Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Part I (S13E58)

Introduction to Literature Study

0:00I actually studied literature, and I got interested in the way in which the study of literature got between us and what we were supposedly revealing and helping to illuminate. And there were three aspects to that, very briefly. One was that we decontextualized things. Another was that we made explicit what had to remain implicit. And the third was that we made what had originally been unique entirely general in its nature, as though we could have found it anywhere else by formula.

0:32But works of art are not like that. They are completely unique. They speak from one person to another at a level that has to be implicit. If it could all be just written in prose, then why would you bother writing music, creating a work of art, and writing a poem? Right. And, you know, very importantly, context changes everything. Context just radically changes everything. Something that a lot of people need to be reminded of, because they think that you can just take things out of context so as to find out what they are.

1:04Once you've removed them of the context, you've changed them completely. So you have to see them where they lie. So that made me interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain for various reasons, because I felt that the works we were looking at were embodied. They didn't just have an effect on me in some cognitive ray that I could feed into a computer. They had an effect on my whole being, on me morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, but foremost as a living human being.

Welcome to the Podcast

1:34Hey, it's your friend, Dr. Lee Warren. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so proud of you for showing up today to do this hard and holy work of changing your mind and changing your life. You could be doing lots of other things with your time. So Lisa and I are grateful for you, proud of you. We're praying for you. And just want to give you a little shout out, a little fist bump and say, hey, good job showing up. You could be doing lots of other things with your time.

2:04But here you are ready to learn all about self-brain surgery.

Guest Introduction

2:08Today's guest, I'm really excited to bring to you. I've been talking about him for years on the podcast. I've learned so much from him. One of my favorite authors, but not for the faint of heart. Dr. Ian McGilchrist is with us on the show today. And we're going to break this into two episodes because we talked for almost two hours. And when I talk to you about Dr. McGilchrist's work, I just want to give you some perspective. This is my book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. Look at the size of it. This is Dr. McGilchrist's latest book, The Matter With Things.

2:39And this is volume one. So The Matter With Things is about 1,500 pages long. So when I say not for the faint of heart, this is a deep dive into the difference between the mind and the brain. We talk about that stuff all the time on the show. Dr. McGilchrist is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of what the left and the right halves of the brain are about. He wrote the first book, a thin volume of only about 750 pages, several years ago, and followed up in 2021 with The Matter With Things,

3:10which is the difference between the mind and the brain and all kinds of things about beauty and goodness and truth and incredible work on what it means to be a human with a human brain and a human mind. And we had an incredible conversation. Dr. McGilchrist is a fellow of All Souls College of Oxford. He's a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a former consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlehem Royal and Mosley Hospital in London. And he has retired now from practice and lives on the island of Skye in Scotland with his family.

3:42And he's just one of my favorite writers in the neuroscience space. And we just had this incredible conversation that I thought was going to take about 45 minutes and turned into two hours. And frankly, we could have talked all day. We had so much to talk about. And I think you're going to get a lot out of this part, this conversation. Edit that. I think you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. I've broken it into two parts because I want it to be something you can digest and really spend some time thinking about. And we're going to put it on YouTube eventually as the whole episode if you want to watch the entire thing at once. But we're going to release it as two podcasts for now.

Hemispheric Differences

4:15The first part of the conversation gets into his background, the reason he got interested in the ideas behind the left and the right hemisphere and what they do and how that led him to write the master and his emissary. And the second part of the conversation pivots from his writing to some practical things about what psychiatry and neurosurgery have to say about how to help people overcome hard things and how to use his understanding of how the brain works and how the mind interacts with the brain to help you find some practical answers to some of the things that you might be going through. And we get into some very deep discussions about hardship and loss and what people can do and how they can think about those things.

4:51And we talk about prayer and about God and how about in recent years, Dr. McGilchrist has become much more willing to talk openly about his Christian faith, something that he didn't talk about as a neuroscientist who's really vulnerable and shared a lot of that in this episode. We're going to have a great conversation broken up over two episodes. I know you're going to get a lot out of it. And without further ado, it is my honor to introduce you to my friend, the world-renowned neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Ian McGilchrist. Dr. Ian McGilchrist.

5:47In that sense, I am also at another level a brain surgeon in that that's what I've spent a lot of my time doing. Actually, interestingly, I came to medicine late. Ten years later than most people would begin medical training, I began mine because I was attracted to the whole business of medicine in order to understand better precisely the relationship between the mind and brain. That seemed to me pretty essential. Yeah. And I would have wished to have become a brain surgeon, but being already rather late in starting

6:23and being a surgeon is not one of those things that you can extend indefinitely into your age. I realized I'd have a rather short career, so I decided instead to be the physician side of it rather than the surgeon side of it. I love it. And the work that you've done has really transformed the way I think about even my own profession. So I'm grateful that you didn't become a brain surgeon so you could write all those books. Dr. Ian McGilchrist, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you very much, Dr. Warren. It's a great pleasure to be here.

6:53Ian, I've been reading your books and following you for years now. I'm one of the people who, I don't know how many people can say they've read The Matter with Things from cover to cover, but I'm up there with those people. You've done some beautiful work. Maybe just give us an overview of how you got interested in the hemispheric differences and how you got to where you are in your career that led you to these books that you've written. Yes, okay. I'll try and be very brief. Why was part of why I went into medicine at all. I'm essentially by inclination a philosopher.

7:26I wanted to read philosophy and theology at Oxford, but was told I couldn't because it wasn't an honoured subject and I really ought to do an honours degree. So instead I actually studied literature, and I got interested in the way in which the study of literature got between us and what we were supposedly revealing and helping to illuminate.

Embodied Works

7:50And there were three aspects to that, very briefly. One was that we decontextualised things. Another was that we made explicit what had to remain implicit. And the third was that we made what had originally been unique entirely general in its nature, as though we could have found it anywhere else by formula. But works of art are not like that. They are completely unique. They speak from one person to another at a level that has to be implicit. If it could all be just written in prose, then why would you bother writing music, creating a work of art, and writing a poem?

8:23Right. And, you know, very importantly, context changes everything. Context just radically changes everything. Something that a lot of people need to be reminded of, because they think that you can just take things out of context so as to find out what they are. Once you've removed them from the context, you've changed them completely. So you have to see them where they lie. So that made me interested in the relationship between the mind and the brain for various reasons, because I felt that the works we were looking at were embodied.

8:55They didn't just have an effect on me in some cognitive ray that I could feed into a computer. They had an effect on my whole being, on me morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, but foremost as a living human being. And the person that inspired me at that stage was Oliver Sacks. And he'd just published Awakenings, and I was electrified, because here was somebody who was looking at real cases of individual people with a compassion, but also an intellectual sharpness about what was going on for these people.

9:31And I thought, I want to be someone like that. So, nothing loath. I started on the process. In this country, it's a 14-year process from day one to becoming a consultant neuropsychiatrist. That was the path I chose. And when I was nearly there, as it were, I started to think a lot about hemisphere differences, partly because I went to a colleague's lecture, a man called John Cutting, who'd just written a book called The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders. That seemed to be interesting, because in medical school,

10:01I kept on hearing about the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere might as well have just been there to prop up the left hemisphere. It doesn't seem to have any function. And I heard him say all sorts of things that rang bells, like the right hemisphere alone understands implicit meaning. The left hemisphere takes everything literally and explicitly. The right hemisphere sees the unique case. The left hemisphere only sees the generic formula. The right hemisphere sees things in context. The left hemisphere abstracts them. I thought, crikey, and also the right hemisphere doesn't, for most people, have a voice.

10:36So it wasn't surprising that I found it really difficult writing my first book against criticism, which was about what these problems were like. Anyway, this encouraged me to start several three decades or more, nearly four, of research on hemisphere difference. And most of my colleagues, all my colleagues actually, warned me not to have anything to do with it, because it was a toxic subject that had been popularized and so on. And I thought, well, yes, that's as may be, but let's have a look. And to cut to the chase, I found that we really got the wrong answers,

11:09but that didn't mean to say that we couldn't find better answers. So we thought all these crazy things like that the left hemisphere is rational and down-to-earth and dependable, a little bit boring, and the right hemisphere is a bit excitable and so on. But what it turns out is that it is not about what they do. The reason we'd got the wrong answers was we'd asked the wrong question, the machine question, what does it do? But the brain is not a machine. The brain is part of a conscious organism, a living being,

11:43and it approaches the world in two different ways. And it was this approach that made the difference. So both hemispheres are involved in everything. They're involved in language, they're involved in reasoning, they're involved in emotion, they're involved in pictures, everything. But they're just consistently in a quite, quite different way. And this is for a simple evolutionary reason, which is that every creature has to solve the conundrum of how to eat and stay alive. And I know that doesn't sound tricky, but it is for most creatures at most times in history.

12:16Because in order to get food, they have to be locked onto a target that they know exactly what it is, they see it exactly where it is, and they just want to go and get it immediately and grab it and use it. But if that's the only kind of attention they can pay, then they don't see the predator that's keen on making it its lunch. Well, the bird is getting its own, so to speak. And also, you can't look out for your mate and your offspring, which is evolutionarily incredibly important, if you're locked onto this piece of food,

12:48this seed on the background of grit or pebbles or whatever it might be. And so the answer is that all creatures that have brains, all creatures that have brains, have, in a way, divided brains. They have two loci of capable of sustaining consciousness, and they are disposed towards the world in two different ways. One of them narrowly, with a preconception as to what it's going to find, and the other broadly open and uncommitted as to what it may find. Now, when I first heard about that, or really surmised it as much as anything,

13:24there are plenty of hints in the literature that this must be the case. I wasn't struck by quite how earth-shattering this is, because I just thought of attention as another of those cognitive functions. But attention is not just another cognitive function. It is the very way in which you dispose your consciousness towards the world. And depending on how you dispose it is what it is you find there. That's right. And so if you dispose your attention in one way, you find one sort of thing,

13:57say a mechanism. In another, you find a whole living creature.

Evolutionary Reasons

14:03So that was really how I got onto this. And philosophically speaking, it has some correlates that it will help if I just very, very quickly outline. The left hemisphere's attention builds a world out of pieces that are known, fixed, certain, disconnected from everything else, decontextualised, disembodied, entirely explicit, and lifeless. And the right hemisphere's attention, on the other hand, has the exact opposite picture. It sees things that are never completely certain,

14:34that are always changing, always interconnected with just about everything else that there is. It sees the implicit, and that may not sound important, but actually everything that gives life meaning is implicit. Right. Love and friendship, as well as sex, art of all its many kinds, myth, ritual, religious faith, all these things become diminished when they're made explicit. They're no longer what they could be, or should be, or even they give no hint of what they are.

15:04You can't make a piece of music explicit. It just doesn't work. So that is very, very important, and its world is contextualised and living, and yes, a world that we can inhabit. It's three-dimensional. On the one... Yeah, three-dimensional, literally three-dimensional. So the left hemisphere tends to see things two-dimensional, in time and space. It lacks depth in time, depth in space, and depth in emotion, which the right hemisphere has. Depth, visual, spatial depth, depth across time,

15:35and depth in emotion. The deeper emotions are right hemisphere-based. But a lot of the shallow ones, like anger, self-righteousness, disgust, are more left hemisphere-derived. And so one way of putting this is a famous distinction made by the Polish philosopher, Alfred Korzybski, the difference between the map and the territory. So the left hemisphere is the map, and the right hemisphere is the territory. And that was all very condensed, but we can talk about unpacking why that is important.

16:07Yeah. Well, so you came to write Master and His Emissary, which was about that, right and left. Yes. And before we go on, because you pulled the pen out of this grenade, so I'm going to drill into it just a little bit. You mentioned two things I want to talk about, the consciousness and how attention shapes reality. I've been a good boy, and I've read my Henry Stapp and my William James and my Jeffrey Schwartz, and I've read my McGilchrist. So I've been telling my audience for a long time about how we had this Western perception, and it's a left brain perception,

16:38that we can know something by what we see of it, and we can turn it into a thing that we can know and put in our pocket and trust and all of that. But most things are not that. Most things have a story, a context, a big picture around them. And if you lose a child or something, that's important. You have to bring your whole child's life into your consciousness to be aware, not just the loss of the child, or your whole life is going to be defined by that, right? And so when you talk about how attention shapes reality, just unpack that just a little bit for us,

17:10because it's real. Your brain, your reticular activating system, everything, your brain shows you what you tell it to look for, right? Is that a good way of saying it? I think that's right. So there's some very neat and astonishing neuropsychological evidence that if we don't expect something, we simply don't see it, even if it's massive and right in the middle of our field of vision. Like that gorilla basketball experiment. Have you seen that? The gorillas in our midst, as it's called. It's wonderful.

17:41And it's said, I don't know if this is right, that when Captain Cook first laid anchor off the coast of New Zealand, he saw that there were a lot of the native people there working in the fields, and they seemed not to notice that there's this colossal ship, the like of which they could never have seen before, suddenly sitting there in the bay. But they just carried on calmly getting on with what they were doing. So he thought, well, let's go and have a look. So he put some little boats over the side, just little rowing boats, and sat off.

18:12And immediately they sat up because they saw the rowing boats, because they knew what they expected there. So, yeah, I mean, another analogy would be, you know, how do we see the human body? Well, it matters a lot whether you have been trained only to see it as a machine. And I'm afraid that something that is wrong with the way medics, at least in this country, are trained, is that it is largely on a mechanistic model. And if you try and explain to them that that's, you know, that's helpful for some things,

18:43but very, very misleading for others, they're a bit baffled. And I don't know what on earth he may be talking about. But, you know, if the way the body is seen by a physician is different from the way the body is seen by a surgeon, which is different from the way the body is seen by the pathologist when it's on the slab in the mortuary, which is different from the way the artist sees the model's body when painting. And that's different from the way you see your lover's body or perhaps your elderly relative's body that you're trying to help across the road.

19:17So these are all different. And I sometimes use the example of this extraordinary mountain behind my house. Its name is Talisker. People may know the word from a whisky, which fortunately is not made quite here, but some miles away. But what that means in Norse, it's a derivative of a Norse word, which means the sloping rock. And so that tells you that for them it was a landmark from the sea and it made a big difference between life and death because it was the sign that there was a particular bay, Talisker Bay,

19:49that has submerged rocks in it and it was dangerous to get too close. And so it was a lifesaver in that sense. But for the Picts who lived here before that, it was the home of the gods. For people who came here in the 18th century, the first tourists, it was a beautiful, many-colored form that they could sketch and paint. In the 19th century, people got more interested in geology and it turned out that it was an extraordinarily good example

20:20of columnar basalt formation. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water?

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21:29and you know it's good for you. Go to AquaTrue.com now for 20% off your AquaTrue water purifier using promo code Dr. Lee Warren. And AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee. That's AquaTrue, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com. And use the promo code Dr. Lee Warren, D-R-L-E-E-W-A-R-R-E-N, for your AquaTrue water purifier. So they came here with their picks, their picks, not the picks. And that, of course, means that to a speculator, the mountain is dollars.

22:03And to a physicist, it's 99.99% empty space, and the other 0.01%, well, we can't really say what it is. Now, which of these is the real mountain? And my answer is they are each the real mountain as revealed to us by paying a certain kind of attention with its preconceptions. Exactly. So we see what we're looking for, effectively. We see... Yeah. And you mentioned consciousness.

22:34Consciousness is one of these words that I've come to see is often bantied about in a conflated way. Like a brain surgeon talks about consciousness, and we can be talking about things that the brain does, arousal, like the ability for the eyes to open and the person to interact and not be... The opposite would be coma. And so we have consciousness, meaning arousal, alertness, awakeness, interactiveness. We often mean this ability to be aware of our thinking and be interacting with our interior world

23:06and this sense that we have a self about us, that sort of consciousness. They're not the same thing, but they're often sort of conflated by neuroscientists. I think materialist neuroscience especially is... Consciousness is some epiphenomenon of neuronal activity, and you've come to think differently about that, right, over the course of your career. So when you say consciousness, what does Ian mean by that? Well, I do have to distinguish between those different kinds of consciousness, what you don't have on the operating table, but you're still alive and aware at some level.

23:38It's also different from what you don't have on the mortuary slab. It is different from what you don't have when you're asleep, and it's different from what you don't have when you're simply not aware of something because you're focused on something else. What we mean by being conscious changes in context appropriately enough. But again, to cut to the chase, I don't think it is rational or scientific. In fact, it's to invoke a conjuring trick to say that consciousness emerged out of lumpen matter

24:10if matter had nothing whatever to do with consciousness. That leads to the conclusion that consciousness has always been present in some form, and that what we see is that consciousness has changed, evolved in the evolution of the cosmos, first the inanimate cosmos and then the animate cosmos, to become, at its most, evolved what we know as consciousness, but that it is always there. So it is what philosophers call an ontological primitive.

24:43You cannot get behind it. There is nothing out of which it can come. It is foundational. Right. And that leads to various conclusions. Some of them go in the direction of what do we mean by God and the ground of being, and some go in the, we can go there by all means, but first perhaps I should say, well, what then is matter? And I think the relationship between consciousness and matter is not between two separate entities. It is between two modes of manifestation of the same underlying entity.

25:19How can that be? How can matter be a way of manifesting consciousness? Well, I think it's because, the best way I can put it, is that matter is a phase of consciousness, not a temporal phase, but a phase in the way that physicists say that water has phases, liquid, hard and solid as in ice and in the state of suspension of water droplets in the atmosphere. When people say, but matter doesn't look like consciousness, I'd say, but neither does ice,

25:50nor does the invisible water in the atmosphere that enables you to breathe look like water in a stream, but they're all water. If you asked me which one is water, I'd have to say, well, they're all water, actually. They just have different qualities. And it's interesting that the qualities of matter are things that we only know because of consciousness. I would emphasize this, because in the reductionist field of mainstream science, it's just assumed that matter is foundational and that somehow consciousness must emanate from that.

26:22I mean, the first thing that's amusing is that if you say that to physicists, they're a bit baffled at the assumption that matter is any easier to understand than consciousness. Right. Adam Frank, a physicist in New York, says we kind of tend to shuffle uneasily, look at our feet and go, well, it's all a bit difficult. But the point is this, that we do only know matter because of our consciousness. That is for sure. We don't know that we only know consciousness

26:53because of our material existence. I mean, that might or might not be the case. I suspect it's not necessarily the case, although obviously it is the case for most of us most of the time. So that's in short how I understand the difference between them. So you might ask why do we have matter at all? Should I say something about that? Sure. I mean, that is the next question. Well, why would a universe that can deal in consciousness

27:23ever bother with matter? And I think the answer is because it is a creative cosmos. I see it as the one thing you can definitely say about it is it is creative. So as far as we know, it started from this enormously simple and compressed thing, whatever it was, that then evolved, unfolded, in enormously intricate ways to form all kinds of different things. So it wants, in order to be creative, it wants differentiation.

27:54It wants to be able to differentiate things. And it wants for them to be able to interact. And that means for them to have some degree of permanence just for a while so they can be there to be interacted with. Because my thoughts could be anywhere. But matter gives us a bit of permanence and it gives a bit of resistance which allows this creative differentiation. Sorry, I've spoken too much. No, no, that's beautiful.

Consciousness and Matter

28:20And I think that segues into the kinds of things you were thinking about when you wrote the matter with things. I mean, this is the difference between immaterial things and material things. And the materialists would say there are no immaterial things. This whole idea even that you can think or that you have a sense of an interior world is just an artifact of neuronal activity and that everything's built out of parts. But we see things like near-death experiences that people have that they're dead. They're dead. They're brain dead by all of our legal criteria.

28:50And yet they come back with these very consistent stories. Like, what do you think about things like that in terms of consciousness, brain activity, mind activity? I'm not sure what to say, actually, Lee, really. It's a difficult one. I've heard the reductive materialists try and explain away these rather consistent experiences. They're almost forced to say that they are something to do with a meltdown in the brain that causes this.

29:20We do know what happens when there are meltdowns in the brain and then they cause nothing like the coherent and beautiful experiences that are reported as near-death experiences. Right. So I'm inclined to take the reports seriously. There's just too many of them and they're too consistent. I think, as a scientist, one is always walking a bit of a tightrope. One wants to maintain the paradigm as much as possible

29:52and not discard a perfectly good working paradigm because one or two findings seem not to go with it. But when you get a mass of findings over a long period from a lot of different sources suggesting that this paradigm is simply not adequate, then a good scientist says, OK, it's time to change the paradigm. It is not being a good scientist just to be a bigot, to allow your vision to ossify. Great scientists are the people who have made science move on. And I think that around now it's something we have to do.

30:25So I think consciousness is not wholly dependent on the brain. But, goodness me, under most circumstances during life, it is. The way I look at it is in a way which I think both Aldous Huxley look at it and William James, long before Aldous Huxley thought of it, which is as some kind of a reducing valve. So I see the brain not as originating our experience,

30:58but in a way channeling something so that it becomes our experience. And William James gives the example of how it is the resistance to the air coming out of his lungs that gives him a voice. If there wasn't any resistance, if there wasn't a larynx there that carefully resists the flow of air, he wouldn't have a voice. And I think the same thing could be seen as understanding what my consciousness, your consciousness is. Just as the air is everywhere,

31:29but the voice is the product of a particular process of filtration or resistance, a better way of putting it. I think our personal consciousness is like that. So I think there are fields of consciousness. In fact, I think probably we're coming to the conclusion, a lot of physicists are now coming to the conclusion that consciousness is what there is, that there are fields of consciousness, but that they too can take particular individual, particularistic form.

32:03So they collapse into a point, an atom, something of that kind. But the atom is just another way of manifesting a field. So here too we see this concept that I'm trying to put across, that there are different ways of the same thing manifesting. One is broad, open and flowing, and the other is collapsed into an instant in time and space for certain purposes to be fulfilled. And those are the purposes that we think of as,

32:34what I think of as the reasons why this creative cosmos needed, needs matter. The thing that is, the way I see it is a reversal of what most people think. They think, well, matter is obvious, there's lots of it, but what's this consciousness? But I see it the other way around, that consciousness is what exists primarily. And what we see, and we can see through our telescopes and so on, is lots and lots of lumps of matter. Right. So maybe articulate your thinking that led you to write The Matter With Things.

The Matter With Things Book

33:08Just for somebody who hasn't read it, like what's that book in your mind? Why did that book come about? And why is it, what, 1,500 pages long? Yes. Well, it's quite amusing, really, because after I wrote The Master and His Emissary, in the first half of which I devote myself to giving the neuroscience behind what I'm saying and the philosophical consequences, and in the second part, looking at Western history through different phases since the ancient Greeks, looking at how at different times our cultures were better at

33:38allowing these two to work well together, and those in which, unfortunately, when civilization decayed, we seemed only to listen to and to attend to what the left hemisphere has to tell us. And they said, but it's a long book. Could you not write a shorter one? And I thought, well, that's a good idea. So I went to Penguin Random House, publisher with the biggest reach in the world, and said, this is what I want to do. And they said, wonderful, we'll publish it. So I set about writing it, and after a while, I realized that this was a very frustrating process,

34:13because all I was really doing was saying much more crudely and without the caveats and the nuances, something that really needed to be said with the caveats and nuances, and which I'd already said. So I wrote to my editor and said, I don't want to do this. Instead, what I want to do is to follow up on the philosophical consequences of the fact that we have two different ways of looking at the world. And these seem to matter, because in different cultures,

34:43we see them being evinced in different ways. And he said, that's fine. We trust our authors. You go with it. So I then ended up doing a much bigger book than I had thought. And when I finally delivered the manuscript, something like four years late and four times the agreed length, he fairly reasonably said nothing and sat on it for five months before saying, yes, it's great. We want to publish it, but it'll have to be half the length. And I said to my friends who had read it at that stage,

35:14you've got to be brutally honest. I may not want to hear it, but if you say it would be better if it were half the length, I'll do it. There were five or six, and each one of them said, no, you'd lose too much. So what have I done in that book? I have tried to answer the question, which never can have a final answer. But what is true? What is truer than its opposite? What can we, we can never say, I've got it. That would be the left hemispiece idea. Yep, truth's a thing. It's out there.

35:44I just walk these steps, and then I have it. And I think there are still people, particularly in science, who are rather naive philosophically, and they think that truth is like that. There are also people, of course, in the humanities who think that there is no truth, it's just what we choose to call truth, and that too, they resist and deplore. There are things that are truer than others. Otherwise, there'd be no point in us talking or doing anything or getting out of bed, never mind writing books. So I think there is relatively truer things, and how do we find them?

36:17And so the book falls into three parts. In the first part, it's neuropsychology. So I just look at the difference between the two hemispheres and say, is there an indication that we can trust one of them more than the other? And the answer is fortissimo, yes. Yes. It's the right hemisphere, not the left that you were told was dependable. The left, not just by me, but by other neuroscientists, has been described as, frankly, delusional. And in one of the chapters in that first part of the book, I actually look at something like 25 of the most exotic

36:52and interesting neuropsychiatric syndromes in which people are deluded. And they're all, with the exception of one, commoner after, or only happen after, damage to the right hemisphere. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But the long and short of it is, the conclusion I can draw from that first part is that the right hemisphere attends better, it perceives better in all modalities, it makes better judgments on the basis of what it's attended to and perceived. It has greater emotional and social intelligence, but get this, it also has greater cognitive intelligence,

37:28good old-fashioned IQ, than the left hemisphere. And it is more able to see creatively, imaginatively, the connections. So in terms of understanding the world, the right hemisphere wins hands down. And people might say, well, that can't be right. I mean, why would things be so unbalanced? And the answer is, because the left hemisphere has a task that it does supremely well. And it's so important to survival that that is effectively all that it does, which is to enable us to grasp things, get them, amass them, become powerful, become rich,

38:02become able to use and manipulate the world. All the rest is left for the right hemisphere, because the left hemisphere doesn't really understand it. So that's part one. Part two, I can summarize very quickly. It's really looking at what I call the four paths towards truth. And they are science, reason, intuition, and imagination. And to summarize my findings there, I find that each of these is essential, that each of them has its strengths that the others don't have,

38:32but each of them has its limitations. And so it's no good just using one or two of these. We have to use them all. And, of course, there's a lot more to it, and I go into each of those in some detail, but that's it. And the third part of the book is what you'd call ontology or metaphysics. So at the end of the day, equipped with that, can we say what is more likely to be the case about the world? Just to interject there, somebody might say, look, it's fine you saying the right hemisphere does this,

39:03and it's more perceptive and more intelligent and more intuitive, but I don't frankly care where this is going on in my brain. Why should I be bothered about that? Right. And the reason is this, that we can actually identify the hallmarks of left hemisphere type approach to reality. It is purely analytic. It is purely dissecting. It is taking apart, categorizing all those things that I described earlier. I won't go with them again. The right hemisphere is much more able to see links between things,

39:36how the whole picture works on a much higher and bigger level. It sees the meta picture, whereas the left hemisphere only sees the narrow picture. And so when we can see that this kind of thinking leads to that place and this other kind of thinking, it doesn't do away with the left hemisphere. It knows that the left hemisphere is a helper, but it should never be guided by it. Einstein said, what was it he said? The rational mind is a faithful servant.

40:08The intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in a world that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift. It is really, without knowing it, describing exactly the proper relationship between the two hemispheres. The right hemisphere, because it sees more, sees that it needs the left. The left hemisphere, because it sees so little, doesn't know that it needs the right. Hence a lot of our problems. So in that very last part of the book, I look at the conjunction of opposites, the one and the many, the nature of time, the nature of space, matter, consciousness, flow, actually, the flowing nature of reality.

40:47And value and purpose, those big no-no's of science, that science is now very belatedly realizing it can't do without. And finally, the sense of the sacred, which is about exactly what it says on the tin. I'm interested in the fact that most of us do have, all cultures have had a sense of there being something sacred that speaks to us of something beyond the purely material and everyday. And we disattend to that at Feral.

41:19What an incredible conversation. That was so deep and so moving. I didn't want to give you the whole thing at once, because it could be kind of overwhelming. And I want to make sure that you get the opportunity to sit and think about some of the things that Dr. McGilchrist has talked about. If you're interested in going further with him, I would recommend that you read his book, The Master and His Emissary, first. Or go to the channel McGilchrist on YouTube. He's got lots of videos of interviews that he's done and other places where he's discussed these ideas in more manageable, bite-sized pieces. If you want to go the full direction and talk about mind and brain and the things that we talk about on this show a lot,

41:52but if you want to spend a year reading it like I did, The Matter with Things is a fantastic book. It's moving. It's interesting. He's a great writer. And it's deep philosophical work of looking at the neuroscience of the difference between your mind and your brain. I think it has tremendous value for you. But it's a serious work, and you're going to get a lot out of just hearing him talk on the podcast. Thank you for your time. We're so grateful for you. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Check out my newest book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. I drew heavily from Dr. McGilchrist's work.

42:22I congratulated him and thanked him as one of the acknowledgments that I made in the book. And I'm so grateful that we're able to give people an opportunity to share their stories here on the show and for you to get to know so many great writers and thought leaders and people on the show. So we're very thankful for you showing up and making all of this possible. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. Make sure you go to drleewarren.com and get on the newsletter list so you don't miss anything that we're doing. And as always, don't forget that you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the very good news is you can start today.

42:54Thank you.

43:06Thank you.