The Master and His Emissary: Conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist

Well, I have a question. I guess I'd like to know a little bit more about why you specifically chose the title "The Master and the Emissary."

Yeah, that's two metrics plain. What I believe to be the relationship is Union Hemispheres and they, like most other things in life, they're in equal and asymmetrical, and that one of the brain hemispheres sees more than the other. That is the one that I've designated the most.

Mm-hmm, and it was the right hemisphere.

Mm-hmm, that's a weird inversion because people often think of the left hemisphere as the one that's like dominant.

They do, they do traditionally. That's been the case, but as it's becoming ever clearer, the right hemisphere, this has been a real steep learning curve for some people, but the right hemisphere is in many ways more reliable, sees more, understands more than the left hemisphere. It's like a sort of hybrid high-functioning bureaucrat in a way.

Mm-hmm, and the idea of the story was simply that certain matters needed to be delegated, not only because, as it were, the master couldn't do everything — he needed an emissary to go abroad and do some of it — but also that he must not get involved with a certain point of view, otherwise he'd lose what it was that he did to see.

So, that's what I'm really saying there is that there's a good reason why, evolutionarily speaking, the two brain hemispheres are separate.

And when you say "doesn't get involved," what's the advantage of that, that detachment from the involvement?

Well, it's... Rimoni Cahal, you know, is a great histologist.

Yeah.

And one of his findings was in primates there are more inhibitory neurons than in any other animals, and there are more in humans than in any other primate.

And there are many... and that's proposed speaking proportionally, proportionately, and there are more kinds as well. So we think that about 25% of the entire cortex is inhibitory; right, so it's a very strong effect, and the corpus callosum seems to be very largely, in the end, inhibiting function in the other hemisphere.

And that is, I think, because over time the two hemispheres have had to specialize. There are reasons why, actually, it can't be—I'm not going to go into now—but I was talking about just a few days ago at the evolutionary psychiatry meeting.

But there are reasons why the corpus callosum has had to become more selective and to inhibit quite a lot of what's going on in the other hemisphere because it enables the two to do distinct things.

Mhm. And of course, they have to work together, but usually good teamwork doesn't mean everyone trying to do the same role, right? So differentiation is very important for two elements to work together, and inhibition is one way of doing that.

So effectively, the two takes on the world, if you like, that the hemispheres have are not easily compatible, right?

And we're not aware of that because at a level below consciousness there's a meta-control center that is bringing them together. So in ordinary experience, we don't feel we're in two different worlds, but effectively we are. And they have different qualities and different goals, different values, different takes on what is important in the world and what meaning or whatever.

So, let me ask you about...I've got...I've developed a conceptual scheme for thinking about the relationship between the two hemispheres and I've kind of been curious about what you think about it and how it might map onto or not your ideas.

So, I've been really interested in the orienting reflex, discovered by...so club, I think back in about 1962, right? He was a student of Laureus, and the orienting reflex is manifested when something, at least in their terminology, something unpredictable happens.

I've thought much more recently than it's actually when something undesired happens; happens, and the laboratory constraints obscured that, and that turned out to actually be important, but go ahead.

Um, so. And I kind of put together the ideas of the orienting reflex with some of the things I learned from Jung. Jung's observations on the function of art and dreams.

So imagine that you have a conceptual scheme laid out, right? We could say that it's linguistically mediated; it's enforced on the world. And then there are exceptions to that conceptual scheme. Those are anomalies that are unexpected and the orienting reflex orients you towards those.

Yes.

And so those are things that aren't fitting properly in your conceptual scheme that you have to figure out. You know, the first thing you do is react defensively, essentially, because it might be dangerous, and then your exploratory systems are activated.

Yes.

So, and the exploratory systems, first of all, are enhanced attention from an attentional perspective. But then, and this is where the art issue sort of creeps into it, it's the idea would be something like the right hemisphere generates an imaginative landscape of possibility that could map that anomaly.

So, you can kind of experience that. It's at night, you know, like say you're sitting alone at night, it's 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, you're kind of tired, maybe you're in an unfamiliar place, and there's a noise that happens that shouldn't happen in another room.

Yep, you can play with that.

So for example, if you open the door slightly and put your hand in to turn on the light and you watch what happens, your mind will fill with imaginative representations of what might be.

Right, so it's like the landscape of anomaly will be populated with something like imaginative demons.

Yes.

And that's a first-pass approximation. And it seems to me that that's a right hemispheric function. And then that as you explore further, that imaginative domain, which circumscribes what might be, is restrained and constrained, and constrained until you get what it actually is.

And that's specialized and realized...it's something like that, yeah. Does that seem like a reasonable...what do you think about that?

I love that, host of reasons. One is you mentioned defense, and one of the ideas behind my hypothesis is the right hemisphere is on the lookout for predators.

Right.

Whereas the left hemisphere is looking for prey, and this has been confirmed in many species of things I'd never heard, the second part is amphibians and mammals.

Yes, [Music].

So and you're in left hemispheric mode, you're more in predator mode.

Well, I mean, of course we are not lizards or toads or marmosets or whatever, but in animals, generally speaking, yeah, this is the case—getting in grasping.

And after all, our left hemisphere is the one that controls the grasping; the head is left hemisphere.

And exploring, which you mentioned, is more right hemisphere.

And when the frontal function is deficient, people often go into warm somatic mode of that side, and the left hand, it’s usually exploratory motions, meaningless ones, but trying to explore the environment. And with the right hand, it's grasping, pointlessly, at things.

So they, as where their automatic thing is with the left hand, the right hemisphere to explore, with the right hand, the left hemisphere to grasp.

So when you said exploratory and you said defense and you said also opening up to possibilities, these are all aspects or the way the right hemisphere, I often say, the right hemisphere opens up to possibilities, right?

Whereas the left hemisphere wants to close down to a certainty, right? And you need chaos and order. And, you know, I loved in your talk, you talked about chaos and order, but if I may say so, you seemed, and maybe you'd like to gloss that a little, you seemed to suggest that it would be good; we can't get rid of chaos, but you've seemed to imply that it would be better if we could.

Whereas my view is that chaos and order are necessary to one another, and there is a proper sort of harmony, balance.

Okay, I think that's as deep a question as you could possibly ask, I would say. Because I'm saying something, I would say there's a central theological issue there.

And yes, you know, in Genesis, the proper environment of humanity is construed as a garden.

Yes, and so I see that as the optimal balance of chaos and order. Nice nature is flourish, isn't it? Prolific and is chaotic.

Yeah. Then if you add harmony to that, you garden.

Yes, where you live in the garden, you're supposed to tend the garden.

Okay, so now the garden is created, it's a walled space.

Yes, even as a walled space.

Yeah, a ferriday side, so it's a walled garden.

That's it. Now the thing is, as soon as you make a wall, you try to keep what's outside out, but you can't because the boundaries between things are permeable.

So if you're going to have reality and you're gonna have a bounded space, you're gonna have a snake in the garden.

Yes, now then the question is, what the hell should you do about that? Make the walls so high that no snake can possibly get in, or should you allow for the possibility of snakes, but make yourself strong enough so that you can contend with them?

And I think there's an answer there that goes deep to the question of even maybe why the theological question of why God allowed evil to exist in the world.

I agree with you. It's like, well, do you make people safe or strong? And strong is better. And safe might not be commensurate with being, like it might not be possible to exist and to be safe.

Well, our existence is predicated on the fact that we dies.

Well, what's never safe?

Well, it's certainly bounded.

Yeah, there's this...there's a lovely, lovely Jewish idea and ancient ideas, one of the most profound ideas I've ever come across. And so it's a kind of a Zen koan, and here it is: Is that so? It's a question about the classic attributes of God: omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

Hmm.

What is it being with those three attributes, locked?

Mm-hmm, what kind of question is that?

The answer is limitation.

Yeah.

And the second answer is that's the justification for being is that the unlimited lacks the limited, exactly. And so because a limited is us, for anything to come into existence there needs to be an element of resistance.

And so things are never predicated on one pole of what is always a dipole.

Right, everything has that dipole.

Yes, it is, and it's imaged in the yin-yang idea.

But it seems to me very important because in our culture, we often seem to suppose that certain things are just good and other things are just bad, and it'd be good if we could get rid of the bad ones.

But actually, by pursuing certain good things that are good within measure too far, they become bad.

Not so cool, right?

But now let's go back to your anomaly thing because Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the "unnormal."

Yes, yes.

And so I think that that's a very important point because there are two ways you can react to an anomaly. One is to...and both have to be explored. One is to try and prove that it's not really an anomaly and, therefore, you can carry on with things as normal.

Yes, and the other is hopeful.

That's the typical left hemisphere approach; doesn't want anything to have to shift.

Yeah.

And quite reasonably, you don't want to be chaotically shifting if you're onto a good thing, too stressful.

Exactly.

It takes too much work, and you might actually be mistaken in a way. It's perfectly correct to be wary, but it's not correct to be so wary that you blot out anomalies.

And there's a lot of evidence, as I'm sure you know, that the left hemisphere simply blocks out everything that doesn't fit with its take.

It doesn't see it acting at all, right?

So there's a hugely important element in the right hemisphere going, "Hang on, but there may be another way of thinking that will accommodate this better." And actually good science needs to be skeptical about anomalies; otherwise, there will be chaos.

It also needs to be able to shift when an anomaly is rightly large enough.

Right, right. Or there is quite a lot of them and they don't really fit very well into this.

Exactly, yes.

Yes, so there's another observation that Jung made which I loved. I love this observation. He was trying to account for radical personality transformation, and so his idea was this, and I think it's commensurate with the ideas of inhibition between the two hemispheres.

So let's imagine the left is habitually inhibiting the function of the right to keep fear under control. It does that all sorts of ways, but so imagine that the right is reacting to anomalies, and it's aggregating them.

Okay, the left can't deal with them, so the right is aggregating anomalies and maybe that's starting to manifest itself in nightmarish dreams, for example.

Like that.

These normally start piling up; it's an indication that you're on shifting sand.

Well, so then imagine that the right hemisphere aggregates anomalies and then it starts to detect patterns in the anomalies.

And so now it starts to generate what you might consider a counter-hypothesis, and the left psychosis, if that counter-hypothesis gets to the point where the total sum in some sense of the anomalies plus the already mapped territory can be mapped by that new pattern, then at some point it will shift, yes, and the person will kick into a new...yes.

Now, it's like a Piagetian stage transition, except more dramatic.

It is, and what a fusion stage transition is also like, and subsumes those is Regalion Alf fable, the idea that a thing is opposed by something else.

But when it...when there is a synthesis, it's not that one of them is annihilated, right?

They're both transformed and taken up into the new whole, which embraces what before looked like an opposition.

Okay, so here's a question for you. You know, when I read Thomas Kuhn, I was reading to a PSA at the same time, and I knew that PSA was aware of codes work, by the way, and the problem I had with Kuhn and the interpretation interpreters of Kuhn is they don't seem to get something.

Who interprets Kuhn as a moral relativist in some sense?

Yeah, you don't seem to get the idea of increased generalizability of a plan.

So let's say I have a theory and a bunch of anomalies accrue, and I have to wipe out the theory.

And so then I wipe out the theory and I incorporate the anomalies, and now I have another theory.

Yes, it's a descent into chaos; that's my estimation.

Okay, old story.

So the anomaly, yeah, disruption is the mythical descent into chaos.

Yes. And then you reconfigure the theory with the chaos and you come up with a better theory.

Yes, okay, the reservoir is it better, and the answer is what accounts for everything that the previous theory accounted for plus the anomaly.

Exactly, so there's progress always.

Yes, exactly. But Kuhn is often read as stating that there is no progress; that, you know, there's incommensurate paradigms and you had just a shift between them.

But there isn't; there is a cumulative knowledge in some sense.

Well, I think one thing that we probably would both agree about is that we don't buy as a story that, you know, because nothing can be demonstrated definitively utterly to be there is no truth.

I mean, I think we both believe that there are truths, things that are truer than other things, and indeed, if the actress— well, we couldn't even talk correctly if we did exam, and even to say that there are no truths is itself a truth statement, which is truer than the statement “there are truths.”

So everybody automatically has to choose, whether they know it or not.

Yes, because while you—and you said why—I don't think it's not only that you can't talk; you can't even see.

No, because you don't know how to point. You wouldn't know how to discriminate what's coming into your brain, so it's inevitable, and I think we would agree about that.

But I think that may be a slight point of difference between us in that I'm very willing to embrace the idea of uncertainty.

And I—Isis, I may be wrong; perhaps you could expand on that, but sometimes you come across as a man who has certainties.

Well, it's a peculiar kind of certainty. I'm certain that standing on the border between order and chaos is a good idea.

That's a weird...

Exactly, because that you need to be in this sort of slightly unstable position.

Yes, you have to be, what would you say, encountering as much uncertainty as you can voluntarily tolerate.

Yes, I think that's equivalent to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development.

I'm sorry.

So when we talked a little bit earlier about the idea of an instinct for meaning, yeah.

So I think what meaning is, it's the elaborated form of the orienting reflex. But what meaning does, its function, its biological function, which I think is more real in some sense than any other biological function, is to tell you when you're in the place where you've balanced the stability, let's say of your left hemisphere systems with the exploratory capacity of your right.

So that not only are you master of your domain, but you're expanding that domain simultaneously.

And when you—I think that when you're there, yeah, it's a kind of a metaphysical place in some sense that you're imbued with a sense of meaning and purpose, and that's an indication that you actually optimized your neurological function.

Yes, and perhaps we could gloss the idea of purpose because I think there's a difference between people getting very confused, I think, about the idea of purpose, particularly whether there's a problem suggesting there is a purpose, and I believe there is a purpose, or there are purposes to the cosmos, not just to mine.

And suggest that somehow it's all been predetermined by God, but this is to misunderstand the nature of time—that there are time static slices.

And God, as there, and he's sorted it all out, and the whole thing's just unfolding as birdsong says, like a lady's fan being unfurled, is extremely boring and entirely static and non-creative universe.

But actually, something is at stake; things are unfolding; they have overall a direction, but actually exactly what that direction is isn't known what it looks like.

And it's a fool who says anything positive about the nature of God, but I'm not convinced that God is omniscient and omnipotent either.

I think God is in the process of becoming.

God is not only just becoming, but is becoming epidemic.

Yeah, so being and becoming, more becoming, I think becoming is the important thing.

Why do you think that?

I mean, it's also a strange segue. I mean, I'm not criticizing, but I'm curious what drove you to that conclusion?

An awful lot of things, really. And I think that everything is a process. In fact, I'm writing a book called "There Are No Things."

Oh, there are processes.

Yes. And there are patterns.

Patterns, yes.

Well, I think music is so powerful. Music is one of the most mysterious and wonderful things in the universe, and I don't think it's at all foolish of people to have thought that the planetary motions were kind of music.

I think it is a very important insight.

Now the music, you know, I've thought and I've said this in public lectures, that music is the most representative of the arts.

It is the world's music describes how those patterns should be arranged.

You're using "representative" in a very different way.

No, it depends on what you mean by represent.

So it's representing the ultimate reality of the cosmos.

What I would like to say, that presentative inner, that it's not representing anything.

It is actually when we're in the presence of music, something is coming into being which is at the core of the whole cosmic process.

And I think that's what love music do, and I mean, I'm hardly any originality in the idea; lots of physicists say this—their sort of the movements of atoms and the movements of planets and so forth are more like a dance or more like music than they are like things bumping into it.

Right.

And so a lot of things, there's patterns that people have made into tools.

I agree with you.

And tools of what the left hemisphere is always looking for. It's always like insanity didn’t pass, right?

It rare phase processes; it's all a matter of time.

Every single thing, including the mountain behind my house, if you were able to, which is billions of years old, if you were able to take—and as it were, a series of like a time-lapse camera—you'd see the thing morphing and changing and flowing.

Everything flows, as Heraclitus once said: "Everything flows."

It's just a question of over the time period that you consider it temple; it's a question of the tenure.

And so taking time out of things and considering them in the abstract, deracinated from context, particularly from the flow and from the context of time, changes them into something else.

And I think that what, in brief, what Plato has done and what a lot of the history of more recent Christianity has done is to thing if I God and heaven perfect states that are unaltered and so on.

And I think that it is an ever, evermore wonderfully self-exploring, self-actualizing process that requires a degree of opposition, you know, as a stream in order to have the movement and the ideas and patterns in it.

That, when I experienced, it's hard to describe these experiences, but when I've contemplated death deeply, it has struck me as a fundamental repair mechanism, like it's part of the mechanism by which new things that are better are brought into being.

Absolutely.

And I mean, you see that in your own being.

Yes, of course, without death you couldn't live.

Yes, because you're dying, the things about you that aren't right, even though at the physiological level, are dying all the time.

They are, unfortunately.

You also completely die, which is unfortunate side.

But more cosmically speaking, it does seem to me that death is...I don't know, man.

It's...I've had intuitions or intimations that death is the friend of being.

And that's like...it's hard to get my head around that.

I completely agree with you.

And indeed that's been said by many, many, many ways, of people than myself. I think that's right, that death is predicated on life, but also its...it shouldn't be seen as a sort of something that's negative.

It's a necessary stage in the process of being becoming what it is.

And since everything is ramified, since nothing is just isolated, you and I may look as though feel as though, but as you often eloquently say, we all have in time, we come from a place, but also as a culture we have history.

We can't detach ourselves from it.

We're expressions of it, but we're also inevitably dependent, as all organisms are, on the environment, where I end and where the great environment begins is a...I didn't like the word "environment."

It's not a nature; it's just something that's always been born.

Whereas environments, there's something around me from which I'm separate, but anyway—all of that is close to this.

Yes, so I would see us as like an eddy in a stream or like a wave in the sea that is never set for Schrodinger.

Life is really—I mean the comings together of physics with this process philosophy is a very strong.

When does that book come out?

When I finish writing.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm very worried that it's getting bigger, and you know, all the time I'm writing it, I'm seeing more and more of things that I am really must get to know more about, and it's an ever-receding.

Well, it's a danger of a book that I know that aims at something fundamental because I never run—you never hit the proper boundaries, that's it.

I need that...wool.

Mhm, yes, yeah.

Well, I also had experiences, I would say, that when I was trying to understand their imaginative experiences, when I was trying to understand, let's say, the necessity of evil.

Hmm.

No, because that's also a fundamental theological conundrum, and yeah, a metaphysical conundrum, you know, why is it that being is constituted such that evil is allowed to exist?

And it's even chromosomes.

What critique of Alyosha's Christianity, essentially?

What kind of God would allow for this sort of thing?

That's the ancient question.

Yeah, it's an ancient question. And I mean, part of what I thought— but I mean, I thought about the adversarial—I went to that, which is that you need a challenge because you don't—you’re not forced to bring forth what you could bring forth without a challenge.

And the greater the thing that you're supposed to bring forth, the greater the challenge has to be.

Yeah, you need an adversary or something like that.

But then I also thought that it would...it's possible that being requires limitation, you might say optimal being requires free choice.

I know I'm going through a lot of things quickly; free choice requires the real distinction between good and evil is that you don't have choice.

Well, so maybe it's possible to set up a world where evil is a possibility but where it isn't something that has to be manifest, you know, where it's an option open to you and a real option.

And it has to be, and the challenge that was presented to you, but it's something that you can...that can not move towards if you so desire.

And that seems to me to be something like the ethical requirement—that's the fundamental ethical requirement to avoid evil.

I'm sure it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist; that's not the same issue.

There it isn't; it isn't. And I wonder what could recast it as the need for otherness.

And God needs something other, and that other, if it's not going to be just part of God, has got to be free; otherwise, there will be no creation.

I mean, the nature that there is some other than God may, in the end, come from and come back to God.

Well, with that divine essence, all that...whatever.

But there's a wonderful thing, I can't figure out either. Like in the Christian idea, there's the end of time where the evil is separated from God.

From...yeah.

And I think about that as a metaphysical—well, you might think if it's a form of like, imagine it's a form of perfection.

A form of striving for perfection; you fragment yourself.

Yes! You challenge yourself, throw what's not worthy into the fire.

Elastic, something like that, and so what you end up with retained is so much better than what you started with through the trials, something like that.

Well, that sounds a bit like the dialectical process that we were talking about.

Right, and you have alluded to a couple of very good Jewish myths, and there's one in the Lurin Kabbalah about the creation, which I don't know if you know it, but it's absolutely riveting to me.

And the idea is that the primary being aims off the ground of all being and needs something other to come into being, the creation.

And that creation, what does that aims off do? Was his first act?

Is it to stretch out a hand and make something—oh no, the big—the first act is to withdraw, to create a place in which there can be something other than it.

And so, the first stage is called Sim Sum.

Isn't it?

Sounds—as so many creative things do, withdraw.

And then in that space there are vessels, and a spark comes out of aims off and falls into the vessels, and they all shatter, and that's called Sefirot.

Okay, yes, you write.

Yes.

And then there is the third stage, repair, in which what has just been fragmented is restored into something greater, and so this process carries on.

And it's in my terms very like what happens with the hemispheres —the right hemisphere is the one that is first accepting, it is sort of actively receptive—if you can put it that way—to whatever is new. You were talking about Hammond Gobo cancer and, and then whatever that is is then sort of processed by the left hemisphere at the next stage into categories.

So it's a bit of that, yeah, trying to understand it.

But of course, whatever it is, is much bigger than any of the categories, so they all break down, and it gets restored in the right hemisphere into a new whole.

That, the Tikun, the repair.

Mm-hmm, right.

Tikuf, Tik.

Right, right, right.

And I think that the kind of easy way of thinking about it is learning a piece of music.

You'll first of all be attracted to it as a whole.

You then realize that you need to practice that piece from bar 28, and you realize that...you know at 64 there's a return to the dominant or something.

And then actually, when you go on stage, you've got to just forget all about that.

But it's not that that work was lost; it's just that it's no longer present.

Right, right.