The Master and His Emissary： Dr. Iain McGilchrist
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Summary
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, "The Master and the Emissary," Dr. Peterson provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywireplus.me/themasterandemissary to become a supporter of this new series. Let's take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. B.P. Peterson's PODCAST by Donating to his PODCASTS, the link to which can be found in the description of his self-development program, "Self-Authorizing". His self-authorizing programs, Self-Authorization, can be located at selfauthorizing.org. Let's all work together to make the world a better place, a place where we can all be kinder, more compassionate, more caring, and more understanding of each other. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling and offer a moment of support. Today's episode is a reminder that we're all in this together. . Let s all of us work together, not just to make a brighter future we deserve a brighter, more beautiful, more peaceful, more hopeful, more loving, and a better world. Thank you for listening. - Dr. Dr. P. Peterson - The Master & the EMISSARY - Dr. J.B. Peterson, PhD and the emissary (The Master & The Empress . (P.S. - The Empress). The Empress "The Empress - A.M. (The Emissarian ) - Thank you, and the Empress (A.A. (the Empress) Thank You, and The Empress, and Thank You For Your Support, Thank You for Listening, and I'll See You, Friend, and Pray, and God Blessings, and Good Luck, and Love, and Keep You, And Keep You Happy, and Sleep Well, and Happy,
Transcript
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Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious
00:00:05.320
and important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for
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those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these
00:00:15.020
conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who
00:00:18.760
may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique
00:00:24.300
understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a
00:00:28.480
roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely
00:00:33.040
possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.
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There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start
00:00:43.500
watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be the first step towards
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Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating
00:01:01.800
to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's
00:01:07.600
self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.
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Well, I have a question. I guess I'd like to know a little bit more about why you specifically
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Yeah. In an attempt to explain what I believe to be the relationship between the brain hemispheres,
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that like most other things in life, they're unequal and asymmetrical, and that one of the
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brain hemispheres sees more than the other. That is the one that I've designated the master,
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That's a weird inversion, because people often think of the left hemisphere as the one that's
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They do. They do. Traditionally, that's been the case. But as is becoming ever clearer,
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the right hemisphere, this has been a real steep learning curve for some people, but the right
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hemisphere is in many ways more reliable, sees more, understands more than the left hemisphere,
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which is like a sort of high-functioning bureaucrat in a way. And the idea of the story was simply
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that certain matters needed to be delegated, not only because, as it were, the master couldn't
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do everything. He needed an emissary to go abroad and do some of it, but also that he must not
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get involved with a certain point of view, otherwise he'd lose what it was that he did to see.
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So that's what I'm really saying there, is that there's a good reason why, evolutionarily
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speaking, the two brain hemispheres are separate.
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And when you say it doesn't get involved, what's the advantage of that detachment from the involvement?
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Well, it's that Ramon y Cajal, who you know is a great histopathologist, one of his findings
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was that in primates there are more inhibitory neurons than in any other animals, and there are more
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in humans than in any other primate. And there are many more...
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Proportionally, and there are more kinds as well. So we think that about 25% of the entire
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So it's a very strong effect. And the corpus callosum seems to be very largely, in the end,
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inhibiting function in the other hemisphere. And that is, I think, because over time,
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the two hemispheres have had to specialise. There are reasons why actually it can't be...
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I'm not going to go into now, but I was talking about just a few days ago at the evolutionary
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psychiatry meeting. But there are reasons why the corpus callosum has had to become more
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selective and to inhibit quite a lot of what's going on in the other hemisphere, because it
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enables the two to do distinct things. And of course, they have to work together. But
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usually good teamwork doesn't mean everyone trying to do the same role.
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So differentiation is very important for two elements to work together. And inhibition is
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one way of doing that. So effectively, the two takes on the world, if you like, that the
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And we're not aware of that because at a level below consciousness, there's a metacontrol centre
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that is bringing them together. So in ordinary experience, we don't feel we're in two different
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worlds, but effectively we are. And they have different qualities and different goals, different
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values, different takes on what is important in the world and what meaning or whatever it might have.
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So, so let me, let me ask you about, I've got, I've developed a conceptual scheme for, for thinking
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about the relationship between the two hemispheres. And I'm kind of, I've been curious about what
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you think about it and how it might map on to or not your, your ideas. So I've been really interested
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in the orienting reflex and discovered by Sokolov, I think back in about 1962, right? He was a student
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of Lurius and the orienting reflexes manifested when something, at least in their terminology,
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something unpredictable happened. I've thought much more recently that it's actually when something
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undesired happened, happens and the laboratory constraints obscured that, and that turned out
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So, and I, I kind of put together the ideas of the orienting reflex with some of the things
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I learned from Jung, Jung's observations on the function of art and dreams.
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So imagine that you have a conceptual scheme laid out.
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And we could say that it's, it's, it's linguistically media, it's enforced on the world.
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And then there are exceptions to that, to that conceptual scheme.
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And the orienting reflex orients you towards those.
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And so those are things that aren't fitting properly in your conceptual scheme that you have to figure
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The first thing you do is react defensively, essentially, because it might be dangerous.
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And then your exploratory systems are activated.
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So, and the exploratory systems, first of all, are enhanced attention, just from an intentional
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But then, and this is where the art issue sort of creeps into it.
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It's, the idea would be something like the right hemisphere generates an imaginative landscape
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So you can kind of experience that if it's at night, you know, like say you're sitting alone
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at night, it's two or three in the morning, you're kind of tired.
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Maybe you're in an unfamiliar place and there's a noise that happens that shouldn't happen
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So for example, if you open the door slightly and put your hand in to turn on the light and
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you watch what happens, your mind will fill with imaginative representations of what might
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So it's like the, the, the, the landscape of anomaly will be populated with something like
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And it seems to me that that's a right hemispheric function.
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And then that, as you explore further, that imaginative domain, which, which circumscribes
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what might be is constrained and constrained and constrained and constrained until you get
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Does that seem like a reasonable, what do you think about that?
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Um, one is you mentioned, uh, defense and one of the, uh, ideas behind my hypothesis is
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that the right hemisphere is on the lookout for predators.
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Whereas the left hemisphere is looking for prey.
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And this has been confirmed in many species of.
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So when you're in left hemisphere mode, you're more in predator mode.
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And when you're right hemisphere mode, you're more in prey mode.
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Well, I mean, of course we are not, uh, lizards or toads or marmosettes or whatever,
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but in animals generally speaking, uh, this is the case getting and grasping.
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And after all, our left hemisphere is the one that controls the grasping head, um, is
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left hemisphere and, uh, exploring, which you mentioned is more right hemisphere.
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And when the, when a frontal function is deficient, um, people often go into automatic
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mode of the hand of that side and the left hand, it's usually exploratory motions.
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Meaningless ones, but trying to explore the environment.
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And with the right hand, it's grasping pointlessly at things.
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So they, as it were, their automatic thing is with the, with the left hand, the right hemisphere
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to explore with the right hand, the left hemisphere to grasp.
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So when you said exploratory and you said defensive, and you said also opening up to possibilities,
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these are all aspects of the way the right hemisphere.
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I often say the right hemisphere opens up to possibility.
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Whereas the left hemisphere wants to close down to a certainty.
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And, you know, I loved in, in your talk, you talked about, um, a chaos and, and order,
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but if I may say so, you seemed, and maybe you'd like to gloss that a little, you seem to suggest
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We can't get rid of chaos, but you seem to imply that it would be better if we could.
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Whereas my view is that chaos and order, uh, are necessary to one another.
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And there is a proper sort of harmony or balance.
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I mean, I think that's, that's as deep a question as you could possibly ask, I would
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I mean, some of the, I would say there's a central theological issue there.
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And the issue there is the, you know, in Genesis, the proper environment of humanity
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And so I see that as the optimal balance of chaos and order.
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Because nature is, flourishes and is prolific and is chaotic.
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Then if you add harmony to that, you have a garden.
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You try to keep what's outside out, but you can't because the boundaries between things
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So if you're going to have reality and you're going to have a bounded space, you're going
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Now then the question is, what the hell should you do about that?
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Should you make the walls so high that no snake can possibly get in?
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Or should you allow for the possibility of snakes but make yourself strong enough so that
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And I think there's an answer there that goes deep to the question of even maybe why,
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the theological question, of why God allowed evil to exist in the world.
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It's like, well, do you make people safe or strong?
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Like it might not be possible to exist and to be safe.
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Well, our existence is predicated on the fact that we die, so it's never safe.
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I mean, it's inevitably wrapped up with that sort of finitude.
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So there's this old, there's a lovely, lovely Jewish idea, an ancient idea.
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It's one of the most profound ideas I've ever come across.
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And here it is, is that, so it's a question about the classic attributes of God, omniscient,
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What does a being with those three attributes lack?
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And the second answer is, that's the justification for being.
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For anything to come into existence, there needs to be an element of resistance.
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And so things are never predicated on one pole of what is always a dipole.
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But it seems to me very important, because in our culture we often seem to suppose that
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certain things are just good and other things are just bad.
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And it would be good if we could get rid of the bad ones.
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By pursuing certain good things that are good within measure, too far they become bad and
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But let's go back to your anomaly thing, because Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere
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And so I think that that's a very important point, because there are two ways you can react
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One is to try and prove that it's not really an anomaly and therefore you can carry on with
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That's the hopeful, that's what you hope will happen.
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And quite reasonably, you don't want to be chaotically shifting if you're onto a good
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So in a way it's perfectly correct to be wary, but it's not correct to be so wary that you
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And there's a lot of evidence, as I'm sure you know, that the left hemisphere simply blots
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There's a hugely important element in the right hemisphere going, hang on, but there
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may be another way of thinking that will accommodate this better.
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And actually good science needs, yes, to be skeptical about anomalies, otherwise there
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would be chaos, but it also needs to be able to shift when an anomaly is large enough.
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Or there are quite a lot of them and they don't really fit very well into the scheme.
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So there's another observation that Jung made, which I love this observation.
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He was trying to account for radical personality transformation.
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And so his idea was this, and I think it's commensurate with the ideas of inhibition between the two hemispheres.
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So let's imagine the left is habitually inhibiting the function of the right to keep fear under control.
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So imagine that the right is reacting to anomalies, and it's aggregating them.
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Okay, the left can't deal with them, so the right is aggregating anomalies.
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And maybe that's starting to manifest itself in nightmarish dreams, for example.
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So then imagine that the right hemisphere aggregates anomalies, and then it starts to detect patterns in the anomalies.
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And so now it starts to generate what you might consider a counter hypothesis to the left's hypothesis.
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If that counter hypothesis gets to the point where the total sum, in some sense, of the anomalies,
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plus the already mapped territory, can be mapped by that new pattern, then at some point it will shift.
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And the person will kick into a new personality configuration.
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It's like a Piagetian stage transition, except more dramatic.
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And what a Piagetian stage transition is also like, and subsumes both, is Hegelian Aufhebung,
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the idea that a thing is opposed by something else.
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But when there is a synthesis, it's not that one of them is annihilated.
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He is transformed and taken up into the new whole, which embraces what before looked like
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You know, when I read Thomas Kuhn, I was reading Piaget at the same time, and I knew
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that Piaget was aware of Kuhn's work, by the way.
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And the problem I had with Kuhn and the interpreters of Kuhn is they don't seem to get something,
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who interpret Kuhn as a moral relativist in some sense.
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They don't seem to get the idea of increased generalizability of a plan.
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So let's say I have a theory, and a bunch of anomalies accrue, and I have to wipe out the theory.
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And so then I wipe out the theory, and I incorporate the anomalies, and now I have another theory.
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So that's a descent into chaos, that's my estimation, that's the old story.
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So the anomaly, the disruption is the mythical descent into chaos.
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And then you reconfigure the theory with the chaos, and you come up with a better theory.
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And the answer is, well, it accounts for everything that the previous theory accounted for,
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And so, but Kuhn is often read as stating that there is no progress, that, you know,
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there's incommensurate paradigms, and you have to just shift between them.
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But there isn't cumulative knowledge, in some sense.
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Well, I think one thing that we probably would both agree about is that we don't buy
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the story that, you know, because nothing can be demonstrated definitively, utterly,
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I mean, I think we both believe that there are truths, things that are truer than other
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Well, we couldn't even talk, could we, if we didn't?
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And even to say that there are no truths is itself a truth statement, which is that
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it's truer than the statement there are truths.
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So, everybody automatically has truths, whether they know it or not.
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I don't think, it's not only that you can't talk, you can't even see.
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You wouldn't know how to discriminate what's coming into your brain at all.
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I think we would agree about that, but I think there may be a slight point of difference
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between us in that I'm very willing to embrace the idea of uncertainty.
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And I may be wrong, perhaps you could expand on that, but sometimes you come across as a
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I'm certain that standing on the border between order and chaos is a good idea.
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You need to be in the sort of slightly unstable position.
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Encountering as much uncertainty as you can voluntarily tolerate.
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And I think that's equivalent to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.
00:20:49.320
So, we talked a little bit earlier about the idea of an instinct for meaning.
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I think what meaning is, it's the elaborated form of the orienting reflex, but what meaning
00:20:58.320
does, it's function, it's biological function, which I think is more real in some sense than
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any other biological function, is to tell you when you're in the place where you've balanced
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the stability, let's say, of your left hemisphere systems with the exploratory capacity of your
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right, so that not only are you master of your domain, but you're expanding that domain simultaneously.
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And when you, I think that when you're there, and it's a kind of a metaphysical place in
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some sense, that you're imbued with a sense of meaning and purpose.
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And that's an indication that you've actually optimized your neurological function.
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And perhaps we could gloss the idea of purpose because I think there's a difference between,
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people get very confused, I think, about the idea of purpose, particularly whether there's
00:21:47.320
a problem that, suggesting there is a purpose, and I believe there is a purpose, or there are
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purposes to the cosmos, not just to my daily life, and suggests that somehow it's all been
00:22:01.320
predetermined by God. But this is to misunderstand the nature of time, that there are time, static
00:22:06.320
slices, and God is there, and he's sorted it all out, and the whole thing's just unfolding.
00:22:10.320
As Bergson says, like a lady's fan being unfurled. It's extremely boring, and an entirely static
00:22:17.320
and non-creative universe. But actually something is at stake. Things are unfolding. They have
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overall a direction, but actually exactly what that direction is isn't known.
00:22:29.320
And it's a fool who says anything positive about the nature of God, but I'm not convinced
00:22:36.320
that God is omniscient and omnipotent either. I think God is in the process of is becoming. God
00:22:42.320
is not only just becoming, but is becoming, if you see what I mean.
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Yeah, so being and becoming. More becoming. I think that becoming is the important thing.
00:24:06.320
Why do you think that? I mean, it's also a strange segue. I mean, I'm not criticizing, but
00:24:12.320
I'm curious, what drove you to that conclusion? An awful lot of things, really. I think that
00:24:18.320
everything is a process. In fact, I'm writing a book called There Are No Things.
00:24:24.320
Oh, what are there instead? There are processes. Yes. And there are patterns. Patterns. That's
00:24:31.320
why I think music is so powerful. Music is one of the most mysterious and wonderful things
00:24:36.320
in the universe. And I don't think it's at all foolish of people to have thought that the
00:24:41.320
planetary motions were in some way like... No, it's not at all foolish. No, no. No, it's
00:24:45.320
a great insight. Kind of music. I think it is a very important insight. Well, music, you know,
00:24:50.320
I've thought, and I've said this in public lectures, that music is the most representative
00:24:54.320
of the arts. Because the world is made out of patterns. And music describes how those
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patterns should be arranged. You're using representative in a very different way.
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I know. I know. But I mean, but you know, it depends on what you mean by representative.
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By representative, yes. So it's representing the ultimate reality of the cosmos.
00:25:09.320
Well, I would like to say presentative, in that it's not representing anything. It is actually,
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when we're in the presence of music, something is coming into being, which is at the core,
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of the whole cosmic process. I think that's why people love music. They do. And I mean,
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there's hardly any originality in the idea, because lots of physicists say this, that the
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sort of, the movements of atoms and the movements of planets and so forth are more like a dance
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or more like music than they are like things bumping into them. Right, right, right, right.
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So I thought of things as patterns that people have made into tools.
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I agree with you. And tools are what the left hemisphere is always looking for. It's always
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looking for something to grasp. Right, right. It reifies processes that if you, it's all a
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matter of time. Every single thing, including the mountain behind my house, if you were able
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to, which is billions of years old, if you were able to take, as it were, a series of, like a
00:26:09.320
time-lapse camera, you'd see the thing morphing and changing and flowing. Right, right.
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Everything flows, as Heraclitus once said, everything flows. It's just a question of over
00:26:19.320
the time period that you consider it. It's a question of tempo. It's a question of the tempo.
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And so taking time out of things and considering them in the abstract, deracinated from context,
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particularly from the flow and from the context of time, changes them into something else.
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And I think that what, in brief, what Plato has done and what a lot of the history of more
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recent Christianity has done is to thingify God and heaven, perfect states that are unaltered
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and so on. And I think that it is an ever, ever more wonderfully self-exploring, self-actualizing
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process that requires a degree of opposition, you know, as a stream in order to have the
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movement and the ideas and patterns in it. It has to be constrained.
00:27:09.320
I've had intimations like that about death. It has to be constrained. Death.
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Like, when I've experienced, it's hard to describe these experiences, but when I've contemplated
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death deeply, it has struck me as a fundamental repair mechanism. Like, it's part of the mechanism
00:27:23.320
by which new things that are better are brought into being. Absolutely.
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And I mean, you see that in your own being. Yes.
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Because, of course, without death you couldn't live. Yes.
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Because you're dying. The things about you that aren't right, even at a physiological level,
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Now, unfortunately, you also completely die, which seems to be a bit on the unfortunate
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But more cosmically speaking, it does seem to me that death is the, it's, I don't know,
00:27:48.320
man, it's, I've had intuitions or intimations that death is the friend of being. And that's,
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I completely agree with you. And indeed, that's been said by, you know, many, many wiser people
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No, but I mean, I think that that's right, that death is predicated on life. But also
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that it shouldn't be seen as a sort of something that's negative. It's, it's a necessary stage
00:28:19.320
in the process of being, becoming what it is. And since everything is ramified, since nothing
00:28:26.320
is just isolated, you and I may look as though or feel as though, but as you often eloquently
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say, we all have a history. And we, so we have, in time, we, we come from a place, but also
00:28:39.320
as a culture, we have history. We can't detach ourselves from it. We're expressions of it.
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But we're also inevitably dependent, as all organisms are, on the environment, where I end
00:28:50.320
and where the quote environment begins is a, I don't like the word environment, I prefer
00:28:54.320
nature, which suggests something that's always been born, whereas environment, there's something
00:28:58.320
around me from which I'm separated. But anyway, all of that is connected.
00:29:03.320
Yes, yes. So I would see us as like an eddy in a stream, or like a wave in the sea that
00:29:12.320
Well, I mean, the, the coming together of physics with, with this, with a process philosophy
00:29:23.320
And I, I'm very worried that it's getting bigger and it's, you know, all the time I'm writing
00:29:29.320
it, I'm seeing more and more of things that I, I'm really must get to know more about
00:29:39.320
That, that, that aims at something fundamental because you never run, you never hit the
00:29:49.320
Well, I, I also had experiences, I would say that when I was trying to understand,
00:29:52.320
their imaginative experiences when I was trying to understand, let's say the necessity
00:29:56.320
of evil, you know, because that's also a fundamental theological conundrum and a metaphysical conundrum.
00:30:03.320
How, why is it that being is constituted such that evil is allowed to exist, right?
00:30:07.320
It's Ivan Karamazov's, uh, what critique of, of Alyosha's, uh, Christianity essentially,
00:30:13.320
what kind of God would allow for this sort of thing.
00:30:18.320
And I mean, part of what I thought, what I've, I mean, I thought about the adversarial element
00:30:23.320
of that, which is that you need a challenge because you don't, you're not forced to bring
00:30:27.320
forth what you could bring forth without a challenge.
00:30:30.320
And the greater the thing that you're supposed to bring forth, the greater the challenge has
00:30:37.320
But then I also thought that, um, it would, it's possible that, that, that being, being
00:30:44.320
You might say optimal being requires free choice.
00:30:47.320
I know I'm going through a lot of things quickly.
00:30:49.320
Free choice requires the real distinction between good and evil.
00:30:54.320
Well, so maybe it's possible to set up a world where evil is a possibility, but where
00:31:01.320
You know, where, where it's an option open to you and a real option, and it has to be,
00:31:07.320
But it's something that you can not, you can not move towards if you so, if you so desire.
00:31:12.320
And that seems to me, to be something like the ethical, ethical requirement.
00:31:16.320
That, that's the fundamental ethical requirement, to avoid evil.
00:31:24.320
Um, and I, I wonder, one could recast it as the need for otherness.
00:31:33.320
And that other, if it's not going to be just part of God, has got to be free.
00:31:39.320
I mean, the, the, the nature that there is something other than, than God, um, it may
00:31:58.320
In, in the Christian idea, there's the end of time where the, the evil is separated from
00:32:06.320
Well, you might think, if it's a form of, like, imagine it's a form of perfection.
00:32:22.320
And so what it, what you end up with retained is much better than what you started with through
00:32:27.320
It's a bit like the dialectical process that we were talking about.
00:32:31.320
And you have alluded to a couple of very good, um, Jewish, um, myths.
00:32:36.320
And there's one in the Lurian Kavala, um, about the creation, which I don't know if you
00:32:44.320
know it, but it's, it's absolutely riveting to me.
00:32:48.320
Um, the idea is that the primary being, Ein Zoff, the ground of all being, um, needs something
00:33:07.320
Is it to stretch out a hand and make something?
00:33:13.320
To create a place in which there can be something other than Ein Zoff.
00:33:19.320
And so the, the first stage is called Sim Sum and is, sounds negative as so many creative
00:33:25.320
And then in that space there are vessels and a spark comes out of Ein Zoff and falls into
00:33:34.320
And that's called, uh, Sheferat HaKenya, the shattering of the vessels.
00:33:41.320
And then there is the third stage, repair, in which, um, what has just been fragmented
00:33:51.320
And it's, in my terms, very like what happens with the hemispheres.
00:33:56.320
The right hemisphere is the one that is first accepting.
00:33:59.320
It is sort of actively receptive, if you can put it that way, to whatever is new.
00:34:05.320
You were talking about Elken and Goldberg and so on.
00:34:08.320
Um, and then whatever that is, is then sort of processed by the left hemisphere at the
00:34:18.320
But, of course, whatever it is, is much bigger than any of the categories.
00:34:23.320
And it gets restored in the right hemisphere into a new whole.
00:34:34.320
And I think, you know, the, the, the, the kind of, um, easy way of thinking about it
00:34:41.320
You're first of all attracted to it as a whole.
00:34:43.320
You then realize that you need to practice that piece at bar 28.
00:34:47.320
And you realize that, you know, at bar 64, there's a return to the dominant or something.
00:34:51.320
And, uh, then actually when you go on stage, you've got to, um, just forget all about that.
00:35:02.320
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00:35:13.320
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00:35:22.320
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