[WHOOSH]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[THEME MUSIC]
>> How do we experience the world?
How do we make sense of it, measure it, construct it,
and understand our position in it?
A controversial scientist, Iain McGilchrist,
has developed a radical theory about how
our brain interprets the world.
>> Iain McGilchrist, he's a psychiatrist and author of "The
Master and His Emissary--
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,"
about the various implications of the differences
between the two hemispheres in the brain.
Let's start there.
Like what?
>> Two hemispheres have styles--
takes, if you like-- on the world.
They see things differently.
They prioritize different things.
There are different values.
The left hemisphere's goal is to enable us to manipulate things.
Whereas, the goal of the right hemisphere
is to relate to things and understand them as a whole.
Two ways of thinking that are both needed,
but are fundamentally at the same time incompatible.
>> McGilchrist claims that the left hemisphere of the brain is
gradually colonizing our experience of the world with
potentially disastrous implications.
>> The way of thinking which is reductive,
mechanistic has taken us over.
We behave like people who had right hemisphere damage.
>> Do we pay a price for being too left hemisphere-centered?
>> We may pay the ultimate price,
who treats the world as a simple resource to be exploited.
It's made us enormously powerful.
It's enabled us to become wealthy.
But it's also meant that we've lost means
to understand the world.
>> His revolutionary theory has attracted prominent supporters
worldwide, comparing him to Freud and Darwin.
>> I think "The Master and His Emissary" was possibly,
one of the most important books I read.
>> The idea that there is a distinction between those two
perspectives seems, to me, correct.
And I see it all the time in my own field
of clinical psychology.
>> I kind of had one revelation after another.
I mean, it just explains an incredible number of things
that I've always been slightly positive about.
>> But scientists think he's a heretic.
>> It's a fantastic book.
It's a fantastic book that I don't believe in.
>> The brain is as mechanical as clockwork.
A famous English physicist said that.
Let's just get over that.
>> Now McGilchrist is on the road.
Invited to speak about his view of the brain and society.
Could the problems of the modern world
be influenced by an imbalance in the human brain?
And what does that imply about our future?
For Iain McGilchrist, the problem
is not only bad politics or a warped economic system.
The problem is inside our modern brain.
[WAVES]
>> The landscape speaks very strongly to people.
Some people find it a little bit overwhelming.
I suspect it's what the people call
one of their Celtic thin places, where
the world beyond the immediate seems very apparent.
There is something very special about the whole place.
There's a strong energy there from the wildness of nature.
You feel it.
>> It was here that McGilchrist developed his groundbreaking
theory.
>> My dad was a doctor and tried to avoid becoming a doctor.
His first degree was in economics.
And I rather repeated the pattern in this.
I didn't even begin to be trained in medicine
until was 28.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
>> McGilchrist took an indirect path to reach medicine.
As a young man, he taught literature
at Oxford University.
>> After I got my degree, I got a fellowship at All Souls
College, which enabled me to do, really, more or less,
anything I liked intellectually for seven years.
And into that time, I then ended up really
thinking more about the mind-body problem.
When we read a poem or we listen to a piece of music,
it can bring tears to your eyes.
It can quicken your pulse.
It can raise your blood pressure.
In other words, it has enormous effects on you physiologically.
I felt that we were doing something
destructive to literature.
People in the past had taken trouble
to create something that was unique, embodied, and implicit.
And we came along and made it general
and abstract and explicit.
And making a poem explicit is a bit like explaining a joke.
It just makes it fall flat.
A work of art is an embodied being
that has an encounter with you as an embodied being.
It's not a bunch of thought that just has
an encounter with your brain.
The base of the problem was the mind-body relationship.
That we were looking at literature in much
too disembodied a way.
I thought no.
I need somehow to tackle this problem.
That was what impelled me to do medicine.
>> McGilchrist spent the next 14 years training in neurology
and psychiatry.
It was a journey that took him to the renowned Maudsley
Hospital in London.
>> So this was built just around the time of the First World
War.
This was one of the many places to which I owe a huge debt.
Because I was seeing an extremely broad cross-section
of patients.
Conditions such as schizophrenia,
severe personality disorders, and head injuries.
This is an amazing painting by William Kurelek
called "The Maze."
What's interesting is the very human anguish
of this person with his illness.
What one is seeing is a change in the whole way in which one
experiences the world due to something out of the ordinary
in brain functioning.
Here at the Maudsley Hospital, I had access
to patients for whom the world has become utterly changed.
Particularly interesting to me were
people with either tumors or strokes.
Because there, you can localize where the damage is.
You can see it in a scan.
And you can then see what happens to that patient.
Good science starts from a really intriguing question.
Why is the brain divided?
You know, I never heard that asked in any of my training.
It's really what I've been thinking about all my life.
About these two different ways in which
we seem to inhabit the world.
And that was the beginning of a 20-year long process in which I
tried to apply myself to the question of what
the differences between these two hemispheres really were.
>> Everything we human beings ever do,
no matter how ordinary it seems, has a complex beginning
in our brains.
Finding out how the brain does this work
is a study that has fascinated scientists for centuries.
>> The brain is, of course, an enormously complex structure.
In fact, it's kind of redundantly complex.
We have two cerebral hemispheres.
But it becomes a fascinating question
to know whether the two cerebral hemispheres can
operate separately.
>> In the '60s and '70s in California at Caltech,
there was some incredibly important and fascinating work.
And what they were trying to do was
to improve the quality of life for people
with intractable epilepsy.
Now these people might have almost continuous
epileptic seizures.
Which meant that they couldn't really
carry on any kind of normal life.
>> The original idea was based on the notion that if you
isolated a seizure to one half the brain so it could not
spread to the other half brain, when a seizure occurred,
you would prevent a generalized convulsion.
It wouldn't spread throughout the brain.
The patient wouldn't lose generalized consciousness
and you would have helped.
>> Today Michael Gazzaniga is a world-renowned neuroscientist
and vineyard owner.
In the 1960s, he was a grad student participating
in radical brain experiments.
>> By sectioning this structure, as can be seen in this half
brain section, called the corpus callosum and it has over 2
million nerve fibers.
And they richly interconnect the two halves of the brain.
What they did was, with some trepidation initially,
to divide this corpus callosum, the main pathway
by which the two hemispheres communicate.
And what they found after the operation was that the seizures
largely stopped.
The other thing was it was possible by setting
it up carefully controlled experiments
to find out what the reactions of the left
and the right hemisphere were independently.
>> Each side of the brain controls the opposite side
of the body.
So the left hemisphere controls the right side
of the body and the right hemisphere communicates
with the left.
>> The patient looks at a screen.
Just imagine fixating on a dot.
And over here, we flash a picture of an apple.
So if it's in the right visual field.
That goes to your left brain.
Left brain's got language and speech.
Patient said that's an apple.
This time, you put the apple over in the left visual field.
That now goes to the right disconnected brain.
And you say to the patient, what did you see?
And the patient says, I didn't see anything.
>> Something on the left.
I know what it is.
I can't say it.
I want to, but I can't.
I know what it is.
>> What's it have to do with?
>> I can't tell you that, either.
>> They found that the left arm and the right arm seem to be
contradicting one another.
So if somebody would select a dress with her right arm,
then the left arm would take it back, and put it on the shelf,
and take out another one.
>> Frustrated.
>> The experiments proved that we have two brains
in our heads.
Not just one.
But they do not see the world the same way.
>> When I started to do psychiatry,
nothing much was said about what the mass of the right
hemisphere did.
My training was that the left hemisphere
was very important for understanding and language
and for speaking language.
But that really, what went on in the right hemisphere
was not that significant.
Michael Gazzaniga had said that the right hemisphere
of the human brain had about as much intelligence
as a chimpanzee.
And so that wasn't encouraging.
>> Well, I used to give a lecture.
The left hemisphere, don't leave home without it.
And that summarized the importance
I saw to the special modules, we call now systems,
in the left hemisphere.
That's where the heavy duty lifting comes
for our complex cognitive life.
>> But in this experiment with a split brain patient,
while the right hemisphere is trying to make the cube,
the left hemisphere's hand keeps interfering.
Because it doesn't know what it's doing.
Yet, the right hemisphere on its own
solves the problem in seconds.
>> All of those who were involved in the team came
to the conclusion that each hemisphere had, if you like,
like a different way of looking at the world.
>> You separate the two hemispheres,
you've got mine left, you got mine right.
It's what grabbed everybody's interest.
Everybody can understand that.
And so the left talks and is analytical
and the right is creative and pulls stuff together.
And boom.
It was an industry.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> Thanks to pop psychology, the right and left hemispheres
became cartoon characters.
It was no longer considered serious science.
>> The left does language and reason and the right does airy,
fairy pictures of image.
And that turned out not to be right.
Because what people found was that over time,
it was obvious that each hemisphere
engages in everything.
So each hemisphere-- right and left--
is involved in reason and in language and in emotion.
But in crucially different ways.
>> Although the pop culture understanding of the left
and right hemisphere was eventually rejected,
a central question still remained.
>> Why does the brain have two centers of consciousness,
each capable of maintaining consciousness on its own
involved in everything, but in a different way?
But it was only when I came to look at the animal literature
that just, the penny dropped.
Professor Gunturkun.
>> Hey, Iain.
>> How nice of you to see me.
>> Absolutely.
Fantastic.
How are you, Iain?
>> Lovely to meet you.
>> Absolutely.
Same with me.
>> I apologize for delays.
>> No problem at all.
This university is a maze.
>> Just completely lost.
>> It's an absolute maze.
>> Dr. Onur Gunturkun is a leading researcher in the field
of animal neurology.
He focuses on how birds use each half of their brain.
>> These are the animals with the eye rings.
>> Using the Velcro, you can cover one eye at a time.
>> Exactly.
Exactly.
So there is a little cap that we have.
And then the animal just sees with its left or right eye.
Because, as you know, the optic nerves cross completely.
>> Yes.
>> So everything the right eye sees goes to the left
hemisphere and vise versa.
>> Gunturkun devised a test where pigeons were trained
to recognize human beings in vacation photos.
Each time the birds recognized there
was a person in a picture, they were rewarded.
>> After a while, they start to understand there are pictures
with humans and there are pictures without humans.
>> But then the birds were given a harder challenge.
>> Now we can start to alter the pictures.
We cut out the head, we cut out the arm, we cut out the trunk,
and spread it across the picture.
It is like a slaughtering scene.
We take the pictures and chop them
in smaller and smaller and smaller pieces.
The left hemisphere says, OK.
I see a head.
I see eyes.
I see a nose.
That's a human.
I'm packing on it.
The right hemisphere now says, this is no human anymore.
The right hemisphere requires the correct position
of the human body to recognize the human.
So that means both hemispheres are doing an excellent job.
Both hemispheres contribute.
And both hemispheres can decide human or non-human,
but they do it with different cognitive strategies.
When pigeons are up to find food,
they have to discriminate grain from pebbles.
So that one hemisphere is really concentrating
on the tiny little details of the food,
while the other one is glancing into the environment.
And is on quick alert if an aerial predator is coming.
>> This is fundamental to survival.
And that was the moment at which I realized
this is profoundly important to all beings that
have to solve the conundrum of how to eat and stay alive.
>> McGilchrist realized that in human beings,
these two different kinds of attention played out in much
more complex ways.
>> You won't find a neurologist anywhere in the world who will
dispute that there is different kinds of attention paid
by the left and right hemisphere.
Then, very clearly, each hemisphere
must find a different world.
What would those two worlds look like?
>> McGilchrist observed that the left hemisphere gives a narrow,
sharply-focused attention to detail.
Without understanding the larger context.
It sees objects in relation to their usefulness.
It's in charge of the right hand, which
has the power to manipulate things
such as tools and technology.
But it can't make human connections.
It doesn't understand relationships, humor,
tone of voice.
Things and people are not unique and individual.
But groups that it can organize, sort,
and file in a system of rules and linear connections.
On its own, it has no sense of the whole.
Even people are seen as body parts.
The world of the left hemisphere is lifeless.
It shatters the world into an assortment of bits
without meaning.
The right hemisphere, by contrast,
sees the broad view of the world.
It is the master of the brain.
It perceives an interconnected world.
It understands relationships, body language,
facial expression, and implicit meaning.
The right hemisphere engages with life,
understands movement, story, and metaphor.
It forces how humanity fits into the whole of creation.
The divided brain gives us two types
of attention, two ways of engaging with the world.
It has made us the most powerful species on Earth.
But the left hemisphere's narrow kind of attention
reminded McGilchrist of something else, our world.
[TRAIN TRACKS]
>> I began thinking about how in public life,
everything has become more regulated, more rule-bound,
more explicit.
For the last 100 years, a way of thinking which is reductive,
mechanistic has taken us over.
It's enabled us to manipulate the world, to grab resources,
to become wealthy.
But it's also meant that we've lost the means
to feel satisfaction and fulfillment
through our place in the world.
And we created outside ourselves,
a world which, very much, looked like the interior world
of the left hemisphere.
Rigid lines of things that were rolled out
mechanically and were non-unique.
Bureaucracy is in its element.
It depends on qualities which the left hemisphere provide--
organized ability, anonymity, standardization, uniformity,
abstraction, and so on.
Systems designed to maximize utility,
there will be a loss of cohesion socially
because the left hemisphere needs control.
And there's a lack of trust and a lot of paranoia
that we need for CCTV and monitoring of all kinds.
[TYPING]
The left hemisphere is the quick and dirty one.
Because it has to make action.
It likes things to be black and white.
What do you mean there's half or ambiguity or metaphor?
I want to know the facts.
It's like this or it's that.
People think, well, the left hemisphere is surely,
the basis for our intelligence.
It's the one that does all that analysis.
But actually, this is not the case.
There's a lot of evidence that the really critical one
from a point of view of intelligence
is the right hemisphere.
Another important difference-- a very important one--
is that between fixity and flow, so things
in the left hemisphere are fixed.
Whereas in the right hemisphere, flow
is what it sees and understands.
Now, that is very profound.
That actually changes the whole nature of what life is.
Nothing is just isolated.
It is always part of a flow.
Things can only be understood in context.
When you take them out, they change.
When you grab them and put them in the spotlight of attention
and make them explicit, they change their nature.
Jokes, for example.
Sex, for example.
Religion, for example.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much, Iain.
What I want to ask you is, how do you
guard this idea as it unfolds in the next few years?
>> Well, that's a very good question.
And I'm--
>> There's something, I think, very counterintuitive,
a little bizarre, a little-- it evokes incredulity in people.
And when I first heard it, I thought that, that
sounds really strange.
Iain's saying things that other people haven't seen.
The fundamental thing he's saying
is the philosophical notion that what matters
is not what the brain hemispheres do,
but how they do it.
There are times when we're very focused, very explicit
and there are times when we're more
nuanced and implicit and contextual.
You do begin to notice it in certain places.
So the, sort of, creeping bureaucratization
that you sense, the fragmentation of knowledge,
the over-reliance on quantification,
the obsession with evidence-based policy.
And the desire for data--
the, sort of, fetishization of data, really.
And the losing touch with broader patterns of judgment
and taste and discernment.
>> Many of my McGilchrist's insights into the brain
hemispheres have come from patients who have had strokes.
[MUSIC - JURG KESSELRING]
>> Jurg Kesselring is a great neurologist.
He's a clinician, but also, a philosopher
and a great musician, as it happens.
[APPLAUSE]
>> You see how hard life is in the mountains?
>> It is very hard.
I see that.
>> You want to do something serious and then the laughing
winds.
>> Come and blow everything.
>> [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
>> Something you must go to and--
[LAUGHING]
Also, therapy's everywhere.
And over here--
>> [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
[LAUGHING]
>> [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
>> It's been fascinating going around and seeing some
of the patients that you have here.
And I remember you telling me about some cases.
You mentioned--
>> One I remember well, there was a gentleman who is
a writer.
He's writing travel books.
And one night, he woke up and felt an arm next to him.
And then he thought, well, who could that be?
Because my wife said she will stay
in Basel and another place.
So it cannot be her.
And then he turned on the light and saw this arm
and threw it out of the bed and followed it
because it was his arm.
And then he realized lying on the ground
that something must be wrong.
And he went by his own car-- with his own car
into the hospital.
>> This patient relies on her left hemisphere.
She's been asked to spread sauce over the entire pizza.
>> [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
>> What is the definition of neglect?
That people behave as if one part of their outer space
would not exist.
This part of her surroundings does not exist for her.
>> Now we change the perspective.
>> We turn it.
But I don't have any here.
>> You wanted it here?
>> Huh?
>> And here?
>> And she's surprised there was no tomato sauce anymore.
>> For people and animals, the effect of losing the right
hemisphere is the same.
>> The left hemisphere on its own is deeply deluded, in fact,
and is unaware of its deficit.
It doesn't have insight.
And it doesn't realize what it is it's missing.
>> Hi, Mr. Cohen.
Hi, Miriam.
>> Hi, doctor, how are you?
>> I'm good.
>> Six months ago, Miriam Cohen collapsed from an aneurysm.
>> Look at my eyes.
And I'm gonna put some fingers up
and you tell me how many fingers you see now.
Don't look over there.
Look at me.
Now?
>> Since then, she's been relying primarily on her left
hemisphere.
>> Now?
>> It was a fortunate thing for me that he just happened to be
working.
>> That's very strong.
>> Because-- and I thanked him later on.
I said to him, if you weren't there, I wouldn't be here.
>> One, two, three.
>> Yeah.
>> She had quite a severe case of neglect.
At the beginning, she was the same patient
who wouldn't know her own head.
Neglect's an interesting thing.
People who have strokes, particularly
in the right parietal area, the patients
will not have an awareness of the left side of their world.
>> I would start my writing not on the left hand side,
I would start it in the middle of the page.
It's not that I couldn't see it.
I could see it, but my brain wouldn't
register that it was there.
>> Open.
>> Miriam's stroke left her with a skewed sense of reality.
>> She hallucinated.
She's an accountant.
So she would see numbers everywhere.
>> She also was adamant that there was a woman sharing her
room.
>> She was there.
You never saw her.
I said why are you in my room?
This is not your room.
This is my room.
>> These are not people who are mad.
These delusions are mostly due to problems
in the right hemisphere.
>> So if anyone talks about the right side of the brain
and the left side of the brain, that is my goal in life to find
a good balance between these two ways of looking at the world
and acting upon the world.
But I'm convinced, of course, that many
of us with the two hemispheres functioning beautifully
have neglect for great parts of the world.
>> Well, one of the primary features of the left hemisphere
is that you often find this enormous capacity for denial,
this capacity to just ignore things and keep them shut out.
I think what Iain's trying to say
is that there's a certain disconnection
from the natural world gradually happening.
We're living in cities much more.
We are distracted much more.
We have more claims on our attention.
The problem is when a completely urban life shuts you off
from the ecological resources that sustain the life you have.
They're all hidden from us.
I mean, our electricity, our gas, our water,
our food sources, we don't know where they're coming from.
So there's a kind of delusion, really, at the heart
of modern urban life.
This sort of implicit understanding
that we're a part of nature is no longer a default position.
People broadly accept climate change as a global phenomenon,
that humans are causing it, that it's very serious,
that we can and should do something quickly,
and that if we don't, there'll be very serious effects.
But we live as if that knowledge was not there.
We've got to look at it from the perspective of science
and perspective of technology, from law, from culture,
from democracy, from behavior, from money.
And to do that requires a form of perception and understanding
that isn't going to come from the left hemisphere that
wants to slice and dice and execute quickly.
>> To make quick decisions, the left hemisphere relies
on abstractions, categories, and models of the world.
>> Economists have been amongst the most frequent
of my correspondents, saying you describe precisely the world
in which I operate.
>> The tendency to get fixed with models,
almost to fetishize them, has led us astray in many ways,
historically.
Versions of instrumental rationality,
reductive reasoning that we associate with the left brain.
>> Yes.
>> Taking finance through boom bust cycles where people have
failed to see what's plainly obvious in front
of their noses, that we're in potential bubbles and so forth.
The financial system was supposed
to have been based on certain models
and assumptions of 8% returns.
It was supposed to have given people
the ability to lead a certain decency of a future life.
>> The closing numbers on the markets today, at one point,
the market fell--
>> We're down by between 3% and 4.5%, generally,
across this market.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
>> Now we're down--
>> 21%
>> 43%
>> --over in Frankfurt is down by 9%.
>> Yes, we can certainly think of the crisis, in some measure,
as being traceable to an excessive reliance on certain
forms of modeling, on algorithms which was used to price
mortgage-backed securities and the subprime portions,
most significantly.
>> Everyone thought, yeah, well, I'm such a brilliant at this
market.
It keeps going up--
until it doesn't, until one day you wake up
and people are jumping out of windows.
We see traders celebrating with 1,000-pound bottles
of champagne.
And on the other side of that exact trade,
there are people committing suicide.
That clarifies the mind.
When you suddenly think, hang on,
this is not just an electronic platform
which spikes on a chart.
There's a global, real consequence
to any action that is done in any market.
I think it's so fundamentally wrong.
At 2 o'clock in the morning, I woke up and I said to my wife,
I'm not doing this.
I cannot do this.
We're serving a system that we cannot control.
You're not cleverer than the market.
It's the market that's clever.
>> When mortgage holders in Orange County, California,
start defaulting on their mortgages,
and then all of a sudden, the whole nation of Iceland goes
bust.
So this level of intense correlation
is something we need to be deeply aware of
and try to come up with some new, more sustainable paradigms
of how we do finance.
>> Economics detached from a robust,
resourceful picture of human well-being is very dangerous.
That's what we're living with in large parts of the globe.
We seem to take it as absolutely self-evident
that unlimited material growth is
the best thing we can hope for.
And I think the biggest single task is thinking again
through that question of growth and why
it's so obvious a target and why some kinds of growth
are, of course, privileged over the notion
of the growth of real human well-being and understanding.
>> We've become terrifically clever at technical matters.
But technical matters are only interesting if they
can be there in the service of a long-term vision.
>> If our society acts as if the left hemisphere is in control,
how would the right hemisphere view the world?
One scientist reveals her first-hand experience.
>> Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist and someone
who's also experienced a stroke.
>> But on the morning of December 10, 1996,
I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own.
A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain.
And in the course of four hours, I
watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability
to process all information.
Then I realized, oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke.
I'm having a stroke.
And then the next thing my brain says to me is, wow,
this is so cool.
[LAUGHTER]
This is so cool.
How many brain scientists have the opportunity
to study their own brain from the inside out?
Dr. McGilchrist.
>> Hey.
>> What an honor.
Thank you.
>> Real good to see you.
>> I'll give you a little tour.
>> Thank you very much.
>> So this is, uh-- well, this is my main space.
I do the stained glass brains.
And this is my cosmic brain.
This is actually right hemisphere, left hemisphere.
>> OK.
>> It's a piece called "Neural Processing."
And I've just started limestone carving.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> And then I did a little brain.
>> Right.
>> And they're just going to get bigger and bigger.
I have all kinds.
>> That sounds great.
>> Big ones, little ones, real ones.
I just think the brain is totally cool.
>> Mm-hmm.
Oh, right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> And then right here is an arteriovenous malformation,
which was where mine was when it blew.
[SIREN SOUNDING]
[EMERGENCY RADIO CHATTER]
On the morning of the stroke, I ended up in the hospital.
And I wake up later that afternoon,
and everybody else is freaking out because I'm drooling
and I'm paralyzed.
I didn't have language for five weeks.
I had a completely silent mind, no language whatsoever.
Yeah, my mom was my best friend.
And of course, she ended up rearing me twice.
I wasn't that woman I had been anymore.
She died.
The woman I had been died that day, no question.
No question.
I didn't have her friends.
I didn't have her knowledge.
I didn't have anything in common with her,
other than I was going to be in this body.
Mom would take me to the store.
People are rushing to buy all these products,
bombarding the sensory systems.
Too much stimulation.
I always say to people who have lost the left brain
and they're open to the big picture right hemisphere,
they can read people like nobody can.
Truthtelling, the relationship between tone of voice
and facial expression and body expression, these people
should be hired by police departments and anybody who
really needs a good lie detection.
Because it's obvious.
>> What can it be like?
Can you try and give us some idea
of what it's like to think and to know you're thinking
but not to have words?
Is that very frustrating?
>> There's zero frustration.
I think the frustration comes from the left brain not
being able to express itself.
>> Yeah.
>> I didn't have that.
>> You didn't really feel that.
>> I felt none of that.
It was wonderful.
And the state of blissfulness feels like awe.
My experience became the energy in the space between us.
>> Right
>> It wasn't about me and you.
It was about the experience of all of us.
>> Right.
>> I think you and I have a whole lot in common.
I think the difference is significant, though.
But I think that's because I'm experiential.
I agree with you completely that our society has completely
shifted and skewed to the left.
And with that, comes the left hemisphere value structure.
Yeah, I agree with you completely.
>> It's too simple to be able to just say what
she's experiencing is the activity of the right
hemisphere.
I think it's more complex than that.
But one cannot deny is that that is her experience.
And you know, she's done fantastic work
on the basis of it.
>> Strokes are one way to learn about the right hemisphere.
But there is a time of life when we are all experts.
>> So, hey!
They don't need microphones.
>> [LAUGHS]
Hi, guys.
Yeah!
>> Colwyn Trevarthen, and he's done important research
on childhood development in terms of their hemispheric
activity.
Tell me more about what happens in terms of hemisphere shift
in the way in which we bring up our children.
>> There's a complementarity.
>> Absolutely.
>> They work together.
>> Yes.
>> But there are periods when one hemisphere is growing more
rapidly and taking more responsibility for controlling
behavior.
And in the first couple of years,
the right hemisphere is definitely more active.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> And enjoying imitation and games right from immediately
after birth.
>> Yes.
>> Babies have a great interest in sharing rituals,
little peculiar things like nursery songs and clever,
clappy, handy action games.
>> [LAUGHS]
>> Children make music and dance long before they can speak.
They communicate through body language, music, and rhythm.
>> Musicality is the innate need,
the urge for human beings to move in expressive ways.
And it can be dance.
It can be music.
It can be poetry.
It can be anything.
And that's what art is, art is the cultivation of play.
>> Hello.
>> Do you like this place?
>> It's our nursery.
>> What's the most fun thing about it?
Right.
>> Well, there's been a revolution in psychology.
It's now clear that everything is embodied in movement,
movement and time have been neglected by people
concentrating on information.
The difference between that and formal schooling
is that formal schooling assumes that they
have a lot of knowledge to learn and they have
to be taught by skilled adults.
>> Yes.
[BELL RINGING]
>> As children get older, their left hemisphere matures.
It starts showing its talent for spoken and written language.
The school curriculum moves away from areas where
the right hemisphere excels.
>> There is a kind of westernization or, as he would
put it, a left hemispherization of the way we approach
the world, the development of a kind of technical
problem-solving attitude to our lives, certainly in education.
Almost everybody on the planet now
goes to the same kind of school.
And your life trajectory is determined by how good you
are at that kind of learning.
The more embodied the subjects of the school curriculum--
physical education, drama-- the lower
down the hierarchy of esteem it is,
you can drop them as early as you like.
They get less time in the curriculum.
So this imbalance is absolutely institutional.
It's in the bone marrow of our educational system.
>> Look around, and many of the models we habitually use
in education, many of the models that often the government
promotes in education are mechanistic, narrowing,
and dull.
They buy into all the problems that we see.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
>> So this is a person who's giving off light.
And do all people give off light or just this person?
>> It's like, like this--
>> It's like the personality.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So some people--
We need people to think rigorously, to be literate,
to be able to use models, to be careful and articulate
and lucid.
My concern is that, far from asking too much,
we ask too little of our children.
Far too often education is about ingesting information,
not about learning how to think independently and critically
and on many different levels at once.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
>> In universities, the left hemisphere's way of thinking
becomes even more dominant.
As students specialize in narrow fields,
theories and categories become important.
>> It's sad because also the humanities, at some level,
have been corrupted.
When one reads a piece of literature,
it's not experienced in terms of what can it
teach us about the universal experience of being
a human being.
Rather, it's how can it be seen in the context
of some narrow vision of identity politics.
In the Academy, there's a lot of fuss over trigger words
and everyone warring over language.
>> What certainly would not happen is that things would be
calm.
Because the left hemisphere is quite emotional.
And one emotion that lateralizes particularly clearly is anger.
And it lateralizes to the left, to discourse
in public would become marked by anger and aggression.
[YELLING]
>> Boo!
Boo!
>> Decency!
Decency!
>> I think it is a in certainly Western society to try
and solve problems by regulation rather than by culture.
[CHANTING]
>> The questions that are around free speech in universities
and offense and all these questions.
[CHANTING]
>> The trouble is that when you start legislating about it
and try to control it, you produce higher levels,
not lower levels of anxiety, deeper division.
And you park the fundamental question,
which is how do you evolve a culture in which people
speak with one another patiently and respectfully?
You can't legislate that into existence.
>> The monologue of the claimers who say,
world is like this and only like this, this reductionism,
that is a real danger for our world.
And we have to cultivate the dialogue again and dialogue
with different people, different cultures, and not just
claiming I'm the knowledge I have--
I know everything.
>> But in the world of the arts, students rely more on the right
hemisphere to convey multilayered and implicit
meaning.
>> My darling, I know what's keeping you here.
You must get a grip on yourself.
You're a little intoxicated right now.
You need to clear your head.
>> Be my friend.
Let me go.
>> Has it gone that far?
>> It's as if she's calling me to her side.
Don't you see?
This could be the making of me.
>> In the brain, memorized lines are worked on by the left
hemisphere.
>> Sane, magnificent, wonderful man!
>> But how they are expressed, the tone and gestures,
is the preserve of the right hemisphere.
>> I've never been in love.
I've never experienced that young love, blissful,
dreamlike, romantic, all-embracing love,
the only love that can bring about true happiness.
>> What did we talk about yesterday?
We talked about the fact that like lots of men,
he wants permission.
>> To leave.
Iain, can you explain the left and right side of the brain?
>> Um, there are versions of the world in which we are all
living.
We're not aware of it because we're bringing them
together all the time.
But in one, the world in which I believe we've got trapped
is the idea of a world of things which are
knowable and precise and clear.
But this isn't at all how the world is.
According to the right hemisphere, everything,
everything is connected to everything else.
It's all about the relationships.
Something completely electrifying
was happening in this room, which
I could feel very strongly, which
emerges from the implicit.
But all art is like this, that the power of it
lies in the bits that are not explicit.
>> What I find reassuring is that it's not necessarily
knowable.
>> Actually, it's necessarily not knowable.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
The reason we have theatre, poetry, we have music,
we have religious ritual, all these things are ways of taking
us beyond the everyday language that we're pinned down by.
And it's breaking out of that.
And only things like really powerfully performed art,
you know, these things can take us there.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
[KNOCKING]
[LAUGHTER]
>> Doctor!
Doctor!
>> Hello.
>> Are you the brain specialist?
>> No, I am not the brain specialist.
No, no, I am not.
Yes!
Yes, I am!
[LAUGHTER]
>> My brain hurts.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Of course, this museum contains the skeleton
of a very, very large man, taller even than you, John.
And--
>> How tall was he?
>> He's thought to have been the tallest man who ever lived.
But here we've got an interesting specimen.
>> Ah.
>> This is Charles Babbage's brain.
>> No, the computer guy?
>> The computer guy, the guy who is credited with inventing
the first computing machine.
It was thought interesting to find out what
a genius' brain looked like.
The answer is a little disappointing.
It's rather like mine and yours.
>> [LAUGHS]
>> John, I mean, I never thought in my wildest dreams that
I'd be sitting in a room in London surrounded by brains
talking to you.
Who knew?
But tell me, how did this come about?
>> You won't believe it.
A Monty Python meeting.
>> Right.
>> Seriously.
We had a lunch in an Italian restaurant in Soho.
And at the end, Terry Gilliam suddenly
started going on about your book.
>> Right.
>> And I think he's such a fool.
>> [LAUGHS]
>> Most of my education was all to do with the left hemisphere.
You know?
>> Yes.
>> I got into Cambridge on science, then I did law.
And that's how I was taught to think.
It's been from this very logical, cold-blooded way
of thinking into something that is hugely more intuitive.
And this obviously came because I discovered
by accident at Cambridge that I could write
stuff that made people laugh.
[LAUGHTER]
I began to see that the process that I used when I was writing
stuff like this was quite different from the process
that I used if I was trying to understand a legal case.
They seem quite different ways of operating.
I think sometimes you have something
that is so completely silly that it's almost meaningless.
I can think of things in Monty Python jokes
that you simply are unable to explain.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHTER]
[THUD]
And since then, I've been very much more intuitive and very
much this sort of logical linguistic in my approach
to life and much happier as a result.
Well, this is sort of an "Alas, Poor Yorick" moment.
This head has clearly seen better days.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Humor is a wonderful tool for eliminating idiocy.
>> Yes, I think that's exactly why you restore our sanity.
>> Well, because--
>> You take the mickey of this kind of thinking.
>> Yes, and it's a sense of proportion, as you say.
Because a sense of humor is a sense of proportion.
Well, I've been studying the DNA ideas for some time.
And I've come to certain conclusions
based on all the research I've done.
For example, this gene just here,
this is the gene that determines whether you prefer raspberries
or strawberries.
>> Ah, yes.
>> You know?
>> Indeed.
>> Now this gene here is terribly interesting.
If you have that gene, then you're
likely to enjoy Nicolas Cage films.
>> Huh, right.
>> So that's another mystery here.
And this one here, which is very strong for you,
is someone who spent 20 years writing a book.
>> I wish I didn't have that gene.
Because--
>> Because you could get on with your life.
>> I could get on with a life, yes.
[LAUGHING]
Can we do something about it, please?
[LAUGHS]
>> If our society is relying too much on the left hemisphere,
how have past civilizations perceived their world?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> When we began to look at the main movements in the history
of ideas, a person emerged which was quite extraordinary
and so much more interesting than I could possibly have
imagined.
What I could see was that three times in the West,
there had been a period of flourishing of a civilization--
Athens in the 6th century BC, the beginning of the empire
in Rome, then once again in the early Renaissance--
and that this civilization, in each three cases,
showed a marvelous balance of right hemisphere
and left hemisphere modes of thinking.
But in each case, it ended up with a movement
further and further towards that of the left hemisphere,
after which the civilization collapsed.
>> In ancient Greece and Rome, statues and paintings portrayed
individuals, people with character.
But as the Roman Empire declined,
subjects often faced forward without emotion.
Individual character gave way to expressions
of power and status.
>> So one of the things that distinguishes the right
hemisphere is the concept of depth.
It's a very important one, philosophically speaking.
And one can think in quite concrete terms
of depth in space, depth in time, and depth of emotion.
Here we've got a crucifixion scene
in the middle of the 14th century.
There is no depth to this picture.
There is no landscape that's situated
in the natural world and nothing to situate it historically.
And it's not a criticism of it to say
that it doesn't have such depth or any relationship
to the world around.
>> But during the Renaissance, art changes,
suggesting a shift in the mind.
>> When we come forward here to this "Adoration of the Kings"
in 1500, the building work here obeys the laws of perspective
and at the same time gives us a sense of temporal perspective,
that this event is taking place at some point in the past,
hence the ruin.
You will only get that perspective
from the right hemisphere take on the world.
It's a mistake to think of the arts or the sciences
as being one hemisphere or the other.
A Renaissance man was somebody who was learned and experienced
in many aspects of knowledge.
What you see is this broad perspective on life in which
science and art came together.
They weren't separate, as they so often are today.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> If you go from hemisphere to cultural history,
it will feel incongruous and like a non sequitur.
It won't feel like it makes sense.
But remember, hemisphere is really
shorthand for a way of seeing the world.
And what he's arguing is that of these two broad patterns
of perception, two broad ways of viewing the world,
historically, you see them in a kind of battle for supremacy.
>> One of the most daring maneuvers of the left
hemisphere is the Industrial Revolution.
We began a full-scale onslaught on the natural world,
that we were the masters and we could control and exploit
mere material, as we saw the natural world as something
there for us to utilize.
We saw machines.
We saw a landscape that was increasingly
molded by our efforts to slice through it with railway lines,
to carve tunnels, to put our stamp on nature.
>> The Industrial Revolution also changed how artists saw
the world.
In the early 20th century, modern art frequently
portrayed the world in terms of fragments, cubes, and geometric
shapes.
>> Artists always think that they can escape painting
in the spirit of the age.
But their very rebellion betrays the culture out
of which they came.
Art doesn't come out of thin air.
It comes out of a culture.
I think there's something different about the world
that we have entered in the last 100 years.
What we find is that various kinds
of ways of looking at the world that occur to people who
have damage in the right hemisphere
start to become fashionable.
This is absolutely fascinating.
As we come forward into the 20th century,
it reflected outwards onto the world aspects
of the left hemisphere with cities
that were laid out on grids which were full of structures
that were rectilinear, the left hemisphere way of thinking,
of being able to use things.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> McGilchrist's theory of the brain and Western civilization
attracts attention from all over the world.
Some leading scientists welcome his controversial theory.
>> So the distinctions that Iain is playing with between these
two modes of knowing, modes of experiencing that he associates
with the two hemispheres, that distinction makes a lot
of sense to me.
And I think it's extremely important in the modern world.
>> There aren't that many academics who can span,
who have that broad span that can go from very authoritative
analysis of scientific data through to the big picture
and even on into spirituality.
>> But among others in the scientific community,
there is serious resistance to the link between the brain
and society.
>> You talk about this division as if it has a purpose.
But that's not how things work.
It exists as a consequence.
>> It's just your theory that there isn't a purpose.
You don't know that there's no purpose.
It's an assumption of science that there is no purpose.
>> This book is taking a selected set of neuroscience
findings and trying to relate them to the clinical
psychiatric experience, telling a story that tries to mesh
those two things.
I'm not comfortable with that just because I'm
one of the guys committed to actually finding out what
these patients are, how they behave.
And I don't have the freedom to just go off
on a larger metaphor.
I think here's how you think about it.
The brain is as mechanical as clockwork,
a famous English physicist said that.
Let's just get over that.
That's the way it is.
>> So we life scientists, we read the papers,
come up with a working hypothesis that is one step
ahead of what we know, but not two steps.
Two steps are punished.
So I think there are two options.
One option is in 30 years, it could
be the Bible of neuroscientists or it could be forgotten.
I think there is nothing in between.
>> Stepping away from this debate,
McGilchrist seeks a different kind of evidence.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Scientists have argued that the human brain has
been the same machine throughout history
and that every major civilization was
built by people with the same kind of brain
and the same perception of reality.
But McGilchrist believes that the brain shapes
and is shaped by human culture.
And how do other cultures view the world?
It is a question that is studied at Harvard University.
>> A lot of psychologists have the strong intuition that what
they study is something deep.
It's something about human nature.
It's something fundamental to how human brains operate.
When neuroscientists measure the brain,
they think they're seeing a piece that's
constructed by human genes that's human nature.
But actually, our brains are heavily
influenced by the environments.
And our environments are heavily culturally constructed,
our social relationships, the physical environments
we operate in.
96% of psychological studies are done with Westerners.
And most of those are actually American undergraduates,
just because of the bulk of psychology
being done in the US.
So this really gives us a biased picture of human psychology.
And we don't know to what degree those things extend
to other members of the species.
>> Henrich and his colleagues decided to take
their psychology tests to the rest of the world,
people in Tahiti and the Amazon.
One of the tests features an optical illusion.
Which line is longer?
They are both the same.
>> Westerners have the biggest illusion.
And hunter gatherers don't actually see the illusion.
So they accurately see the two lines.
We live in a world of right angles,
so our brains get really good at converting
that presence of right angles in our environment
and using that to create a spatial understanding
in our brains.
But in the world of hunter gatherers,
there might not be any right angles.
So their brains are calibrated more accurately.
So it's a basic difference across human societies
as our minds adapt to the culturally constructed world
that we live in.
>> [SPEAKING CHINESE]
>> At Queen's University in Canada,
research is being done on how Asian and Western minds
perceive the world differently.
>> I grew up in China.
I spent first 20 some years there.
It was not hard for me to get interested in culture
because my own background.
People think differently, depending
on their cultural background.
Compared to North Americans, East Asians
are more sensitive to the context.
They attend more to the context.
When we show people the pictures of panda, monkey, banana,
Chinese actually are more likely to put monkey and the banana
together because monkeys like banana.
So they focus on that relationship.
[SPEAKING CHINESE]
Next, [INAUDIBLE] is more linear?
>> I would say it's the dragonfly and the bee.
>> Why?
>> Because they're both flying insects.
>> OK.
In traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings,
you do see less focus on the individual person.
You barely see the face.
You see the overall scenes.
You see mountains.
You see trees, flowers.
The person actually is minimized.
>> People get very uncomfortable with the idea that culture
produces biological differences.
Because normally in our minds, we
separate biology and culture.
So it certainly gives you an appreciation
the degree to which things you take
to be just how the world works or how people are
is not the case.
It's a peculiarity of this certain cultural trajectory
that you happened to be born into.
>> Some cultures with a more balanced way of seeing reality
may live within Western society.
>> We know this as [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
Probably the best translation would be
"an inlet into the mountains."
The way we look at the world inside the Blackfoot mind,
what you would see is a panoramic view.
>> Yeah.
>> How do we fit in into this whole picture?
And kind of drawing on some of the work
you've done, hey, that's very--
that's very right sided, right brain thinking,
looking at this big picture how we fit in.
>> Yes.
>> But at the same time, nothing is ever at a standstill.
That's what we refer to as that flux.
>> Everything is related--
physicists say this-- to everything else.
And is that also in the wisdom and the culture
of First Nation people?
>> If you hear Native prayers, they will talk about "all
my relations."
So when they're talking about all my relations,
they're not talking about human relations,
they're talking about these trees.
They're talking about the water.
>> Yes.
>> They're talking about the rocks, those birds out there.
All those animals, they're all my relations.
>> Yes, yes.
>> See?
>> Yes.
>> And that's where we fit ourselves into that relational
network.
>> Does that suggest, as it does to me,
that rocks and lakes and streams and waterfalls have a life.
They're not just sort of things.
>> They're all animate.
>> Yes.
>> In our way of thinking, in fact, in Blackfoot,
there is no word for inanimate.
So that's the reason why our elders always come out and say,
this is my church.
>> Yes.
Yeah.
>> I am the environment.
>> Yes.
>> I am the environment.
>> This is me.
>> Yeah.
This is me.
>> That's actually wonderful.
>> If there are these competing forms of perception and there
are mechanisms culturally that make them compete and play out
and make one usurp the other, and I think he argued that
pretty coherently, then we should act on it.
You know, we should figure out what to do about it.
>> The question is whether we as persons have agency and are
capable to do something and whether we can translate that
into society.
>> Here's the area where you had the bleeding in the brain.
There's no more blood there.
And we'll check the aneurysm to make sure nothing's coming
back.
>> OK.
There's been a big change.
I believe that you have to want to get better.
It's very important that in your mind
you have to say I'm gonna get back there
to where I was before.
I want to do everything I was doing before
and I'm going to do it no matter what I need to do.
>> This is my neuroplastic attitude.
We are not just the victims of our flattened world
and the dogmas that some people put upon us.
But we can do something else.
And our patients are the best teachers in this respect.
That in spite of deficits, we can change something.
And this is what we want to do.
>> Like you, I appreciate that humanity is enormously
resourceful.
And there must have been times in history
when we could not have foreseen what was coming in terms
of a shift in the ideas.
And we need that shift now.
>> Maybe it's asking too much of Iain's work to say just solve
the problem for us, you know?
What he can do is point towards the direction of the solution.
If we can get better at seeing things
more holistically, more specifically, more in context,
if we can get better at systematically resisting
attempts to turn things into algorithm,
to always measure, to always quantify,
if we can get better and more robust at doing that,
the world will begin to steer towards a better place.
>> We need to take advantage of other systems of knowledge.
We need to have a balance.
If we do that, we will have--
we will be around as a species for a long time.
>> Well, then let us hope.
Let us hope.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> I want my ideas to be picked up by other people
and internalized so that they use them as a driver to look
at the world in a different way.
Things that were anciently known,
they were embodied in myths, in drama,
in poetry, the way of thinking that
was kept for the kind of knowledge
that logic can't reach, our way of thinking, feeling and being.
Einstein said the rational mind is a faithful servant,
but the intuitive mind is a precious gift.
And we live in a world which honors the servant
but has forgotten the gift.
We do need a paradigm shift.
Because it's not about little things here and there.
It's about the whole way we conceive what a human being is,
what the world is, and what our relationship with it is.
Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other.
It's such a simple thing, but it's so deep.
And I found it applies to many, many things in life.
Really what we're on this planet to do
is to give attention to that other.
It can be other people, but it can also
be what until very recently was the other that we were all
surrounded by all the time, which
was the natural world, which is our home, which
is this completely amazing, beautiful, staggeringly
expressive gift.
[MUSIC PLAYING]