Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Yet Connected Brain

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ian McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, writer, lecturer, and former Oxford Literary scholar.

He's the author of many books, including The One Eric and Ian discuss Here, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain, and the Making of the Western World. Hi, Ian, Welcome to the show. Great Here. It is a real pleasure to have you on. You are the author of a book called The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and you have a great new two volume book coming out shortly also that really expands these topics greatly. Your book has

been so influential. It's the sort of thing in you know, reading for this podcast. You know, I've been doing this seven and a half years and I've read five books, and your book because very very often reference. So it's really great to have you here. And we're going to get into your work here in a second. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. There's a couple of quite

separate angles really to think about. This. One is, I think the one that probably I reckon you're expecting me to take and inviting me to take, which is, you know, how do I relate this to my experience? You know, do I recognize is this? And if so, what do I do about it? But the other is to make some reflections on the whole way it's set up, which

is the idea of opposite yes. And one of the things I argue in the new book it may sound a bit strange, is that opposites tend to coincide, and that things that look like they're negative sometimes are not, and so on. So if I could just briefly address both of those, please, or whichever you'd prefer you to both are great. I mean, you're talking to a dedicated Zen practitioner, so I am all about your ideas around

the opposites coexisting. So take it wherever feels like you'd like to take it, Okay, But in that case, let me just jump in and talk about that. As you say, it's an ancient idea that is certainly very prevalent in Oriental philosophy, and then it's also present in Hinduism, is

present actually in medieval Christianity. Some of the great mystics that we don't read anything like enough and aren't known enough in the West, were very paradoxical in the way in which they talked and seem to be saying things that to the modern mind seem like how can both those things be true? And I also discovered more recently the Caballa, the body of mystical thought of Judyism, which

completely blew me away. So these ideas that mean in any case, crystallizing thoughts in my mind for a very long time, which is that often we seem in the modern world, for example, to be beset by paradox as we set out to do one thing and we achieve exactly the opposite of it. To give a few concrete examples, we want so much to protect our children that we actually robbed them of the chance to experience any kind of risk, and but in doing so we make them

more vulnerable. We protect ourselves from bacteria with all kinds of media that will will sanitize our environment, and in doing so we knock out our immune system and become vulnerable for infection. We take huge steps to protect society from the dangers of drugs, and we make very little impact on drug use, but in doing so we create

a fertile field for organized crime. I could go on and on, but there are many things, and and some of them are very topical that in the modern political sphere, one sees people who advocate a world in which obviously what they want is greater justice, greater compassion, greater understanding, and they do it with such lack of understanding, such a lack of compassion, and such lack of justice, that they completely undermine what it is they're setting out to do.

So we see this all around us. That's in a very practical way. There's a single hormesis, which I don't know if you are familiar with the concept. It's actually a concept from chemistry. But what it means is that sometimes a tiny bit of something that's damaging it's actually very helpful. I'll just give one example. Those who looked after biosphere two, which is an enormous geodome that protects an environment, and they want to see how how plants

and trees and animals worked in this environment. And one thing that puzzled and very much was why trees kept falling over before they'd even retrieved maturity. And it turns out that for trees to thrive they need winds, they need to be stressed. They're not stressed, they don't grow. And of course there are many human I don't need to unpack them, probably for your listeners, but they will see them for themselves. So there's all that going on.

But also at a deeper level, the level of Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, one of the very earliest of all the Greek philosophers sixth century BC. I mean, he is very much in the tradition that I would associate with Daoism and with zen of paradox, calling junctions the way up is the way down. You know, all these things, and that by changing it remains the same, and an extraordinary remark which turns out to be totally central to all living creatures and living organisms. So I see all

this is very important. And one other thing is that I think the element of resistance is essential, as in the story of the trees. So one thing I've become very clear on, and it's a thread that runs through many of the great philosophers I admire, particularly Shelling the early nineteenth century German philosophy is the idea that actually creativity requires resistance, and in some ways this is whether they're like the idea that you can't move without friction.

Friction is what stops movement, okay, but actually without some friction you can't move at all. So we need something over against to help whatever it is coming to being. It's always this coming together of opposites that are fulfilling one another, in some ways frustrating one another, but in doing so spurring them onwards, as Nietzsche pointed out, to greater and greater achievements and greater greater fulfillment of themselves.

So those are some brief comments on the structure of this idea that the thing that's good and the thing that's bad and they oppose one another. I'd like to problematize a before saying anything. For well, I was fairly certain, knowing you and your work, that you might come right in and be like, you know, that's a very dualistic

left hemisphere type parable. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good place to lead us into the main thrust of your work is on the differences between the hemispheres in the brain and how those hemispheres work, how they process reality, and then what the consequences of over reliance on one or the other is. I won't I won't give away the conclusion, although most listeners probably know where we're headed

with this. But how would you set this up? How would you start this conversation for somebody who's kind of coming in cold to your work? Okay, well, I'd ask a few very simple questions. They relate to facts that are well known too many of your listeners and viewers, but may not be to some others. The fest is that the brain is asymmetrical. Why because the skull ain't and the world that it's encompassing is all around. Why is the brain asymmetrical? Why is it divided in two?

Why is there a whopping great divide right down the middle of the brain. We'll only mean a large number, but proportionately a very small number, about two of neurins actually crossing from one hemisphere into the other. If the brain is all about making connections to what the hell

is that about? Why is it that when we look at all living creatures that we've ever looked at, right down to the most ancient living creature, which is a life form called Nemesis cellar vectensis seven million years old, the kind of c anemone described by Thomas Holstein at Heidelberg, who imaged it as the origin, the most ancient forebear of the neuromal system of vertebrates. Why is that already asymmetrical?

And my answer to that in brief and I don't know a better one, is that all living creatures have to do too completely opposed things at the same time, coming back to opposite and how they fulfill one another or complement one another. An example I've used so many times that I'd be a rich man if I was paid a penny. But here it goes. A bird feeding on seed on a bed of gravel has to be able to pick out accurately and swiftly a seed from a piece of grit. To do that, it needs very

highly focused but also extremely precise and targeted attention. So it's targeted, it knows what it wants. It's very narrow beam and it's highly precise. But if that's the only attention it's paying, then at the same time it will become someone else's lunch. While it's getting its own because it needs to have the precise opposite attention, an uncommitted

attention for anything. It doesn't know what. It might be a friend, it might be a foe, it might be its offspring, might be it's made that attention needs to be very broad open, and it needs to be vigilant and sustained, not piecemeal from second to second. This bit, that bit, the other bit. Now that just gives your listeners, those who don't know my work, a little flavor of the idea that there are these two kinds of attention, and to begin with, when I learned about it, I thought, well,

that's interesting, But is it that important? Isn't attention just another cognitive function? So steeped was I in the tradition in which I've been trained, I was also enough of a philosopher to realize that attention changes the world. The way we attend to things changes what it is that we find there. The same set of things attended to one way looks entirely different attended to another, you know,

in a homely way. We can all experience this that, you know, on one day, the world seems like a wonderful, glorious or inspiring, beautiful place. On another it seems like a crop of ship and you go, what happened? What's changed? Well, actually, not much except the way you look at it. And this is also true when it comes to the world

of ideas. If we teach people that the world is a pointless, senseless, purposeless mechanism that is best understood by taking it apart and seeing what it's made on as if we're trying to understand a bicycle in the garage, then we will see the world as pointless, senseless, made up a little bit, but you know, what the hell are we doing here with it? Whereas if you instead see it as something that is fundamentally living and an organism that can't be just summarized by taking it apart.

In fact, you take it about lit and you can't make it again by putting the parts together. In fact, the parts may be an artifact of the way you look at it. I mean, in essence, I argue that there are only holes. There are holes that are parts of other holes. That is true. But in the body, the body is not made up of a liver and a heart and lungs and someone that are put together.

The body starts as a single mass, and then what we called the part differentiate within the hole, and you can see the cosmos as a whole I would say, as a living being in which one of the drives is differentiation. But differentiation doesn't mean fragmentation. A very important distinction I make is that between distinction and division. Distinctions are important, but divisions are invented by us. So that's a little bit of that. Now, how does that impact

on the way we see the world? In brief? If you see it as made up of little bits, then you see that the world is composed of things you already recognize. Oh it's the seed. Oh it's a bit of grit. It goes in my little box, my category, and my pigeonhill of seeds, bits of grit, etcetera. It's made up a familiar bit that are isolated can be fixed. They're not moving about, they're not living or changing or flowing.

They're just there they are, and it's your job to make the world by putting them together in a way that makes sense. These bits have been taken out of context, and context makes every difference of all the things that matter to us. Like a poem, musical note, somebody you love a religious experience. It doesn't mean anything when it's taken out of context. It's only what it is in

the context. They're abstracted, that they're no longer embodied, they're no longer experienced by the whole of us in an embodied way, but experienced only by the mind in a very cerebral way. They lack uniqueness because they've become general. They're in an on it because they've been stopped and killed by the process of fixing them with a gorgon stare.

And what's more, their representations of something that used to be present after the word represent literally means present again later when it's actually no longer present, and we've got so used to living in a representation of the world, which is according to our scheme, our map, are scary that we are no longer aware of the immediacy of experience as it actually comes into being for us through

the attention we pay to it. And indeed, I argue that we come to be who we are through the responses that the world makes to us, of the choices we make in the world. To sort of elaborate a little bit there, we know that there's two hemispheres in the brain. We know that they are connected, but not as connected as we might think. Why is this? And we know that by looking at the world through those certain ways, the left brain being the hey, I pick out the little bit of food from the grit. The

right brain is I've got a broader awareness. I can sort of take in that there's a tree over there, in the sky is over there, and I'm watching, you know, the whole thing, and that ideally those two things come together to make a whole person, a whole bird, and the best version of those things, a bird, a person would be where those two hemispheres are working very closely together. And if you look at our world, your argument is that we see a world that has come to be

dominated largely by left hemisphere thinking. You're absolutely right that we need both, and the reason they are separate is there needs to be enough division that they can actually sustain two completely different modes of attention to the world, and therefore two versions of the world coming into being. Of course, we are not aware of that. It all happens below the level of consciousness. If we were conscious

of it, we would be stumped. I mean, we wouldn't be able to move we'd be like, which one do I attend to? So that's all happening seamlessly. But it's division and union. Another theme of my new book, that we need separation, but we need the separation and not to be in the service of division. And they too go their own way, but that they work together. Now here comes the interesting point. One of them understands the

need for the other. The right hemisphere, the one that takes the broad view, the view of the world is ultimately always interconnected, always changing, always flowing, always living, sees the need for occasionally taking a spotlight to a bit of it. But the one that uses the spotlight only because it knows less, thinks it knows more. It doesn't

know what he didn't know. That is a very important point which is in many many religious traditions, as you know, and indeed I found that this image of an arrogant servant that thinks it knows everything trying to use up a master who is a spiritual leader who understands far more and appointed his emistry to do certain business for him. This image is present in Chinese, in Indian philosophy, but also in the native myths of North America. In Aboriginal culture.

It's they're all over because we intew it that there's something in the brain. David Bone, the physicists, wrote about this very brilliantly, that there's a kind of thinking that tells you it's okay, I'm just doing this. I'm not really doing anything. You're in control that actually it wants to control you, as he says, and it is controlling us now. So what we need is a working together, but not in a symmetrical way. One of these knows

far more than the other, and it hasn't got a voice. Interestingly, the right hemisphere doesn't speak. The left hemisphere, for most of us, is the one that does speech, so it knows far more. But articulating it is harder, and I spent most of my life in one book after another trying to articulate what it is I believe the right hemispheres is. When I started out, before I read medicine and study neurology and neuroscience, I didn't know that that's

what I was doing. In an earlier life, I wrote about the philosophy of art and literature, but what I was actually doing was articulating this thing that is very hard to say which is what the right hemisphere gets and what them understands. So we need these two things, but we need them to work in a certain relationship in which the very good servant is a good servant, but it's a very bad marster. And once it becomes the mercer or thinks it's got the mastery, then things

start to go very badly wrong. And that, I believe is where we're at now. So we live, in my view, in the world in which we've forgotten about these more sophisticated visions, in which indeed a thing and it's opposite come together, in which everything is actually unique. There is no such thing as a generality except in your mind. You generalize. It helps you see shapes and patterns. But there are no two people, no two blades of grass anywhere in this world that are the same. They're all unique.

That there is nothing that is actually ultimately unconnected to everything else. That when you start is John Muir said, if you pick out one thing, you find it ultimately connected to everything else in the cosmos. And of course you can, for the purpose of our argument, very easily I isolate something, and I'm not saying that's not a very useful thing to do. All I'm saying is it's a very bad mistake to think that that's how the

world is. It's just a tool. And one of the ways you could sum up the difference is that the left hamp is here and knows how to manipulate the world, but really has very little understanding of it, whereas the right hemisphere understands the world and it's not particularly interested in manipulating it. Somebody has to. It's delegated that to

the emissary, that's the emishy. In my title of my first earlier book, The Master in his Emisphry, the left hamis here, does the bureaucracy, the admin the manipulation, but the right hemisphere is the one that is meantime pre occupied with helping us understand what it is that we're doing. And in my new book, what I do is I ask some very very basic question. I say, Okay, we've got a huge crisis on our and nobody would deny that. I mean, it could well finish us off, no question.

But even if we could find in time solutions to the myriad problems that beset us through misuse on manipulation are grabbing our lack of understanding of what nature is, it would do us no good because we just carry on being the same disgruntled, unhappy, selfish, narcissistic being that created the mess in the first place. So actually, the important first step is to rethink who we are, what the world is, and how the two relate. And it

seems to me that is our task. And if we can actually reimagine what a human being is, get back in touch with what all the great with some traditions have said that, philosophers has said what. Indeed, modern neurology,

in my view, tells us. If we can get back to that and see the world no longer as a predictable class mechanism, but as something that has drives in it and is in fact probabilistic and never a certain or fixed as modern physics cels, we would start to understand that our role in the world and our ways of responding to it have to be very different. A lot of people want me to provide a quick fix, and I think the thinking behind it goes like this, Oh my god, the world's in a complete mess. There

may not be one in ten years time. And I'm very comfortable with the way things used to be how can we get that back again? And what they really want is just to carry on business as usual. But my message is there is no such thing as business as usual, because it was thinking like that that got us into this mess in the first place. So we have to do some hard thinking about who we are. And I think that, you know, for a civilization to founder, and it may be sadly that that's what we're witnessing.

This is when people wake up and start to think about what on earth they're doing on this planet and doing with it. So there may be some very hard lessons ahead. I don't like to think about that because I have children and even grandchildren of whom are deeply fond, but you know, times ahead are just not going to be simple, and adopting the right hemispheres position is not,

by the way, a nice easy, cozy, hippie like panis here. Oh, everything will just be so lovely because it will all be interconnected and everybody will see It's it's not like that because the right hemisphere, yes, is able to see that more beautiful picture. I absolutely don't deny it, but it also shows that the path to it is rigorous, as it is in all the religious traditions, that self discipline is required, that blaming other people for the way

you are will never get you anywhere. That in other words, some self knowledge and self discipline and some hard tones are required. And I'm not holding myself out this. Anybody to follow on this. I was, I was bad boys the rest of you. But I'm just saying I'm not. I'm not. Actually, I'm not saying that what I've got is an easy onset. Thank you for all that. And

I have children too, and the same thing. I look towards the future and it's a little bit scary, although I think every generation does that to some degree, so I kind of am like, well, it definitely does seem worse now than say, in my parents or grandparents age. But the other thing that I wanted to say is I just wanted to very briefly hit an objection that a lot of people make to this right brain left

brain thing. You know, some listeners may have already heard it and been like whatever, and you know, hopefully they're still around. And the general argument is either one of two things. I'm sure you've heard all variations of it, but one seems to be that's a pop psychology idea. You know, we had drawing on the right side of the brain, we had riding your peloton on the right

side of the brain, on and on and on. And the other is that, you know, the more we know about modern neuroscience, the more we know that things work in networks, that there is connection going on, and you can't just say, well, like, this little part of the brain does this, because large parts of the brain are involved in a lot of different things, how would you sort of answer those two things. Both of those are beautiful things to bring up because they help me. Let's

take the second one first. The two most massively interconnected networks in the brain are the left and right hemispheres within one another. There massively by orders of magnitude, more interconnected than they are connected across the corpus, closing with one another, and a lot of that interaction is actually inhibitory when they do interact. So it's fascinating these are and it's good that we are now thinking not in tiny modules but in big networks, because it's big networks

I'm talking about. And there's a lot of perfectly conventional neuroscience that will demonstrate that when you alter one part of a large net work. It has distant effects on other parts of the same network. This was first described in the nineteenth century and it's very well known to neurologists.

It's called the Ascus. But anywhere there were and we now know that there are these vast white hemisphere tracts, which are the super highways of the brain that connect the posterior part of each hemisphere with the frontal loop. So that is fine. The pop psychology is where, of course I usually have to start, because you can imagine that I've been searching this now for thirty five years, and a lot of my friends in neurology said, don't go there because it's toxic. You know, everybody knows this

is pop psychology. And however, unfortunately a grotesque over simplification, because of course I'm not saying that all that stuff was right. In fact, the first thing I have to do is say, rid your minds of all the crapolo

you've heard about. And I sometimes put up a slide when I'm lecturing, which is one of the better ones actually off the internet, and we're about twenty of these things, and I go, there's one thing in this list that is just about okay, All the other nineteen are complete rubbish, So you have to rid your mind of any of that. It's not about what the brain does in each of

its hemispheres, it's the how. So it's perfectly true that, you know, we used to say language in the left hemisphere, reason in the left hemisphere, emotion in the right hemisphere, pictures in the right hemisphere. We now know that both hemispheres contribute to language very importantly, in fact, probably the

single most important part of language pragmatics. What an utterance actually means in context is very strongly right handis bit of reason is very importantly right hemisphere dependent as well as left, including deduction, deductive logic pictures. Both hemispheres do them. Emotions. Both hemispheres have them. Depth of emotion. The right hemisphere is much better at, but certain rather superficial emotion such as anger, irritability, and disgust are very strongly lateralized to

the left henmisphere. In fact, the most lateralized emotion is anger. There's a big literature on this, and it lateralizes largely to the left handisphere. So I'm undoing all of that. But what I am saying is that coming back to attention. There is a way of doing these things, a way of approaching the whole idea of understanding something, and the

two ways of the two hemispheres are extraordinarily coherent. And I put a lot of evidence into the first part of the Marshrood his Emishy as you know, and in the new book I have massively expanded that. So I reference and unlike many people who write at great speed, I have had the leisure of the long time to look into these papers and I actually read them. And there are five thousand, eight hundred papers that I reference. And I'm not saying I've read every single one from

beginning to end. That would probably longer than I have years in a life. But what I certainly have done is I have read at least the gist of the papers. I've looked at them and sometimes looked at them in great detail. And you know, amazingly, what I found is that often things have been referenced and repeatedly referenced, sometimes many, many, many times, and they say the opposite of what people

have referenced them to say when you look at it. Actually, so no, I'm I'm a great believer in actually doing the science, getting down to the nitty gritty, and the story I tell is a very very much more sophisticated and complicated one than the pop science one, which I

can't wait to see the battle. Unfortunately, the message is getting out there and a lot of people, particularly and I would like to say the more imaginative end the sort of the great figures in neuroscience and neuropsychology, some of them around the Chandra and Howard Gardener, Yak Panks, the really names the conjure with and Colvin Travathan. Have you know who knows more about hemispheres than almost any living person? Have head? You know? Mcgirl Chris's aren't something

important here? Um and I have a lot of support from such people. And I agree that people who have never really bothered to look at the literature, it's self fulfilling because if you heard that it's all blowney, then you don't bother to spend time looking at it. And if you think your colleagues will criticize you for getting involved, then you certainly don't even go there. So an awful lot of people don't really know what they're talking about

when they rubbish it. They haven't actually looked. I would ask them will you read my work first and then see because I think you might get are we surprised as we're saying the water of the body. Here in the new book, you talk about eight ways of how would you say it, apprehending the world, interacting with the world. You know, I'm talking about attention, perception, judgments. Yes, I

called portals. And the reason I called them portals not paths is that the books divided into three parts, and the first one is in neuropsychology pretty much, and that's about the portals, the ways we get access to any information. The second part is how do we understand it? Epistemology, what do we do with it? And that's where the paths come in. And I look at reason, science, intuition, and imagination and say we probably need all of these,

and they have left hemisphere and right hemisphere aspects. In every case, the right hemisphere aspect, including in science and reason, are more important. But we need them all, not just one. And in the last part of the book is metaphysics. So if we take that approach, what have we got in the cosmos? What is space? What is time? What is value? What does matter? What is consciousness? So on? But to come back to your point the portals, Yes,

I mentioned about it's actually seven I think. But attention is primary perception because I feel if you don't attend to things, you don't perceive them, and often if you don't perceive them, you don't attend to them. So they're not the same thing. You can attend without perceiving, and you can't perceive without attending. But they are not the same thing, but they're related strongly. Then with the judgments we make on perception, and judgments are inevitable because a

percept doesn't come to you naive like blank. You automatically take already a judgment of what you're likely to be going to be seeing here to it. So your judgments affect both what you can see and what you do see in terms of what you make of it. And then I would say that comes what I call apprehension, which is the ability to use that information, to grasp it and take it and use it. Then there is emotional and social intelligence, which by no means as fringe

as they sometimes are made to sound. In fact, they are probably every bit as important, if not more so, for the business of living than cognitive intelligence. Then cognitive intelligence and Finally, creativity, since what we see in the world is often something that we create. I don't mean to say that we just make it up wilfully out of nothing, but that the results of what we find are in part something we have brought to the party,

You know what I mean. Yes, So these various portals, I think what I do is I think they contain some fascinating clinical material. You know, if people want to have the socks blown off by by just seeing what can happen to a person when they're right hemisphere, and usually it's the big changes can when they're right nonishiter not working, the big changes to their understanding of the world. That is, then there's wonderful clinical material here that will

astonish anybody. How a human being who is not in any sense crazy is led to believe all kinds of bizarre things about themselves, their bodies, are, the people of

the world, what's being said, and so on. And these have resonances with things that any attentive reader will see in the public sphere around them happening now as though the whole social sphere in which we operate, the pop intellectual sphere that is the media, and the world in which we encounter one another for the most part these days, it reflects many of these strange aberrations, delusions, or illusions. And the subtitle of my new book is Our Brains,

Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. And what you're saying is that if you look at our delusions, perhaps a lot of our cultural delusions, a lot of what's happening, they resemble what you see in the clinical literature of somebody who has had damage to the right hemisphere exactly that is right. And if you have damaged to the left hemisphere, they you lose speech, often lose the use of the right hand, often devastating things for the majority.

If you of us, it's easier to rehabilitate somebody than after the right hemispheretery in which they can still use their right hand, that they can still speak because their understanding has gone. And what I really share with all these portals that I've just mentioned, apart from apprehension, the business of using and manipulating the world, of which the left hemisphere is much better, the right hemisphere is in

every case superior. It's attention, it's perception, it's judgments formed on those it's intelligent, including I Q cognitive intelligence, good old fashioned what most people in the street mean by intelligence more dependent on the right than on the left. That may surprise some people. So that's what I have to say about that. In the first part of the book, in brief it takes a few hundred pages. There, let's jump to the middle section. Briefly, you talk about four

powers we have to arrive at truth. And I think these four are interesting because the first, to most everybody's gonna be like yep, okay, good, yep, I'm down with that. The second too might need a little bit more explain. Indeed, so let's talk about these four powers to arrive at truth. Okay, Well, I'll try and do that. It's succinctly and briefly as I can have three chapters on science, free on reason,

and three on intuition and imagination taken together. And on the first two you're right, most people go, yep, I think I buy that they're very important, and indeed they are. And one of the things that worries me in this world is that we are losing our respect both of science and for reason. And that's in part that science has become less scientific than it could be by becoming dogmatic and not actually just dealing with empirical findings, and

reason has become less reasonable. Then it could be by being something like a set of algorithms that the computer could follow. But that's not what for thousands of years people have meant by reason. It's bringing together logic with understanding of the world of people, of what is meant of all the subtle stuff, all the implicit stuff that is not spelt out in a way that the computer picks up. It's what a good judge has, you know, a good judge should be somebody who can put the law, experience,

and everything together and make a wise judgment. Context again, context again. And nothing upsets me more than people who reject science because it doesn't happen to fit the theory they've got about the world. They may have a little theory that is the way they want the world to be, and then when science shows actually it's not like that, they go, no, no, no, there's something wrong with the science.

That is very upsetting to me. So I think that we should listen to science, we should listen to reason, but I would like science to be more scientific and reason to be more reasonable. I explain what I mean by that in the book, and I think that they both have vast strengths, but they can't answer all our questions. You know, science can't tell us what love is. It can tell us what chemicals go off in the brain, but still can't tell us what lab is. Things that

reason can't reach are not necessarily irrational. Reason can't explain to me why c Major Quintet of Schubert is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and why it could powerfully change my life. But it's not irrational, it's just transrational. It's a rational It simply isn't confined to what reason tells us, which doesn't make reasonable science unvaluable. They just have their limits. And then we come to

intuition and imagination. And what I argue is an intuition that's had a bit of a bad rap through a very left hemisphere. Take on it, and I try to redress that balance. Intuition can be mistaken, certainly, but many scientific conclusions and conclusions of reasoning can be mistaken. They can lead us to places that in the end we will find are mistaken. So there is no royal road. And if you just disattend entirely to your intuitions, you

will be a much stupider person. And we're invited at the moment not to pay attention to any of our instutions, because some very clever psychologists who loves this kind of thing, they've made their reputations on it, find very specific cases in which your intuition will lead you astrang Usually the reason is that, actually, most of the time, the instution underlying that will serve you very well, but on this occasion it doesn't. And this is an exact equivalent of

optical illusions. In the book, I showed the famous checkerboard illusion. It's so extraordinary that nobody who sees it believes it that two squares on a checkerboard. One of them looks dark gray and the other one looks just off white. And the more you look at them, you cannot believe that they are in fact the exact same color. But they are, and it can be demonstrated very simply by drawing a bar between them. They are the same color. But I've never heard anyone go, oh well, right after that,

that does it. I'm not going to open my eyes. I'm not going to use my eyes because they can deceive me. Yeah, okay, So I'm saying there are intuitive illusions. They can deceive you, but there's masses of evidence that

intuitions make you smarter. And indeed, a great German juror says, in talking about how organizations should work, that they should maximize the use of intuition by their employees, because reasoning about something narrows you down to one single point at a time and often neglects all the things that can't easily be articulated, but that your intuition can bring into play. It can bring into play eighteen factors and balance them,

rather like the judge, if you have good intuitions. And what I always say is these things in a war with one another. People who reason well have better intuitions than those who don't, and people who use their intuitions well know how to reason better than people who don't. And then perhaps I could just say something briefly about imagination. I don't know whether you've got time, but it's it's

so important. Imagination, I believe, is not the way we turn away from the world, but the way in which we access the world, and without it, we can't access it. It takes imagination to see what is in front of us. Imagination is the very opposite of fantasy. And this is a distinction that was made by very is eighteen century philosophers more excessively by words within courage. It was a

very important point for them. The imagination was what first put you in touch with something you thought you knew but really had never seen before. A rock, a river, a waterfall, a lake, a mountain. These things required the imagination to access them. Without them, you didn't see them. You just saw your representation of them in your mind. I just think because it's amusing. I like a little anecdote here that comes from Tolkien's college at Oxford. JRR. Tolkien,

Professor of English at Merton College, Oxford. For a while, the fellows of the college was very tired of guests being brought into dinner by other fellows of the college and fawning on the great man, oh, Professor Tolkien. One day a guest was brought in and was introduced to the great man, Professor Tolkien. Your works are so they're so so full of imagination. And from behind the newspaper, a grumpy mathematician was heard imagine nation, Imagine nation made

it all up that sort of in a way. He puts its finger on part of the problem that actually, in order to understand something you have to go and meet it. I know, actually arguing against the idea of making it all up fantasy. But what I do argue is that imagination is very much like what the right

hemisphere of the brain does. It has an intuition, or if you like, a part perception, an inkling, a feeling about something, that something is there to which it responds, is drawn closer to it, seas more, and it was there for a reverberation between whatever is as we say out there problematic phrase and what is equally problematic in here,

that these things reverberate with one another. And that is what I am getting at there, that there is neither just a world out there that that's the way it is and get the facts or you know, miss the bus. Nor is it the case that, oh, well, you know, since we take part in whatever it is, we'll make

it all up, you know, kind of naive postmodernism. I reject both of these positions that are both the opposite of what I'm arguing for which there is a real something and that is accessible to us, but only through a process of reverberative interaction, of opening oneself to it, of being attentive, listening, actively receptive in a in a sort of way that you, as as zen practitioner, will understand exactly what I mean by that, actively receptive to the world, That this is how the world comes into

being in a less mistaken way. I do talk about truth, but I said, there is such a thing that's truth. We can't ever really fully access it, but we can certainly know that some things are more on the past of truth than others. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ian. I really appreciate your time and getting a chance to talk with you about these important ideas. Thank you very much, And I'm afraid I never properly honest with your first question.

You want to take a ryan at it now already, Okay, we take five minutes. I don't think we've got five minutes. Alright. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me on. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits It's our way of saying thank you for your support now.

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