Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and Perceiving the Sacred
Intro
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield. This is a podcast about our common life and the deep values of the people who are shaping it. In every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of platform or voice or ability to feed into public conversations. And I want to get beneath the surface with them to their principles, to their values, to their story, to get a sense of who they really are. In our public conversations very often, we have them in one of two ways, in very adversarial ways where two people from opposite positions are put up against each other to have a ding–dong. Or we gather people who are like us or who we know already agree with us and we talk amongst ourselves. On The Sacred, we’re trying to break that mould and do something a little bit different. And so I speak to people from a very wide range of philosophical, political, and metaphysical positions, from different professions, different tribes, and try and get a sense of what drives them. This means that if you listen long enough, you will almost certainly hear someone who you would not otherwise have chosen to spend an hour in the company of. And I want to encourage you to push through the discomfort of this, because I think this is how we together build a more curious, open, empathetic common life.
In this episode, you will hear a conversation I had with Dr Iain McGilchrist. Iain has worn many hats. As you will hear, he studied English literature at Oxford and went on to be a fellow in English at All Souls College. And if you don’t know about All Souls, it’s this very weird, kind of wonderful, quite archaic, purely postgraduate college. I think of it as a kind of Hogwarts/holding pen for geniuses. And if someone’s been to All Souls, someone’s been a fellow of All Souls at least once, you know they have a really kind of generation defining mind. And so Iain was there pursuing a career as an English scholar, but in his twenties, he changed path. As you’ll hear a bit about wanting to study medicine and went on to be, among other things, a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley, which my guess is the leading mental health hospital in the UK. He came to much more public prominence over the last decade or so because of two books that he’s written. First was called The Master and His Emissary, and the most recent which comes in two enormous volumes is called The Matter With Things. We spoke about Iain’s childhood being brought up with non–religious parents, about how formative his experiences at boarding school were, why he has decided to kind of follow the threads that he has in his career. And to my joy, and broadly unprompted, we talked a lot about God. There are some reflections from me at the end and I really hope you enjoy listening.
What Is sacred to you? Iain McGilchrist’s response
Iain we are going to dive right in with a question that I know that you will not balk at, but some people do, which is about what is sacred to you. And you can go with that however feels right to you: deep values, something else, you can challenge my premise, what bubbled up for you?
Iain McGilchrist
I certainly wouldn’t challenge the premise. I think the concept is extremely important. Famously, it’s not encompassable in language. And so it’s a difficult thing to say. But I can hint at it. It’s something, I think that I would say, speaks to us of something beyond that is powerfully rich, beautiful, good. And draws us forward in life by its attractive force. So, I don’t know quite how to sum it up. It’s one of those things rather like being in love, that if you haven’t had the experience, you can’t really convey it to someone else.
Elizabeth
Yes, and we’ll come back to some of the reasons that maybe we need to not fight that, but surrender to it. You write in various places about the importance of truth, goodness and beauty as a three–part, set of values, famously how Thomas Aquinas summed up God. Could you tell me a little bit about what they mean to you?
Iain McGilchrist
Gosh, another really difficult one. I know that they’re important. And I believe that it’s clear that we’re not heeding them in the way that we once did. So, I find that truth is travestied in our world, that beauty has somehow been side–lined, if not banished, even by art, that should know better. And that goodness is very much something we don’t really understand. We think it’s about following rules and having right opinions, where it’s actually about a matter of the disposition of one’s soul. The disposition of one’s mind and heart at any rate, if one doesn’t like this word ‘soul’, but I think it’s an important one. So, I find they’re very important. They’ve always called to me. And particularly, in my intellectual life, truth. In my more embodied life, beauty. And goodness is something one comes to understand with experience, it seems to me; and as I say, one has to keep revising what one thinks of it, because when one’s young one latches on to what adults tell one about rules and principles, but it seems to me to go deeper than that.
Elizabeth
Well, let’s stay with that, then, and try and get a sense of you as a child.
Growing up at Winchester College: Iain McGilchrist
I find it very helpful as we’re trying to listen deeply and openly and curiously to the people shaping our common life. Start with where they came from, could you talk about some of the big ideas that were in the air in your childhood that formed you?
Iain McGilchrist
Well, at home, certainly nothing to do with religion. Not that my parents were rabid atheists, but they just didn’t really think there was any point in worrying about religion. So my first experience of it really was when I went to – I mean, of course, we had school prayers, and so on, but my first really proper experience of something religious as opposed to just spiritual – was when I went to my secondary school, which was Winchester, at the age of 12. And the ideas that were in the air there were complicated, because it was a rather wonderful mix. I mean, on the one hand, officially, we were taught how to reason well, to do maths and science, and to decode the famously difficult classical languages: Latin and Greek. But there was also for me something else there, which was partly to do with a person who was very formative for me, my housemaster – it was a boarding school. He was a completely remarkable person, and far more influential, really, on me than my father, who was a very decent man, a GP. I think he was liked by his patients. He was definitely a kind man, but I don’t think he really understood anything much beyond the fairly straightforward everyday mechanical view of things. He was terribly good at setting a joint, but I think he thought that psychiatry was rather funny. However, my housemaster was a spiritual man with an amazing sense of humour. He was rather like everybody’s idea of a mediaeval abbot. He was extremely large, he was about six foot three, and would have been a very good ‘rugger’ player. But also he had become rather rotund, and he had a sort of hair like a tonsure and gleaming blue eyes and his lips were always puckering up into a laugh. So all the time, he managed to bridge this wonderful thing of humour, seeing things in proportion, seeing the absurd, but also seeing the deep, and not mocking it, but actually nourishing it. And he helped me through that by recommending holy books – poetry mainly, but also the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, and the works of Thomas Browne, and so on, which I came to love. And the other thing was that the school was very rounded, and we were taught that it’s very important to have a sort of general reasonable attitude based on an experience of all kinds of things; not just as I say, on a kind of logarithmic working out of what the answer must be, but one that is sensitive to experience. And the experience that that school gave me was – I was a scholar there, my parents would never have sent me there otherwise, and it was all paid for amazingly – it gave me a setting which was ancient. There were these very old buildings, 14th century monastic buildings, which definitely had an aura of something about them. They were very beautiful; they’d stood for a long time. They had sort of the feeling of ancient ages in the stonework, somehow. And daily rituals, because we had to go to church twice a day initially. I didn’t know anything about this, but I got to know prayers. I got to know beautiful music. I was in the chapel choir. I made the acquaintance of Renaissance composers, Palestrina, Tallis, Victoria, Gibbons, all these people. And Byrd. And I also was close to nature. The school ran out into water meadows, which was a really lovely place to just wander, in the slightly melancholy way that adolescents do, or at least this adolescent did. And so that was how I got the sense of a rich world around me that was not at all something superstitious or made up, but was contacted deeply through one’s embodied and emotional experience as well as one’s intellectual life.
Elizabeth
Yes, I smiled halfway through that, because my dad is also a GP and was an orthopaedic surgeon prior to it. So the idea of medicine as DIY is very familiar to me. You’ve painted this beautiful picture of a kind of melancholy adolescent out in the water meadows. How would you describe yourself during that time? Or how might someone who knew you have described you?
Iain McGilchrist
Oh, gosh. Well, I think they would have thought I was a bit precious, really. They would have thought I was too interested in poetry. Although that was not scorned at, at that school. I mean, that was an important part of things. It wasn’t a sort of hearty sports–only kind of atmosphere; as I hope I’ve conveyed it was anything but that. But I think they would have seen me as a rather shy, perhaps a bit sharp, bright, but moody perhaps, adolescent. I don’t know. I’ve never asked people, but I imagine I was pretty insufferable, really, because I was aware that I did know an enormous amount at an early age. And that’s a bit off–putting, really!
Elizabeth
So I listened to an interview in which you mentioned a sense of having a kind of long–lasting lack of confidence, or that confidence being sometimes a challenge. And I have to confess to you, Iain, that one of the things that this podcast repeatedly does is it challenges my preconceptions about people. And we’ll talk a bit later about tribalism and polarisation and the sort of quite left hemispheric mental shortcuts that we use to categorise people. And I thought, you know, All Souls fellow, boarding school, psychiatrist, male, of course he hasn’t got a problem with confidence. Could you say, partly schooling me as I repent for these preconceptions, could you say a little bit about that thread in your life?
Iain McGilchrist
Yes, I think it was very strong at Winchester (sorry, it won’t be interesting for most of your listeners, but) there is a big difference in culture, between Winchester and say, Eton. At Eton – and it’s a great gift, actually, at least to the persons themselves – people are taught very much to have confidence in themselves, to believe in themselves, and so forth. We were taught almost the exact opposite: to doubt ourselves all the time. And in Greek, there’s a way in which things are argued in which you have two particles, men and de. And you start, men, on the one hand; and de, on the other. So, everything was on the one hand, and on the other. And this was the way we were taught to think: as soon as we’d express something, we were to question it, and to see if there wasn’t something to be said for the opposite point of view. Actually, that was drilled into me from a very early age, that seeing both sides of a question is incredibly important. And I wish that was part of more people’s education, because it could save a lot of unpleasantness and violence, and aggression, and anger, and resentment, and so forth. So that was it. But also, I cannot account for it: my parents did not in any way undermine me, they rather supported me, and would have given me confidence. And at school, I certainly wasn’t told I was not good enough, or anything like that. But I’ve always gone through life with the, you know, what they call the ‘imposter syndrome’. I am aware of how little I know. And so you feel like you’re skating on thin ice all the time. And you can never have enough knowledge of an area. So when I’m writing, I’m drilling down and gathering in and trying to make sure that what I’m saying is grounded on something that is very hard to refute. I’m a shy person, but I’ve developed a persona as many shy people do for performing. And it’s interesting to me as a psychiatrist that some of the people who have what’s now diagnosed as social phobia (in the past, they would just have been said to be rather a shy, retiring person), often take jobs that involve them being on stage. Or being a DJ is another famous one. You’d think you’d have to have a lot of confidence to do these things. But actually it’s a kind of way of performing which is not too threatening.
Iain McGilchrist’s first impressions of Christianity, and difficulty around the word “God”
Elizabeth
And when you were at Winchester and going to chapel twice a day sometimes –and I’ve been listening to a lot of Tallis’ Lamentations this week, it’s been in my ears – did you, you know, coming from a non–religious or not explicitly religious family, did you feel drawn to Christianity? To God? What was the kind of journey around that for you in your teens?
Iain McGilchrist
No, I was drawn very much. So much so, that I was pretty certain that what I wanted to do after school was to study theology, and be ordained, and then go into a monastery. That was definitely my ambition. It was based on very little experience of life. And as soon as I had a little, I repented me of this idea; and a good thing too I say, for me and for the monastery. I’m a bit of a rebel. I don’t like to just take things because somebody says so. So I’m often adopting another position from the one that’s fashionable in order to see what’s been lost here and to recover the valuable in it. I often say that I’m the believer among sceptics, but I’m the sceptic amongst believers: that I often think, “well, yes, but hang on”, you know. I’ve never been one of those people who has 100% certainty about anything in the spiritual and religious realm. I go so far as to say that, you know, I admire and envy people who have that certainty. But I think there should be a bit of a question mark over it, because these are not really realms – unless one has a very, very convincing and undeniable personal experience – that just absolutely convinces one. This is not an area in which 100% certainty can be had; indeed, it’s a matter of faith, and it wouldn’t be faith if it could be certain. Faith is a matter of having trust in something. And trust is part of a relationship. Trust can be upheld, fulfilled, or it can be betrayed. And so I see whatever it is, as a two–way relationship between … God …I say the word in that slightly hesitant way because the word ‘God’ is so surrounded by assumptions and images that I think are damaging, and I’d want to distance myself from – but nonetheless, in the end, one has to call it that: God, the divine, the Sacred Realm, whatever – that it is something that is responsive to us. That we are called to respond to it. That it is always a relationship. That it is in fact to do with love. And love is another very powerful thing that can be reciprocated or can be lost. So I think it’s a good way to think. Sorry, I may have wandered off the question there.
Elizabeth
No, I love it and I am about to wander off as well. So who knows if this will stay in. But I have been trying to write a chapter on God myself, which I just finished before I started reading your chapter, The Sense of the Sacred, and the way I got round that is for most of my book, the word ‘God’ is in square brackets. And then I got to you when you started talking about a non–word we need. We need an ‘un–word’. And then trying to find those linguistic signals, like in Orthodox Jews not saying the name, or we need to find some way to signal that you can’t drop this into a conversation casually, and expect that it doesn’t drag with it this kind of semiotic baggage that we’ll be setting off, you know, existential fireworks in the person who’s receiving it. And I very much valued that honest wrestle. But I will try and stay on track and we’ll come back to it.
The problem with academic critique: Iain’s stint as an English Fellow at All Souls
So you said you thought you would study theology and go be a monk, but that’s not what happened? How did you end up studying English instead?
Iain McGilchrist
Well, in order to get into Oxford in those day –I don’t know if it’s still true – you had to sit an exam. And you had to sit it in some school subject, and theology wasn’t a school subject. So instead, I thought, well, I like English literature, and I’ll do that. So I did the exam in that. I was called for an interview. And my interviewers were John Bayley, who’s better known as the husband of Iris Murdoch, but was a very brilliant writer and critic in his own right, and Christopher Tolkien, the son of JRR, who was to be my Anglo–Saxon tutor. And there were also a couple of philosophers: Anthony Quinton, and a theologian, Gary Bennett. And they said, “you can’t do theology and philosophy”, which is what I’d applied to do, because I wasn’t really interested in theology, if it was mainly about the Bible – I was interested in theology if it was mainly philosophical theology. And I also wasn’t interested in philosophy, politics and economics, which was the obvious alternative at Oxford, because I really hadn’t, and still have, very little interest in politics and economics. I’m mainly interested in the kind of philosophy which has room in it for God. So theology and philosophy looked like precisely the course. But it had only been set up that year, and it wasn’t yet an honours degree. And they all said, “no, you can’t do a non–honours degree, you need to do a degree in which you can, you know, show your strength. So, either I think you need to do theology, or you need to do English.” And I wasn’t, at that stage, sure enough that I just wanted to do theology, I really wanted that philosophy, because I’ve always really been basically interested in philosophy, even when I was a schoolboy. And so I did English: they said, “come and do English”, and they gave me a scholarship, and I went and did English. And I enjoyed it very much. But I didn’t really want to go on with it forever. Because I liked literature so much that I didn’t want to spend my whole life, as I sometimes say, ‘operating on my friends’, you know. I wanted to have a different relationship with literature. And as soon as I got my degree, I was encouraged by John Bayley (I’d never heard of it) to sit the All Souls College examination. It’s amazing what you don’t know: I mean, I was in New College right next door to it, and I just knew there was a funny college there that had only dons in it, and that was rather weird. But he said, “no, no, go and sit this exam.” So I did. And amazingly, I got a fellowship there, which gave me seven years to do what I liked. I had provisionally arranged to do a doctorate in late 18th and early 19th century literature. But Derek Parfit, the philosopher, was a very kind man. And he took me under his wing, really, and said, “You shouldn’t do something like that. You can do a doctorate anywhere, but you’ve been given something very special, which is seven years to do exactly what you like.” And he said, “instead, why don’t you read widely around things that interest you. Go to different seminars and different faculties and decide what you want to do”. Which I did. And in the process – here I’m thinking about literature – I came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the way we processed literature in the academic world. And in brief, I thought of works of literature not as something clever for critics to show off in relation to. There was a sort of terrible feeling that critics knew more than the author they were criticising: they worked from a superior position, in which they saw what the author himself never saw. And often the work of art, the poem, the novel, the play, was really more like a trampoline on which the critic could do acrobatics and show off how clever he was. But this distracted attention from the actual work, which required a patient, close openness for the work to speak. And so I wrote a book called Against Criticism, which was then published by Faber & Faber, in my 20s. That was really on what we do wrong with literature, which was to take something that really meant something to the person who wrote it, and wanted to communicate with other human beings; that was absolutely unique in its nature –if it was good (if it was second rate, and mediocre, then it could be, yes, rather just an example of bad ‘something’, but if it was a great poem, or a great play, it couldn’t possibly be substituted by anything else). That’s the first thing. The second thing was that it was an embodied statement. It wasn’t just a bunch of ideas. It was something that worked on you physically and emotionally when you read, it in much the way that music does. And the third thing was the ignoring of context. So when you take a phrase out and transliterate it, if you like, into prose, it means something different from what it meant when it was embodied in the poem. I thought there’s something wrong with this, and I thought that it was about the mind–body problem. Essentially that, in other words, we were entirely cerebral in the way we approached it, whereas in fact, it asked for something else from us. And I went to the mind–body problem seminars in the philosophy faculty; and I just didn’t find them at all satisfactory, because they were just too disembodied.
Elizabeth
Ironically
Iain McGilchrist
Yes, I know! And so what I really conceived was – it came from two places. One was, I wanted to understand how when something changes in the brain, it changes the mind of a person. And how when something changes in the mind of somebody, it can have bodily effects –they can develop diseases, that are based on a psychological problem. So this relationship seemed to be much more fertile. And I, you know, had just come across Sacks’s Awakenings at that point. And that was his greatest work. And to me, it was wonderful, because it combined the ability to see individual cases as individuals, but to see what general truth could be recovered from them. And I thought, I want to be something like this. So I went to the medical faculty at Oxford and said, “I want to do medicine.” I was 28, so 10 years older than most little nippers straight out of school. And they said, “Yes, yes, of course, but you will have to go to get your A–levels”. And I had just been a Fellow at All Souls for seven years, and I thought, well, I didn’t really want to do that. So, at the time – I’m sorry, you asked for a bit of autobiography! – I went to Southampton University, which had just been set up by somebody from Oxford, who had decided that what we needed was a medical training which brought together the humanities and science; and it wanted also to encompass the possibility of people turning to medicine slightly later, not just as a, ‘well, you’re doing well at chemistry, so you’d better become a doctor’, but somebody who’d actually lived for a decade or so and thought, no, no, I really want to be a doctor. And that was the second place in which this idea came to me, because it was almost like the equivalent of my wish to be ordained, or whatever. It was, I’m afraid, in a corny way, I guess, you being a doctor as a way of – of devoting oneself to serving others.
Elizabeth
I think vocation is the opposite of corny, Iain, and the fact that we feel like we have to apologise for it is a bit of a tragedy.
Iain McGilchrist
It is a bit of a tragedy, and it tells us something about the age in which we live. But in any case, that’s what I did. I went off and studied medicine, did a bit of neurology, and neurosurgery at a very low level, and then went to the Maudsley. And the rest is – well, not quite, but – the rest is history.
Elizabeth
Yes. So. Gosh, Iain so much in there, it’s making me think about how we read Scripture. And that I imagine someone who’s already written the Against Criticism for scripture, you know, don’t dissect it into dry doctrines, just let it work on you.
The Origins of Iain McGilchrist’s Two Hemisphere Hypothesis
I want to hear about the time when you were working in psychiatry and having great success in this second career essentially, and the hemisphere hypothesis, this sense that there are different modes of attention that the different hemispheres of the brain have. And that that impacts much more than has been thought in the past. I’d love to hear as you were kind of, you know, building essentially on Against Criticism and bringing in all these disciplines and this was emerging in you – how obvious it was that this was your project, you know, that this was the thing that you needed to say in the world? Or whether there were times where you thought this is too big, I need to go at one small area, or no one’s going to take me seriously, I’m gonna, just going to read a bit from the beginning of, I can’t remember which of your books but it says something like, you know, this is the book about the nature of reality, the cosmos, morality, consciousness and God. What was it like coming to realise that that’s what you needed to write?
Iain McGilchrist
Well, there are two things – two different ways, appropriately. One is that in a sense they had always been what I was interested in, and therefore it wasn’t that they came to me. Since my teens, I have found these concepts, as I’ve really already mentioned, very important. How I came back to them at that time, is a different story. And I never saw where I was going, looking forwards, but I can see where I was going, looking backwards. Of course, it’s famous that we make sense of a route we followed as though it had a kind of direction, afterwards. But it may be that actually there is a kind of direction at work, but just not one of which one’s fully conscious. I somehow needed this foot in both camps of the mind and the body. Of, you know, dealing with human beings in the sense that medicine enables one to be part of their lives, and their embodied existence and help them with that; and also be in this more rarefied realm. Being an academic by disposition, and a philosopher, really, all my teens and adult life, I went to the Institute of Psychiatry, when I got to the Maudsley, and said, I want to do some research. And they said what do you want to research in? And I said, I want to research into how children develop a concept of time. I still think this is a fascinating topic. And the person who interviewed me, who was a quite well–known psychologist, looked at me, and her eyes glazed over, and she said, “come and clone, the P450 receptor”. And I said, “I don’t want to clone the P450 receptor”! As part of a research team, that’s what they wanted: a new pair of hands, who would be the dogsbody on the team where they had a project to clone the P450 receptor. I wanted to do my own research. And I realised that the only way to do this, actually –because I was so much going after philosophical things that mainstream psychiatry was not interested in – was to plough my own furrow. And almost by accident, I happened to go one day to a lecture by John Cutting, who was an older colleague – well, I was still in training, he was a consultant, and a lecturer at the Institute. And he was giving a talk based on a book he’d just written, published by OUP, called The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders. And I suppose it was an eureka moment for me. It wasn’t just that I liked the general drift of what he was saying. There were three things that struck me very forcibly at the time: that he said that the left hemisphere understands more literal language, and the right hemisphere alone understands metaphor, irony, tone of voice, the manner in which things are said. Secondly, it understands unique cases, whereas the left hemisphere tends to have already aggregated whatever it is into a category. And thirdly, the right hemisphere was just more in touch with the body than the left. And I can expand on that, but I’ve done that in other places, and I won’t spend time on it now. But those three things really struck me very forcibly, because in a way they were the three things I found that was wrong with the academic approach to works of art – specifically works of literature, but it applies right across the board, of course. And after the lecture, I went up to John –who’s very humble, and not at all one of these ambitious academics, but was a very thoughtful man; and he said, “I’m glad you’re interested”. And I said, “well, I wrote this book Against Criticism”. I gave him a copy. He said, “Fascinating. Come and work with me and help me with some research”. So I was the beneficiary of some work he’d been doing for a long time on hemisphere differences. And he unlike almost anybody else, had spent a lot of time sitting at the bedside of people who had had right hemisphere ‘insults’, as we say, i.e. a stroke, or an injury, or a tumour, and how this had changed their lives in a way that the hurried doctor wouldn’t notice so much. Because they certainly noticed after left hemisphere stroke the person couldn’t move their right hand, often couldn’t speak. This is the kind of stuff that’s so barndoor that even the average medic can spot it. But the other – sorry, no disrespect to my colleagues, who are in general, a very intelligent bunch – but you know, after a right hemisphere stroke, actually, much more of the world has gone. And it’s oddly enough, much harder to rehabilitate somebody after a right hemisphere stroke than after a left. And this struck me as absolutely fascinating. We produced a couple of papers, I think, together. And then I got the opportunity to go and do research at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where we were researching asymmetries in the brain – I was already interested in asymmetry from talking to John – and this was to do with schizophrenia. Again, I won’t go into the detail, but it was about the importance of the normal asymmetry in the brain, how this is lost in schizophrenia, and sometimes reversed in schizophrenia, and how this results in a very different way of looking at the world. And around that time, I also was advised by John to read a book called Madness and Modernism by Louis Sass, a very distinguished psychologist at Rutgers. And that book, in again a nutshell, showed that there were extraordinary parallels between the experiences reported by people with schizophrenia and works of art since about 1910 – so modernism. And they’re so striking, and they’re so deep and interesting that it couldn’t possibly be just a coincidence. But on the other hand, we couldn’t all have got schizophrenia suddenly – so it was something else. What was that something else? It was an inability to incorporate into one’s vision of the world what is offered to us by the right hemisphere. In other words, a vision of the world based on how the left hemisphere sees it – which is very bizarre, as much modern art, of course, became. And so that’s the story really. I then thought, right, this is so important. I’d had so much experience in neurology of patients who had typically had left–sided or right–sided symptoms, and certain diseases, certain conditions, certain syndromes are known to be preponderantly, left–sided or the right–sided. I just thought that in itself was very interesting – why? And that got me into thinking there’s going to be some big differences here. And of course, there are: they just weren’t the ones that people had talked about earlier in the 60s and 70s. All my colleagues, you know, who had my interests at heart, begged me not to take this path. They said, you’ve got a promising career. Don’t do this. Nobody will take you seriously if you talk about hemisphere differences – it’s all baloney. It’s all pop psychology, don’t do this. But in fact, I had the confidence to carry on, because I kept finding things that are just too interesting and couldn’t be dismissed in this way.
Unpacking Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis
Elizabeth
Yes, I’m going to ask you to do something which always seems a bit violent because of the three enormous detailed, complex, multidisciplinary books you’ve written about it – and quite ‘left hemispheric’ – which is just to ask you to summarise what are the key differences in the ways the left and right hemisphere attend to the world?
Iain McGilchrist
Yes, first of all – on ‘left hemispheric’ –it seems to me that if you’re going to win people to a point of view, you have to do it by speaking the language that they understand. And so if people say to me “you certainly use your left hemisphere”, I say, “well, of course, I use my left hemisphere, it’s my second favourite hemisphere: and without it, I wouldn’t really be performing very well at all.” So I rely on my ability to think clearly to construct an argument and to marshal data.
The short version of what happens is this. It seems that the fundamental difference – and this exists in all the neural networks we know going back hundreds of millions of years – is that creatures have to solve the problem of how to eat without being eaten. They have to be able to focus on something that they can grab and get very quickly. For this they need detailed, precise attention to a very small thing that they need to manipulate. But that’s not the only attention they need. They need at the same time to have a broad, open, vigilant attention for the predator who will make them its lunch while they’re getting theirs. And more than that, it needs to be open to everything: to its mate, to its offspring, to everything that’s going on in the world. In a soundbite, the left hemisphere has evolved in all of us to serve – well, I say “all of us”, but I mean, in general, throughout the history of the evolution of this arrangement – the left hemisphere has evolved to be the one that helps us manipulate the world. And the right hemisphere is the one that helps us understand the world, make sense of it. Because, of these two different kinds of attention, the left hemisphere sustains this very narrow (perhaps three degrees out of the 360), targeted attention to something it already knows it wants: the world is made up of things that are familiar, known, unchanging, unmoving, isolated, decontextualised, non–individual, inanimate.
Elizabeth
That one really stuck with me.
Iain McGilchrist
Yes, and it’s true. As for the right hemisphere, it sees a world in which everything is ultimately connected to everything else, nothing is ever finally certain, nor completely fixed, it’s on the move all the time; that often what is important is something that is implicit in the context, and is ruined if you decontextualise it. It’s in touch with embodied feeling, with emotion, with the physicality of our existence. And this vision also has a place for the unique individual. And it’s an animate world. Just to gloss that, you can in a perfectly painless procedure, now suppress one or other hemisphere for 20 minutes at a time. And when you do this, if you suppress the right hemisphere, people see things that they would normally call living as just mechanical. Whereas if you suppress the left hemisphere, they see things that we would probably think of as inanimate, like the sun, as a living thing. So it is quite interesting. There’s another couple of things that are very, very important, and one of them sound fascinating, but it’s not as important as the other. That first one is that the left hemisphere is very full of self–confidence. Because it knows so little, effectively, it thinks it knows everything. And the right hemisphere, on the other hand, is much less certain and has a much more modest opinion of its capacities, whereas the left hemisphere has a grossly inflated optimism about what it is and what it can do. But the last thing, which is really, really crucial, though it might not grab people’s attention in the same way, is the difference between the presence of something and a representation. The right hemisphere is able to deal with the presence of something as it comes into being for us, actually just being there with it, and experiencing that presence. Whereas the left hemisphere takes it and makes it a representation, literally something that is present after it’s no longer present: actually ‘re–presented’. This is the difference between a two–dimensional depiction of something, and the embodied thing that is there. So for example, an image is static, it’s fixed, it’s two dimensional; whereas the landscape that is imaged is everything else that is left out. And a quick and dirty way of putting it is that the left hemisphere deals with the map and the right hemisphere with the terrain that is mapped.
The consequences of living in a left–hemisphere society
Elizabeth
You’ve described something which sounds like it could be healthy and useful when we’re functioning with both hemispheres in their proper way, and you talk about the fact they do take over functions of each other, it’s not kind of, you know, hermetically sealed. But I think the reason that your work has been so influential, and so moving for lots of people, including myself, is the kind of consequences of a culturally embodied imbalance, that we are effectively continually strengthening, because the brain is plastic: we are using the left hemispheric form of attention. And then reinforcing the left hemisphere form of attention and then denigrating, dismissing, right hemispheric forms of attention in ways that change fundamentally our experience of being in the world. Could you narrate just a little bit of the consequences of that for me?
Iain McGilchrist
Yes. Well, as you say, the left hemisphere is not to be dismissed. It’s very important. It’s a tool, much as it is itself interested in tools. But it’s got to be as it were, in the service of something beyond that. As Lessing said, “What is the use of use?” I mean, if you just have use – useful for what? If the answer is only we’ll use it, there’s got to be something else, like the famous goodness, beauty and truth – the Platonic virtues. So we need it, but it needs always to be under the superintendence of the right hemisphere that sees more. And in a way it should be acting as a functionary – or something rather like a desktop computer. I resist the equation of anything to do with the brain with a computer; but in this one respect, it’s slightly like that, in that it’s very good at carrying out procedures rapidly, but it’s not good at understanding what those procedures mean or imply. So it must take material, do useful preparation, and then give it back to the right hemisphere, which then incorporates it into the overall picture. But what happens is that the normal passage from right to left stops now at the left hemisphere, and is not taken back into the right hemisphere. In other words, we think what the left hemisphere shows us, once it’s broken the thing down, is the reality. But having broken it down into bits, it will seem meaningless, it will seem unattractive and senseless. And it lost all its meaning. If you take a piece of music that is profoundly moving and just turn it into a bunch of notes, and perhaps catalogue all the notes and say, “Well, we have 37 A–flats, and we’ve got…”, you know, this is not going to help you understand the piece of music, because the music’s all in what has been lost in breaking it up into bits. It’s all in the – what I call the ‘betweenness’; not the space between, but actually the construction of relations. And that’s another thing that I can only just throw out briefly. But I believe, and argue in this book, The Matter With Things, that relations are the foundation of everything; that things are not primary, and then have to be related, but relationships are primary ,and the things we call ‘things’ emerge from a network of relations. Now, if we lose sight of this, what happens is that we start to view a theory, which is extremely thin stuff, as more real than experience. We start to see the map as more real than the land in which people live that appears on the map in just a few lines. We lose all the subtle stuff, all the stuff that comes, the skills that come, from experience. It’s the downgrading of experience, the downgrading of one’s intuitions, the downgrading of one’s judgments, as though the only thing that can validate or verify anything, is an argument inevitably based on things that have been isolated, decontextualised, and so forth. Because if it’s not based on that, then once again, one finds oneself appealing to people’s judgments and their intuitions, and so on, all of which we’re being taught to disregard, too, because of a whole industry of psychologists who move around businesses making a small fortune telling people they shouldn’t trust their intuitions. But as you know, in The Matter With Things, I have three whole chapters on intuition and its important place. And although it’s quite true that intuitions can sometimes mislead us … as I say, there are optical illusions I can show you that you can’t believe are right, but they are; but after seeing one, one doesn’t say “Well, in that case, I’m going to close my eyes from now on, I’m never going to rely on eyesight because it can sometimes deceive me.” And the cases in which it can sometimes deceive you, in intuition, are a consequence of its being 99% right. If something is 99%, right, most of the time, it will not cover those very occasional things when it’s not right. But to just chuck it out is to become a moron. Because it’s intuition that makes one intelligent and what intelligence means is understanding. So we’re making ourselves fools. We’re following very black and white positions because the left hemisphere wants decision now. It doesn’t want ambiguity. It doesn’t like uncertainty, because, remember, it’s the one that’s grabbing. It wants “Look, is that a seed or is it a pebble? You can’t tell me it couldn’t be one or the other. I’m gonna get it.” And so the left hemisphere is quick and dirty. It’s not the one that is more reflective, more … VS Ramachandran, a very well–known, distinguished neuroscientist, calls the right hemisphere, ‘the devil’s advocate’, because it’s not the one that jumps to conclusions. It goes, “yeah, but it might be this”. Whereas the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions all the time. So it has a quick and dirty way of thinking. It tends to put people into categories and everything into categories. So, you know, you are what you are by virtue of being … as you started off by reflecting. In fact I’m worse than you said. I’m not only a male, but I’m old and I’m white. Crikey, we’d better not listen to him. So, you know, it’s this categorisation which is so heinous; and yet at the same time, we’re being encouraged to think flexibly and diversely. But we’re not. We’re being channelled into very, very rigid, very foolish ways of thinking. And then having battles with one another over this, instead of going “well, that’s very interesting. You see it that way. But what would you say to this?” You know, having a proper discussion. That’s what civilization has grown up to enable us to do. It’s what education is for. And we’re throwing that away, it seems to me. By our very cut and dried, simplistic decisions, and ways of looking at things. And if I may just add, there will be a growth of bureaucracy and an enormous burgeoning of bureaucracy, which works according to purely left hemisphere principles, algorithms based on categories, it never takes account of the unique case. And the other thing is AI, which again, is based on general principles. Sorry, let me…
Elizabeth
No, I mean, as the listener will be able to hear this connects to everything and so knowing where to focus, but I think what’s coming to mind is, I sort of want to tell you a little story about something that happened to me recently, because I was on the radio. I was on Radio 3 Free Thinking with Daniel Dennett and Philip Goff. And yes, so radio for non–UK listeners, Radio 3 is probably the most highbrow radio station that we have, and Free Thinking is amongst the most highbrow shows on it. And we were asked on to talk about meaning, consciousness and God. Yeah, Daniel Dennett, one of the most famous atheist philosophers in the world, you know, him and Dawkins. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And Philip Goff, a very interesting kind of consciousness panpsychist sort of sits in between me and Dan Dennett, in one sense. Believes that there’s cosmic purpose, that the world has consciousness, that various kind of scientific arguments lead him to believe etc, etc, but not a theist in the same way that I am. And Daniel Dennett did what Daniel Dennett does, which was speak in an incredibly mechanistic way about the world and human beings. And used the ‘brain is a computer’ metaphor. Because I’d recently been reading you and a bunch of other feminist philosophers who I think are so good, and have been banging the drum for embodied knowledge. And reading a lot of black theologians who have been so key at putting emotion and experience, and again embodiment, kind of back in the centre of theology. I had gone into the conversation quite cowed because we live in a left hemispheric world, and these were two left hemispheric men. And I am not a philosopher. I am whatever I am. But I felt emboldened to say “Dan, I think that is disgusting. I think that metaphor is disgusting and dehumanising.” And when we get to these questions of the sacred and consciousness and meaning, left hemispheric ways of thinking come to the end of their usefulness. And I asked him at the end, “do you think it’s possible, because of your formation, that there are some things that you can’t see?” And I don’t think I would have been brave enough to ask that question before, because my intuitions, my experience, my voice, felt less legitimate than his. But I’m not sure that he heard me, and I’m not sure that telling him that the computer metaphor is disgusting was necessarily helpful. So forgive me, that’s long, but I’m getting to a question about this divide, when those of us who feel an intuition that there is more, that there is something deeper, that there is a sacred beyond us, that our imagination and our intuition and our emotion and our bodies are as important as our reason (reason as it is thinly defined), what actually helps us see and hear each other? How have you found people who might be hostile to the argument that you’re making are best able to actually hear it and respond to it?
Iain McGilchrist
First of all, it’s interesting, I did a piece of research many, many years ago – this may not sound relevant, but it is – on the degree subjects that young people who had psychotic breakdowns at university were studying for. A lot of them went through the Maudsley, because it’s a tertiary referral unit, or even quaternary referral unit. So I looked at this, and I found a very, very strong correlation between developing bipolar disorder and studying the humanities. And a strong relation, very strong relation between studying engineering and developing schizophrenia. And schizophrenia is an example of a world in which the right hemisphere is not really contributing. And this is a way of saying, it’s quite interesting that Dan Dennett says that he would have been an engineer if he wasn’t a philosopher. And by the way, the second most populated category after engineering was philosophy. So I think a lot of philosophers, as I’ve written in this book slightly tactlessly, do seem to have a very ‘special’ way of thinking, which is an exaggeration of the left hemisphere’s way of thinking, at the expense of what the right hemisphere would contribute. Not phenomenologists: they are quite different from this. And I think that people like Dewey and James, and so on, were different again, the Pragmatists. But the modern Anglo–American analytic philosophers seem to have gone down a rabbit hole; and what you’ve flagged up is the importance of metaphor. We only understand things by using metaphors. So we say, “Oh, I see, it’s like this,” meaning something we reckon we’ve already understood. But depending on the metaphor we choose, we will see different things in it. So if I compare going to a football match with doing the football pools and betting on a sport, I see one thing; if I reflect on going to a football match as something more like going to church, I will see something else completely going on. So what metaphor we use really changes the experience we have; and the machine metaphor is pernicious. Machines are things we made, and we made them according to our very fallible understanding of what things are doing in our bodies. And our bodies are not like machines. In chapter 12 of The Matter With Things I put forward eight reasons why they’re not at all like machines. Now, the further question you ask is, how do you get through to these people? I think there’s two answers to that. One is to write a book which I hope is pretty convincing, in the sense that I’ve never found anybody yet who said, “your science base is flawed”, because that would involve them in reading 6–7,000 papers and showing me what was wrong with them. And that’s not really going to be very helpful. The other thing is arguing for it, in as far as I can, in a rational way: “Well, if you understand this, and you understand that, let me take you by steps, as it were, take you to where I want you to see a different vision.” And most people are able to do this. But there are always some people who can’t. And one thing that psychiatry teaches one is that one cannot help everyone. So in order to be helped, people have to be willing to be helped, to a degree. There are certain conditions where they’re not able to give informed consent, the Mental Health Act deals with that and they get treatment anyway. But really, there are people who will never see certain things. And I believe Dan Dennett is one of those people. He’s a very, very brilliant man, obviously. But he’s also not able to see certain things and there are people who can’t. In the book, I actually do some exposition of personality types and, indeed, the relationship between autism and an ability to understand or not understand the divine. And on the whole, people who are autistic, who have personalities with certain characteristics that I list, are more likely – not inevitably so, but are more likely – to find it impossible to understand the divine.
How we can use right hemispheric thinking to cure tribalism?
Elizabeth
Gosh, there’s so much in there. I want to land us somewhere about what might this teach us about divides in general. We live in a time when out default formation is to polarisation, tribalism, you know, our natural homophily, our natural preference for people like us is continually being reinforced by the technology that we use and the news and a kind of ongoing theme of this project is wanting to find ways to resist that as a spiritual practice, essentially. What might the hemispheric hypothesis have to – I mean, it helps explain a lot, but – how might your work help those of us who are wanting to resist that growing tribalism, and polarisation? And is there anything that you personally do, any practices that you use to keep yourself healthy in this way?
Iain McGilchrist
I think the first thing is to see what’s happening, because I think a lot of people have no context in which to set their unease: I think a lot of people would agree with us that there’s something wrong, but they don’t know what it is. And I suppose what I aim to do in The Matter With Things – which is my final work, I will never write a book of that length or magnitude again – is an attempt to provide a wholly new philosophy of life, to see the world a different way. And this is not really a way of just saying “buy my book”! Though I don’t think it would do any harm to do so, if you read it. Because I’ve tried to explain that what we’re doing is seeing only a very, very partial and degraded version of reality; we’ve been trained by the culture that has evolved since the Industrial Revolution particularly, but really also earlier than that, with parts of the Enlightenment – not to ignore that they had value in themselves, but that they helped us to be hubristic, to be arrogant. And that has made us think that we understand everything, and we know what we’re doing. But we’re really actually more like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in the famous fable, who knew how to get things started, but didn’t know what it was it started, or how to stop it. This is where we are at the moment. I think that one of the things that would help with the sacred, specifically, is to see that – from the descriptions I’ve given (and I won’t recap them) of the world conjured up by the left hemisphere and the right – if you’re buying into the left hemisphere world of certainties, isolation, nothing unique, categories, abstractions, disembodiment, the inanimate, you’re not going to understand what we’re talking about here. Because it all comes indirectly, it comes through things that don’t speak to us in the literal language of a dishwasher manual, but in fact speak to us through things like poetry, through music, through narrative, through myth, through rituals; all these things that, if you are able to open yourself to them and experience them, will let you know you are contacting something at a much deeper level. You will actually experience your body responding to it, even if it’s only the hair on the back of your head standing up when you feel these things. So that’s one thing. The way we think now is directly opposed to any way of encompassing the sacred. And I rather blame, I’m afraid, the church. I mean, in a way they were in a quandary. They saw congregations dropping. How can we entice people back? By making it more mundane, and more like life at home; more simple and more popular. But actually what people crave is not more of what’s going on at home, because that’s exactly what they’re finding is not satisfying. They want to be told there’s something here that will take patience, silence, prayer, some singing, and going through rituals, and then you may see it. And you won’t get it by sitting outside it, and going ‘Well, you do this, you do that’. I always say it’s like learning to swim by sitting on the bank with a book, and saying, “OK, now I understand, I’ll get in the water and swim.” You have to get in the water and swim to understand swimming. And I’m afraid the spiritual life is like that.
Other things that one can do? I’m afraid one’s ideas become very banal here. But I think there are two things, apart from the obvious thing of listening to music, and playing, and reading poetry, and so on – which I probably ought to do more of, I’m just so busy a lot of the time that I don’t – but I do try to make time for two things. One is mindfulness, which is really about stilling the left hemisphere. It’s about trying to get the left hemisphere out of the picture, and enabling the right hemisphere to speak. And people think – because this is the left hemisphere way of thinking – that we make things happen: “let’s do this, and it’ll happen”. But often, it’s not doing that enables something to happen, because what it is you are doing is itself part of the problem, even if the doing is trying to achieve a more spiritual approach. What you need to do is stop doing many of the things you’re doing and listen; and in the silence that you create, in the creative space that you bring about, something may come to you. And I can almost guarantee it will come to you if you have created that open space properly, and not going “but where is it, I need an intuition now”: you can’t do that. And I often say it’s like a gardener. A gardener can’t make a plant, and can’t even make it grow. But what it can do is create the circumstances in which the plant will flourish, or the circumstances in which it won’t. And we’ve created the circumstances in which the spiritual life can’t flourish: we therefore need to begin reversing many of the things that we do that get in the way. This is not unlike psychiatry. So, for example, when somebody comes with a problem, if you’re a naïve and inexperienced psychiatrist, as we all were once – and I did this, I had a pretty good idea of what this person needed to start doing, and I made the mistake of telling them, and they said, “Oh, no, no”, because they weren’t ready to hear that. And they say, “I’ve tried that” or something. And then I’d say, “Well, all right, but let’s do something else.” And then a year later, they come back to me and say “I’ve had an insight, I’ve had a revelation, I’ve changed and I’m much better.” And then they would tell me what they were doing. And it was exactly what I had recommended, but they hadn’t been able to hear. So it’s no good my saying “you should do the following things”, for two reasons. One is that people won’t be able to hear it, because if they did, they’d be already doing it. And the other is that I would narrow down the field of what can be done to my prescriptions, you know? And I don’t want to do that. I believe people will come up with their own answers, which will be imaginative, and things I hadn’t thought of. So it’s not really about prescribing things to do. It’s about prescribing – if prescribing is even the right word – it’s recommending people to invoke a certain disposition towards the world. A disposition that is marked by gentleness and compassion, by a sense of awe and wonder, and some humility. Not in some ghastly, self–effacing way, but just recognising that, you know, as William James said, “our ignorance is an ocean, our knowledge is a drop”. And that’s still true 100 years later. We think we know so much more. But what we’ve done is develop a lot of techniques for putting into practice what we know or don’t know. And I’m afraid our ignorance will be played out upon the world very powerfully, unless we’re able to get back into a vision of the divine and the sacred that would lead us to see that there are things we’re missing, that there are things that we need. And there are things that can flourish: but they will draw us there – not by recommendations of the following bullet points – but by just being there. I sometimes think of the face of Christ as displayed in that amazing painting in the church of St Saviour of Chora, which I actually reproduced in The Master and His Emissary. It was one of the most electrifying experiences of my life. I think it’s, it’s 12/13th century, I can’t remember maybe even 14th century, but it’s ancient. And there’s a picture of Christ and his mother. And it’s in this ruined church in Istanbul. And I remember going in, and just feeling … I mean, even just talking about it, I can feel something inside me, this… it was just so, so redolent of so much, it seemed to say everything, without saying anything that I can report. And so I think images like that – I have quite a lot of icons, I probably don’t pay enough attention to them – but things that speak to one of something beyond, even if it begins with spending more time in the natural world, because I think the natural world is an embodiment of the Divine. It’s a way in which the Divine is expressed in matter. But again, that takes us to another conversation, what is matter? And is it indeed separate from consciousness? And in brief, my answer is they are not separate, but aspects of one and the same underlying reality. But that’s another talk.
Elizabeth
To be continued, I hope very much. Iain McGilchrist, thank you so much for being a guest on The Sacred.
Iain McGilchrist
Thank you very much Elizabeth. It’s been a great pleasure.
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