them to a place where they see that something they're doing now is definitely wrong and get them to stop doing that. So if we could actually just stop people pushing further and further down this cyborg path and re-humanize humanity, this would be wonderful. But to do that would require a degree of humility, a degree of awe or wonder before the world, and a degree of compassion for people who don't agree with us rather than a kind of, um, high-handed narcissistic contempt. So, uh, w-... there's a, there's a little way to go. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:45 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. Uh, you know, kind of the-

Iain McGilchrist 54:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:54 ... the sensation that you get when you look up at the night sky. It's this sort of insignificance, it's beauty-

Iain McGilchrist 54:59 Yes.

Chris Williamson 54:59 ... 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 yet 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-

Iain McGilchrist 55:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:18 ... are things that, I don't know, progress, uh, i- i- it's regression, not progression, I think, towards making people feel fulfilled with those. Now, sadly, we weren't able to run census data on people in, you know, 2000 BC or whatever, the, 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-

Iain McGilchrist 55:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:48 ... lower resolution environment. But that doesn't take into account the fact that humans don't just need a, a formula that can explain some of the things that are going on in front of them. They need to frame that-

Iain McGilchrist 56:02 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:02 ... in a, in a broader narrative. It needs to be part of what does this mean-

Iain McGilchrist 56:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:06 ... for the fact that this stuff exists?

Iain McGilchrist 56:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 56:08 What does it mean that the universe is this wide and this vast and that I am here and that I am able to observe the universe and I am able to know that I am an observer? So on and so forth. Um, so yeah, I mean, there's pockets, there's small pockets. Here in Austin, there's a big sort of, uh, 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, a global movement yet.

Iain McGilchrist 56:40 Yes. I, I think that the s- my impression is that people are less and less satisfied with the inability to contact, um, the very real aspect of experience that we call the sacred, the awe-inspiring. Um, and it's often been pointed out that, in fact, curiosity is the, not necessarily the same as wonder. In some senses, it could be the opposite of wonder. It's, um, how do I, uh, work out how this, this i- this, how the clockwork works here, uh, (laughs) which is the opposite of the sense of wonder, you know. We don't say, "I'm curious what the meaning of life should be. I'm curious if there is a God." We w- we, uh, we wonder and, and are awe-inspired by these, these questions. So, I mean, as Kant famously said, "There are two great things that inspire awe in us. One is the, uh, starry heavens without us, and the other is the moral law within." And you mentioned, uh, the moral law. And one of the things I, I think is terribly important, and towards the end of this lat- latest book, The Matter with Things, emphasized, is that one way of thinking about what we're getting wrong is that we've completely inverted the pyramid of values. We, we, we worship things like greed, pleasure, and manipulation, which used to be thought of as really at the bottom of the, uh, heap, uh, 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..." R- r- read, (laughs) , read my book on those questions. Um, well, I'm sure you have. So, um, yeah, the- th- these are the parts of the problem. And I think that there is a, a hungering and a, for something meatier, more philosophically rich and deep than this very thin gruel that we're fed at the moment, which really almost a, a, an autistic child could come up with, you know. It's just a mechanism. It's a, it's a piece of clockwork. Don't get fussed about it. (laughs) But there we are,

Iain McGilchrist 58:54 hmm.

Chris Williamson 58:55 Do you think that there's a, a moral obligation that people have while they're existing, or do you think that there's a, a, a north star or a vector sort of direction that people should be moving themselves toward?

Iain McGilchrist 59:11 I definitely think that life is a moral business and that we make moral decisions all the time. In fact, um, how we pay attention to things, which is at the core of my understanding of the difference between the hemispheres, since they attend to the world differently, is a moral act. How you attend 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, um, its capacity and, and potential, um, or, or, or you, or you are aware of those. And equally, it changes you. So certain kinds of attention paid to the world impoverish the world and impoverish us. They make us, um, crue- simple, um, uh, blinkered people. So how we attend is a, is a moral act in itself. And what we do is morally important. I believe it is, in a way, w- the, 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, um, i- in something I've only got to, uh, come to grips with, uh, fairly recently in my, uh, intellectual history is, um, the Kabbalah, the, the Judaic mystical literature, in which one of the core images is that of vessels that have shattered but contain sparks of light from the divine, and that it is the human, um, role during this life to piece together what has been shattered in order to make these vessels more beautiful than they were before they were broken. I think that's very beautiful, and it brings to mind for me this Japanese art called kintsugi, where if a, a, 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 e- I- I- I can't obviously go into any more of that, but just that hint suggests to me that actually, yes, our role here is profoundly moral. And if we don't realize that, that is a, that's a moral failure in itself.

Chris Williamson 1:01:27 Iain McGilchrist, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go?

Iain McGilchrist 1:01:33 Well, um, to channelmgilchrist.com, um, and it's having a complete overhaul. Should be in its new form by the middle or end of April. And, uh, yes, thank you very much.

Chris Williamson 1:01:46 I appreciate you, Iain. I really, really like the stuff that you do. Thank you.

Iain McGilchrist 1:01:50 Thanks very much, Chris.

Chris Williamson 1:01:51 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.