The divided brain, attention and how we see the world - Dr Iain McGilchrist

0:28Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. his emissary is one of the most fascinating and profound books about how the brain works. So I'm going to catch up with Ian to find out how does the brain work and what is the truth about how the hemispheres operate and what does it mean for how we see the world? Because actually, once you understand this, it has really, really profound implications. And also in this episode, I've got a little cameo appearance from none other than Orlando himself to talk about what inspired him about Ian's work and how we can apply it to advertising. You're going to love this.

1:01It is one of the most thought-provoking and challenging conversations I've ever had. Ian, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Thank you very much indeed for inviting me. It's a pleasure and I listen to the book actually, which for anyone watching and listening, you can listen as well as read to it. It's absolutely fascinating. I don't think I've ever listened or read a book where the introduction itself is two hours and it's the most fascinating introduction. But maybe to go back to this beginning. How did you get into the career you've had? Why write these books and what inspired you in the first place?

1:33Well, I started off really with an interest in philosophy as my basic interest. And I went up to Oxford to study philosophy and theology, but ended up reading English literature. And I thought there was something wrong with the way we approached literature in that we made an object that should really be entirely implicit, embodied, and unique into something that was explicit, disembodied and general. And we somehow lost the point of the work of art in the process of analyzing it. And that got me to think that the really crucial thing is the mind-body relationship. I went to all the philosophy seminars on the mind-body relationship and just found them all too disembodied.

2:16And I thought, I've got to do this in a more embodied way. And around that time, Oliver Sacks had just written Awakenings. and I was electrified by this because there was this doctor who was able to bring to life individual cases of patients but very much from those individual cases to see through them some important general principles about the relationship between mind and body. I thought this is fascinating and I want to be somebody like Oliver Sacks. So I went to medical school, I did some neurology I then went to the Maudsley study psychiatry and one day I heard somebody talking about the right hemisphere it was a colleague of mine John Cutting and in medical school we'd heard nothing about the right hemisphere everything happened in the left hemisphere probably and it was almost as though the right hemisphere was just there to prop up the left hemisphere and stop it falling over you know it didn't really do anything But he was saying, no, it does remarkable things.

3:18In fact, it's much more important to a human life than the left. And that got me thinking. I talked to him. I did some research with him on hemisphere differences. I went to Johns Hopkins' important hospital and science research center in Baltimore and researched on asymmetries in the brain and then came back to London and carried on researching for about 30 years. And what was really fascinating was the first moment at which I realized this was something I had to do, which was in John Cutting's lecture. He said three things that he didn't know were going to really set off fireworks in my brain.

4:04The right hemisphere alone seems to understand the implicit. So things like humor, metaphor, poetry, myth, sarcasm, all these things are understood by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere takes everything terribly seriously and deadpan, as though it were a computer. The right hemisphere is much more in touch with our embodied being, our emotions, our physical self. And when you actually read a poem or listen to a piece of music or whatever it is, your body is reacting all the time. Your blood pressure is changing. The pulse is changing. Your breathing is changing. The tension in your muscles is changing.

4:46You are an embodied being. You're not a brain in a vat. And the third thing was this important idea that the right hemisphere understands the unique case, Whereas the left hemisphere is simply eviscerating everything, taking it out and going, I see it's one of those, I'll put it in that box. And so we end up in a world, I believe now, where this is the normal way of doing things. We've lost the sense of humor, of poetry, of fables, of narratives, of rituals. Instead, we think of everything in this incredibly simplified and basically impoverished way. We no longer see the unique case. We've always got to be a member of a class or a group or a race or a sex or whatever it is.

5:31And that's all that really matters. And you tick boxes. And the world, unfortunately, is not properly reflected by a number of boxes. And, you know, again, we're talking in a very disembodied way. something I feel very strongly as a lot of writing talking and thinking these days is so far from uh embeddedness in nature including the natural world but also in our nature the things that come from our bodies like our our sense of of love and and honor and you know all these good things not there and now I can't wait to get into unpacking a bit more about how the hemispheres work and so on but let's just um maybe address one of the questions I suppose you must get a lot, which is the popular myth of left and right brain doing different things.

6:17It's something that we get asked quite a lot at System 1, is surely that's been debunked many, many years ago. Can you explain a bit of the history to how that became a popular myth and the difference between what you're doing and the reference to the old myth? Yes. Well, in the 60s and 70s, there were a number of operations carried out in California originally at Caltech called callisotomy, which is popularly known as the split brain operation. And this was because some people had intractable epilepsy, which can't be treated with drugs, and they're basically having seizures all the time. So their life is effectively not a life.

6:58And what this operation was able to do was to stop the seizure that begins in one hemisphere spreading to the other. And as long as the people had one hemisphere at least that was in full consciousness, this meant that they weren't so disabled by these seizures. Now, this gave psychologists an opportunity to have a window into one hemisphere at a time. And so many ingenious experiments were set up in which they tried to find out what the basic differences between these two hemispheres are. I mean, it's been known since the ancient world and was finally confirmed in the 19th century that if you have a stroke in the left frontal region, you will almost certainly lose speech.

7:39Whereas if you have a stroke in the right frontal region, you don't. So there's no question that they, as it were, operate differently. They're also asymmetrical, and they're fundamentally divided. Why would that be if they were just doing the same job? They're not. So on the basis of what we learned from these operations, a number of conclusions were jumped to. And these were that the left hemisphere was maybe a little bit dull, but at least reliable and logical and linguistic, whereas the right hemisphere, what was it doing? Sort of being rather emotional and painting pictures. And this is an extremely fallacious view, and it was soon found that actually both hemispheres were involved in everything that we do, and so the subject was simply dropped.

8:25But as I say, since a billion of years of evolution have meant that all the neural networks we look at are asymmetrical, have this division potentially, and then actually as we come forward through birds and reptiles and so on to ourselves, what is all this about? It's got to be about something. And after I had discovered this different take that John Cutting put me onto, I began to look more subtly at what happens. and in a nutshell the left hemisphere helps us to grab things to manipulate them but not really to understand what it is we're grabbing or manipulating the right hemisphere is not dedicated to that it's enough to have one hemisphere dealing with that the right hemisphere is basically one with which we understand things it has profundity it has depth in fact literally depth in space is impaired when the right hemisphere is not working.

9:25Literally depth in time is impaired when the right hemisphere is not working. And literally depth in emotion disappears. So you get people who are living almost like in a virtual slice of the world and have no understanding for what other human beings are thinking, what they're saying. And this is why actually it's much easier to rehabilitate somebody who's got a dysfunctional right arm, pretty important, and lost speech than it is to rehabilitate somebody with a right hemisphere stroke because they basically can't understand the world anymore. So in the end, I found that the right hemisphere is actually more intelligent than the left, not only more intelligent emotionally and socially, but more intelligent cognitively in terms of old-fashioned IQ.

10:09And there's evidence, scientific evidence that this is clearly the case. And also it attends better, it perceives more, it makes more reliable judgments in the left hemisphere, not less reliable, more reliable. In fact, the left hemisphere on its own is frankly deluded. And what this is to do with is that for good evolutionary reasons, the two hemispheres pay attention to the world in two quite different ways. And I have to admit that when I first heard this, the full import of this did not dawn on me. I thought, well, attention, it's interesting, it's another cognitive function. but no it's not it's how our world comes into being for us what we attend to but much more how we attend to it changes what we find in the world and i therefore say that attention is a moral act because it changes the world and it changes us who are doing the attending so if you have a very clinically detached atomistic attention to a detail you don't really understand what you're looking at, you become alienated from it, you become a different kind of person from the way in which you would understand the world if you had a deeper sense of its meaning and significance.

11:24And so effectively, what you have is according to the left hemisphere, a world of little bits that are targeted. I know I need it. It's a rabbit. It's a seed. I've got to pick it up quickly. I've got to get it and that really is effectively the task of the left hemisphere to get stuff power utility that's what it's for now it was pointed out in the 18th century by a philosopher Lessing what is the use of use if utility doesn't have some further need or aim or goal it is futility Use for what? Well, use for more use. No, there's got to be use for something. You've got to have other values. And it's the right hemisphere that brings into being those values, such as beauty, goodness, and truth, effectively.

12:13But, you know, these are values that we've lost sight of in our world. I mean, during my lifetime, I've seen truth travested. I've seen beauty neglected by artists and architects. And I've seen, and by all of us, actually, the phrase that artists like now is, a work is powerful. But power is the only thing on which we judge anything now. Power is what everybody must have. But sometimes actually the relinquishing of power, the allowing of things to happen, a certain degree of modesty, a certain degree of wonder at the world is actually wiser and more productive than thinking, I know it all and I'm going to control it all.

12:49It's interesting you talked about what you've seen in your lifetime. So can you describe changes in society through looking at how hemisphere might be more or less engaged? I mean, is it fair to say that? Can you sort of look at patterns in culture or in art or in industrial revolutions? And can you see the imprint of hemisphere change? I believe you can, in short, yes. When I was in Baltimore neuroimaging, I got a message from John Cutting saying, you must read this book. And this book was a very good book that I do recommend to your viewers and listeners, called Madness and Modernism by Louis Sasse, who's a very widely educated psychologist.

13:34And what he was basically pointing to was that in modernism, i.e. since about 1900, our ways of thinking, our ways of doing art, our ways of relating to the world are much more similar to the ways that people with schizophrenia see the world than you would have ever expected before. And I found it utterly compelling. There are about 25 or 30 ways in which he points to what I'd really intuitively understood but never really thought about, that we're moving into a world, a more schizophrenic world. Now, schizophrenia doesn't mean split brain. That's not what it means. I mean, it does literally mean that in Greek, But people with schizophrenia don't have that.

14:16What they do have is an over-reliance on their left hemisphere and inability basically to understand what the normal right hemisphere would be telling you. So it's not that they lose their reason. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, a man who is mad has lost everything but his reason. In other words, has to work everything out from first principles logically, as though they were an alien or a computer. and this actually leads to all kinds of delusional understandings. You know, this voice that's actually obviously in your head, there's nobody in the room, so it must be coming through the wall from, or it's being beamed into me by a radio station or whatever it is.

14:55So I then started thinking about other eras in which there might be a more balanced vision, one to which both the right and left, as they do when they're working well, contribute but always with the left hemisphere which knows less and understands less being if you like the the the minister the emissary of the right and in the second half of the master and his emissary i do actually dare to review western history from the greek through to modernism and show that probably in brief three times in our history with various interesting swings of the pendulum. But very, very roughly, over three periods, we've seen a civilization begin with both hemispheres working beautifully in harmony.

15:48And then over time, the left hemisphere always coming to predominate. And this causes the collapse of the empire. And I believe that we're in that phase now. So much as there was a great phase in 6th century BC in Athens and another around the year dot in rome followed by the collapse of those civilizations i believe there was a great efflorescence of everything of science of culture of drama of poetry of cosmology or philosophy at the renaissance and music of course and that over time that has closed down to a much more rigid, almost computer-like understanding of who we are, what we're doing here, and what a society is, what we should be doing.

16:38So when you see or observe a society moving from right hemisphere to left hemisphere dominance, what typically plays out in terms of that society? And I guess linked to that question is, do you think that's what we're seeing today happening in society at the moment? Yes, I do. I mean, what happens is, first of all, you lose the big picture and you start concentrating and focusing on small parts of it, which is the way the left hemisphere understands. It moves from one slot to another of things that it already knows. It's not interested in anything new. It's, ah, it's one of those. I get it. I've got it.

17:12And it's grabbing it. So that's the first thing that happens. And gradually things like skill and wisdom, which are embodied and come from experience, get downclassed by comparison with a set of rules or principles. Everything has to be done by rules. Historically, this is because when a society overreaches itself, it needs a huge administration. And administration can't be dealing with the unique case. It simply, quote, rolls out. a whole way of thinking, which is simple-minded and basically ignores all the life which comes from diversity and individuality and our embeddedness in things that are not taken into account by an administration, like the beauty of wild nature or the beauty of art and so on.

18:09But also what happens is that you get black and white thinking. the left hemisphere is it jumps to conclusions much more than the right Ramachandran, a famous neuroscientist says the right hemisphere is the devil's advocate so the left hemisphere is busy jumping to conclusions and it hasn't got time for nuance so what do you mean, well it depends on the context and sometimes it's a bit like this but sometimes it's like that it goes come on, I want either this or that everything has to be compartmentalized. There isn't any room for the quality of an individual. In fact, quantity comes to triumph over quality.

18:50A certain kind of paranoia comes about, which is the left hemisphere's mode of operation, because it needs control. It wants control. If it thinks that anything is not under its control, it has to move to control it. And this is manifest again in schizophrenia. One of the famous things about schizophrenics is they are paranoid. And paranoia is, I'm not in control of things. Somebody else is controlling me. And in fact, what they're pointing to is their unconscious mind, which is talking to them, but they're thinking, this is alien to me. I think we're now rather like that. I think we live in a world which is schematically simple, ridiculously impoverished from a philosophical and emotional point of view as well as a moral point of view, has completely put out of the picture any spiritual value.

19:39and I mean that may or may not interest your viewers or listeners but I happen to think it's the biggest loss of all and that in fact it won't do us any good to push technology further if we don't have some sense of what we're doing with that and where we're heading, some wisdom. So we end up in a world where in fact innovation, although we're always striving for it, becomes less common because creativity depends partly on letting go. one of the most important pieces of advice for anyone who wants to be creative is stop doing whatever it is you think is going to make you creative that's very good let go yeah give some space for something to happen because if you're crowding it all out with your conscious mind you're thinking you're talking still all that get rid of it instead practice an openness to what is and this is how things will come to you they'll come to you in what psychologists call an aha moment, very original.

20:40And an aha moment is that moment when, as it were, a picture comes into focus. So we think we arrive at a conclusion by following logical steps. Almost never has that happened. In science, it's well known that there is this scientific method, but it's also well accepted that almost no great findings were ever made by the scientific method. And more often than not what happened was that a lot of spade work was done, which I call preparation. And then there's incubation. And then suddenly there is this flowering that comes unbidden and preparing the ground and then standing back and letting it happen.

21:17It's like being a gardener. A gardener can't make a plant. The gardener can allow the plant to thrive or stifle it. And if there's too much going on around it, then the plant won't thrive. So it needs space. And if you prepare the ground well, leave it alone. Don't keep digging it up to see how it's getting on. It won't improve the progress of the plant. Leave it and then just have trust that something will come. And for a long time it may not, but don't despair, it will. This does explain why the brainstorm rarely works, doesn't it? Because you've got 60 minutes to come up with a unique idea.

21:51But you're so right. I'd never thought about it before, but that makes sense of how the best ideas I've ever come up with have happened. It hasn't been following a process suddenly a number of different things will all connect together and suddenly form but it might it might be quick it might be slow it might be involving other people it might be doing something completely unrelated you know it's hard isn't it so how how are the biggest discoveries made is you know small question of course small question i mean one of the things you said there was right on the money i think which is bringing together a lot of different things so it's often to do with not drilling down, as we now say, in a certain place.

22:29It's rather like that's a bit like the man who was found looking for his keys under the light, because that's where the light was, but it wasn't where the keys were. So you really need to let go. And there are a number of famous examples, but one I like particularly is that of Poincaré. He was trying to demonstrate something he knew intuitively about something in mathematics called Fuchsian equations. And he stayed up all night and he drank coffee and he wrote for two weeks and he did nowhere nearer. And so he gave up and he went into the local town and did some shopping. And then as he was coming back, he remembers that the moment he put his foot on the bus, suddenly it all came to him.

23:12And so it's in these moments when we're not looking for it that it comes. And poets and other artists have commonly describe this, that you put in some groundwork, you know it's not going to happen then. You need that time. And that's why people who are desperate to increase efficiency are going to make things very inefficacious because you can't do that thing. You've had three months, where is the proof of what you're doing? You have to take good people and trust them. It's true that occasionally you won't be rewarded, but if you carry on screwing them down every three months, you will never get anything good.

23:53So you've got confirmed mediocrity. Nothing good will come out of that. So, yes, in life you have to take risks. But if you take these risks, an amazing number of people will actually come up with the goods. And in the 1960s, I think it was the Rand Corporation used to give people a check and an office and a pencil and paper and say, get on with it. And a lot of important discoveries came out of there. One way of looking at the history of the last 100 years is that between, say, 1910 and 1960 or 70, there were a lot of really revolutionary discoveries in science. But since then, what we've tended to do is elaborate on things from a technological point of view without necessarily breaking very new ground.

24:39That is so, so interesting. I was going to ask you, if taking all the work you've done, what do you think, if understood, would be the most profound impact on our world? Because you've already touched in just the conversation now and the role of creativity and how societies change over time. What do you think would be the one thing that if we could really understand would change the world? I think it's probably attention, and that may sound rather disappointing. Attention, I don't know about that. But actually, how you attend to the world changes everything. And so if we could do that, pay attention to our attention.

25:16How are we attending? Let me try attending in a different way. You will find things coming about that will open doors for you. You will see things you didn't know. So a lot of what is important is not doing and not saying. This is a truth that is very well known in the Oriental traditions of wisdom. As it were, when you're naive and don't really know a lot, you think it's all about what you do and what you say. And then you come to a position where finally you get enough wisdom to realize that actually it's letting go of those things. And so having a very light hand on the tiller, not controlling too much where it goes, is much more predictive of some sort of success than holding the tiller very sternly in the course you want to take.

26:07It's a bit like that Dunning-Kruger effect that some people talk about, isn't it? People that think they know everything know the least, and then the more you know, actually, the more you realise you don't know. The more you don't know. Which is so true. William James, one of my absolute heroes, a 19th century psychologist and philosopher, said our ignorance is a is a sea our knowledge is a drop and i think we're still in that position in fact the more we see them the less we realize we really fully understand yeah now you touched on it a bit earlier but i'd love just to unpack a little bit what kind of left and right brain hemispheres do differently because i think you describe it's not that do different things they you know they're all into interlink but they do things differently how do they do things differently I think if you want a very simple single point, it's that the left hemisphere produces a representation of reality, whereas the right hemisphere actually puts us in touch with the presence of reality.

27:04We're so used to representation that we can't see how very different it is. Almost everything we live in now is a representation, a projection on a screen in two dimensions, living in a city which represents certain things, but nature is absent from it. so it's like the difference between a diagram a theory a map and the actual territory of the real world or the terrain as i prefer to say in which we live and the map is very much simpler than the terrain and that's not a criticism because we need simplicity for a map to work if it had too much information in it it wouldn't work but it's vital not to mistake the map for the real world.

27:45And the differences in quality of these experiences are one in which the left hemisphere sees single atomistic bits of information that have to be put together by it to make any sense. These bits are disembodied, general in nature, taken out of context, explicit and inanimate, literally inanimate. In the right hemisphere, one sees things that are connected, They're always in relation when we meet them. It is an encounter that changes us as well as it. All of this world flows. It's never static, so you can grab it quickly. It sees it's all moving. It's all so implicit, so that all the really important stuff comes to us through things that are very hard to put into words.

28:30And this world is animate. and you can literally do this with TMS a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation in which painlessly you can suppress or enhance the activity of one hemisphere at a time if you suppress the right hemisphere people see things that they'd normally see as animate other people as like zombies or machines or robots really when you suppress the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere is active we'll see the sun as a living being So animacy is a very important point. And as we move more and more to a zombie-like vision of what humans are and thinking that somehow AI will be a richer version of what we are instead of a very, very simple and impoverished version of what we are, I think we're moving towards something foolish and dangerous.

29:21Now you talked about attention being the most profound aspect. Is attention driven by what we choose to give attention to or is attention created by the world? So are we becoming more attentive to our left hemisphere because the world around us is changing, or do we shape it? I mean, which way around does it work, or is it both? I mean, since the Industrial Revolution, we have externalised into the world of experience much of the structures of the left hemisphere, mechanical things that are the same because they're produced on a production line and they work in ways we can interfere in and so on.

29:50And so we've externalized the world, a cityscape, like a grid, often with hard surfaces, which we're repelled by. And this confirms to us that the world has this man-made structure, which is very simple and not resonant. Whereas until, I don't know, most couple of hundred years ago, almost everyone on the world lived in contact with nature in all its complexity, in its responsiveness to us and our responsiveness to it. so we are responsive to the world and the world is responsive to us and the attention that we take is firms up in a certain way if you pay a certain kind of attention this is important what you see say you you you imagine that things are mechanical you will see all the things about them that confirm that they are machines but all the rest will retreat you won't see it so now you think well that worked very well so everything is a machine and at that point it's very difficult to break out of it unless you force yourself to think, but maybe it's not.