Right Brain, Creativity, and Meaning in Life w/ Iain McGilchrist

This week, Scott is joined by Psychiatrist and Author of "The Matter with Things", Iain McGilchrist, for a wide-ranging conversation spanning the main differences between left brain and right brain functions, the creative brain, intelligence, the source of truth, and the metaphysical realm of human existence. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There is a kind of thinking that we have prioritized
over all other kinds of thinking because I believe of
one simple thing, it helps us manipulate the world, but
it doesn't necessarily help us understand it. I usually say
the right hemisphere helps us understand the world, the left
only to manipulate.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Today, we welcome psychiatrist and author Ian McGilchrist to the show. Wow.
What an episode. I've greatly enjoyed going down the rabbit
hole of reading doctor McGilchrist's work and was pleased to
see just how many areas of overlap we have in
regards to our fascinations, including our attempts to understand the
nature of intelligence, creativity, and even sacred and transcendent experiences.

(00:44):
This conversation is very rich and meaningful, and I think
brings quarity to some important issues in the fields of
psychology and cognitive neuroscience. So, without further ado, I'll bring
you doctor Ian McGilchrist. Ian McGilchrist, Wow, So such an
honor to have you on the Psychology podcast Wall.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's a delight to be here. Thank you for asking me.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
We have so many areas of mutual interest. As I
realize more and more as I go down the rabbit
hole that is your large body of work. I think
to myself, Wow, I want to talk to him about that. Well,
I want to talk about that while I want to
talk about that, But I always like to find out
the genesis of people's work and their ideas. And I

(01:28):
did kind of gown a rabbit hole of your life.
And you really are hard to fit into any particular box.
That is very true. You've said that before, and that
is true. Yes, you start off in literature and the humanities,
is that correct?

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yes, I've always been equally attracted to science and the humanities,
And at school I started in science and specialized later
in humanities. Then I went to Oxford to do philosophy
and theology, ended up reading literally studies English literature mainly,
and and then I got a fellowship which allowed me
to range back into philosophy, which has always been my

(02:05):
big interest.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
And so how were you in your life in nineteen
e two when you published your book Against Criticism, which
I read, by the way, Yeah, preparation for this, yes,
because I see lots of linkages with your current work.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
That's unbelievable. That's so I don't think any of my
interviewers has ever done that?

Speaker 2 (02:26):
No, I bet they have not. For anything I wanted
to step up. I wanted to step up, Apart for
anything else.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
It's extremely difficult to find a copy of the book anymore,
and people say, why don't you republish it? And I
guess one day I will, but I just didn't want
it to come out. And then people go, have you
seen the latest thing? Ian Miguilchrisfritten. It's something I wrote
in my twenties. So I wrote twenty the ages twenty
two to twenty seven or something like that, and I

(02:54):
was twenty eight twenty nine when the book came out.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, I can help, but notice linkages between things you
wrote in there and things you wrote even in your
most recent book, you know, going up to the matter
with things you say in Against I'm calling you from
against Criticism in nineteen eighty two. Are you ready for this? Okay,
you might not remember this. You might not remember this.

(03:18):
You say, the understanding of any one thing requires an
understanding of the whole of which it is a part.
Now that seems to capture a lot of your interest
in the left and right brain sort of asymmetry.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Right, it does I mean it led there by a
very you know, security stuff. But then I believe that
somewhere I use this image of you know, climbing the mountain.
You have to go round and round before you get
to the top. You can't just go straight up. And
I just see this as being a very important issue
throughout and at school, I already thought, you know, somehow

(03:56):
the whole is not the same as the sum of
the parts. And you know, wise guys would say to me, okay,
so watch this extra something land that you put in,
and I didn't think of saying, then, it's not that
something needs to be put in, it's that something has
been taken out in the process of disassembling it. If

(04:19):
you disassemble anything, it's lost its structure. And the structure
of the form may be the meaning in a piece
of music, it's very obvious, but also in poetry.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, and I love that you bring in gestalt psychology.
That was a major principle of gestalt psychology is the
idea that the perception perception is greater than the sum
of the parts. And you know, while we have this
divided brain, we do have the corpus colossum that tries
to give us some sort of gestalt perception.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Right, Yes, yes, I mean you can imagine one of
the things that I had to deal with early on
when I found more and more interesting themes that had
been my interest before I studied medicine, because I came
to medicine started studying at the age of twenty eight.
So and in this country, that's unusual. That's like ten
years too old. And my colleagues are, you know, fresh

(05:14):
out of school. Got oh, I was so brave of
you to do this, like, you know, one foot in
the grave. But I knew what they meant. It's a very,
very long haul and took me fourteen years to get
to be a consultant psychiatrist. So yeah, why am I
telling you that? I mean just that when I got
interested in hemisphere difference and in my medical training, I

(05:35):
started asking myself questions and these were often prompted by
clinical phenomena. The thing I had to face down was
that everybody said, don't touch this topic. Everybody knows it's
been debunked, it's just pop psychology, it's all et cetera,
et cetera. Now, the fact is that, yes, almost everything
that was said back in the day was wrong, but

(05:58):
it doesn't mean that there is no difference. And I
wanted to know what that difference was. The sure as
hell is difference, and it's just knowing what that difference is.
So I get frustrated. And this is how we first met.
Was that you publish a piece saying, you know right
and left hemisphere, this is all you know junk? Which

(06:19):
is which is true? The old the old stuff.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
I didn't say that. I didn't say that, but it's junk.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Well okay, but roughly I paraphrase. But but I wanted
to to. I just so want people to get beyond
this because there's such an interesting, I believe, path to
learn about about genuine differences between the two hemispheres.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Absolutely well, let's double click there a second, and how
our paths crossed, so that our audience can understand. I
was putting an arena to the beat when I didn't
sign up for it. I was, I was. I was tricked.
I was tricked to go in in in a boxing ring.

(07:05):
In my original article ten years ago, ten years ago
in Scientific American did not mention your name whatsoever, and
it was not directed at you whatsoever. It was directed
at pop crap you know, yeah, yeah, and then and
then they put it as though like Ian responds to me.
It's like, wait a minute. I never was saying anything

(07:27):
about Ian. I love his work. So it's a it's
as fascinating how these things happen. But here we are.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah, Well, to be honest, I was set up in
just the same way. It was like, but Scott says,
this about what you're writing, about what you think you know.
So anyway, there we are. The great thing is, as
so often something you don't think is good at least
to something that is. And this is an example.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
It isn't It really is an example. It really gave
me a great opportunity to go down this very deep
rabbit hole. This is your work in life and I
I spent my whole vacation in Santa Barbara reading your work.
That was my vacation. Yeah, but but it but I
must say it's very, very rich. It's very uh at moments,

(08:21):
profound and and in line with a lot of my
own sort of deep interest in in intuition and imagination
and intelligence. So these these are three words we're going
to talk about a lot today. Let's just let's just uh,
you know, let's have like a conversation, not like a
formal interview, but you know, conversation just like stepping back

(08:44):
a moment for our listeners who haven't read all the
million pages you've written, like all I have, no I'm doing.
I haven't read a million, all a million? But can
you just explain to our listeners, I've read a lot,
but it's it is a lot. Can you explain to
our listeners a little bit how you see the major

(09:05):
characteristic differences between left hemisphere and right hemisphere?

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah? Sure, I think the fundamental difference is And people
have puzzled about why the brain should be divided. You know,
it seems like, when you think about it, a strange
thing that an organ that it exists to make connections
and derives its power from making connections, should be divided.
Why should it be asymmetrical? You know, if you just
needed more space, why didn't it expand symmetrically? And why

(09:34):
is the corpus collosum involved in a great deal of
inhibition of information as well as facilitation of information? So
you know, these are unanswered questions, and one way of
approaching this is through what I believe is the most
coherent evolutionary explanation of why this should be. It's because

(09:57):
all living creatures have to solve the problem of how
to eat without being eaten in order to get stuff,
either food or a tool or a twig to build
a nest or whatever it is to manipulate the world.
To help us survive, we need to be able to
pay a minutely scrupulous attention to a detail of something

(10:19):
so that we can quickly and precisely get it. But
if it's the only kind of attention you pay, you
don't survive because you also need, at the same time,
which is a very difficult trick to play, to pay
a completely different kind of attention to the world, which
is wide open and sustained and broad and cohesive and
integrating and vigilant. And the only way that actually you

(10:43):
can do this is by having too sufficiently separate neuronal
masses that they can attend to the world in two
different ways at the same time. And what these two
kinds of attention, the very narrowly focused, targeted attention something
you already know you want to get grab and the
broad open attention that is agnostic about what it may

(11:06):
find is interesting to see what there is going on
around the difference is that they create two phenomenological worlds.
I just want to say, I don't think you'll find
a neurologist anywhere who would deny that the hemispheres attend
in different ways. This is fundamental, you know, And you
see it when somebody has a right hemisphere stroke, they
get this pathological narrowing of the window of attention. But equally,

(11:29):
attention is pretty important. And it took me a while
to see this that attention isn't just another cognitive function.
Attention is how we construct the world. We experience the
phenomenological world. How we attend and what we attend to
or choose not to changes what we see the world

(11:49):
to be and what we find there.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
And so.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
What these two worlds look like in a very brief
sketch is the world of the left hemisphere and consists
of little pieces of stuff that we already know what
it is. It's familiar, it's isolated, it's static so that
we can quickly grab it and pick it up. It's
taken out of context, it's explicit, it's abstract, it's general

(12:19):
in nature and effectively inanimate. And the right hemisphere is
see is a quite different world, and it's nothing is
ultimately certain things have degrees of familiarity, But as Ramachandran says,
it's the anomaly detector and the devil's advocate. It's the

(12:39):
one that goes it could be something else. So it
never sees anything as finally certain or finally separate from
anything else. Everything is connected, nor is it static. It's
flowing and changing all the time. It takes in the
implicit That means that in terms of human psychology, it
is the right hemisphere more than the less that enables

(13:01):
us to read between the lines, to see the meaning
of what is not being said as well as what
is being said, to realize the implicit meaning in things
like metaphors, poetry, irony, which can completely reverse the meaning
of a statement or sarcasm, but also you know, poetry, drama,

(13:23):
narrative music, all these things. So all that relies on
a meaning that cannot necessarily be simply put into words
that you know, make the sort of sense that you
get from reading a science textbook. And this world is
basically an animate world. And you know, people think I'm

(13:45):
just saying that in some kind of metaphorical way, but
I'm not. If you're using TMS. If you suppress the
right hamisphere, people will see things and people that they
would normally consider to be alive as no longer alive.
They would see them as mechanical or zombie like, Whereas

(14:06):
if you suppress the left hemisphere, they may see things
that ordinarily they would think of as inanimate as having animals,
like the sun moving across the sky. So it is
very interesting these differences. And there are two I've just
sign off these two little things that separate the way
the two hemispheres work. One is that one of these hemispheres,

(14:29):
namely the right, is involved in producing the very presence
of something, and it's so quickly in our minds becomes
a representation of that thing that we often are not
aware of this. It's only when we begin meditating or
doing mindfulness, or are lost in sort in front of

(14:50):
a work of art or a beautiful landscape or whatever,
that we notice something that is actually kind of really there,
the sense of being there, not being off in your
head commenting on it and turning it in. Oh yeah,
i've got it. It's a picturesque landscape. I know about those,
but instead actually just being there and feeling the landscape.
So in the right hemisphere you've got what Hidiger would

(15:10):
call presencing of the world. In the left you've got
representation of the world. And the other thing, which is
just fun is that the left hemisphere is ridiculously over optimistic.
I mean, it's so in denial about anything bad that
a person with a right hemisphere's stroke who's got to

(15:32):
paralyze left side of the body will completely deny there's
anything wrong with it, even though they can't move it.
They'll say, there, I just moved it. I mean, it
is so bad, Whereas the right hemisphere is slightly on
the downside about itself. Whether left hemisphere has extreme high
self esteem, the right hemisphere has sort of kind of

(15:52):
slightly lower self esteem. But it's more realistic, it's closer
to reality.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, will they say depressed people are more realistic than
not depressed. Exactly exactly. Now, you said so many things
that I want to respond to. Let me start with
the last thing. You see, the last thing you mentioned. Now,
there is this really fascinating work by Richard Davidson in
colleagues showing that the left heemisphere is the suit of happiness,
you know, to put in pop language. But this relates

(16:19):
very much to what you're talking about right now. It
seems to be that there is a correlation between left
temis for activation and happiness or feeling a general sense
of well being and things of that nature. Do you
think that contributes to a richer, sort of more fully
alive experience, even if it's not necessarily happier.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
It's a very good question, and I think the answer
is yes. So I think one has to distinguish between
the sort of cheerfulness and the sort of brute happiness
which almost anybody can have if they just don't think
too much or feel too much, and the kind of

(17:02):
connectivity that comes from leading, you know, leading a fulfilling
life in which one is inevitably involved in the suffering
of the world and in existential questions. But there's no
doubt that to be involved in that, although superficially it

(17:24):
seems to be something negative, is actually the way in
which we grow, I think, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. So
the answer to your question is basically yes.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
You know, I agree, and I feel like I want
to map let's try to map our both of our
research programs, because I think they're very consistent, not at
all like it was presented in that fake debate. No, no, no,
it's actually it's actually our work is actually really consistent,
really consistent. We should co author an article together for

(18:01):
them and really shocked them.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
That would be great, That would be great, It would.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Really shock them. But because I'm obsessed with the default
mode brain network, because I think that network offers us
the core of human experience of what it means to
be really human, And I think you're obsessed with the
right hemisphere because of the same for the same reason.

(18:28):
I could be wrong, I could be wrong, but I
think that. So I went in and I looked deeper
into our pub our for instance, our Nature paper, looking
at the different brain networks across creative time, and I looked,
I re examined it, and I noticed that there were preferential,
preferential right hemisphere activations and the default mode network. When

(18:52):
we talked about the default mode network, it was right
hemisphere preferentially. Now, we didn't originally sit out to test that,
so don't quote me on that as a statistically significant effect,
because that wasn't our you know, we didn't have the
methodology to specifically, but I noticed a trend. So I
think that in a lot of ways, just at a

(19:13):
more higher level, conceptual level. I think me and you
really feel as though a lot of our discussions about
human cognition and the brain really focuses on this kind
of abstract and intelligence and leaves out the experiential what
it means to really be and feel human, the quality

(19:38):
of humanity and the richness of humanity. So I'm going
to take a pause there, But do you do, generally,
in the main, agree with it that both of us
are actually quite aligned in that way.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
I'm sure the thing is that there is a kind
of thinking that we have prioritized over all other kinds
of thinking because I believe one simple thing, it helps
us manipulate the world, but it doesn't necessarily help us
understand it. And if you want a kind of crude SoundBite,

(20:09):
I usually say, the right hemisphere helps us understand the world,
the left only to manipulate it. And I suppose what
we're both trying to do is to say that there's
far far more going on in our brains than the
bit that we're aware of. And you know, somebody somewhere
and you know, I quote it largely because it's so

(20:32):
hilarious with deadpan precisions. Says ninety nine point four four
percent of all that we are at some level aware
of is not in our center of our consciousness. And
so you know, it's that other bit that is so fascinating.
And I think intuition, imagination, these things are very very important.

(20:54):
But I would also say that doesn't for me, and
I'm sure it doesn't for you. Mean any disk spects
a science or reason. My work is based very largely
on both, particularly on being able to reason, I hope,
But it's just that they can't deal with everything. I mean,
there are certain things that are not irrational, but they're
just not rational. Like music, it's super irrational. It's beyond

(21:17):
the reach of reason. And so forl yeah, oh boy,
this might be a big stretch. But in your nineteen
eighty two book Against Criticism, you actually the main point.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Of that book is that you disparage analytical criticism, so
any form of criticism that's based on absolutes, and you
have a quote where you say the only application of
abstraction there is the rejection of abstraction. You actually reject
abstract intelligence as the predominant view of criticism in that book,

(21:52):
it just seems so linked. It just seems so linked
to your modern day thinking. Is that too much of
a stretch? Am I being crazy here? Connection?

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Not at all? No, I mean I think that's exactly right.
I mean, of course, what it doesn't mean is that
I think there's no value in analysis. And in fact,
oddly enough, I use analysis p example, in the part
of the book where I discuss words with I do
a lot of stuff based on the frequency of certain
expressions and soon, which is analytic. But I suppose I'm

(22:24):
always worried by a process that ends in analysis, because
it's just taken everything apart, and it's just lost the structure,
the form, the implicit. And what I realized about works
of art is that they must remain implicit, in just
the way that a joke must remain implicit. Once you've

(22:46):
explained it, it no longer has any power. It just
falls completely flat. And the difficulty is that you paraphrase
a poem. There's only so many things that people are
going to write poems about, you know, the tragedy of love,
you know, the awareness of mortality, whatever it may be.
And if you do this process of just analyzing what

(23:06):
they're you come up with the same, you know, handful
of dust. Basically, you've just destroyed something that could, you know,
move you more than anything you've ever read and speak
to you deeply in your soul, and you've just turned
it into a heap of trite. And so what I
was really saying is it's the decontextualizing and the making

(23:27):
explicit of what needs to remain implicit. That it is
the danger, and that so much depends on context. Context
changes everything.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Let's take a step back second, can we can we
talk about actually not to take a step back, Let's
jump into the fray of the field of human intelligence
for a moment, because this is this is where I
started my career. Do you have you heard of the
psychometrician at Cambridge Nicholas Macintosh. Does that mean ring a bell?

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Yes she does.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
He was my mentor studying IQ and intelligence and in
fact you and him if I close my eyes, he's
from Scotland. If I close my eyes, you actually sound
you guys sound so. But anyway that might be like
or something something now, even the cadence of speaking. He's
very careful and deliberate about the way he speaks. I

(24:23):
always appreciated that. I appreciate that about you. So if
we look at the rich research on intelligence and IQ,
A big part of my dissertation was my annoyance at
our and even the field of psychology's obsessive focus on
abstract intelligence as measured by like Raven's advanced progressive matrices test.

(24:47):
So I thought to myself, and this is my theory
of dual process intelligence. So I developed a theory of
dual process intelligence that argues we should just call that
explicit intelligence, but we have a whole, rich, vibrant implicit
intelligence and found a zero correlation between that capacity and

(25:08):
IQ capacity.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Well that's interesting, Yeah, I mean, obviously you know far
more about this than I do. Although I wrote about
I have a chapter on each of emotional and social
intelligence and progressive intelligence speaking IQ. Yeah, but I would
have thought, or what I have found from my researchers

(25:34):
in the area. But correct me if I'm wrong. Is
that a lot of the important intelligence of scientists and
mathematicians as much as artists, comes from an intuitive ability
that if they don't if they lack the intuitive ability,
they can plod on in science, you know, holding down

(25:57):
a good job and being respected and so on, but
they're not going to really be those high flying ones
that make the important breakthroughs. And when you come to
look at their experience, and I take a lot of
them in the book in the Matter with Things, and
look at their storage, I mean, there's just so many
times in which it becomes clear that they are guided

(26:21):
by insurition, by gestalt forms, by even the sense of
the beauty of what they're discovering, more than they are
by simply following a sort of analytic procedural way of thinking.
So I think it's I would have thought that it
was a sign of high intelligence. Whichever way you work

(26:43):
that people who I mean, I often say that people
who use their insuritions well are people who know how
to reason well, and people who reason well are people
who have good insuritions, So I think you need them both.
I'm rather sorry to hear that you found that intuitive intelligence,
if that's really what we're talking about, was not related
to intelligence, because my strong hunch is that it is,

(27:05):
and I think I quote some quote some research that
suggest that it is.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
In fact, Yeah, yeah, no, no, there's a point five correlation,
for short between the personality demean openness to experience and
IQ tests. So that is true in the main, but
that is only a point five correlation. And what you
find is these things can break break out off in

(27:29):
various fascinating ways. When you do you know, regression, you
control for one for the other, you know, so you're
you're right, we're talking about different levels of analysis. But
also we didn't have any Einstein's in our sample. And
I think it's interesting to think through, and I think
that's the point you're making. You you argue this in
your chapter, your very long chapter on creativity. You argue

(27:51):
there might be something really fundamentally and qualitatively different between
not just quantitatively, but quality between those who are fundamentally
reorganizing a whole domain, a whole field of knowledge, and
they might bring their intuition more to bear than you know,
when we talk about creative achievement in the general population

(28:12):
is all I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
So that's interesting, Yes, absolutely right. I mean what I
wanted to draw attention to is that when you come
to look at creativity research carefully, and what you find
is that different patterns of activation are associated with different
two things, different levels of creativity. So they're very highly

(28:37):
creative use their brains differently from the only moderately creative
or the not very creative at all. And the other
thing is that the patterns you're looking for must be
tested for by something that is truly creative. And often
in research, because it's so hard to set up a

(29:00):
situation in which people are going to be creative, and
because it's easier to measure lots of other proxies for it,
what you often end up with is not really asking
them to do a profoundly creative thing, but instead to
do something rather more pedestrian. And this muddies the waters,
I think, because what seems to be clear is that

(29:23):
when the task is highly creative, and when the person
is highly creative, there is this very strong effect of
right hemisphere preponderance. But it can become reverse as you
go down, so that people who are not so creatively
gifted tend to use a sort of second best mode,

(29:44):
which is a more analytic approach to do it with
a sort of rationalistic thing. Well let's try this, and
so on. And I've quote annas Fad, who's a mathematician,
on her research on mathematicians. She interviewed many mathematicians and
also tested children that were either mathematic gifted or not,
and she noticed that they approached problems in two different ways.

(30:04):
The real mathematicians. The gifted mathematicians described always this sense
of not knowing until an AHA moment came, and then
they and those Aha moments were more right than the
less gifted, who plodded along an analytic path and felt

(30:25):
a different thing, that they were getting closer and warmer
as they went along the path, but unfortunately often the
conclusions they came to were not as good as those
who had been able to do this in a more
intuitive way.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
So I think one maybe useful way of approaching this
is to realize, you know, so the personality, the main
openness to experience, has various components to it. You have
intellectual curiosity, which we found out predicted IQ when it
came to creative achievements. So I'm not saying the intellect
was not important, but it was important distinguish between IQ

(31:00):
test performance and intellectual curiosity. Those two things were only
correlated point five zero. So there could be people who
ace i Q tests but don't have a shred of
intellectual curiosity or intellectual openness and UH and that's possible,
and then vice versa, It's possible to have very low
IQ and be very intellectually curious. So that was one

(31:20):
important distinction we wanted to make. But in the openness
to mean you also have openness to fantasy and imagination,
which is, you know, there are plenty people who score
sky high and IQ tests but aren't particularly imaginative or
have a proneness to imagination or even care about it
or day. They're not big daydreamers. And then there's openness

(31:41):
to aesthetics, which is like openness to beauty and the arts.
And then there's openness to emotions, you know, which is
a real deep openness to your emotional world. So I
think these it's important in this discussion to to kind
of break. You can have a latent construct at the top,
but I think these these civic sub factors can break

(32:02):
apart in very interesting ways. Maybe the shall we say
true geniuses, I don't know, that's a terrible phrase. It
sounds like a controversial phrase to say there are true
geniuses and they are faker geniuses. But maybe the extraordinarily creative.
Let's say that humans of our species, I would have
thought they are really good at integrating all these various

(32:24):
ways of being, or even if not integrating, experimenting with them.
So let me step back and see what you think
of that.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, yes, I mean immediately thinking of this from a
perspective of hemisphere theory, one of the distinctions between the
hemispheres is that the right hemisphere seems to be able
to use what the left hemisphere knows as well and
take it into account, but the left hemisphere doesn't seem

(32:54):
equivalently capable of taking into account what the right hemisphere knows.
And it's also possible for the right hemisphere, under certain circumstances,
to apply local attention just as effectively as the left hemisphere,
but it's not possible for the right, sorry the left
hemisphere to apply global attention as effectively as the right,

(33:15):
and I talk about that in the book. So in
the sense of bringing these things together, it probably is
going to be the right hemisphere that's better at doing them.
But I also found, to cut a very long story short,
that emotional and social intelligence, no surprise, is more associated
with right hemisphere function. And that's pretty much non controversial.

(33:37):
But what is controversial is my discovery, quite contrary to
anything I had previously assumed that the right hemisphere is
also more important for IQ, and I'm not really surprised
because a lot of it is to do with things
like pattern recognition. I mean, it's a long time since

(33:59):
I did an IQ test. I don't think I've done
one since I was eleven, But I think there were
things where you had to see what a series implied
by looking at shapes and seeing which one was the
odd one out or what was coming next, and so
one that seems to me very gestalton right hemisphere sort
of orientated. I might be wrong.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Can I push back on that for a second, Yes,
because all the most recent data I've seen on general
intelligence when you look at the common variance across various subtests,
because if you do look at IQ subtests that are
more visually loaded than verbal loaded, yes you do find
more right hemisphere activation. But actually the common variance general

(34:42):
intelligence is more left brain activated, and I think there's
that's replicated among enough studies now where actually IQ test
performance in terms of the common variants, you know, generalizing
across content does tend to be left brain oriented because
it isn't involved in abstraction and really involved in that

(35:06):
kind of logical reasoning. That's what the most recent research
does show.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Actually, well, I'd be interested in that, but I wonder
if it might I don't know how it was determined,
but there are problems. As I point out that when
you look at what's active in a brain when it's say,
doing an IQ test or something, it's probably going to

(35:32):
be loaded towards the left hemisphere, partly because the only
way that one can often test things is going to
involve some degree of articulation or verbalizing, and that is
going to automatically bring in the left hemisphere, but also
that one is looking at any kind of faculty. I

(36:00):
like to bring together measurements in intact humans with what
we know about bits of the brain that are insulted
as a tumor an injury. And what is really really
striking is that when you compare people who prayer to

(36:20):
one of these events, had an IQ measured, and after
the event, their IQ was measured again where there are
substantial drops, the injury was almost always in the right hemisphere,
not in the left. I mean that's based on the
study of one hundred and fifty six individuals who had

(36:41):
that data and had an intervening injury. Now, I know
you can argue the pros and cons of deficit literature,
but you can also argue the pros and cons of
every kind of imaging literture. And I think that bringing
into the picture the deficit literature is quite.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
I agree we can bring in the deficit literature and
give you and give a complete counter example to what
you just said, though, and that's within the savant literature.
I have been deep friends with a man called Darryl Treffort,
who may he rest in peace, passed away recently. He
was the scientific advisor to the movie rain Man, and

(37:22):
he spent his whole life studying savants. And what you
find with savants is that they tend to have very
low IQs. So this is actually a counter example to
what you're talking about. They tend to have very low IQs,
but they tend to display an extraordinary talent or ability
that seems to become unlocked when you are more right

(37:43):
hemisphere focused. Again, I think suggesting an important distinction between
the kind of left hemisphere IQ logical abstractive performance necessary
to score high in IQ tests and the type of
intelligence that is unlocked by the right hemis. I just
think it's important to recognize that the intelligence of the

(38:04):
construct seems to be richer and deeper than just IQ
test kind of Raven's kind of performance.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
I of course agree with that, but I'm not sure
that I would accept that that somehow contradicts what I
was saying, because one of the other things I'm well
aware of is that most cases of Savon syndrome come
on after some I mean, they can sometimes congenital, but

(38:32):
in the cases where the blow of the injury is
often to the left hemisphere, and that releases the right
hemisphere to be, as it were, more intelligent in certain ways.
And so I'm not sure that is a counterexample. And
I'd just like to mention the research done by Snyder is.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Alan Snyder Alan Snider problem.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, yeah, the nine art problem. And you know this
is amazing because I know you know all of this.
But what his research appears to show, which is the
nine dot problem, which is extremely difficult for anyone in
the normal circumstances to be able to solve within the
time of the test lotted. It was unsolvable by people

(39:18):
who had their left hemisphere activity augmented and their right
hemisphere activity suppressed. But was solved by staggering forty of
those who had their right hemisphere active if you augmented
and their left hemisphere activity suppressed. This is of course
using transcranial magnetic simulation. So anyway, I'll just throw that

(39:39):
into the pot.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
No, it's great, it's great you're saying, and I agree
with it. And what your example show is that a
lot of IQ test batteries they miss out on creative insights.
That's not what they're measuring, you know. No, there's a
lot of cognitive processes relating to creativity and imagination and

(40:02):
insight and metaphor and frame shifting that the right hemisphere
contributes to that is not tapped into by measures of
general intelligence.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Well it is, And you know, one of the things
that we need drastically in this world is to stop
mistrusting our intuitions. All over the place. There are armies
of psychologists making a fat living out or going around
telling organizations that they shouldn't trust their intuitions. But actually
a lot of the mess we're in now is because

(40:36):
we've consistently failed to honor our intuitions for rather long time.
And if we actually did respect our intuitions, they're fallible,
of course, but then so is merely looking at the
world logically infallible at times, but it's not a reason
for not using it, because intuition you can bring together
subtly various strands of thought and reason and experience and

(41:01):
so on and come to a conclusion which is subtler
than anything that would happen if you linearly argue.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
I love that. Yeah, I'm right there with you. And
there is a tyranny of language. You know that the
left hemisphere contributes to with creative thinking, because I've seen
some really cool research showing that the right hemisphere is
important for accessing non dominant meanings of words and unusual
associations and the whole idea of the whole idea of

(41:30):
remote associations. There's a test called the remote association's test,
and the left hemisphere gets in the way of that
because when I say how many uses are of a brick?
Or there, if I say, you know, how many what's
the use of a table? You know, your left hemisphere
wants to give you kind of the most obvious answer,
you know, And if you can just get rid of that,
then you can access a whole depth of unusual associations.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Well, we're remote associations are certainly a part of creativite,
they're not obviously the full story. And and as you know,
the right hemmish is much better at making these imaginatively
remote associations.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, it's so, you know, mapping on the network approach
to the left brain right brain approach. It's You've got
me thinking about it in a such a deeper way
than I ever have before. How these these two different
they're just different levels of analysis. They're not They're both
probably saying the same thing. There's just different levels of analysis.

(42:27):
You know. I've been I've been arguing against the tyranny
of the executive attention network, where you've been arguing against
the tyranny of the left hemisphere. But conceptually, I feel
like we're both bothered by the same thing.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
I think that that's right. Yeah, No, there's a lot
of over left.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Here we go. You ready for this question? What is truth?

Speaker 1 (42:50):
What is true?

Speaker 2 (42:51):
No? No, but and that's a cheeky question, but you know,
I think that you kind of your work really he
does raise a lot of metaphysical questions about the nature
of reality and which half of the brain is really
seeing reality clearer than the other.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
Yes, well, the what is truth question, which was first
famously asked by Ponscious Pilot how we go in the book?
Because I raised a lot of metaphysical questions, and of
course I don't claim to have answered I'm only a
fool would do that, but I do at least address them,

(43:32):
and I do actually have I'm bold enough to have
a chapter called what is Truth? And what I suggest
is that, like everything else, and this is differently seen
in the two hemispheres, that the left hemispheres prefers a
vision of truth and acts as though truth is to
be found by seeing it as a thing that is

(43:52):
at the end of a pass, that if you take
the steps to it, you will eventually reach it, and
that that truth is single and pure and will be
the same for everybody when they get that. And while
I'm very very much opposed to the postmodern position that
there are no trues, They're just whatever we choose to believe.

(44:12):
No no, no, no no. But on the other hand,
I think the other vision that truth is just pure
and simple and clear and out there is also wrong.
And what I suggest is that it comes out of
an encounter and that what we experience is always something
that is partly given to us and partly us giving
to it, and in this encounter there is always a

(44:35):
two way process that alters both us and what it
is we're encountering. So there is a truth which is
more like being true to something, being true to an ideal,
being true to a person, being true to your wife,
your husband, your partner, whatever. These are another way of
thinking about truth that is an allegiance where you cannot

(44:57):
prove it, but you can get very close knowing that
this is really more right than whatever the alternative to
this might might be.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Well, well, I love that and link it to roll
Me's work on human existence as an encounter with the
world and creativity as an act of putting something into
existence that has never existed before. You know. There is reality,
but there's also creation, you know, like of something that

(45:27):
didn't exist a moment before you know, and you can
do that. You can do that.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
We all do it all the time, all the time,
all the time. And this brings us to your imagination.
I make it a distinction which is not original to
me at all, between fantasy and imagination. Fantasy is something
that is like dressing up reality in a way that's cute.
It's like you haven't really transformed it. You've just taken

(45:56):
something and you've put on a pretty dress. You've taken
an hour aristocrat and you dressed him in a shepherd's
cloak and giving him a crook, and he plays for
an hour or so, And that is fantasy. But imagination
is quite quite different. It's looking at something that you
think you already know until it's strangeness appears to you

(46:19):
and you enter into it with your whole imaginative faculty,
which is your brings parts of your emotional life, your
intellectual life and so on into it. In words, but
you know, describe being in the presence of a mountain
or just a rock or a waterfall or whatever, and
sort of seeing it for the first time, and that

(46:39):
is the power of the imagination. Now, what Coleridge did
in Brief was to make a distinction, which when I
was studying him in my twenties I thought was pedantic
and slightly forgettable, but I now realize it's just profound
between what he calls primary imagination and secondary imagination. Secondary
imagination is what we've been talking about with artists and

(47:02):
creativity and that very you know, clear sense. But primary imagination,
which was before it, and you know, supportive of secondary imagination,
was the business we do all the time in bringing
into being the phenomenogical world. So all the time, second
by second, I am in dialogue with whatever it is

(47:25):
that exists apart from me, and out of that dialogue
comes something that partly I created. But it only works
if I am true to the thing that I'm really
truly trying to see. So it is this encounter that
gets closer to truth, and it is brought about by imagination.
So where fantasy leads us into falsehood, imagination is the

(47:46):
only path in the truth and it's something we're doing
all the time.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Wow, So fantasy is putting lipstick on a pig, is
what you're saying. In essence, that's what you're saying. But okay,
so you know, let's talk about the link between mental
illness and creativity for a second, because there is an
interesting there is an interesting connection here, and you have
a very interesting take on schizophrenia as essentially you can't

(48:16):
do anything but engage your rationality to make sense of
the world. In a sense, that's that's the almost kind
of an opposite of how a lot of people think
of schizophrenia as being totally in the realm of delusion.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yes, but it is. It is in the realm of delusion.
But but just using using reason only for approach life
will lead you to delusion. As gkhss I said, you
know the madmen, there's not the person who has lost
his reason, but the person who's lost everything but his reason.

(48:51):
You know, because think about it. You know, if I'm
sitting in this room and I hear a voice, I
look around the room and I can't see anybody, but
the voice is there. I think, Okay, so it must
be the next door neighbor putting a trumpet up to
the wall and sending the messages, or is coming through
that socket on the wall over there. This is how
they think because it's a kind of reasoning, but it's

(49:12):
reasoning on a basis of completely misunderstanding the world. And
this is what happens when the left hemisphere goes off
on one and suppresses what the right hemisphere can see.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Well, I'm trying to map on the way I've been
thinking about it, whether you're thinking about it, you know,
I think of it from a network perspective. You tend
to find that. I often joke in my talks about this.
I say, when you look at the brains of schizophrenic
patients and you look at the brains of highly creative people,
you notice no difference between the brains, And I say,
just kidding. Then the audience laughs. But anyway, but you

(49:47):
actually do notice some similarities, and that's in the default
mode network functioning. When you compare the brains of schizophrenic
patients for creative, highly creative people, you do notice that
they have a very overactive de fault mode network. But
the difference between the two populations is that there is
higher executive functioning among the highly creative people than the

(50:10):
ones we put in a mental institution. But I think
that that I think a lot of people we put
in a men's stituition have a lot of potential for
men's creativity. I say, it's important to be able to
be daring enough to dip your toes into the sea
of madness, but you must be tethered to a rope
that can pull you back to the shore of reality.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
Very that's very good. I like that. And you know,
my next book book one if I'm Spared.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
I thought you said this one was at last book
in the matter of things.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, if I'm spared or if you're
all spared, it is a book on the art of
schizophrenic subjects. I have had a fascination with this going
back thirty years because I was a consultant at the

(51:03):
Bethlman Maudsley Hospital in London, which the old Bethlum goes
back to the fourteenth century at least, and it has
a museum of amazing works about done by patients. Particularly
interesting are the ones by schizophrenic subjects. And I've you know,
I've collected ones of my own patients and studied it.

(51:25):
But you're dead right, they have this capacity, particularly for
that kind of creativity. Some of it is just bizarre.
I don't know that any of it is profound. Actually,
I don't think that's really the point. But what it is,
it's often very telling. It tells you something about their world,
and I think it's just fascinating getting into that world.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
So fascinating, you know. And yeah, a lot of it
is are word salads and and things, but a lot
of our most creative thoughts, you know, arise from that
unconscious world. You know, bizarre dream like state. Right. I
actually sent a portion of your book to my colleague,
Colin de Young, who had argued and he had had

(52:10):
a he had a theory that during sleep we have
dopamine production to the default mode network that causes us
to have a rich imagination. But then I saw your work.
I saw what you you cited that the right that
while we're sleeping, the right hemisphere is more active. And
he argued that dopamine is projected to the right hemisphere

(52:31):
during sleep, is what he argued. And anyway, I linked
to that to what you were arguing about in sleep,
a sleep like state, and it makes me think that,
you know, really creative people during their wakeful hours are
able to enter more of a dreamlike state with consciousness
there as well.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yes, absolutely, And you know, coming back to what you've
just said a minute or though, it's about being tethered enough,
you know, the trouble is that most of the time
it is really word salad and it's not poetry. But
if you take the example of Blake, I mean, Blake

(53:09):
was almost certainly I mean nowadays he would be diagnosable,
poor man, and he'd be on I don't know, a
lands of Pene or something. But the thing is that
he saw, you know, an angel in a tree in
peckham Rye. He saw God looking in at the window,

(53:32):
the landing window in his house. He saw the ghost
of a flea. So he was clearly in another realm,
but he was also very tethered in his humanity. And
so what happens is you get this utterly amazing poetry,
which is well, you know, one of the great achievements

(53:54):
of English issue. And some of it is a little dotty,
I agree, but some of it is just outright genius,
no question. And it's interesting that Christopher Smut, who was
an eighteenth century poet who was very clearly skisphrinting. He
did write some very interesting poets. It's some of it

(54:14):
was set to music by Benjamin Britton. But anyway, sorry,
off the point there, but not off the point. Maybe
nothing's off the point.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
No, No, that's the point. That's the point. That's the
point that you just summarized. You just summarized everything by
saying nothing's off the point. You know, the people people
who have low Ladent inhibition, meaning they are able to
entertain associations between things that don't seem obviously relevant to

(54:44):
a goal, tend to be higher and creative achievement. They're
able to even entertain things that So that's part of
your genius, sir, that's part of your genius bringing together,
you know, all these different areas of your life that
you've been interested.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
When it comes of being pulled many different directions, and
I just have seen patterns that cohere, and that's all
I've tried to articulate.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Let's send this interview talking about the sacred. The right
hemisphere seems to be able to see the interconnectedness of
all things in a way that left hemisphere kind of inhibits.
And that really does get us into the realm of
the sacred and into the realm of peak experiences and profound,

(55:31):
the most profound experiences of human existence, which you don't
need to be on drugs to see. But drugs help
sort of, drugs help with that.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Well, no, I got that they do help some people. Yeah,
you know, I had grave misgivings about writing a chapter
on the sense of the sacred, but it is actually
the longest chapter in the book, in the last substance
of chapter, and it's been pointed out to me by
many people that it also could be a book on
its OAF. But it costs me a lot of concern

(56:02):
and hard work and tearing my hair and revising because
I wanted to be I wanted above all to do
justice to something I think is very deep and that
I think we're in danger of losing the sense of
the sacred and I think it's very, very important that
we rediscover it. I mean, people might say, well, we've
got more pressing things to do, like you know, what

(56:25):
we do about climate change, and of course these are
infinitely important, but actually we could solve these problems and
not be a whit better if we remained the I
think spiritually desolate people that we've become selfish, obsessed with

(56:45):
power and wealth and neglectful of the things that really
really matter, which are one us with others, one ess
with nature and wonder us with the sacred vine, or
whatever you'd like to call it. So yes, I did
stick my neck out and write about that. But in

(57:06):
terms of hemisphere is what it occurred to me is
that the dominance of the left hemisphere, both as an
actual measurable thing in the EEG, that in the normal
waking state, most people are just slightly more predominantly active
in the left hemisphere and the right, and of course
the left hemisphere tends to dominate the right when given

(57:29):
a chance to do so. But not only that, but
in our culture, as I argue in the second half
of The Master and His Hemisphere, we've moved towards a
culture which has seems to have lost whatever it is
the right hemisphere can put us in touch with. But
if you think about it, the left hemisphere wants something
that is certain, that is out there and known, that

(57:51):
is familiar. And what we're talking about here is the
exact opered it, something that is never fully known. But
it's no bull in the sense that you can deeply
sense something. It's like a work of art. You can
never fully know it, but you were attracted by it
and you know that something real there and you know.

(58:12):
So it's quite different, and it's asking you to suspend judgment,
suspend the need for proof, the need for certainty, because
they just are things that are not susceptible to this analysis.
And if you don't understand that, then in a way
I can't really help you. But it just seems the

(58:34):
right hemisphere is much more able to attune itself to
these things on the left, and for what it's worth,
the nearer imaging suggests that most of the things that
open us to that kind of a world, including mindfulness, meditation,
and so on, these things have effects in both hemispheres

(58:54):
that you can't just reduce it in one thing, but
overall the preponderance of the effects to be served by
and to nourish the right hemisphere more than the left.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
I think it's important to note that that the both
the left hemisphere functions the right hemisphere functions they have
there both have their benefits and disadvantages. I wouldn't want
to live I wouldn't want to live twenty four to
seven in either hemisphere. The exclusion of the other.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
No, I mean the left hemisphere is essential. But as
a as a servant, that's the important thing. If asked
to do a job, it can do it. But if
it thinks it knows everything, which he doesn't, then it
becomes a problem.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
No, that's right. The point, the point you're making is
that there's there are some things that some of those
profound human experiences can only come through direct experience and
opening and opening to an encounter with with the world.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
That's it, and it's you know that that quote of Einstein's.
Whether he ever said if or what, I don't know,
but the rational mind is a use servant. The intuitive
mind is a precious gift. We live in a world
which honors the servant that has forgotten the gift. Whether
or not he put it in those words, I don't know,

(01:00:11):
but it certainly is in keeping with many things he
said about his own creative experiences in science.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
I'm going to end this whole interview today by quoting
the famous Ian McGilchrist. Okay, are you ready? Are you ready?
And I hope I got I hope I get this
quote right. I hope I get this quote right. Our
talent for division, for seeing the parts is of staggering importance,
second only to our capacity to transcend it in order

(01:00:40):
to see the whole. And it was a real profound
experience having this conversation with you today, Ian, And I
hope I think that that the people that force us
to debate. I told them we're going to have a
podcast chat, and I think they're going to publish our
podcast chat. So I'm happy with that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
I think so correct. So yeah, No, it's been lovely
being here and talking with you. I feel we could
go on for hours and hours, but sometimes a little
is as good as a lot, and it's been nice.
I feel I've made an intellectual friend here, so that's
thanks very much.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Likewise, well let's just say to be continued then, Okay,
very good,