Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Part II (S13E59)

Introduction

0:00Welcome back to the show. I'm Dr. Lee Warren. I'm so grateful for you to be here with us doing some more of this hard and holy work. I'm thankful for you, and I'm proud of you for showing up and doing this when you could be doing literally anything else. Good job. Today, we're going to finish our conversation with Dr. Ian McGilchrist that we started in the last episode. If you missed the last episode, please go back and start there. You don't want to start in the middle of this conversation. We had a tremendous, deep, almost two-hour-long talk with world-renowned neuropsychiatrist Dr. Ian McGilchrist. We're going to get after the second half of this conversation right now.

Value Chapter

0:40I think my favorite chapter in the book, by the way, is the chapter on value. So thank you for writing that. I think it's so important to get around to value. It's just my favorite part of the work. I think it's beautiful. Thank you. Let's talk about that if we have time. Yeah, we have lots of it. I mean, I'm not limited by time at all, if you are. No, I'm here to talk. I'll pull a quote here. I've got the book up in front of me. You said two things. One made me

1:11cry a little bit when I first read it, and I told my wife it reminded me of her, how I feel about her. You said, what are values? There is something in common between truth, beauty, and goodness. And you quoted Andrew Steen. They make demands on us and fulfill us and leave us thirsty for more. Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. They are what give meaning to life.

Importance of Values

1:34Like, unpack that. Why are values so important? And how would we have generated them out of the neurons in our brain if there wasn't something more outside of us? Well, yes, exactly. Well, I now see values as the single most important thing that we can talk about if we really want to get at the core of reality. That might sound odd to a lot of people because they think, well, surely values are things that we make up. I think they often think the picture that comes to mind is of us being in an enclosed cell without any windows and painting pretty pictures

2:10on the walls in order to cheer ourselves up. I don't see this as right. First of all, I don't think we're in a windowless cell. I think that we don't just read off dials as some noted figures have said we do. Instead, we actually do make contact with the real world. Of course, we only see what we're capable of seeing. It may only be a very small part, but what we do see is the real deal. We're seeing reality there, some aspect of it. So it's not that we only get some way towards reality. We get all the way. It's just that we don't see the whole of reality. How could

2:44we? We just see the bit that we can see. And are things that we could not have made up.

Ephemeral Taste

2:52So I need to distinguish between value in the sense of ephemeral taste. You might say, well, beauty in the 18th century was different from beauty in the 16th century, or beauty in the West was different from beauty in China or Japan or India or whatever. And I'm not talking about individual judgments as to what is beautiful. I'm talking about the very existence of being anything beautiful at all. Right. And what really touched me was in reading Darwin, in The Descent of Man, he twice asked himself the

3:28question. Okay, given beauty, I can explain that it can be used for mate selection and so forth. But where does beauty itself come from? Why are things beautiful at all? And he didn't have an answer to that, obviously. But the fact that he was asking the question shows what a free thinker he was, not just some... He's often presented as this terrifically reductionist figure. I don't think he was at all. He was a very broadly imaginative man. So I think these things go beyond anything we make

3:59up. And I therefore say they are things we discover, not things we invent.

Resilience and Overcoming

4:05Right. So they're there for our discovery. We can either choose to discover them or not. And incidentally, on the point about differing values in different places, this is greatly exaggerated. There's some interesting research on this. But broadly speaking, it's obvious that people from East Asia are very happy to come to London and go to the National Gallery and go to Stratford and listen to Shakespeare and they're not going, none of this means anything to me. They're blown away by it. Equally, I've been

4:38to Japan and, you know, I find it absolutely staggeringly beautiful. Their art is unspeakably beautiful. Look, this is fine. There are commonalities. And interestingly, research on babies that are only 72 hours old, and it takes till about 72 hours for them even to be able to resolve a face, a human face. Right. But even at that point, as early as they can bring into resolution the image of a human face,

5:09they prefer faces that are called beautiful by the people who have the culture out of which those faces are chosen. So it's very deep. It's not something made up, even at the level of individual qualities. But I'm talking about behind that and beyond that, what gives rise to the being anything good at all, anything true at all, anything beautiful at all. And equally, I'd say... Sorry, go on.

5:40Sorry. That reminds me of C.S. Lewis talking about the kind of universal moral law. Like, there are certain things that we all just sort of know. Like, whether you believe that there's some design behind the universe or not. Like, everybody knows you're not supposed to murder a baby. Everybody knows you're not supposed to steal from your neighbor. And everybody knows that something is beautiful and staggering and stunning. Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's been part of the rhetoric of trying to debate and destroy and dismiss these profoundly beautiful and important truths in the last hundred years that

6:16people have said, oh, there's nothing. I mean, these things are just all made up. I don't think they are. And people, for the reasons you say, but also, I mean, interestingly, things like goodness, it's okay that you can point to certain cultures in which it is a crime to do a certain thing that in others it isn't and so on. But really, the core of everything, as you've just said, is highly consistent. And interestingly, it is also shared by animals that not all animals,

6:48of course, have a moral sense, but those that have evolved enough to have a moral sense. So for example, the great apes and dogs will act selflessly in order to try and rescue or avoid suffering to another creature, not just a creature of their own species either. So there are many cases in which actually birds also have acted. Birds are very, very interesting, but let's not go into animal. Because they have these tiny brains, but they're amazingly capable of all kinds of

7:24cognition. Crows are reportedly capable of doing mathematical, solving mathematical problems at the level of a nine-year-old human child. Anyway, let me get back to what I was saying. Experiments that were done back in the 50s and 60s, I don't think they would get past an ethical committee now, but they involved having primates in cages next to one another. And the only way that a, as it were, chimpanzee could get food was by administering an electric shock to the creature in the next cage,

7:58and that allowed something to open. And even though they were starving, they would go for days without availing themselves of this, because they felt so averse to causing this unnecessary suffering to another living creature. I just say all this, and there's a lot more to say, but I mean, I think the point is that the culture emphasizes that it's all disparate and made up. And what I'm saying is it's much more cohesive than you think, and I don't believe it is all made up at all. I think it is something that creatures realize and are drawn towards. And that's the point, because this is where

8:31it comes together with purpose. I think that there is purpose, and I have a chapter on that as well, as you know, but that purpose is not deterministic. So it is not, it's neither random nor determined. And that is really, really important, because that is what is referred to as the edge of chaos. It's neither chaotic, nor it is fully determined. And it is there that all the creativity happens. It is what, in fact, evolution works with, is that edge of chaos. If it's overdetermined, then nothing can

9:06change. If it's absolutely chaotic, then nothing can happen. But if there is that togetherness of a direction, a general directional aim, but without a defined goal, then things can evolve and creatively come into being. And I believe that values are of this kind. They are, unfortunately, I can't think of a better word. And if you can think of a better one, I'd be grateful. I call them lures, but that sounds rather unpleasant, because in modern English, a lure is something that deceives and betrays. It's

9:41like a trap. But what I mean is that it's something that calls to us. It calls to us, and something in us responds, and we want to go towards it. Love that. I think you're right. There's this universal sense that our lives are supposed to mean something, supposed to be aimed towards something, and that there are good things and true things and beautiful things. And we all know them, even if we don't understand that they come from something other than our neurons. I mean, that makes sense to me.

Counseling Someone Suffering

10:09And as we get close to starting to land this plane here, let's pivot and be doctors for a minute. Let's talk to the people, because a lot of the people that are listening, they're not neuroscientists, they're not neuropsychiatrists, or neurosurgeons, or farmers, or people who sell insurance, or normal people with normal jobs and normal lives. But many of them have suffered greatly in some way. And so let's bring your work to a practical point of how does Ian McGilchrist counsel someone from your

10:40perspective with all that you've learned and known and written? Somebody who's suffering, going through something hard, grieving in a way that they can't recover from, they don't feel like they can move forward from. What do you say about that? How does our brains help us do that? And what part of our conversation today could be helpful to somebody who's listening from that perspective? Good question. But I suppose that there'd be broadly two ways of answering it. And one would be, what in the consulting room would I find to say? And the other is things that I probably

11:13wouldn't say in the consulting room, but help to make sense of suffering. It relates to faith and God and those things too. I think it does, exactly. So what I wouldn't say to them are the sort of more philosophical and abstract things that fall under that particular category. They might, for example, not share my vision of the world. And they might be put off by thinking, well, this only makes sense if I'm a Christian and I'm not a Christian. I'm speaking for the patient there.

11:46Right. But I think that in terms of what I would say, it's very hard to say for two good reasons. One is in the conversation needs to be led very much by the person and every person is individual. So one of the joys of psychiatry is that every patient, it's not just a piety to say that every patient is different. Every patient is a new experience for me, for the person who's trying to help them. And I think glib answers are no help to anybody. I think acknowledging the fullness of and encouraging

12:25an expression of and a facing of the grief that is part of most people's lives, when we come to look at them. We think that certain people must have life very easy. But goodness, when we get to know the inside story of most people's lives, it's one that contains much suffering. So I think acknowledging that is one thing, but that's not enough in itself. I think what one has to build

12:57is confidence in something rather unfashionable in some ways these days, which is one's resilience, one's ability to overcome even great adversity. So in our culture, there is a great emphasis laid on vulnerability, people who are hurt and need safe spaces and are easily offended and so on. Personally, I think this is overdone. I also think that the rhetoric around trauma is overdone. And

13:32I may well rub plenty of people, plenty of my colleagues up the wrong way. But I know and they know what trauma really can be. I have had patients who have seen terrible things. I can't even articulate it. Seen their children tortured. Now, if there's just one word for that and being offended and sort of feeling that people don't pay you enough attention and all that sort of thing, then we've lost something. So I don't myself want to try and find the place where you were wronged, but instead to find

14:08the place where you rose up to meet and perhaps to be stronger than whatever it was that challenged you. And I think actually that is not just important in the individual case, but is also an important point for all of us that it is in fact, only out of meeting a challenge, meeting resistance of some kind, that we can experience fulfillment. If everything was extremely easy, I mean, fortunately,

14:39we don't live in that world. But suppose everything were just very straightforward and simple. We would be, we would never develop. We would be like infants. We would be, we wouldn't have any of the things that I think we value our lives for having given us. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. And it's not just true psychiatrically, it's true neuroanatomically. We learned in the last functional imaging, really, the mid-anterior cingulate gyrus's role in resilience and willpower

15:15and grit and motivation and drive. And in order to be good at those things, you have to have gone through hard things. Like your brain gets better at doing hard things by having done hard things. It turns out that we're not, we're not wired to be fragile. And so therefore, we should avoid hard things. We're wired to be sort of anti-fragile, as Taleb has written. I think that's, that's what you're saying. Absolutely. And I love the word anti-fragile as well. You know, that's Taleb, isn't it? Nicholas, Nassim, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The concept there, for those who don't know it, being that there is a kind

15:48of strength, which is such that it is brittle. And if you push too hard, it will snap. But there is a kind of strength, which he calls anti-fragility, which is that you're able to move in such a way with whatever is adverse in order to overcome it. I think an image that springs to mind to help illuminate that is one from Aesop's fables. There is a famous fable of the oak and the reed. And the oak is very proud of its strength. And the reed blows about in the wind and, you know,

16:23he feels superior. And then the wind comes one day, it was great strength and completely destroys the oak. But the reed is there the next day carrying on. So that's, I think, what we're talking about. And yeah, it's not just true about things like the cingulate gyrus in the brain, but it's also true, isn't it, at the level of bone structure, that if you don't have enough stress on those bones, they begin to give up on you. That's right. So everything has this quality. And in the psychiatric realm, what I often think of is

17:00the amazing psychologist, Viktor Frankl, who his family didn't, but he survived the Nazi concentration camps. Late in life, he talked about what gave rise to fulfillment. And he said, yes, achieving certain things that you had set yourself, that was very, very important, but also suffering. And he puts it in the way, he doesn't encourage us to invite suffering, but he encourages us to see that suffering is not just a negative thing. Yes, it couldn't break you

17:31completely, but it can also make you stronger and make you flourish. And I think that's really in what we're saying about, you see, I see this as part of the coincidence of opposites. I mentioned when talking about the third part of the matter with things, the chapter on the coincidence of opposites. And this is not an idea that most Westerners find easy. I mean, how can two opposites

Coincidence of Opposites

17:58both be true? They must exclude one another, surely. Well, that, of course, was what Aristotle taught. And that was what we went on believing for nearly two or more than 2,000 years. Modern physics has explained that they often co-occur. Niels Bohr, who's often thought of as the father of quantum mechanics, adopted the so-called yin-yang symbol, the Taiji to, for his coat of arms. He was ennobled by the Danish crown. And he chose that as the image because he said, you know,

18:30the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. Now, that hadn't been said in the West in those terms for a long time. But I think it began to be seen by Hegel and subsequent German idealist philosophers in the 19th century. But it was also there in my all-time favorite philosopher, Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, i.e. a philosopher living before Plato and Aristotle. And he said, they do not understand that a thing and its opposite agree together. It is like the

19:07lyre and the bow. And what he meant was that the lyre, the musical instrument, has to have a taut string that's pulled in two opposite directions. And the bow, if it's to fire an arrow, has to have this taut string pulled in opposite directions. And to the left hemisphere, it seems a waste of energy pulling something in two directions that are opposite. But in fact, they're important to the functioning of the bow or the lyre. Without them, there will be no arrow coming forth, no music, no notes coming forth from the lyre. And it's a bit like a dipole magnet. It has a north and a south

19:42pole. And it's no good saying, well, I don't really like south poles. I'm going to do away with them and cut it off. You just have a shorter magnet that has a north and a south pole. Understanding this relation between opposites that you never know what good may come of what we think is harmful, painful, or evil. And we never know what harm may be concealed in something we think is good if we push it too far. I think we've lost that in our modern culture. We think that in a decontextualized way,

20:14a certain thing is just good. And we just need to have more and more and more of it. But then we find that the neglected opposite of it comes back and bites us. If you think freedom is good, that's fine. And if you think we should have no laws because they trammel our freedom, then you won't last very long because it will be a war in which only the mightiest will succeed. Yeah, there we are. There's a lovely story. I mean, I have the luxury of telling a very short story, but it helped a lot

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22:20D-R-L-E-E-W-A-R-R-E-N for your AquaTrue water purifier. I don't know if you know it. Do you know the story? Yeah. So if you've already told this story in your program, I won't go on and do it. I have not. No, no, okay. So this man loses his pride and joy, his most important possession, his horse. And all his neighbors come and commiserate with him and say, what terribly bad luck. And he says, well, you know, bad luck, good luck, who knows. And the

22:50next day, the horse comes back off the hillside, bringing with it a horse it has found there. And now he has two horses. And his neighbors come and say, goodness, what amazingly good luck. And he says, well, you know, good luck, bad luck, who knows. And the next day, his son gets on to ride the new horse and is thrown and breaks his leg. And they all say, oh, terribly bad luck to be thrown and break a leg and he won't be able to work for months. And the father says, well, you know, bad luck,

23:24good luck, who knows. And the next day, recruiters for the Imperial Army come through that part of China and take all the young men away, able-bodied young men away to war. And this young man is spared. And they say, goodness, what good luck. And he says, well, you know, good luck, bad luck, who knows. I think that is so important. We just don't know what good is hidden in things that look adverse and vice versa. That's right. You mentioned a minute ago about how we often see

23:57goodness come at the end of something that was hard. And our experience with that was true. I went to war. I came back with some real trauma in my brain that I saw some terrible things that happened to people and went to mortars and all that. And then I went, you know, we lost a child and all that stuff. And we started sort of doing what Viktor Frankl said, like suffering can stop feeling like suffering when you try to find purpose in it. And we began to look for purpose and legacy

24:28instead of just loss and pain. And I found this verse in the scripture, and I'll ask you in a second to, you've talked publicly about your Christian faith and most of the listeners here are Christians, but there's this verse in the book of Romans in the New Testament, in Romans chapter five, that says suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. And that reminds me of what we learned about the cingulate gyrus and about how suffering is important to brain structure and development and the development of willpower and perseverance. And it's exactly true of what happened in our life. Like we began to see that we were stronger in

25:03some ways, I think like Hemingway said, at the broken places. Like we got stronger because of some of the things that we had been through instead of in spite of them. And that ultimately those things are what give you hope because the punchline is, like you said earlier, we're all going to go through something else that's hard in the coming years. And when you've made it through something really hard, then you have this hope because you know that you can do it now. You're equipped for it. And so I think maybe speak to that for a moment in the context of your faith and how that

25:35can give us hope for the future. Yes, yes. Well, I have to say I'm, you know, I am now used to calling myself a Christian, but I'm a very bad one. And that for a long time, for a very long time, stopped me from saying I was one. But I think that what Christianity teaches and has taught me all my life, I've never really been apart from Christianity. I came from a completely non-religious family. I mean, my father was a doctor, actually. And his father was a doctor. But he thought religion was a bit funny,

26:11really. I mean, well, you know, these little stories people like. So I wasn't encouraged. We never went to church. But then I encountered Christianity in my teens, and it changed my life. So at the moment, I think very much about brokenness, because a friend of mine is certainly going through a period where he feels very broken. I know what that feels like. In fact, it would create a picture of me as a constantly gloomy or... But I'm not. I'm not a constantly gloomy person at all.

26:46I mean, I've had my periods of depression, but I, generally speaking, am able to enjoy and celebrate life. But I do consistently feel a resonance with that phrase from Psalm 51. The sacrifices of the Lord are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, wilt thou not despise. How many times have I said that to myself? How many times? I think that it is never bad to acknowledge that, and that

27:18actually, in a strange way, without being broken, you can't heal. And the healing is the process. I mean, there aren't many people who have never suffered, but there are people who certainly seem never to have learned from it. And they're not the better for that. I sometimes say people who haven't suffered are insufferable, and there is something of that about it. So I think suffering is never to be invited. It's never to be self-inflicted. But when it comes, as come it will,

27:49it is to be accepted as an important part of the story of a life, and as the way in which we grow towards whatever is good and true and beautiful. I believe those are our destination. I believe they are accessible to everyone. And I believe we know when we are encouraging the growth of them in ourselves and in the world around us. And when we're not, we're stultifying them.

28:20And in the last hundred years, I've seen each of those great values vilified and debased. Beauty, artists in the last hundred years have not wanted their work to be beautiful. They've rejected it when people say it is beautiful. They want it to be powerful, because power is the only value of the left hemisphere. But beauty is a gentler thing. But actually, in terms of power,

28:50it can move mountains. It can be very great. And I've seen truth. We've all seen truth. Travested. When I was at university, it was a big movement that, you know, there were no really any truths anymore. It was all your experience. Well, no, sorry, I don't buy that one. But and of course, in politics, we then got post-truth and all that. So I've seen all this. And I've seen goodness turned into box ticking and saying the right things and affiliating yourself with the right

29:24movement. And this has nothing to do with goodness. Goodness is to do with the heart. And, you know, it's a funny thing, because I suppose most people would think of me as a highly intellectual being. I mean, I can't deny it. That has been my trajectory. And as a young man, despite my non-religious family upbringing, I wanted to be a monk, in fact, and wanted to enter an order, maybe even an enclosed order. I don't know. But I certainly wanted to study theology and

29:57so forth. But as I've got older, and I hope a little bit wiser, I've come to see what we have to say about God. What we have to say about what is good is not the important thing. The important thing is the disposition of the heart. And that comes back to St. Paul, who, to be very honest, is not my favorite spiritual guide. But he says, you know, though I, what is it, though I give my body to be

30:30burnt and so on, but I have not faith. I am but a tinkling symbol and so forth. So I think that is right. Because people often say to me, you've diagnosed a problem in our world. So what can we do? And of course, there are, I have to say this, there are practical things that need to be done, but they're not really. That's putting the cart before the horse. Because if we do even those things that need to be done, but do them for the wrong reasons, we do them with the wrong goals, with the wrong values, we will not, we will not have remedied, we not have saved the world or ourselves.

31:03We'll simply have carried on being the same entitled, selfish, atomistic, individualistic beings that we are. So we need a change of heart. That seems to me very important. It surprised me to hear myself saying these things, as though rather than a follower of Aquinas, I was a follower of St. Francis. But I think overall, Francis's image, Francis's model, Francis's lesson is the greater one. And even Aquinas, you know, at the end of his life said,

31:38I've seen something this morning when he was saying mass, so profound, so important that compared with it, all that I have written is just as chaff or straw. And this was the man who wrote the most intellectually robust summary of theology that there has been. Do you have time for a question from a listener?

Listener Question

32:01Of course I do. My time is yours. Wow. This is a man named Addison, who is a theologian and a writer. He's written some beautiful books. And he's writing a book about the neurological implications of prayer, which I think you'd be, you'd find interesting. And so Addison asked Dr. McGilchrist, you describe reality as something we participate in rather than standing over. Do you think that participation is ultimately impersonal, like entering into a process? Or is it personal, more like entering into a relationship? And how might

32:36that distinction shape how we understand prayer? Very good question. It is. What I'd say is, yes, reality is participatory. And once again, I'd quote a physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, who famously said, this is a participatory universe, so our attention to whatever exists matters. It's certainly not impersonal. It cannot be. And here we come to a really important distinction between two kinds of knowledge that, in every other language than English,

33:09are distinguished by different words. But we have just one word for it. Wissam and Kennan, yeah. Wissam and Kennan, or Savoie and Konet, that, you know, we just have this one word to know. But it means very different things. One is to know the facts, as it were from the outside, what you can measure and objectively point to. And the other is to know from experience. I can say I know that Paris is the capital of France, but I can also say I know Paris, which is a quite different matter because I lived there for a few years. So it's that second kind

33:43of experiential knowledge that matters. No amount of knowing from the outside is going to help. And that knowing from the inside is always personal. But the personal is not an inferior species, if you like. Because the personal is a portal to something else that we share and are part of. When reality is neither just in me or out there, reality is always, as I say, an encounter. It's an

34:14encounter between something I bring and something else that is brought to me. And what results is what we call reality. And it's different every time and with every person. But not so different that there isn't very, very strong common truth. So we always are part of what it is that we are coming to know. But that is not a weakness. That is a strength. Because this is the only way in which we truly can

34:45can come to know something. And your question I asked about prayer. And the main thing I feel about prayer is that it is necessary to listen more than anything else. That prayer is a matter of audition. And to begin with, one may hear nothing. One has to sit with the silence. And if one is faithful to the silence, something will emerge and will speak to you. And it's in listening to that

35:18and answering that, that prayer for me exists. St. Francis, incidentally, went a bit far in my view, but he did make a very good point. He said, when you pray, you must ask for nothing, nothing. And I think that might be just a tiny bit too absolute. But nonetheless, I do know what is meant there, that it is more a matter of receiving than anything else. And in that, it's very like the cast of mind of mindfulness meditation, and to an extent, compassion meditation. And we do know,

35:53interestingly, because of course, I'm interested in the brain correlates of all these things, that these exercises have more to do with the right hemisphere than the left. And indeed, practice often causes areas in the right hemisphere to increase in size. You were saying the prayer enlarges areas of the brain. That hippocampus is one of them. That's been shown really well in imaging studies. Okay. And is that the right hippocampus? I don't know that particular piece of research. Yeah. There's some studies on just a short, I think Andrew Newberg has published this,

36:2710 minutes a day of focused meditative prayer for about six weeks, produces an average volume increase in the right hippocampus of 22%. Like, it's impressive. It's similar to the research on the London cab drivers. Yeah. Well, I do quote quite a lot of research. I may have forgotten that particular piece, but of course, he is one of the big people who has researched this area in one of the appendices, because I didn't want to lose the thread, the philosophical thread by suddenly having a long disposition on the brain. But it's all there for those who want. And I think there are eight

37:00appendices to that book, which contains the neuroscience largely. Yeah. Well, thank you for answering the question from Addison. And I guess the last thing I would ask you is, what has surprised you the most? So psychiatry, largely, historically, was a discipline that never really looked at the brain, never looked at the organ that they treated, right? Like, there was, there's not a lot of emphasis on brain imaging. But in the 21st century with functional imaging, what has surprised you the most about what we've learned about, especially when you consider

37:33mind and brain being different? Like, what has surprised you the most that we've learned from the 21st century of brain imaging? Well, I'm not sure it surprised me, but I have found very interesting the research, which doesn't show simply that the left hemisphere plays no part in the spiritual life, but that the right hemisphere seems to be critical for the, for the most important kinds of religious experience. And I don't mean just unusual ones, but I mean the regular ones. Right.

38:06But the left hemisphere plays a part as well. But I think that, if I may say so,

38:13I'm only a modest fan of the neuroimaging literature. I did do, obviously, a lot of neuroimaging. I mean, my patients very often had to have scans, and that was very helpful in understanding what was going on with them. So I understand that. But I also think that it can, it's seen as a sort of panacea. It will answer all our questions. And I think that's dangerous. I think that it has to be that the information we get from scanning, both functional and structural imaging,

38:47frankly, I found the structural imaging at least as important as the functional imaging. Yeah. And I bet you have too. But those are very important. But so are many other ways of coming to understand the brain. And for me, the thing that has really, you know, was almost like finding an old box in the attic and opening it and finding it full of the most beautiful object that you didn't know were there. And that, for me, has been going back over the neuropsychiatric literature or from about 1880

39:21through to, in some cases, even earlier, but mainly from about 1870, 1880, through till just after the war, the Second World War, because people did the most beautiful thing. They were mainly neurologists, but they didn't just put people into machines and score them. They actually sat down and talked to them. And they wrote down, what's more, exactly what the conversation went like. Crikey, it's gold dust. You thought that you're there and you see these responses and it tells you so much. It's so

39:54beautiful. So that, for me, has been more of an eye opener. And I think I've learned more from it, actually, than from the imaging per se, though the imaging is incredibly important for the work that I did. I'm retired now. And for the work that you do, so. What's next for Ian McGilchrist? What are you working on these days?

Future Projects

40:16Myself.

Future Projects

40:16Very good.

40:20Writing The Matter of Things was an extraordinary business for about five years, which was the period of writing. I mean, I was gestating it and thinking about it and making notes and researching for much, much longer. But the actual solid writing took about five years, I suppose. And for most of that, I did nothing else, really. I have a love-hate relationship with writing. In fact, it would be probably more fair to say I have a hate-hate relationship with writing, which kind of surprises

40:52people. And they say it doesn't read like that. And I say, well, if it doesn't read like that, I'm very pleased. But the only reason it doesn't read like that is I sweated blood over it in order that it should be readable by people who have no... I mean, the way I've tried to write is not to talk down to people at all, but not to assume specialist knowledge. So to explain briefly what you need to know and the evidence. But in any case, what I'm really saying is that writing that book was,

41:22it took me a very, very long time to get started. And then once I got started, I just couldn't stop. That has been my experience with both the big books, the master and his emissary and the matter with things. And I think if I'd been my own patient, I just said, look, what are you trying to do? Kill yourself or what? You know, you've got to have proper breaks. You've got to look after yourself. Anyway, I didn't, because I actually thought I was, I had cancer, and I knew I was not terribly well. And I thought, if I dilly-dally, I'm not going to finish this. And I've gone so far into this,

41:55that to stop now would just be to vitiate the whole thing. You've got to carry on until you finish. And it was like having a demon possessing me and saying, no, no, no, I know you want to do something else, but you must write. So at the end of all that, I ended up very depleted. I used to think burnout, I don't know if I think that really exists, but I think now I can say, I think it probably does. You know, my reluctance to write or to engage was very strong. I think it's getting better. But I will say I'm doing an awful lot of traveling and talking. I've just come back

42:30from a tour in which I went to Texas and then North Carolina, then Spain, then back to Oxford and London. And, you know, I gave seven lectures on quite different topics in a period of about 12 days. And they all had pretty much to be written out. So what I'm trying to do now is to not push anything forward, but allow things to germinate. And it is frustratingly slow. But my experience is that it's only if I do that, that something will happen. And I can't tell whether it'll be tomorrow

43:01or another day in the future or never happen. But I would like to, there's a couple of things that I've got in mind, I'd like to do one is to write a book about the art of psychotic subjects, because it is absolutely fascinating. I mean, they paint the most amazing pictures. And also, it ties in very well with my understanding of especially schizophrenia as being a right hemisphere deficit disorder. So that would be very worthwhile doing partly because I think a lot of people would find the pictures beautiful and interesting in their own right.

43:33Yeah, and I suppose I mean, I have a contract, I'm ashamed to say, I've had it for about 10 or 12 years to write something called an intellectual autobiography. But frankly, I have no idea what that is. And writing about myself seems to be the most deadly thing I could possibly do. So I'm sort of fighting with that one. But really, my ambition would be one day to write a short book composed of short chapters, none of them more than a page long. Wow, that would be hard. That's very, very hard.

44:04Yeah. Are you still, are you still, are you still practicing? Can I ask? Yes, I am. I did eight surgeries in the last two days. I've been a busy week. Yeah. Well, how fabulous. I really admire you. I mean, I, the days I spent only at a very, you know, low level as an assistant in the operating theater taught me a lot and admiration for those like you who have the immense skill that is needed to do that job. So there we are.

44:38Thank you. Thank you for having me along to talk. Oh, it's been a joy. I've probably talked far too much. I've long looked forward to this. It's been on the calendar for over a year. We got it, we got you scheduled early, early 20, put this on the calendar. And it's just been something my audience has been anticipating and I'm so grateful for your time and for your work and your friendship. Thank you. It's been great. Thank you very much. God bless you, man. Thank you. What a wonderful talk. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have met Dr. McGilchrist after reading him for years, after being so influenced by him and his thoughts.

45:11I know you got a lot out of these two conversations. If you're interested in his work, go to the channel McGilchrist on YouTube or his website. I'll put the links in the show notes. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and share these episodes. If you think they're valuable to other people, make sure you check out my latest book, the life changing art of self brain surgery. You can go to Dr. Lee Warren.com and get information about my books and the newsletter and the podcast and all those things. Please make sure that you're signed up for the newsletter because it's every week since 2014. I've given you my best prescriptions for how you can change

45:41your mind and change your life using self brain surgery. Friend, we're grateful for you. I'm so thankful that you stuck it out and you went through this work with Dr. McGilchrist with me. We'll be back next week with more self brain surgery. God bless you. And don't forget to start today.