Iain McGilchrist on the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain

The following is from Rick Archer’s inteview with Iain McGilchrist on August 22, 2020. Iain McGilchrist talks about the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain and his two books, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. The latter was published a year after this interview on November 9, 2021. My emphasis in italics.

2:29 >>Rick Archer: “He [Iain McGilchrist] is unusually self-effacing for a genius. He emanates a gentle, curious amusement that puts ordinary earthlings at their ease. I believe he’s one of those rare polymaths who’s more interested in finding the truth than he is in being right.” –John Cleese

5:15 >>Iain McGilchrist: …there are important differences, very, very important differences [between the two hemispheres of the brain]. And one is that the right hemisphere understands a good deal more than the left. But the left is the one that does all the kind of administration, does all the talking, and does all the kind of “working out” of things. And it thinks it knows everything, but actually it knows very little compared to the right hemisphere. And I believe that we live in a world in which this left hemisphere take has become the dominant one. And we’ve lost the wisdom that we could have had from what the right hemisphere prompts us to know.

6:16 >>Rick Archer: …the whole thing becomes sort of this top-heavy left-brained operation that loses the spirit that started it in the first place.

6:45 >>Iain McGilchrist: …what I suggest is that the wellspring that is recognized in our idea of the Divine, and the sacred, is something that cannot be articulated, regulated, systematized, and monetized. And that’s what happens when institutions take it over: it becomes left-brain and it’s dogmatic, and “you must believe this”, and “it’s all written in a book”, and “we are right and you are wrong”, and all this kind of thing. So it’s opposite of what the original person with the insight wished for.

8:30 …when I was at Oxford, I was interested in philosophy and literature. In our seminars we were taking things that somebody in the past had taken great care to make, quite unique objects of great beauty — poems, like a vase…, can’t be paraphrased, or…have its meaning ripped out of it. And yet, we would make this implicit thing explicit. And we would make this embodied thing disembodied. And we would take what is special and categorize it. …he [John Cutting, author of The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders] pointed out three things that were quite relevant to my move from the humanities into science, which were my dissatisfaction with this process of abstraction, disembodiment, and the turning of the unique into the general. And what he said was, the left hemisphere only understands things as they belong to a category, the right hemisphere actually sees the unique instance; the left hemisphere sees things in a very abstract way, the right hemisphere sees things in relation to emotion and embodiment. It has much better connections with the body and with the part of the brain in which our emotion and our bodily sensations come to be merged with our thinking in a very important and valuable way. Also the right hemisphere understands the implicit, it understand metaphor, it understand humor, tone of voice, all these things that are so valuable in literature. And the left hemisphere doesn’t get it at all, it takes everything very deadpan, like somebody who…just can’t understand what human beings mean. And so I realized that why I had not been able, or had found it very difficult at any rate, to overcome the difficulties in English of explaining why the implicit is more important than the explicit, why the embodied is more important that the abstract, why the unique is more important than the category — why that was difficult was because the voice, my speaking, is all done by the left hemisphere, which doesn’t understand; it hasn’t generated vocabulary for it. … The hemispheres attend to the world in two quite different ways that we need in order to survive. One [the left hemisphere] is the attention that helps us grab stuff, it’s a very narrow beam attention precisely focused on a target… The right hemisphere meantime is looking out for everything else, while you’ve got this very narrow attention going… So the left hemisphere pays this very narrow-beam sharply focused attention to a detail that it know it wants, whereas the right hemisphere pays an uncommitted, broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to the world as a whole. And that results in a significant difference in the way they have a take on the world. Because when you attend to the world differently, you see different things. …different kinds of attention…change…the experienced world. …we have these two ways of looking at the world. …the left hemisphere sees disconnected fragments, which then have to be somehow put together in order to make something: it sees them as static, two-dimensional, categorical, ‘either/or’, fixed known and familiar, and certain, and can therefore be grasped — because the left hemisphere wants to grasp things, it actually controls your right hand with which, for most of us, we grasp things. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere is seeing that that is a very artificial view, it’s like a snapshot. …it’s got all the real life drained out of it. The right hemisphere sees a world that is living, constantly changing, complexly interconnected, where everything is interconnected, ultimately, to everything else, in which there are shades of meaning, in which nothing is every completely repeated. There is uniqueness, the joy of discovering the unfamiliar, and so on. And that’s a world to which we feel connected. Whereas the left hemisphere’s world is a world from which we feel detached, as though we were clinically observing it through a lens; whereas in the right hemisphere’s take we are part of the world we are observing.

17:55 In the Journal of Consciousness Studies, I was asked to contribute to a series of articles about the nature of the self. … And I tried to explain that to think that there is no self is as simplistic and as damaging as the idea that we’re just ourselves, in some isolated atomistic way; that we mustn’t collapse these dipoles, as I call them (that are like the two poles of a magnet)… You have to hold both of these difficulties together. …instead of seeing the self as something that is over and against other people, it’s something that partakes of other people. And it’s something that gives to and belongs to other people. So that a primitive ego gets taken up into a much more sophisticated idea of the self. Jung talks about this, that, …when you’re young, you need this defended concept of yourself as different, because you’re distinguishing yourself and setting your boundaries. But then as you grow in insight and experience, you see that something much more mature and valuable comes which is the other sense of the self I’ve been describing.

20:43 …on the coincidence of opposites, the generative nature of opposites, that nothing exists without its opposite. And we live in a world in which we think that things are very simple… But actually, things are never like this… there is always the dark side to everything that has a positive. And it’s knowing these things and being able to hold them in a fruitful conjunction without…dispensing with one or the other. An image I quite like to demonstrate this is the idea of a very good loving relationship. It’s one in which there is a degree of togetherness with a degree of independence. It’s not better if the two elements in the relationship are fused. And it’s not better if they’re so diffused that they really don’t sort of touch one another, then you want something that is in the middle. But it’s not just a middle position, it’s not just a compromise. Because in this position, you are both together with the other person and maximally fulfilled in your own individual self. It is through that relationship that you are fulfilled as a self. And it’s through the fulfillment of you that the relationship is enriched for the other person. So these two things that look like they’re opposites — the solution is not like a midpoint. It’s like a holding of the two together, which is really what I’m saying. And it’s that, that the right hemisphere is able to do, and the left hemisphere can’t. It thinks it’s got to be this or that. Or it’s just something in the middle. …everything depends on this holding of the two extreme positions together.

26:44 It’s only because there are two [hemispheres of the brain] that can support consciousness on their own that one can do it one way and the other can do it the other way… And it’s valuable in life always to be able to blend these, although…one should always take precedence, the right hemisphere should guide the left, and the left should serve the right, because the left doesn’t understand very much. So when it takes over, all kinds of terrible things happen, which I think we’re witnessing in the world around us…

29:28 And this takes us to another very important issue, absolutely central in all philosophy and all spirituality as well, which is the relationship between what the left hemisphere calls objective and what the left hemisphere calls subjective, and it sees those again as two incompatible elements that somehow have to be linked; whereas to the right hemisphere, they’re both present in one thing that doesn’t actually annihilate the subjective element or the objective element but doesn’t make a hard and fast distinction either. …the great Japanese poet Basho said to one of his disciples, “the trouble with most poems is that they’re either subjective or objective”. And his disciple said, “do you mean either too objective or too subjective?” To which his full answer was “no”.

31:46 I think the thing about poetry is that… it’s the right hemisphere that understands metaphor, is aware of the movement of the verse, understands all the implicit associations that are being evoked. So the right hemisphere is vital for understanding poetry.

33:39 …it’s…useful…to make one more aware of how the two types of attention work together and to be able to deploy them a little more at will.

35:04 …you’ve seen it from experience, and that’s probably more important than any kind of neuroscience.

35:40 …I hope we never find out what it is, or somebody will try to instrumentalize it in some way.

41:10 …I think it’s very important that we have to balance the need for stability, with the need for fluidity; if things are over-stable, they’re fossilized, but if they’re over-fluid, they become chaotic. So it’s a question of knowing how many and how valid are the anomalies. And there comes a point when you have to say, “we have to look again and find a better paradigm”. And that is the point at which I find myself standing in relation to the brain: putting forward a hypothesis, at enormous length… And in them together [The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things] I rely on about 6000 individual pieces of research; it’s almost impossible to just dismiss it. So people are beginning to pay attention. But it’s a slow process. …everyone says it takes about 20 years to get a breakthrough acknowledged. And I’m not saying that I’ve made a breakthrough, I’m hoping I’ve cast some light, and I’m hoping that people will find it useful. All science insights are going to be developed, and to change. Because we never get to the end of the road. We never know it all. And so what I’m suggesting is just a new, what I call a Gestalt…, which is a German word, which simply means the overall form or shape of something — we don’t really have a nice word for it in English, but it means seeing the whole thing in a new way. …what I hope to achieve with this new book [The Matter with Things] is that they will look at things that they thought were familiar, and they’ll go, “Oh, my God, I’ve just seen it a different way”.

45:01 …in the second half of the book…I do a sort of overview of the main shifts in the history of ideas in the West. And I think that three times I can see the same pattern… You’d think that a civilization would build up very, very slowly, and then crash. But it seems that what happens is that it comes into being, just like that, and then sort of tails off. And in the Greek case, things were…at their best in the sixth century BC. And then over time, the balance between the two hemispheres were further and further towards the left. And then you get the same thing in Rome… around the “year dot”, the end of the Republic, the beginning of the empire, things were very good. And the,…for the next 300 years through the Empire, they get more and more left hemisphere. And I think we can see the same thing in our time, since the Enlightenment. So things are sort of tailing off. I mean, in every case, this has to do with a number of things. One is usually an empire that overreaches itself, that tries to administer too much, and tries to take on and influence too many things, and therefore overreaches itself. And the only way it can do this is by — a sort of a simple way of putting it would be a very bureaucratic take so that every thing is rolled out the same, everything is procedural, everything is categorical, all the fineness, the individuality, the responsiveness goes — and everything becomes very kind of cut and dried. And I think we are very strongly heading in that direction. …there are a number of massive problems, they’re so obvious I hardly need to name them. But one is…the way in which we’re killing, literally, the living planet, and another is the way in which we’re driving to extinction peoples who have a pre-Western or non-Western way of living their lives. And in our own civilization, I think I can see things breaking down now. Many of the great institutions that used to be on the side of…things that are rich (I mean, imaginatively rich), and spiritually alive and flexible, instead are becoming dogmatic and categorical, and overrun by bureaucrats, managers, and people who have to tick boxes. This is not a good way for any institution to be, whether it’s a church, or a university, or a school, or anything – or a hospital. And, in fact, in my lifetime, I’ve seen the hospitals become more and more and more left-brained. …when I was first training, things were more flexible. People were much more willing to try something, in case it worked. And we’ve seen a little of that come back, just for a while, in the COVID crisis. So we’ve been so desperate for something…that doctors have finally broken free of red tape and have been allowed to sort of go. “Well, this is worth a go, because if we don’t do it, this person’s going to die”… And so, anyway, I think that drift towards the administered, the soulless, the gray, generalized world is the way we’re going.

48:38 …I call myself a hopeful pessimist, which means you should never lose hope. And I don’t lose hope. Because actually, none of us knows what the future contains. … But on the other hand, when I look around me it seems that things are heading in a way I don’t like; so, to that extent, I’m a pessimist. … I think a degree of concern, a degree of fear, would be a good thing in helping us to shift out of our complacency. So there we are.

49:49 …when the Roman civilization collapsed in 410 AD, or whenever you like to place it, it took 1000 years really for civilization in Europe to re-emerge as a kind of vibrant force. I’m not saying that the Dark Ages, as we used to call them, were entirely barbaric. But effectively, civilization is not something you can take for granted. And to be hacking away at its main institutions in the way we are — ha! — I mean, it’s so reckless. It is like pulling down statues. It is like…Islamic fundamentalists taking a pneumatic drill to an Assyrian winged bull,…and that’s what we are doing. We’re just scrawling all over the history of the West and rubbishing it, and not actually teaching people properly. So I’m kind of concerned about it. Very.

50:54 >>Bill in Oakland, California: What do you think a right-brain school curriculum would look like? Since it seems like the right hemisphere is often concerned with personal inner knowledge and that it eludes the control that the left hemisphere desires? It doesn’t seem like right hemisphere knowledge is easily transferred from teacher to student.

51:13 >>Iain McGilchrist: A wonderful question, a very, very good one. …it’s the how that matters. And it’s quite true that the sort of things that the right hemisphere understands can’t be just put into a formula, which can be learned and regurgitated in an exam — that is what we’re now getting. And that is the typical left hemisphere idea. But the right hemisphere’s knowledge is communicated…by inspired teachers. So one of the changes that would happen in a “right-hemisphere-soft-of-congruent” school would be that the teachers were not treated like functionaries in a bureaucracy who had to instill some information into the children at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, according to page 32 of a certain textbook. But we’re actually encouraging them to think! …because education is — it’s a cliché to say that education is — not about putting things in, it’s about drawing something out. And actually, what you’re trying to do is make the stuff that children have in them flourish. And that means clearing things away. I often think being a teacher is like being a good gardener. You know, a gardener cannot make a plant, and he [or she] can’t make the plant grow. But the gardener can get out of the way all the stuff that would choke that plant and make the conditions good for that plan to do the flourishing. So in a way, you’re mediating the flourishing of another individual. And that’s what a good teacher is doing. So one of the things that ought to happen is the deregulation of that, which means deregulation of many, many things, not total deregulation because that’s the other extreme that you get from the left hemisphere: “Oh, so you don’t want any rules at all? And nobody is accountable for it?” No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, there is a degree of necessary monitoring, and there’s a degree of accountability, but there must be freedom too — because otherwise, you kill the human spirit. So that’s one thing. Another is what the curriculum would contain. And we’ve become obsessed in a very left hemisphere way with grabbing and getting… that’s what the left hemisphere is for. And so its main thing is that we should be teaching techniques to make people fit into a large machine that will make money. Now that is not an education — that is simply NOT an education. Education is not teaching a rote skill or teaching information that gets to be regurgitated. It’s teaching a child to think, to use their imagination, to listen to their intuitions to argue all the time against what seems to be the fashionable story. And to think we might be different. That’s what’s not happening. Children are being brainwashed now, in the current education system. …if we bring people out of school, and they haven’t got the faculties to concentrate, to pay slow, deep attention, to enter into other people’s imaginative worlds, to question their own dogmatism all the time, even though they think they’re perfectly correct. If we’re not doing that, we’re letting civilization go.

56:53 …you can be on the right in politics in a very right-brained way, as well as in a very left-brained way. And you can be on the left-wing in politics in a very left-brained way, as well as in a right-brained way.

58:51 …the left hemisphere…gives ‘us and them’. Whereas the right hemisphere is “look, we’re all part of this together”. And that has consequences for how we talk as well. … Again, the right hemisphere understands that the way in which something is done is more important than what it is. And so I think that rather than controlling what all the time, we ought to instill in people what used to exist in them, which is a sense of how it is appropriate to be, to talk, to live: we’ve lost a kind of moral compass. We’ve lost…the idea of the nuanced position. And it’s been replaced by simple-minded dogmatism and rule-following.

1:00:50 …a way of thinking, which is very typical of the left hemisphere… it’s certain it’s right, even when it’s very obviously not. …the most simple minded views are being violently pushed forward by people who are completely sure they know it — and therefore, of course, don’t know very much… Whereas people who can see that things are much, much more complicated than that are…being marginalized; because it’s a society now in which if you’re not 100% for us, you’re against us. If you say, “Hey, look, there’s some truth in what you say, but there’s also truth in something else I want to put to you”, you will be shouted down.

1:10:33 …unless we go flat out to try and remedy the situation, we’re not going to manage it in time. …I say [that] we great grief…

1:11:07 …I think that when things get really, really bad, it’s what’s needed for them to get better. And people need to be shocked, really, into seeing how their lives have been drained of meaning, drained of richness by the attitudes that have been foisted on them, actually, by the public intellectuals… I talk about some very popular scientists, some very popular public philosophers, who are enormously reductionist in their views. … And that’s the theme of my book, to show why it’s not at all smart to adopt this cynical, reduced point of view, and why we need to expand our horizons imaginatively. And that includes taking into account a cosmos that is conscious.

1:15:08 …what I believe I’m showing in the book [The Matter with Things] that I’m writing is that…the most revealing aspects of modern philosophy, the most revealing aspects of modern neuroscience, and the most revealing aspects of physics lead us to similar conclusions; at least they do — I’m thinking about neuroscience — if you accept the idea that there are important hemisphere differences that are manifest in the ways we think and behave in the world, at the confluence of these three important strands. And that’s why it’s a long book because I explore them in some depth. I don’t just kind of allude to them: and I make use of friends I have who are experts in these fields to run things by them to make sure I’m on the right track when I say these things.

1:16:29 I always say about my book The Master and his Emissary, that it’s far too long…: that if I hadn’t actually written it, I’d never have had time to read it. But on the other hand, it contains, I like to think, and I’m commonly told, so much that it couldn’t really have been compressed any more than it already is.

1:16:57 …I found it very, very hard to write. I’d been gathering material and thinking about it for…a decade or 15 years, and I was still not able to write it. …it was like that everything connected with everything else, that everything I knew depended on explaining already something else that I had to explain… …it was a very humbling experience [to write the book] because I realized that what I thought I knew before writing was an ‘outline’ of what I ended up saying, but a lot of the richness wasn’t there until I actually worked it out and wrote it down.

1:18:28 >>Rick Archer: …sometimes people have to bottom out before they’re gonna want to look at themselves and get help. So maybe that’s what society is in the process of doing. And,…not all alcoholics manage to remain alive after bottoming out. But…those who live to tell about it obviously do.

1:18:52 >>Iain McGilchrist: …I’ve helped a lot of people with alcohol problems. …some people don’t ever recover from rock bottom, but nobody seems to get better unless they hit rock bottom. And that’s an uncomfortable place to be, which sometimes means…you lose your family, you lose your livelihood, and you have to start again. …much of what we think of and take for granted as…civilized living won’t be there. We’ll have to be much less demanding, and much more in touch with the earth and much more focused on local communities.

1:20:15 …trusting is central to a flourishing society.

1:21:36 …what I do right at the end of the book [The Master and His Emissary] is imagine what the world would look like if the left hemisphere was really the dominant deviser of the way we think and behave. And most people read it and go, “Oh, my God, that’s where we’re at”.

1:22:15 …our thinking has become de-contextualized, black-and-white, dogmatic. Everything has become more virtual, more purely cerebral. We have no kind of tradition…in which to bed our beliefs, our history, our lives. And that’s a very important thing. It’s again, one of the things that enables any civilization to flourish. …there’s so many things, it’s what happening in the arts, it’s what’s happening in politics, the need for control, with everybody shuffling off responsibility and saying, “it’s you that’s at fault for all the things I suffer”. Not ever saying, “well, maybe I could do a little better”, which is a very right hemisphere mode; actually, the right hemisphere is very keen on taking responsibility and needs a little balancing with the left, which doesn’t take responsibility. So in depression, which is often a right frontal overdrive condition, people believe that they are responsible for the ills of the world. …in left hemisphere-dominant conditions, like schizophrenia, which is like a kind of overdrive of the left hemisphere, a sort of hyper-technical way of looking at life, it’s always somebody else’s fault. It just won’t take responsibility… …the key thing is you take responsibility for what you do now about this situation. And that’s just not happening. Everybody’s pointing the finger at somebody else.

1:26:41 …it’s not a matter of subjugation (that’s the left hemisphere’s power struggle way of thinking…) …the right hemisphere sees this as something that we should be working together on; the left hemisphere sees it as a power struggle.

1:28:00 You only get either balanced societies or societies that are unbalanced towards the left. …as long as the right hemisphere has a say, it will say, “but I need the left hemisphere to help me”. …gradually it gets fossilized, into a mechanistic worldview… …there’s very, very, very much more in the world than can every be proved in a lab.

1:33:59 …we end up somewhere in the sort of slightly fruitless dispute between idealists and realists. And…, I adopt the position which is that of Schelling…that, in fact, the idea that there is a sort of world out there beyond our consciousness, and that there’s another world inside, and [that] they can never really contact one another, is a false point of view. … It leads too easily into the idea of a sort of homunculus sitting on a cerebral sofa, looking at images on a screen, which is all we can know of reality; but I take the view that whatever reality is, consciousness is part of it, and that there is no ultimate divide between my consciousness and what is, because what is, is in consciousness in any case; so there are limits — very, very severe limits — on my consciousness, of course; I can only see a tiny part of the whole, that’s what it means to be a human being. But the tiny part that I do see is real — is not a fiction. It’s true that our brains anticipate what they may be going to experience, and so some come up with things from memory. But these shouldn’t be confused with the idea that somehow there is not contact between consciousness and reality.

1:35:38 There’s an Italian philosopher [Ricardo Manziotti]…who takes the view that when we are conscious of things in space around us, they are where we see them to be, and our consciousness is with them. So that consciousness is not located behind my eyes in my head but is something that actually is in the world and which I have a kind of access to. I haven’t explained that very well. It’s a notoriously difficult one to try and explain. But in the book [The Matter with Things] I take a slightly different view…