The Auron MacIntyre Show - How Modernity Rewires Your Brain ｜ Dr. Iain McGilchrist

00:00:00.240 Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great

00:00:04.260 guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. McGilchrist

00:00:09.920 over in the UK during Jordan Peterson's conference that he was holding there. Actually, we were

00:00:15.660 introduced by Rob Dreher, funnily enough. At that time, I did not have a grasp of Mr.

00:00:21.120 McGilchrist's work, but I have dove into it and found it very interesting. And I'm excited to

00:00:25.680 talk to him about that today. So joining me is Dr. Ian McGilchrist. He is, among many things,

00:00:32.340 a philosopher, a neuroscientist, a biologist, a psychologist, all kinds of impressive accolades.

00:00:38.420 Thank you so much for joining me, sir.

00:00:40.920 That was a great pleasure, Ron. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.

00:00:45.800 Absolutely. So as I said, you've written a number of books. Master and His Emissary might be the one

00:00:51.960 most people are most familiar with, but you also have philosophical tomes, many different disciplines

00:00:57.980 all coming together. And that's what I found so interesting when exploring your work. And it all

00:01:03.940 builds, I think, at some level on your understanding of the human mind and the way that it works.

00:01:11.100 And so perhaps it would be best for people who are unfamiliar with your work to lay out kind of

00:01:15.940 your basic thesis on the different hemispheres of the brain and why so many people have gotten

00:01:22.100 this wrong and kind of the pop science understanding that is circulated around.

00:01:28.520 Yes. Okay. When I started researching it, I was told in no uncertain terms by those who had my best

00:01:39.060 interest at heart to leave the subject alone, because it was considered toxic pop psychology.

00:01:45.940 And indeed, most of the things that did go into the

00:01:50.420 Vox Pop back in the 60s, 70s and 80s about hemisphere difference were wrong.

00:01:56.820 And why were they wrong? And how on earth did people get excited about this around that time? Well,

00:02:02.660 I think the reason they got excited about it was that there was a life-saving operation

00:02:10.340 called commiserotomy, which is the surgical division of the corpus callosum, the band of

00:02:16.340 fibers at the base of the brain that unites the two brain hemispheres. And for people who had

00:02:22.740 intractable epilepsy, cutting this connection between the two hemispheres meant that, if you like,

00:02:29.060 the electrical storm couldn't take over the entire brain. And so this was very important for those

00:02:36.500 who suffered in this way. But it gave psychologists a marvellous opportunity to examine one hemisphere

00:02:44.100 at a time. I mean, I should perhaps just say for those of you who are not spending your days gazing at

00:02:50.420 brains, that they look a bit like a walnut with these two halves and there's this big divide down the

00:02:57.140 middle. So they were able to examine them and they came up with some stuff you've probably heard. The

00:03:06.340 left hemisphere is verbal and rational and dependable, a little bit boring, but at least you've got

00:03:13.380 something that's got wisdom and insight and all that. Whereas the right hemisphere is a bit sort of

00:03:20.260 airy fairy and away with the various painting pictures and being quite emotional in a not very

00:03:29.780 dependable way. I mean, I will explain shortly that all of that is completely wrong. In fact,

00:03:36.020 it's almost the inverse of the truth. The right hemisphere, as I will explain, is far more dependable,

00:03:42.660 um, far more stable, uh, and the left hemisphere is prone to emotional outbursts of a very, um,

00:03:52.500 narcissistic kind. It, uh, it's prone actually to, to anger and, and, uh, to disgust and self-righteousness and

00:04:01.540 emotions of that kind. So, um, um, why did I get interested in it? I was, I was, uh, uh, a lecturer in,

00:04:14.260 uh, in, in, in, in literature at Oxford. Um, my main interests have always been philosophy, but

00:04:21.300 I decided to study literature for reasons I don't need to go into now. But, um, I was soon,

00:04:26.900 uh, after I graduated, I got a fellowship to, uh, a college called All Souls at Oxford,

00:04:33.220 which, uh, if you get this, uh, fellowship, you get seven years to do anything you like,

00:04:39.220 and nobody asks you questions or need to report or anything. You just do what you need to do with

00:04:45.140 total intellectual freedom. And, um, I wanted to explore why the whole business of examining

00:04:51.220 literature was unsatisfactory because I did feel it was that in a way we were destroying the very

00:04:57.940 things we were trying to find meaning in. Um, and, and I, I thought this was, uh, to cut a long story

00:05:06.740 short because what we did was we took something that was in fact embodied. It wasn't an abstract

00:05:14.100 statement. It was something that physically affected you like a piece of music when you read it. Um, uh,

00:05:20.900 you took it out of its context. So when you analyzed it and said, well, it really means this,

00:05:26.980 you were left with what really, but that's almost nothing. I mean, it's like, I sometimes use the

00:05:32.020 example of the great poems that Hardy wrote at the end of his, towards the end of his life,

00:05:37.700 after his wife's death. And you say, well, what are they about? Well, he says, it's very hard when

00:05:43.700 somebody you love dies. Well, what's all the fuss about? I think I could hear that down in the pub any

00:05:50.180 evening. Um, whereas in fact, it's the exact expression, the whole context of the thing that

00:05:55.620 makes it meaningful. And the other thing was that we turned what was individual and unique into

00:06:01.140 something that was general in nature, generalized and abstract. Now there is a reason for going into

00:06:07.540 that because I think it will illuminate something about hemisphere difference. So I decided that, um,

00:06:14.740 there was a problem, uh, which the philosophers used to call the mind body problem, probably still

00:06:19.860 do. Um, although in my view, it's only a problem if you misunderstand the relationship between the

00:06:26.420 mind and the body. Um, and I thought the thing to do was actually, uh, the philosophers didn't cut

00:06:33.860 the mustard. I went to their seminars and really at the end of it, they were just too abstract. And, uh,

00:06:40.180 I wanted to do it in a more embodied way. Uh, and so I thought I ought to become a doctor. And, uh,

00:06:47.540 that's what I did. I, I trained rather late, 10 years older than most people, uh, as a physician,

00:06:54.340 and then specialized in neuropsychiatry, the area of overlap between neurology and psychiatry.

00:07:00.260 And while I was training, I noticed a few things that just set me thinking. One is,

00:07:04.980 okay, it's obvious the brain is divided in this way, but why? I mean, just often think about it.

00:07:12.420 The brain is there to make connections. It's whole power is making connections with

00:07:16.580 billions of neurons. Why make a great big divide down the middle of it? And we're not the only ones

00:07:22.580 who have these divided brains. All creatures that have brains have evolved with this division.

00:07:29.620 And so I thought, well, why is that? And why is the brain asymmetrical in function and structure?

00:07:36.100 And why is the corpus callosum, this band of fibers that only 2% of neurons actually cross?

00:07:43.220 Why is it a lot of the time sending messages to the other hemisphere saying,

00:07:47.380 keep out of this, I'm dealing with it. So the story that I was inheriting at the time I was training

00:07:53.780 was that all that bad pop psychology was wrong. And it was wrong. But it was assumed that that meant

00:08:00.660 that there were no differences. But that's a complete non sequitur. Just because you haven't

00:08:05.380 found the right differences doesn't mean there aren't any differences. It would be illogical for

00:08:10.100 there not to be differences, given the things I've just mentioned. And so I set about researching what

00:08:17.140 those differences were, and why they had come about. And I think, again, people may well have

00:08:25.300 heard me say these things, but I need to say them again. It seems that the division of the brain,

00:08:33.220 and of all brains, of all creatures, seems to stem from the difficulty of paying two kinds of attention

00:08:40.420 to the world at once, both of them profoundly important, but quite contradictory in nature.

00:08:47.460 What are those? Well, the first is the attention that you need to use to get something to eat,

00:08:53.780 to manipulate as a tool, picking up a trig to build a nest, whatever it might be. You've got to

00:09:01.220 have precisely targeted attention to something that you're already quite clear in your own mind about

00:09:06.500 what it is, and you just want to guess it and grab it. And that is so important, obviously, because

00:09:12.820 without it, we would starve, all of us. Well, perhaps not now in 2026. But generally speaking,

00:09:20.180 creatures will starve if they can't bring this attention to bear. But it's not enough to have that

00:09:26.180 attention. In fact, it's fatal if you only have that attention, because while you're getting your

00:09:31.140 lands, you become some other creatures, because you're not looking out for the predator. You're

00:09:36.100 not looking out for the interests of your mate and your offspring. So you need to juggle two quite

00:09:41.700 different types of attention. One precise, narrow beam targeted on something you want to grab,

00:09:48.180 and the other broad, sustained, open and vigilant looking for everything else. And when I say everything

00:09:55.220 else, I really mean the vast majority of everything that we experience. That attentional beam in the

00:10:04.100 left hemisphere is really about three degrees of the 360 degree arc. And the rest is the job of the

00:10:12.820 right hemisphere. So they have different roles, and they look at things differently. And when you attend to

00:10:19.780 things differently, they change their nature. So that if you think that everything is a machine,

00:10:27.300 then you start to look for the mechanical aspects. And then you think, oh, that's good.

00:10:32.660 That just confirms that I was right, that it is a machine. So next time, you're even more likely to

00:10:39.540 look at things in that mechanistic reductive way. And it was this that explains why people had got it wrong

00:10:46.500 about the hemispheres back in the, say, 70s and 80s. They'd ask the question you'd ask of a machine.

00:10:52.900 They just assumed the brain is a mechanism, a set of mechanisms, a machine. And the question you ask

00:10:58.740 of a machine is, what does it do? You know, is it a photocopier? Is it a dishwasher? What's it doing?

00:11:04.180 And they found that in the end, after they'd researched it enough, that each hemisphere was

00:11:08.420 involved in absolutely everything. So there's really nothing that you do that the two hemispheres don't

00:11:14.660 contribute to. But it was wrong to conclude that, therefore, that was the end of the story.

00:11:20.740 Because you ought to have asked a different question, a question you'd ask of part of a

00:11:25.060 person. I'm sorry, a brain is part of a person, a very important part. In what way does it do this?

00:11:32.100 To what end does it do it? With what values? What is it concerned about? Because it will produce a quite

00:11:38.020 different experiential world. So in brief, what are those two experiential worlds like? In the left

00:11:45.380 hemisphere, you see things that you already know what they are, and you know you want to get them.

00:11:51.380 They're fixed, they're isolated, they're in a way fragmentary, they're decontextualized,

00:11:58.660 and they're examples of a kind. It's a seed, it's another rabbit, it's whatever it is that you're

00:12:03.540 interested in. You don't see the unique, you don't see how it fits into the context, and frankly,

00:12:08.980 it has no meaning, except if it can give you food or power, basically power to manipulate.

00:12:17.460 Meanwhile, the right hemisphere is seeing a completely different world. It's seeing a world

00:12:21.940 in which nothing is ever fully certain. It always might be something different, that our prejudices

00:12:29.380 and our assumptions are quick and dirty, I know what that is, I'm going to get it,

00:12:34.340 attitude has prevented us from seeing. It doesn't mean that we don't know anything, it just means that

00:12:41.060 we're never fully certain and determined that something is, and definitely right about it.

00:12:51.300 That world is also flowing, and changing, and multiply interconnected. There's nothing that's

00:12:57.380 isolated and fragmentary. Everything takes its nature from a seamless web in which it takes part,

00:13:05.220 and I think this is a very important point, certainly very important all my life really,

00:13:13.940 literature, philosophy, and science, that context changes everything. So the fragmenting way of thinking,

00:13:24.420 in which you take things apart and say, well, it's one of those, and two of those, and that's got it.

00:13:30.100 It's not really seeing what those things are, because they only are what they are in a context.

00:13:36.020 In a different context, they would actually be different. And yeah, I sometimes use the slightly

00:13:41.380 amusing example of cereal packets in America, where there are four sizes. There's jumbo,

00:13:48.180 which means very large, and there's economy, which means large, and there's family, which means medium,

00:13:56.420 and finally, there's large, which means small. In that context, the word has shifted its meaning

00:14:02.340 through 180 degrees. Everything we look at, we need to remember that the context changes it.

00:14:09.220 So when people quote a remark out of context, they may have completely misrepresented what

00:14:15.300 was intended. They may have, in fact, totally betrayed it. They may have made large, small,

00:14:20.740 and small, large. So all that is very important. And it also sees the world as made up actually of

00:14:28.180 unique things. Of course, it can group them together, the right hemisphere, but it doesn't,

00:14:33.460 in grouping them lose the sense that, all the same, they are individual and unique, as

00:14:41.940 I'm trying to think who it was now, actually, who said, you know, two blades of grass are never the

00:14:47.940 same. So there we are. So that's the sort of difference. And I'm just finishing, don't worry. But

00:14:58.740 one of the differences that sounds least exciting, but is terribly important,

00:15:05.380 is that the right hemisphere sees what is implicit. And frankly, this is everything that matters.

00:15:13.460 So if you make the things that give us pleasure, meaning, fulfillment in life,

00:15:21.700 if you make them fully explicit, you destroy their power. And this is what I was referring to when I

00:15:28.660 say you try and make a poem explicit, you've lost it. But everything that really matters to us,

00:15:34.820 our sense of love, sex itself, which, you know, you can make it explicit, but it changes its nature,

00:15:44.980 it becomes something quite different from if it's experienced as part of a loving relationship,

00:15:51.860 friendship, friendship, religious faith, myths, narratives, poetry, architecture, music, all these

00:16:01.140 things can't be reduced to a little formula. If you try to do so, you've travestied them and changed

00:16:07.300 their nature. So the right hemisphere is holding that very important element that gives us the sense of

00:16:13.540 connection, the sense of context and what is implicit. And it also sees the thing as it comes into being

00:16:21.780 for us. I believe that everything we experience is not just sort of fixed and out there, and it's just

00:16:27.540 a matter of contacting it, but that it comes into being anew every time it is experienced. I mean,

00:16:34.020 this is very much in keeping with physics in the last hundred years, that the consciousness that

00:16:41.140 observes something is affected by it, and it is also affected by that consciousness. There is an

00:16:47.060 interaction. It's not that we make it up, but it's also that it doesn't just exist apart from our

00:16:52.980 knowing it. So we always have to take those things into account. And what I'm suggesting is that when we

00:17:00.260 experience things, certainly when we're young and our thinking is fresh and not already stale and

00:17:08.820 cliched, we are amazed by every new experience because it's an encounter with something else.

00:17:15.700 And Wordsworth, for those who are interested in the great man, lamented the fact that when he was young,

00:17:24.420 the mountains, the lakes, the waterfalls, even a single outcrop of rock astonished him with its

00:17:30.420 awe-inspiring nature. But as he got older, he couldn't recapture that. He just saw these things as

00:17:36.340 elements of, in the left hemisphere way, oh yes, a picturesque landscape. I know about those. I'll put

00:17:41.860 this one in my box. So those are some of the big differences. The left hemisphere only sees

00:17:46.900 representations, which is a funny idea because, of course, it's pretending that something is present

00:17:52.900 after the fact. Re-present. It isn't actually present. So a lot of us are not living in the presence

00:17:58.820 of the world at all. We're living only in representations. Now, I've said quite enough,

00:18:04.180 and take it away.

00:18:05.380 I do love that your origin story is basically C.S. Lewis in Abolition of Man, also at Oxford,

00:18:13.540 but you just decide to then become a neurobiologist to figure it out. Like, yeah,

00:18:18.180 we'll just do this minor transfer of specialty to pull that all together.

00:18:25.540 Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I am very interested in when it comes to your work is the

00:18:34.980 idea that we have leaned almost entirely on the very narrow but very specific processes of the left

00:18:43.140 brain in order to build modernity. When we look at the explosion of capital, when we look at the

00:18:50.020 enlightenment, all of these things are really a triumph of, when I think of it, kind of economies

00:18:57.060 of scale. And the left brain is essential in building these things. We need a world that is

00:19:02.100 mechanical and predictable, ones that we can order correctly and then manage through specific processes.

00:19:09.700 We need less introduction of the human and more understanding of things as rigid.

00:19:14.020 And so this has really become the dominant way that we view everything around us. We find this to

00:19:20.660 be the superior method by which we reason, the superior method by which we should understand

00:19:24.660 everything, even the world's most intimate processes, be it finding a mate or these kind of

00:19:30.980 things, religion. They all have to fall into the domain of this very rigid structured understanding.

00:19:35.780 And I guess my question would be, you know, so much of what I now try to do when I speak with people

00:19:42.900 is for them to understand what has been lost in this specialization, in this transfer to this one

00:19:49.140 mode of thinking, which is why when I read your work, I was simply, okay, this is a fantastic way to

00:19:53.700 further explain this. So maybe you could talk a little about that, why we have gotten stuck in this mode

00:20:00.420 and what we have lost by just narrowing our understanding, but building on that ability of the left brain.

00:20:07.540 Yes. Okay. In a book I wrote, Sam Weiligan published in 2009 called The Master and His Amissary.

00:20:23.060 In the first part, I look at philosophy and neuroscience. In the second, I look at the

00:20:26.820 history of the West. I'm looking at the main turning points in the history of ideas from the ancient

00:20:32.580 Greeks through to the postmodernists. And what I see is patterns in which there are changes over time.

00:20:42.420 And they seem to go somewhat like this, that as a civilization rises up with all its,

00:20:49.060 if you like, new, fresh imagination, intelligence, insight, vigor, the two hemispheres work very well

00:20:58.500 together. But after a while, there is always a tendency for the left hemisphere to come to

00:21:03.060 dominate. And that coincides with the decline of that civilization. I trace it in the Greeks,

00:21:10.340 I trace it in the Romans, and I trace it in our own civilization since the Enlightenment,

00:21:19.620 or perhaps what's called the scientific revolution at the end of the 17th century.

00:21:23.540 So I should say that if I had been alive at the time of the Enlightenment, I think I would have embraced

00:21:33.540 it. I hope not uncritically and not without reservation, but I would have seen it as a

00:21:40.980 great step forward in freeing people from superstition and helping them to

00:21:47.380 pursue a beautiful goal of clarity and lucidity. So that is okay. The trouble is that everything can

00:21:59.620 quite quickly be taken too far. And what happened there was the idea that everything could be made

00:22:06.580 lucid and simple in this way, and that everything could be reduced to something that was a statement

00:22:12.820 that could be transferred to somebody else, and they would understand it. So the idea is everything

00:22:19.460 can be reduced to a formulaic expression that is rational and linguistic, and then I can pass that on

00:22:26.260 to another person, and they've got it, which is not actually what happens in experience. Very importantly,

00:22:33.140 it's not just knowing things cognitively. It's knowing them through experience that makes us wise and gives us

00:22:41.780 a full sense of what it is we're encountering. So I do think that this very simple-minded and

00:22:53.620 intellectually shallow, morally...

00:22:59.540 Some say the bubbles in an arrow truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.

00:23:04.260 Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.

00:23:06.980 Rich, creamy, chocolatey arrow truffle. Feel the arrow bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.

00:23:14.740 Desolate mode of thinking has taken over. And discussing what I just said there, it's worth

00:23:22.820 saying that in The Matter with Things, which is the book that came out in 2021, I was trying to address

00:23:31.460 the question, what is true? And in the first part of the book, it's neuropsychiatry. There's three

00:23:38.340 parts to it. But the first part is neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology. And what I'm saying is, look,

00:23:44.340 if there are two different ways of looking at the world, which of them can we take to be true? I mean,

00:23:50.660 or do they both have a bit of the truth? And the answer is, well, they do both offer something that is

00:23:56.340 true. But one of them offers massively more dependable truth than the other. So the one that

00:24:02.580 we used to think was so clever and reasonable and down to earth and dependable, the left hemisphere, turns

00:24:10.260 out to be seriously prone to delusion. And I'm not using that word in the sense of street slang. I'm using it

00:24:17.300 as a psychiatrist. In fact, I look at 25 or so really staggeringly odd neuropsychiatric syndromes in

00:24:29.860 which people become completely deluded. And almost all of them depend on damage to the right hemisphere,

00:24:36.260 not damage to the left. So I just want to recap this. The left hemisphere is not dependable.

00:24:44.660 It makes poor judgments. It attends to only things that it already thinks it knows what they are and

00:24:50.500 is quite often wrong. Its perceptions are not as good as the right hemisphere's. Its intelligence is

00:24:59.620 not as good as the right hemisphere. And certainly its emotional and social intelligence are way behind

00:25:05.540 that of the right hemisphere, which is quite important because that's where we live in the world of

00:25:11.300 understanding people, the natural world and all around us, not just through equations,

00:25:18.580 but through actually understanding what this means in human terms. But the really, you know,

00:25:24.020 the corker here is that IQ, good old, you know, good old fashioned IQ, cognitive intelligence

00:25:32.180 is more dependent on the right hemisphere than the left. So that all that stuff people used to say is just so,

00:25:38.180 so badly wrong. And the reason I'm bringing forward this at the moment is just to say

00:25:48.180 it's not just that these two hemispheres may have equal things to offer, just they're different,

00:25:56.260 but that they are likely to have quite different validity, that the left hemisphere is basically not

00:26:03.620 getting it. But it thinks that it is. And that's a function of the fact that it knows so little.

00:26:10.580 So there's something that's now called the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I think people have

00:26:14.580 known this since time immemorial, that people who don't know anything very much think that they know

00:26:19.460 everything. And the people who know a lot are quite cautious about claiming how much they know.

00:26:24.420 They're aware of all that they don't know. So we live in a world, I think now, in which the

00:26:32.100 technicalizing way of looking at the world of the left hemisphere is dominating. And it's neither

00:26:41.940 likely to be a realistic way of looking at our situation, nor is it actually able to help us

00:26:50.900 understand how to even approach the business of living in the world. So, for example, in a left

00:27:01.780 hemisphere world, we'd see only the narrow thing, not the big picture, not the big picture in time and

00:27:09.220 space, but focus on what I want now. And I do think that that's a criticism of our society, that we don't

00:27:16.340 see the impact of the things we do in a broader sense on the rest of the world. And we don't see

00:27:25.140 our place in a sequence, which is like a stream that flows from the past to the future. We no longer

00:27:33.300 respect the past, which didn't contain people who were stupider than us just because they didn't have

00:27:39.460 technology, but probably contain people who are much wiser than us. And we don't think enough about

00:27:44.980 what's coming. We're betraying the future of our children. So that narrow vision, which is also

00:27:54.740 one which is mechanistic reductionist and just about value. And so fascinating, because the word

00:28:01.460 value so often now in discourse means money. But wait a minute, there are plenty more values than

00:28:09.300 money. In fact, money might not be anything to do with value at all. And what about things like the

00:28:16.980 truth? What about beauty? What about goodness? These things have all been reduced in our world to

00:28:26.740 kicking boxes and saying the right things and being in the right sets and seeming smart. But this is

00:28:34.340 this is a terrible, terrible, delusional world to be inhabiting. And, you know, furthermore,

00:28:43.860 things would be black and white and either or. The left hemisphere hasn't got time. You see,

00:28:49.780 it's the one that's quickly moving in to grab and get before somebody else gets it. I need that thing now.

00:28:55.780 So but so the right hemisphere is saying, but hang on, mate, you might be quite wrong about this.

00:29:01.620 The left hemisphere says, No, I haven't got time to worry about that. So the left hemisphere is the

00:29:06.980 quick and dirty one. The right hemisphere is the one that actually deliberates, thinks broadly,

00:29:13.700 thinks wisely. And when you look at public discourse, at least the social media kind of discourse these

00:29:21.380 days, it very often suffers from extreme points of view that are rigid, in which the other person,

00:29:28.260 if they don't hold the particular views that you hold, is is vilified, often quite viciously.

00:29:36.740 This is the natural consequence of a very stupid culture. I think, I think, I think, you know,

00:29:44.820 this is the culture of uber dummheit. I mean, if we survive into the future, people will look back

00:29:51.460 on this time as the absolute low point of human wisdom and intelligence, being seduced away from that

00:29:59.220 into just being able to manipulate things. So, you know, we'd also be people who are obsessed by

00:30:07.300 control, obsessed by measurement, obsessed by procedures, algorithms and bureaucracy. You know,

00:30:15.460 there'd be an enormous explosion of bureaucracy, which is really the child of the left hemisphere is

00:30:22.100 aiming to control, to limit in terms of, you know, reproducible statistics, metrics and, and, and,

00:30:30.580 and paths that are linear. Whereas in fact, most things that are deep need to be approached in a much

00:30:36.660 more rounded way, not just in this linear targeted way. What do you think?

00:30:43.300 I find this fascinating because I find echoes of this in other thinkers. So, for instance,

00:30:49.540 the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto talks about the different residues and that, you know, you,

00:30:54.820 you have the, the more conservative, I think more integrated understanding, and then you have

00:31:00.580 the more expansive, you know, the one that scales better is able to discover new solutions. But he

00:31:07.460 says that ultimately we end up top heavy in the kind of more, this more specific, the one that allows

00:31:14.820 us to scale is the one we lean on as we get to the end of, uh, of, of societies. Again, you can

00:31:20.100 think of someone like Oswald Spangler talking about, uh, how civilizations, uh, kind of end in this, uh, you

00:31:25.940 know, that loses the metaphysical animating spirit and it finds itself in a rigid

00:31:30.340 civilizational phase that allows us to scale, but it loses all of its integration of, uh, the

00:31:35.300 metaphysical along with the real and therefore starts to lose its ability to, to continue on. I'm fascinated with this

00:31:42.660 thought that scale is actually the killer of civilization that in a way it, it ends our

00:31:47.700 ability to think in an integrated fashion and understand life in a way that is necessary. It

00:31:52.660 seems that we are required to almost shut off part of our brain in order to enter into this more

00:31:58.420 bureaucratic mechanical understanding of the world that allows us to do amazing things, but it also

00:32:03.540 destroys us as human beings. And again, so much of what I try to talk to people about in politics

00:32:08.900 is hindered by this understanding because they have a difficulty seeing this as a limitation.

00:32:14.100 They think, well, no, I am rational. I'm a rational person. And that is, was necessary in the world.

00:32:19.380 And if you try to talk me into understanding the world in this other way, you're being irrational.

00:32:23.380 You're in some way, you know, limiting your understanding. You're being a fool or you're,

00:32:27.380 uh, I also often get this, you're, you're arguing for some kind of relativism because everything

00:32:32.100 needs to be experiential. And I can't just, you know, I can't always just pin the butterfly

00:32:35.460 down and kill it to understand it. And that, that, that is a problem. And so I, I just think

00:32:40.740 it's, um, I I'm very interested that the fact that whether you come from this, you know, sociology

00:32:46.820 or history or, uh, biology, we always seem to come to this problem, this, this, you know,

00:32:53.140 complexity, uh, issue where we can't get past the way that we need to organize the world in order to

00:32:58.740 scale up. But by doing so, we seem to lose a critical part of our humanity. And this is a problem

00:33:03.940 that we keep running into over and over and over again. And we are just flabbergasted every time

00:33:09.060 we run up upon it, even though it seems to manifest itself across many different disciplines.

00:33:14.900 Yes. That's why we can often learn from past experiences and cultures, but, uh, there we go.

00:33:23.620 I mean, another person I'd mentioned in connection with the people that you, um, commented on,

00:33:29.860 it would be Hannah Arendt, who has become for me, um, almost a faintly figure because of her

00:33:37.460 extraordinary insight into the problems of totalitarianism, total control, bureaucratic thinking,

00:33:46.340 bureaucratic organization, and the way in which, um, that helps to eventually erode and destroy a

00:33:55.860 society through cultivating, um, violence. And that when people no longer have trust in

00:34:03.060 institutions, which I think is happening apace, um, then a society is near the end. I mean,

00:34:10.260 can we still trust universities? Can we still trust the media? Can we still trust, um, the educational

00:34:19.460 system? Uh, what are these things still functioning in the way that we used to? I mean, trust is a very

00:34:27.140 important thing and it's enormously economical. And one of the reasons that everything is so difficult

00:34:35.380 to bring about is that trust cuts corners. When you can trust people, then you don't have to have

00:34:43.780 lawyers and lengthy contracts and court cases that go on for, for, for, for years. It's been pointed

00:34:51.620 out to me that, um, the Quakers, uh, were very good at business. I mean, it's, it's interesting that

00:34:59.220 early capitalism in a way depended on, it's not a slur on the Quakers, but they, they were very good

00:35:05.620 at business because people knew if they said they were going to do something, they'd rather die than not

00:35:09.940 do it. And the other interesting one there is the relationship between Orthodox Jews and trading

00:35:18.180 invaluable products such as precious stones and, and gold. And, and again, that was something that

00:35:25.940 required extraordinary levels of trust. And they knew that their fellow Orthodox Jews would not betray

00:35:35.540 them. If they ever did that, then their name would be like wiped out of the history of

00:35:39.860 mankind and nobody would deal with them at all. So there are these things that don't look rational,

00:35:46.580 but are actually very, very important from a purely reasonable point of view. I'd like to make a

00:35:52.260 distinction between rationality and reason. So rationality is something that any kid with a

00:35:58.020 computer can work out, but reason is something you need to have lived to understand that things are not

00:36:05.060 reasonable, reasonable, even though they look rationally right. And, you know, GK Chesterton said this

00:36:11.140 wonderful thing, a madman is not someone who has lost his reason, as we say, but has lost everything but his

00:36:18.340 reason. And this is actually very good description of somebody who is perhaps a delusional schizophrenic.

00:36:27.780 They have odd experiences, they hear their thoughts spoken aloud, and they look around and see nobody in

00:36:36.260 the room, but they definitely heard somebody. So they think, okay, let's think about this rationally.

00:36:42.340 Somebody is speaking, but they're not in the room. So how is their voice getting into the room? I know,

00:36:48.500 it's that socket in the wall. It's the only opening into the room, and therefore the neighbors must have

00:36:54.180 got into the electrical circuitry and are sending me messages. There's nothing irrational about it.

00:37:01.860 As I say, the left hemisphere is profoundly deluded most of the time. If you want to be very stupid

00:37:07.460 and get everything wrong, then just be narrowly rationalistic. You need to learn how to use reason.

00:37:14.500 You know, and I make a distinction between kinds of knowledge. In most languages other than English,

00:37:19.460 there's different words for different kinds of knowing. So, you know, if you learn French or German,

00:37:24.660 you know that in French there's connaître and savoir. In German there's kennen and wissen.

00:37:29.380 And these refer to different kinds of knowing. Knowing the facts, which is savoir and wissen in German,

00:37:36.500 and knowing through experience, which is connaître and kennen. And that kind of experience is much broader

00:37:47.700 and deeper. So, you know, I give the example that I know that Paris is the capital of France,

00:37:55.140 and that's my left hemisphere doing knowing. But I also know Paris because I spent several years living

00:38:02.580 there. And of course, what I mean by knowing it is infinitely rich and complex, unlike the single word

00:38:09.380 that it is the capital.

00:38:13.060 It's interesting because so much of our society now seems to be a war on experience. If we think about

00:38:21.540 COVID and the fact that everyone was locked in their homes, they were experiencing the entire world

00:38:27.140 through social media and television. Increasingly, young children don't play with each other because

00:38:32.660 it's considered too dangerous. What if they hurt each other? What if they catch a cold? We are encouraged

00:38:38.500 at every moment to reduce risk and thereby reduce interaction and thereby reduce experience. Because

00:38:45.620 everything can be safely observed through some other medium. Making us more and more reliant on this

00:38:53.620 idea of rationality, assuming that this will give us a proper understanding of the world,

00:38:59.060 but we never grasp that the map is no longer the terrain, that these things have fundamentally diverged

00:39:04.180 and we are being fed something entirely different. You know, Baudrillard, of course, hits on this quite

00:39:10.340 well, but it really creates the scenario where people seem to almost be driven mad by their rationality.

00:39:18.260 They have a hyper-rationality, but are in some ways the most naive people who have ever existed and find

00:39:26.100 it very difficult when they have to then interact with the real world. In many ways, I think it's what

00:39:31.220 causes post-traumatic stress disorder, because it's people who have had very isolated understandings of

00:39:38.420 the world suddenly introduced to a far more visceral grasp of it and they can't reconcile the difference.

00:39:44.900 Yes, disembodiment is enormously

00:39:55.140 widespread these days. We're further and further from embodied reality and it's that that I've been

00:40:00.980 pursuing through literature, philosophy and neuroscience is one of the big strands in it.

00:40:09.860 And yes, we've lost the cogency of experience. And you know, emotion is not

00:40:19.220 emotions worth commenting on along with reason, because as the Enlightenment philosopher

00:40:25.540 Wauvenach said in the 18th century, it is emotion, feeling that has taught us how to reason. And in our own

00:40:33.460 age, Antonio Damasio has rather popularized this idea that, you know, if you don't actually have your

00:40:41.460 emotions, you can't think straight at all. And the most basic things, you get caught up in complex things

00:40:49.060 and may easily be led astray, complex chains of thought. Whereas if you, if you nourish your

00:40:55.140 intuitions by carefully attending to experience, you will be far wiser. And it's that wisdom that

00:41:01.780 we've lost. I'd like to go back, if I may, to your point about scale, because I do think that it's not

00:41:07.860 enough commented on. And I noticed that that is one of the things that you are particularly interested

00:41:14.100 in. And I do write a bit about this in The Match With Things. We imagine somehow that if,

00:41:24.100 we get a lot of things wrong. First of all, we imagine that if something is good,

00:41:28.420 more and more and more of it will be better and better and better. But quite often,

00:41:31.860 it becomes worse and worse and worse. So things need to have a certain

00:41:39.780 measure in order to be useful and valuable. So for example, freedom is certainly a value and to have

00:41:48.900 no freedom is tyranny. But to have total freedom and not have any constraints on what you do and how

00:41:57.140 you behave is to produce a tyranny, which is called chaos. Basically, things fall apart.

00:42:05.860 And so we need both to be free and to be responsible to the world that gave us being the society that gave

00:42:17.940 us being the natural world that gave us being. And we cannot pretend to cut ourselves off from these

00:42:24.980 things. But on the other hand, we're not. With due respect to dear Sapolsky, we're not determined.

00:42:36.420 We're not entirely free. That's true. I'm afraid I was never going to make a basketball player.

00:42:42.580 I have to suck that up. But, you know, there are limitations to what we can do. But the idea that we're

00:42:49.300 determined is a very toxic one, which again comes back, I think, to mechanisms of the idea that there

00:42:54.980 are mechanisms. Of course, in the post-Newtonian universe, those mechanisms do not predict in any

00:43:04.820 case. So in complex systems, you simply can't predict outcomes in the way that you could in a

00:43:11.380 limited, more limited mechanistic system, not because we don't know enough, but because actually,

00:43:18.100 in principle, you can never know enough to be able to do that. So as things get larger, they change in

00:43:24.980 quality. And the society does that. So, I mean, Robin Dunbar has put his name to this concept that a small

00:43:36.420 group of people, about 130, 150 people, form a community in which people know one another and

00:43:43.780 therefore have experience of one another and have knowledge, not just in some Savoir version,

00:43:51.940 but connect, where they actually do know these people. And that makes a huge difference to the

00:43:58.340 running of a society because, again, trust, you know, you don't want to piss on your doorstep

00:44:05.540 if people will know what it is about you and what your reputation in that group is,

00:44:12.660 you have an investment in being trustworthy and being faithful to people. And once societies become

00:44:19.700 much bigger, they have to become more operative in a manipulating way. So a large society has to have,

00:44:28.340 you know, more hierarchies, more rules, more procedures, more abstraction, and ultimately more

00:44:34.260 bureaucracy. That changes the nature of things. But there's another sense in which things change

00:44:40.020 their nature. And that is, I think an example might be tourism. So if there is a certain amount of

00:44:51.540 people visiting places that are unfamiliar, and they don't arrive in such numbers that they basically

00:45:00.820 turn the place into an extension of where those people have come from, but actually allow it to be itself,

00:45:07.540 then there is a fruitful exchange of experience between those who have travelled and those who have

00:45:14.260 received them. But when all this gets overblown, it not only destroys the planet, but it also ceases

00:45:24.100 to be the same thing at all. It no longer enables people really to experience the important differences. Hence,

00:45:33.140 the famous witticism that travel narrows the mind, and nothing so narrows the mind as travel.

00:45:45.300 An inversion, obviously, of the usual cliche that it broadens the mind. But it just does very much

00:45:50.420 depend on the nature of it, the context, and part of the context is the scale, how big this is. So, yeah.

00:45:58.820 So I hate to do this to you, because I know this will probably be the least popular thing you want

00:46:04.980 to discuss. But since I spent a lot of my time in politics, I am very interested on the implications

00:46:10.580 this has in our political life. And one of the things, especially as we understand ourselves as

00:46:16.500 these kind of liberal democracies in which we're theoretically having some kind of dialogue over the

00:46:21.940 issues. But increasingly, that becomes obviously impossible. There's simply no way that countries

00:46:27.140 like the United States could have a meaningful dialogue at 350 million plus people. And so,

00:46:32.580 therefore, we switch to a very different mode. We continue to pretend that we are reasoning our

00:46:37.860 way through this understanding at scale, but that obviously can't be the case. And so, more and more,

00:46:43.300 our politics is this disembodied understanding. It is the thing fed to us through social media feeds and

00:46:49.380 communicated through advertisements and headlines and these things. People feel like they know more

00:46:54.500 about the world than they've ever known when, in reality, they know not even their neighbor or the

00:46:59.220 issues that they face politically. And so, these things have become completely disconnected. To my mind,

00:47:05.300 the way this is evolving is that we are basically becoming less human in all of our political interactions,

00:47:12.820 making it very difficult for us to then understand the other as human, to understand the society and

00:47:19.780 the world around us. We can't even really fathom having a conversation about these issues because

00:47:25.460 they've become so taboo and abstract. But simultaneously, we understand this to be the core of our system

00:47:31.300 and see no contradiction in this. And I just wonder, ultimately, if this doesn't mean that we at some

00:47:38.740 level will have to, I'll be honest, a little dour on this, I see a collapse in our political systems

00:47:45.540 bringing us back to more of a city-state model, bringing us back to an understanding where we

00:47:50.900 would be able to at least engage in some social interaction that mimics Dunbar's number, where we

00:47:57.460 can truly understand the people around us in the communities that we're interacting. And do you think

00:48:02.740 that we can continue to see these large super states expand and continue to lean on this idea that they

00:48:10.260 have some kind of meaningful input from the individuals involved in their citizens? Or do you think that

00:48:16.580 ultimately we will have to contract and once again deal with each other at a much more local level when

00:48:21.380 it comes to political organization? I do think we will need to do that very definitely if we're to survive.

00:48:28.900 I was just reading a paper today for a colleague who was making the point that the Roman civilization,

00:48:40.260 the Byzantine civilization and the Mayan civilization all eventually, no surprises, declined. But they

00:48:50.740 declined not by a collapse and that the way of shoring yourself up against the collapse is to make

00:48:56.980 bigger and bigger entities that are so big that they can't be destroyed. It is instead to be much more

00:49:04.740 decentralized, more locally based. And, you know, I say the whole quality of life changes when it is

00:49:15.540 embedded in a place that is known, a history that is known, people that you know, and so on. My friend Paul

00:49:24.100 King's North has just written a book called Against the Machine, which you'll be surprised to learn,

00:49:29.300 I think he's very good. But he says, you know, the past people, prayer, and I'm trying to think what the

00:49:42.340 other one is now. Anyway, I shouldn't have embarked on that. But, you know, not knowing your place,

00:49:48.260 i.e. the place where you belong, being sort of deracinated and just slithering around on the sort of

00:49:56.100 artificial surface of the invented world is quite different from being in a place where you know people,

00:50:04.100 perhaps your forebears lived and so on. That's important. People, your relationship to the people that you know,

00:50:13.380 prayer, and probably patience is another one, that are important, that deepen the way in which we

00:50:25.540 relate to the world. So, yes, I do think that we will have to rediscover the virtues of

00:50:34.420 intermediate size, and that it might look like this is a downfall of the civilization,

00:50:41.220 but it might actually enable the regeneration of a much better way of life in which we lived with

00:50:47.540 more modest demands on the earth, closer to the earth, cultivating the earth in common with

00:50:54.180 our own community, sharing our lives with them, helping and supporting one another. That would be

00:50:59.780 a very different one from the one in which we are alien from one another. Our aim is to rip off as

00:51:07.300 much as much as we can and make ourselves as rich as we possibly can. And believe me, as a psychiatrist,

00:51:14.100 being rich does not make you necessarily happy. In fact, it's much more likely to produce the opposite.

00:51:21.860 But, yeah, so I think that is right. I think also

00:51:33.780 it's not just about we'll get, we need to sort of produce smaller and more viable communities,

00:51:43.940 but something you touched on there, which is so, so, so important, is that we can't have conversations anymore.

00:51:53.460 And, I mean, maybe that that is partly something to do with the very democratic nature of media now,

00:52:02.180 that in the past, public conversations tended to be between people who

00:52:09.060 had learned a good deal and achieved a level of understanding and intelligence,

00:52:16.900 and that the door is open to everybody now to spout. But I think it's more to do with the loss of

00:52:26.420 cognitive freedom, a topic that is very much on my mind at the moment, because in

00:52:32.420 two weeks, exactly, I'm going to be at Duke, giving the opening keynote on a conference on cognitive

00:52:41.380 freedom. And not having cognitive freedom is incredibly dangerous. If we can't say certain

00:52:50.900 things, I mean, obviously, that there are always have been and always will be limits on,

00:52:56.180 on hate, being thoroughly hate, hateful and, and, and so on. I mean, hatred has been recognized in the

00:53:03.780 law for ages. But all these now subjects that just in the last 20, 30 years have become taboo

00:53:12.100 subjects, you can't say it, and you must just follow the party line on them, is, first of all, it's anti-intellectual,

00:53:20.260 it's anti-compassion. Because actually, although people think they're being very compassionate

00:53:30.180 in saying you can't say certain things, they're actually creating hatreds and tensions that are

00:53:37.060 welling up. You know, the trouble with not saying things is that eventually,

00:53:41.940 people will say, and the elephant in the room is this that we're not talking about. And then...

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00:54:19.300 I think some of that is happening with Trump. Trump is a very divisive figure. And Trump, like most

00:54:27.220 politicians, is not all good or all bad, actually. I can see huge problems with his personality and his

00:54:36.740 political style and, and so forth. But at least he has shifted the conversation somewhat so that people

00:54:43.300 feel abled. I mean, that's probably the only good thing he's done is enable people to think, well, okay,

00:54:49.300 we can resume a conversation. Now that conversation can be a very civilized and must be a very civilized

00:54:56.820 thing. So what is wrong with two people who completely differ? And this is how things were

00:55:02.020 when I was growing up and was in university. And it's the basis of intellectual life is you have a

00:55:07.860 debate in a way. It doesn't have to be a formal debate in a debating chamber, but you say, that's

00:55:12.580 very interesting. So I see what you mean, but I see it differently. I see it this way. What would you say

00:55:20.340 about that? And then the other person says, yeah, I guess there's a point in that. But you see,

00:55:24.660 the trouble is bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody. No, those people are behaving like mature,

00:55:30.980 intelligent adults. And that is not how people now behave. They scream vitriol and horrible

00:55:39.060 things at people. I'm in a difficult position because I think I'm happy to say, if I like the

00:55:46.820 work that somebody does. And again, not, not that I embrace every single thing they say in some

00:55:55.540 uncritical way, that would be very unlikely. But I found recently that on my sub stack,

00:56:04.260 there are people who say, Oh, I always thought he was so intelligent, interesting, wise. But now he says

00:56:13.700 he likes Rod Dreher. I mean, what? I mean, how can that happen? And so now I have to, you know,

00:56:22.180 discard him completely. Now, there's a very illogical train of thought here, which is that I just

00:56:27.940 know that somebody that they probably have never met is probably not bothered to pay much attention

00:56:33.700 because they've heard that he's, you know, unfashionably espousing certain positions.

00:56:40.820 They've heard that. And therefore, the left hemisphere's category that this anything to do

00:56:45.780 with this is toxic trumps their own experience. So instead of saying, well, if Ian McGilchrist thinks

00:56:53.620 that he's all right, perhaps I should revise my view of Rod Dre. Now, that seems to me

00:56:57.940 a logical consequence of thinking that they've read all my work, they've spent hours, countless

00:57:04.580 hours in my company. And then they go, Oh, he likes Rod Dreher. Well, that can't be, can it?

00:57:09.620 So I've just used that as an example. But I think there's a lot of that going on in our culture.

00:57:15.220 No, there is. And the first rule of internet life is never read the comments. But I think a

00:57:19.620 a very important, you know, part of that is really that it's parasocial, you know, you,

00:57:26.020 they don't know you, they, they know your work, but they don't know you as a person. And so the

00:57:31.460 minute that they're kind of, you know, carefully curated understanding of you is breached, then

00:57:39.540 it's easy to just discard this because they don't have those bonds. And so yet again, we run into this

00:57:44.260 problem of context without it, without that deeper, richer context, no conversation is ultimately

00:57:49.140 possible. And I fear, you know, that that the basis of all of this really is that shared

00:57:54.580 understanding. And this is why we can't have discussions, because we are doing everything

00:57:59.060 we can to annihilate that for many different reasons. So yeah, I think that I was just gonna

00:58:08.420 say, sadly, I don't think that's a problem. It's going away anytime soon.

00:58:12.180 No, probably not. And I just want to gloss the word shared understanding. And that doesn't

00:58:18.900 mean everybody has to think the same thing. In a shared understanding, there are different

00:58:24.340 points of view, but they are held in a courteous suspension together in a way that is fruitful

00:58:32.180 and intelligent. Just having a slanging match is stupid. And so it brings me to something that

00:58:44.980 I think is so important, which is the relationship between diversity and integrity or unity.

00:58:56.100 So a good society is one in which there is a diversity of opinions as a voice and discussed.

00:59:04.660 But it doesn't fall apart. And the strange thing about our society is there is a narrowness,

00:59:10.180 there's no diversity in the things that can be discussed, and yet it is falling apart. So often,

00:59:16.260 in order for the thing to have sustainable integrity as a whole, it has to also respect its

00:59:22.900 inner differentiation. Do you see what I'm saying? And this is another theme that's very strong in my

00:59:31.300 work. And it's summarized in Goethe saying that dividing the united, uniting the divided is the whole

00:59:40.420 work of nature. And I think this is a massively important insight, that things are simultaneously

00:59:48.900 being differentiated, but also held together in a broader integrity, which is, which is beautiful.

00:59:55.940 I mean, it's Hegel's image of the flower that emerges from the bud. So the bud gives up its

01:00:02.100 buddiness in order to be a flower. But has the bud been destroyed? Not really. It's been fulfilled

01:00:07.540 in becoming the flower. Now, you see that what was there in a very compressed form was actually better

01:00:14.340 seen when it's opened out. And then it will re-enclose itself and become the fruit which

01:00:20.900 generates the next cycle. Absolutely. It is, yeah, that understanding of that metamorphosis that,

01:00:30.180 you know, we can't understand the value of the viewpoint of someone who disagrees with us unless we,

01:00:36.900 again, understand their connective value to the whole until we recognize that the man who holds a

01:00:44.100 different opinion is also my baker. He's also the father of my child's friend. And in those moments,

01:00:51.140 that allows us to then say, oh, well, then our differentiation on this one issue is no longer

01:00:57.060 somehow critical. It no longer destroys our relation because we have all these other natural ties that

01:01:02.740 bind us together. But without that relational substrate, we cannot differ on these core issues.

01:01:09.060 No. And, you know, I hate to be such an oldie, but people of my generation and age remember that

01:01:21.380 it was very common that we liked people, we loved talking with them and so on. And, you know,

01:01:28.100 eventually we discovered they had a completely different political position from our own. But it never

01:01:33.060 occurred to us to drop them or think worse of them. We just took it for granted that there will be

01:01:39.620 different positions. And there should be. It wouldn't be healthy if there was only one

01:01:48.580 permitted political position. But if the price of having them is that people will go to war over them,

01:01:54.980 then we've misunderstood the process. So I would like to see an educational imperative in, you know,

01:02:04.180 that nobody should have left school without at least having learned how to debate a position in this way,

01:02:10.580 which is the way I was taught and no doubt you were. Speak on a subject that you feel very strongly

01:02:17.940 about and explain why you think it's so important. That was very good. Now, espouse the position of

01:02:24.980 somebody who completely differs from you and do the very best job you can of explaining why they think

01:02:31.460 differently about it. And it's a very educative experience. And it means that people learn how to

01:02:38.500 see different ways, you know. Sorry, go on.

01:02:40.660 No, I was just gonna say, you know, I was myself a school teacher. And I will say that I, well, I think

01:02:47.780 that that is, of course, a powerful skill. I do think that actually, education is not the answer in

01:02:54.580 this specific scenario, because I think it really is truly relational. I think we would actually need,

01:03:00.340 I think, I think we need more time simply experiencing and, and, and, you know, discussing

01:03:06.660 the things we have in common. And these are what ultimately allows us to then have those exchanges,

01:03:11.380 because we already see the value that you don't need a theory of mind for people you don't need to

01:03:15.860 interact with. You only need theories of mind for people with whom you, you have to constantly

01:03:21.220 share things you, you, on whom you rely. I think more and more are what we need, what we want is to rely

01:03:28.660 on no one. We all, we want to rely on mechanisms and systems. We don't want, we don't want to have

01:03:34.500 statesmen. In politics, we want to have managers, we don't want to have, you know, friends, we want

01:03:40.260 to have, you know, the utility of whatever, you know, whatever individual can bring. And I think

01:03:46.020 without building that reliance on each other, we can not have that connection. And without that

01:03:51.060 reliance and connection, we can't then discuss important issues, because we don't have those,

01:03:57.380 those thicker bonds that would allow us to, to discuss that, that the practice of having the debate is,

01:04:02.500 of course, a good one, and one I'd encourage people to engage in, of course. But I think without

01:04:06.900 those, those kind of prior commitments to each other, we cannot, we cannot properly have that

01:04:13.060 exchange. I think you're entirely right. But I would just want to add a rider to your thing, not in

01:04:22.500 school, because it's got to be relational. But, but that's what school is, it is an integral part of

01:04:30.580 society. And if you want societal change, then school must play a part in that. And my experience

01:04:37.700 of school was that it was profoundly relational in a number of ways. I mean, of course, one had one's

01:04:43.460 schoolmates, and a lot of one's time was spent talking with them and, and sort of engaging in mutual

01:04:52.180 education. But also, the people who taught me that the teachers didn't just instill facts or give me

01:05:02.980 information or hold forth and then say regurgitate this, please, but but modelled a mode of intelligent

01:05:13.460 discourse, which I think is really, really important is what I'm saying. So education is profoundly

01:05:20.420 relational. And the whole idea that you can do this at one remove over the internet,

01:05:26.820 no, is again wrong, because it was the relations I had, you know, I really felt I had, you know,

01:05:33.700 different kinds of relations with different teachers, because they were different personalities,

01:05:37.860 and they had different subjects and so on. But it was very much a network of relations. So

01:05:43.300 I just say it has, it has its part to play. But I agree with you, it's not the only answer. And

01:05:49.860 indeed, we can't, we can't, well, we can actually, but I was gonna say we can't wait for education to

01:05:56.820 come through, because actually, if we were to change the educational system sufficiently,

01:06:00.580 and rehabilitate the humanities, I think we'd start to see huge differences in the public discourse in

01:06:06.980 only 15 to 20 years. I think you're probably right. But I think that would take a revolution

01:06:12.180 on the scale of pretty much any other that would be, I mean, I remember very specifically,

01:06:18.900 I'll never forget when I was teaching during COVID, and we had to have the remote classes,

01:06:23.300 because, you know, everything that was going on there. I was one of the few teachers who was still

01:06:28.100 doing, like video courses, I was holding them on zoom when then these things, because most of the

01:06:34.260 the teachers didn't have to. And I had students, you know, who had spent their whole time, you know,

01:06:39.700 just being awful and disinterested in those things. And they flocked to those classes. Not only did

01:06:44.580 they do that, kids I didn't even have in my class would join just because they could have that

01:06:49.780 interaction, just to have that social connection. You know, again, that just radical transformation

01:06:55.780 from children who could not have cared the least and paid no attention when they were acquired,

01:06:59.940 were suddenly like just so thirsty for that interaction that they would, they would join

01:07:05.300 in voluntarily. So I think you're right that the relational aspect of education is highly

01:07:10.100 underrated by those and poorly understood.

01:07:12.340 Yes, under those circumstances.

01:07:16.260 Sorry, go ahead.

01:07:17.780 No, under those circumstances, they were starving for connection. And even connection over the internet

01:07:25.300 was better than no connection. But what I'm really saying is, I don't think that it should become

01:07:30.740 the norm. I think it should be something where one is in the presence of people. I mean, even this

01:07:38.420 conversation, if we were together in a couple of chairs in the room would be a different experience

01:07:45.460 for both of us, I guess, although it's much better that we can do these things. I do them all the time

01:07:50.820 around the world with people I couldn't possibly travel to visit. So yes, once again, the blessing

01:07:56.420 and the curse, we must learn how to how to use this technology in a way that benefits us, but not

01:08:00.900 lose our our connection and it in the day to day. And that is the the true difficulty that I think

01:08:06.980 we're all trying to reckon with. But Dr. McGillcrest, this has been a fascinating conversation. And I could

01:08:12.500 literally do this all day. But obviously, I can't take all of your time. So perhaps we can we can do this

01:08:18.580 again, sometime in the future. But it's been fantastic talking with you. You have so many

01:08:22.980 things that you're doing right now. Is there anything coming out that you'd like to share

01:08:26.580 with my audience a new book and new talk anything that you'd like to point them towards?

01:08:30.580 I'm doing them an enormous number of talks. And that actually is

01:08:39.300 not easily compatible with writing books. But I think that I, I, I put so much into the

01:08:47.940 matter of things. It is, you know, it is my last will and testament, basically, it covers

01:08:55.700 most things that I think are important to do with matter and consciousness and values and purpose and

01:09:02.900 the sense of the sacred as well as time and space and the coincidence of opposite. So I mean, it's all

01:09:09.300 there. If people want that, want something, I think they'll find it's a nutritious. I was going to say

01:09:15.620 snack, but I think it's a bit more than that. So yeah, more of a 10, 12 course meal. But yes,

01:09:21.060 yeah. Yeah, I think probably. So no, not really. I mean, it's just that,

01:09:29.380 no, I, if people keep up with my, if they go to my website, which is called Channel McGilchrist,

01:09:36.340 there, and you don't have to be a member or anything, you can browse the website,

01:09:40.580 most of it, most of the content is free. But there's also a schedule, you can join the newsletter

01:09:47.140 and know what I'm talking about, where I'm doing it. I'm just about to go to America. Very nice thing

01:09:53.940 is happening. In early March, I'm receiving something called the Trotter Prize, which I was

01:10:03.460 delighted to learn that Francis Crick had won. And I'm going there and giving a talk at Texas A&M.

01:10:10.340 And then I'm going to Duke, as I say, to do the opening keynote speech on cognitive freedom.

01:10:19.620 And then I'm coming back, and I'm going almost immediately to Spain, where there's going to be,

01:10:28.260 there is a thing where I wish we had this still, we used to 50 years ago, they have a program in

01:10:35.380 which they interview people with interesting ideas in depth, and it goes out right across the Hispanic,

01:10:41.380 the Spanish speaking world, which I'm really looking forward to. And then I'm coming back and giving

01:10:47.140 a talk on AI and spiritual growth in Pusey House in Oxford.

01:10:54.420 And then I'm giving something called the Boyle Lecture, which is a long-standing endowed public

01:11:02.820 lecture in honor of Robert Boyle, the chemist and physicist. And then I think, oh no, I'm giving a

01:11:14.100 talk at the Polymath Institute. And then I'm coming back and going to have a bit of a rest before going

01:11:19.940 off and doing anything else. Well, it sounds like you're very lazy and you should really take up a

01:11:24.740 hobby or something to fill your time, but it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. And

01:11:31.380 guys, if it's your first time on this YouTube channel, please go ahead and subscribe, click the

01:11:35.780 bell and the like and everything so you know when we're going live with these. By the way, this is

01:11:40.340 not a live broadcast, so unfortunately we won't be able to answer the audience questions today.

01:11:44.580 But I appreciate everybody for watching and as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 13, 2026

How Modernity Rewires Your Brain ｜ Dr. Iain McGilchrist ｜ 3⧸13⧸26

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