The Brain & Culture: A Symbiotic Relationship – Dr Iain McGilchrist
What this covers
All in Nature is interconnected: all processes are interactive. The brain and the world (which it exists to bring into being for us) are no exceptions to this. Our brains mould the world and the world moulds our brains. Given the capacity for each hemisphere to attend to the world differently, and therefore make some aspects of the world stand forward at the expense of others, different cultures may come to emphasise different ‘takes’ on the world. I will consider some ways in which this has worked itself out historically in the West, and whether seeing this can help us get a new perspective on what we see happening around us in the world today.
Dr McGilchrist is a Psychiatrist and Writer, who is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context. He has published original research and contributed chapters to books on a wide range of subjects, as well as original articles in papers and journals, including the British Journal of Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. He has taken part in many radios and TV programmes, documentaries, and podcasts, among them dialogues with Jordan Peterson, David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom, and philosopher Tim Freke.
His books include Against Criticism, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, and Ways of Attending. He published his latest book: The Matter With Things, a book of epistemology and metaphysics. You can keep up to date with his work at https://channelmcgilchrist.com
Links:
- Get our latest psychology lectures emailed to your inbox: http://bit.ly/new-talks5
- Check out our next event: http://theweekenduniversity.com/events/
- Dr McGilchrist’s website: https://channelmcgilchrist.com
- Dr McGilchrist’s books: https://amzn.to/318NxBj
Source description (no synthesized summary yet).
McGilchrist argues that Western culture has undergone a progressive shift toward left-hemisphere dominance—characterized by abstraction, fragmentation, and mechanistic thinking—that mirrors patterns seen in schizophrenia and mental illness, with recovery requiring cultural rebalancing toward right-hemisphere modes of understanding that emphasize embodied presence, context, and holistic meaning.
- The two brain hemispheres have fundamentally different ways of attending to and relating to reality: the left focuses narrowly on fixed, isolated, categorized entities for manipulation; the right maintains broad, contextual, embodied awareness of wholes and flows.
- Historical analysis of art, philosophy, and culture shows a cyclical pattern where flourishing periods balance both hemispheres, followed by progressive left-hemisphere dominance that eventually produces pathological symptoms (loss of depth, perspective, embodiment, humor, context) that parallel right-hemisphere damage.
- Modern civilization exhibits the cognitive and social pathologies of extreme left-hemisphere dominance: bureaucratic abstraction, algorithmic thinking replacing judgment, loss of depth perception and metaphor, depersonalization, and a dangerous unrealistic optimism—which is reversible only through cultural transformation of education, art, and consciousness itself.
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
The expressive aspect of the face is placed in the viewer's left visual field, which has priority in its connection to the right hemisphere; leftward-facing faces expose the subject's left hemiface, which is controlled by the right hemisphere and is larger and more expressive than the right hemiface.
“it's two things first the expressive aspect of the face is placed in the viewer's left visual field and the left visual field has priority if you like in its connection with the right hemisphere and it also exposes the subjects left hemiphase which is controlled by their right hemisphere and is interestingly in all of us slightly larger than the um right hemiface which is controlled by the left hemisphere and more expressive”
Writing evolved in stages of increasing abstraction from experience: first pictograms (pictures representing things directly), then phonograms (syllables representing sounds), then alphabetic letters (abstract phonetic units); this progression moved writing further from immediate sensory experience at each stage.
“initially it was pictograms and then it started being phonograms phonograms are not letters as we know them like a phonetic script um that little images that uh instead of representing representing a bird by a bird a little picture of a bird you represent a bird by a syllable that is pronounced as a whole like the word for a bird so it's one step removed from the immediacy of the picture and then you get another step in which there's no longer phonograms but a phonetic alphabet so in other words the correspondence is not between an image that's written down and a whole syllabic sound but just a letter just a single letter”
The brain exhibits asymmetry such that the right hemisphere is broader and juts forward more in the frontal region (a phenomenon called jacobilefian torque), and this asymmetry exists in animals that do not have language, suggesting language cannot have been the cause of this fundamental brain organization.
“towards the back of the brain that's the bottom of the picture it's broader on the left side on the part of the screen that is to your right and that was what was mentioned in medical school which was that we have language that's the thing that distinguishes us from other creatures and we needed to keep language which is a complex phenomenon altogether somewhere under the same roof and that just happened to be in the left hemisphere which obligingly expanded to house it in what is surprisingly known as the language area now there are a number of things about this the first is it completely um overlooks the fact that there is an equal and opposite asymmetry in the frontal region of the brain which is at the top of the picture there where you see that it's broader and juts forward more on the right on the left of your screen in other words than in the left hemisphere so it's as though somebody had got hold of the brain from below and given it a sharp twist clockwise that is called jacoflefian talk t-o-r-q-u-e”
Only mammals have a corpus callosum, the main means of communication between the two cerebral hemispheres; earlier creatures like reptiles, amphibians, and birds have more separated hemispheres with no corpus callosum.
“in fact only mammals do until that point no creature reptiles amphibians birds whatever they do not have a corpus callosum the two hemispheres are more separate even than they are in this case”
Attention itself changes what you perceive; the same object perceived with different types of attention (focused vs. holistic) produces two genuinely different experiential worlds, such that something viewed mechanistically versus as part of a lover's body has completely different meaning and qualitative character.
“if it is true that attention changes what you find and that is very definitely the case and there are some amusing instances that have gone into pop culture from illusionists and so forth which show that the way you attend to something literally changes what you're able to see but it's a more subtle thing than that actually just the same thing attended to with a different um attitude it changes how you see it you can see something in a very objective way as a mechanism and then realize that it's actually part of your lover's body and and then it has a completely different meaning”
In Renaissance painting, the introduction of perspective created paintings with multiple planes of depth, with the eye drawn through successive layers of depth and time; perspective is almost like musical harmony in creating relationship between parts; both perspective and harmony emerged in the 16th century Renaissance and both disappeared in 20th century modernism.
“so you get just to give you an idea of the depth of the understanding of that face here we've got a medieval picture of a bishop in which the bishop is very big in the picture because he's important and the little chap on the horse going by is small because it's not important and there is no perspective here and it looks like it's all in one plane and about to sort of drop off the bottom of the picture um but here really not that much later 150 years later perhaps is a representation uh by guiller landayo of the um the adoration of the shepherds and here many many things to see but first of all you see individual faces you see them situated in a real world which has perspective which is heightened because there are so many planes of depth in this picture the eye is caught by a train of of them of people coming to pay homage and that takes the eye back into another plane of the painting behind which this is another plane of landscape and behind which there's another plane a sea and landscape and also there is a deep perspective of time because the sarcophagus there which is acting as um the um uh manger um for in which christ was laid is an ancient roman sarcophagus”
In the Reformation, the image was proscribed and destroyed; the literal meaning became more important than the metaphoric; the past was erased because it did not conform to reformist beliefs; the body became abstracted away as corrupt flesh to be resisted; this represents a sharp swing toward left-hemisphere dominance through religious doctrine.
“this is just to refer to the um the movement known as the reformation in which there's a lot to say but the word suddenly became very important and the image was proscribed to the extent that people went around destroying images destroying sculpture destroying everything beautiful they could get their hands on unless it had text on it um the literal suddenly becomes more important than the metaphoric so nobody understands when people are speaking metaphorically or when they're saying subtle things everything is taken um as a boldly literally contextualized statement um there's a desire to erase the past because the past doesn't conform to what the reformers believed were the important things there's a turning of the whole abstract left hemisphere mind away from the body which is corrupt flesh and must be resisted wherever possible”
McGilchrist does not claim consciousness is produced by the brain but rather 'facilitated, emitted, or permitted' by it—the brain is a receiver/transmitter, not a generator of consciousness, a position distinct from both pure reductionism and dualism.
“i'm not saying there's nothing reductionist about this i'm not saying that the brain causes experience in fact any of you who attended my lecture to the weekend university in february on the nature of consciousness will know that i believe that consciousness is not in fact secreted as it were by the brain but is facilitated emitted or in fact um sorry not emitted but permitted i should say by the brain”
Currency (gold and silver coins) replaced gift-giving during the same period as the shift to left-to-right writing; money substitutes a token for a thing just as words substitute for things, both representing left-hemisphere abstraction and the rise of bureaucratic, calculating commerce over relational gift exchange.
“in the archaic era um silver and dove were not used for trade there was no actual trade so much as gift giving which is quite a different thing from the calculating bureaucratic way of thinking which is that of money and don't forget that money substitutes a token for a thing in a way a word gets substituted for a thing it's a representation so these representations coins of gold and silver took over from gifts of silver statues or golden statues or objects over the same sort of a time period beginning bit earlier”
The natural world, culture (embodied in art and tradition), and understanding of the body were the main ways people were 'helped out of the hall of mirrors' of ideological representation; until 100 years ago almost everyone lived surrounded by the natural world, but now most people are disconnected from it.
“there used to be a number of ways in which we could be helped out of the hall of mirrors of our ideas one was the presence of the natural world which is nothing like the mechanism that we're taught that the world must be the machine that the left hemisphere can alone understand um and then until 100 years ago almost everyone in the world lives surrounded by the natural world”
In medieval art, depth disappears—spatial, temporal, and emotional depth are all lost; right-hemisphere function, which underwrites all three forms of depth, receded during the Middle Ages as shown by the loss of perspective in painting and the loss of spatial coherence.
“there's three important areas in which the right hemisphere underwrites depth just take it from me um it is the one that understands depth in space so it can see it it is interested in perspective because it actually sees the depth of space and it's better able to see that literally visually it sees not just a flat compressed area but it sees the depth of reality it sees depth in time so whereas the left hemisphere tends to see a slice and another slice which has no depth or an emotion the right hemisphere sees a continuing flow”
The brain has evolved two hemispheres to solve a fundamental survival dilemma: the need for both narrowly focused, targeted attention to identify and grasp immediate resources (left hemisphere) and broad, sustained vigilant attention to the entire environment to avoid predators and maintain social awareness (right hemisphere).
“my hypothesis and i don't know one that better accounts for it and there's a lot of evidence for this in birds and animals as well as in humans is that over evolution the two hemispheres have evolved to carry out different ways of relating to reality and this is because every living creature needs to solve a conundrum which is how to eat and stay alive”
McGilchrist's critique is not that the lab neuroscience on hemisphere differences is wrong but that some neuroscientists refuse to apply laboratory findings to real human beings and culture, treating lab results as confined to the lab rather than as insights into how brains actually function in the world.
“and one of them is a very distinguished neuroscience called mike bazanega and um delightfully he says well you know he takes um data derived from a laboratory and then applies it to real human beings and i'm thinking well yes but i thought the whole point of the lab experiments was to help us understand real human beings and the idea that what you're doing in the lab just stays in the lab seems to me to be part of what i would call the rather narrow focus of the left hemisphere's take”
Each cerebral hemisphere is approximately 10 times more internally connected within itself than it is connected to the opposite hemisphere, supporting the notion that they function as distinct systems rather than seamlessly integrated units.
“each individual hemisphere is um at least 10 times more connected within itself than it is um connected to the opposite hemisphere”
After a right hemisphere stroke with resulting paralysis of the left arm, patients deny the paralysis exists; when shown their own arm, they claim it is not theirs but belongs to someone else (mother, patient in next bed, etc.), illustrating the left hemisphere's tendency to deny reality that contradicts its worldview.
“after a right hemisphere stroke when there's a perhaps a paralysed left arm the person is so optimistic that they will deny that they have a paralysis altogether and if it's pointed out to them if you bring their arm in front of them and say move it then they say oh that's not my arm that's that's somebody else's arm not mine it might be my mother's i think she left it here yesterday or it belongs to the the patient in that bed over there it's nothing to do with me”
In the 20th century, the brain lives in what McGilchrist calls a 'hall of mirrors'—a hermetically sealed control tower in which images of the world are projected on screens and viewed by a homunculus; if what is actually happening outside disagrees with what appears on the internal screens, the left hemisphere denies the external reality rather than updating its model.
“what i think has happened is a number of things i think we've got caught in what i call the hall of mirrors which is the left hemispheres world the left hemisphere lives in the representation of the world so it's like living in a hermetically sealed control tower in which images of the world are projected on the walls and are seen from within the control tower by a homunculus that's the only way to describe it the left hemisphere is like this in relation to the world and if what is actually going on in the world outside the window doesn't agree with what it's got on its you know it's dials on its screens then it just denies that it's the case remember it's very big on denial”
Education must shift from 'instilling information into children' toward helping them 'to think, to imagine, and to think critically,' teaching them to 'question everything' and 'understand a very broad basis of knowledge' without indoctrinating them in preferred views.
“um and i just mentioned a couple one of them is education that we need to get away from the idea that it's instilling information into children and seeing how well they've um learned instead it is actually helping them to think to imagine and to think critically above all therefore the exact opposite of indoctrinating them in what are believed to be the right views but instead telling them how to question everything and to really understand a very broad basis of knowledge about the greatest things um that we have to offer in history and literature in philosophy nobody should leave school without being able to debate a point from two different points of view”
Julian Jaynes's 'Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' proposed something powerful about brain hemispheres and cultural change, and while McGilchrist thinks Jaynes had 'precisely the wrong end of the stick,' the fact that he saw the connection between brain structure and culture was 'totally brilliant.'
“now you may that some of you know the thesis of um a very brilliant book also written in written in the mid 70s um thinking of mcmanus writing in the 70s um it called the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind and he had seen some of the same picture um but he had attributed it also to something to do with the bicameral nature of the mind the by hemispheric structure of the mind and really he was on to something and i think was totally brilliant in seeing it i think he got hold of precisely the wrong end of the stick but that doesn't in any way diminish the value of what he had to say because really just inverting it is a quite simple matter it was seeing that there was this connection with the brain that was so brilliant”
Culture—the embodiment of knowledge and values in great works of art and tradition—has been 'under relentless attack' and is now under 'even further attack' in our lifetime due to mass migration, industrialization of population, and loss of embodied cultural transmission.
“there is the culture which is the way in which what we know and have learned and have embodied in great works of art which should be handed on from one generation to another has been under relentless attack and is now under even further attack in our lifetime um partly of course when you have vast movements of population and industrialization of populations um there's a clash of cultures and the loss of the embodiment of the culture”
In schizophrenia, the normal brain asymmetry (larger left frontal area, larger right occipital area) is either reduced or reversed, and this loss of asymmetry causes enormous problems; proper brain function depends on maintaining that asymmetry.
“of course we couldn't all have developed schizophrenia but i was working on the relationship between problems in the right hemisphere and the development of schizophrenia and although the i showed you that asymmetry that is in the normal brain when that asymmetry is not there and that is either often not that sometimes actually reversed um in the brains of subjects of schizophrenia it causes enormous problems it should have that asymmetry it's necessary for this proper functioning”
The left hemisphere prefers things that are known, familiar, and certain, likes to categorize them into familiar categories, and tends to see things as fixed; the right hemisphere is at ease with things that are new, have not been encountered before, do not fit into existing categories, and have complex or ambiguous meaning.
“the left hemisphere prefers things that are known familiar and certain um he likes to put them in categories which it's familiar with whereas the right hemisphere is um more at ease with things that are new have not been encountered before don't immediately fit into a pigeon hurl or have complex and ambiguous meaning”
The corpus callosum has proportionally shrunk in size relative to overall brain size as creatures evolved to greater complexity; in humans, the corpus callosum is not significantly larger than in dogs despite the human brain being vastly larger, indicating that evolution has 'allowed it to take a back seat' as brains became more complex.
“though the human brain is very much larger than the dog's brain the size of the corpus callosum is not really very much larger in humans than it is in dogs in other words having invented it um during mammalian evolution nature has allowed it to take a back seat as we become more complex”
Much of the corpus callosum's function is inhibitory rather than excitatory; more than half of the time its purpose is to say 'you keep out of it, I'm dealing with this now' to the opposite hemisphere, preventing interference rather than promoting communication.
“the intriguing thing about the corpus callosum is that much of its function is inhibitory in other words it it does give positive excitatory information to the other hemisphere but a lot of the time more than half of the time its purpose is to say but you keep out of it i'm dealing with this now”
The most important distinction between hemispheres is between 'presence'—coming into being in front of you as an active participant in the world—and 'representation'—a 2D image or sign that stands in for something else, which is necessarily a reduced, simplified version of what it represents.
“probably the most important distinction that i would like to refer to is that between what is present or what in the neologism of heidegger's or he used the verb unveisen we translated it into english as presence to presence is to come into being in front of you as an active participant in the world that you are experiencing and this is very apparent to children for which everything is very real”
The left hemisphere never takes responsibility; it treats problems as caused by others ('it's not my problem, it's his') and displays anger and aggression which are more left-hemisphere based than right; in a left-hemisphere-dominated world, public discourse would be characterized by anger and aggression, with all people becoming passive victims of someone else's doing.
“and we'd all be the passive victims of somebody else's doing remember the left hemisphere never takes responsibility it's not my problem it's his you know my limbs work fine it's his problem if my limb doesn't work mine and art would become highly conceptual visual art would lack a sense of depth and include distorted or bizarre perspectives music would be reduced a little more than rhythm because that's the only bit of music the left hemisphere gets melody complex melody certainly and and harmony are really only understood for most of us in the right hemisphere and anger and aggression which are more left hemisphere based than right hemisphere based would become the key uh emotions of public discourse”
McGilchrist suggests that if any of this resonates, it might indicate that the hypothesis is correct and that 'we've gone a long way into the third decay of western civilization,' making it urgent to take this seriously and find solutions.
“my listeners i don't know if you recognize any of that but if you do it might be a worrying indication that what i'm suggesting is right and that we've gone a long way into the third decay of western civilization um and quite what to do about it is another matter but it certainly concerns us urgently to take it seriously all of us”
Historical analysis reveals a pattern: over time there is an initial flourishing when both hemispheres work together, followed by a relentless drift further and further into the realm of the left hemisphere; this pattern repeats throughout Western history.
“what happened here and what i'm going to suggest happens repeatedly in western history is that after an initial flourishing in which you see these two hemispheres working alongside one another there is a relentless drift further and further into the realm of the left hemisphere”
McGilchrist's counter-interpretation of the voice-hearing experiences of ancient prophets: rather than the bicameral mind breaking down, he proposes that the two hemispheres became more separate, and voices from the right hemisphere sounded like voices of gods not because they weren't recognized, but because they came through a closed door—they seemed to come from somewhere else, not from inside the self.
“what he was saying it was that it was a bicameral mind so it was distinct and separate and then what happened at this time was that that separation broke down and the two hemispheres uh became much more immediately in contact with one another and this explains according to him why they heard voices um why they heard the voices of the gods and so on and he thinks this is a heart back to schizophrenia in fact there are all sorts of reasons why that is not right first of all schizophrenia is not a primitive condition at all the hyper hyper modern hyper rationalistic conditions has nothing like the same qualities um as what he was referring to but my take on it is that actually what happened was that these two things that had been joined became separate and that the door between the two hemispheres which had always been there was relatively closed and so the voices coming from the right hemisphere which he says sounded like the voice of gods because they weren't recognized i say um sounded like the voice of gods because they were heard through a door so they came from somewhere else no longer from inside me but from some other realm”
Cultural and neurological change are not causally related in a simple linear chain but are part of a mutually reflecting network in which sociological, economic, technological, anthropological, environmental, epigenetic, and political factors all interconnect and reinforce one another, with hemispheric dominance being another lens on this same nexus.
“nor am i saying that the reason that cult has changed is explicable by neurology alone it's not that i think that neurological changes cause things they're just another way of looking at a nexus of human experiences that you can view in a variety of different ways after all when a society or culture changes this can be for sociological economic technological anthropological environmental epigenetic um economic and political factors all of which in any case are interconnected with one another and each of them mirrors the other depending on which one you tend to focus on that seems to be the cause of all the others but really i'd like you to drop the idea of a chain of causation which is purely linear what there is here is a whole network of phenomena”
Mindfulness practice—'the whole business of not judging standing back and allowing oneself to be there for the first time in the world'—is a practical means of engaging the right hemisphere and represents a concrete individual practice for cultural healing.
“in personal terms what we can do is it sounds very benign but practice mindfulness which is the whole business of not judging standing back and allowing oneself to be there for the first time in the world that is very much engaging the right hemisphere”
This entire scenario would be accompanied by 'dangerously unwarranted optimism' as the left hemisphere's characteristic bias, so that the culture would 'shuffle whistling towards the abyss' in denial of actual dangers.
“and all this would be accompanied by a dangerously unwarranted optimism as we um shuffled whistling towards the abyss”
McGilchrist hypothesizes that something changed in the frontal lobes during the Greek period, possibly due to coming together of different genetic and cultural histories, enabling the necessary distance that the frontal lobes provide—the ability to stand back from immediate experience and take a broader view—which then allowed both hemispheres to fully develop their distinct capacities.
“my take on that is that there was a a beginning of both something we've never seen before that was very expressive of the right hemisphere and something we'd never seen before which was very expressive to the left hemisphere now my take on that is that there was a change in the frontal lobes in the brain at this time um we don't know quite what happened here there was clearly some coming together of different people with different genetic and cultural histories the somehow caused what the the frontal lobes are best at which is being able to stand back from the world that is really what they are there for most highly evolved part of the human brain and what they mainly do is not give us the power to do a certain thing that the rest of the brain doesn't have but to inhibit what's going on elsewhere in the interest of taking a bigger and broader view creating what i call the necessary distance”
The two kinds of knowing are distinct and often confused: 'knowing from experience' (connaitre in French, kennen in German) versus 'knowing a fact' (savoir in French, wissen in German); one knows one's children in the first way but knows facts about Paris in the second way, and most languages besides English maintain this distinction.
“it's a gloss that i find myself very often making unfortunately in english we don't distinguish between two kinds of knowing there is knowing from experience and is knowing the fact that so i know the fact that paris is the capital of france but i know my children in a way that only their father can know them these are fundamentally different kinds of knowledge and in most languages there are two words for example in french and the first is sorry the first december and the second is connect and in german the first is listen and the second is cannon and i've been told by people in almost every other language that this distinction holds for them too”
Anger is the emotion that lateralizes most clearly to the left hemisphere; the right hemisphere is associated with deeper emotions, while left-hemisphere damage often results in lack of empathy but not necessarily emotional flatness.
“also leads interestingly to one of the emotions which is by the way the left hemisphere is not unemotional at all one of the motions that lateralize in fact the emotion that lateralizes most clearly is anger and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere”
All valuable communication between people occurs in the implicit domain: tone, context, metaphor, and meaning conveyed by what is not said rather than what is said; the left hemisphere prefers privacy, clarity, and simplicity and loses this implicit richness, and social media's focus on sound bites tends to intensify the misrepresentation of messages taken out of context.
“so all that is valuable in our communication with one another is in that implicit area of the tone the context um using metaphors not saying directly what we mean um meaning things by what we don't say as much as by what we do say all of that is lost on the left hemisphere which likes um privacy clarity and simplicity and unfortunately i mean i have to pause here just to comment that the whole business of sound bites on social media tends to intensify the way in which um some message taken out of context can be grossly misrepresented and distorted”
The solution to left-hemisphere dominance requires change at the level of 'heart and mind'—understanding that diverse contemporary problems are manifestations of a single way of looking at the world that must be 'jettisoned fast'; there is 'no case for business as normal' and 'we're on a suicide track'.
“the only way out of this is a change of heart and mind and it needs to be a way of understanding how all these individual problems that we see around us you know 20 different things that are going on are all manifestations of a single way of looking at things which we need to jettison fast but there are certain things on a societal level that we need to do... there is no case for business as normal we're on a suicide track we have to change”
Reasonableness (the ability to have conversations about complex issues combining rational discourse with wise, empathic, decent attention to experience and judgment) would be replaced by mere rationality (purely schematic logic that computers can handle); German distinguishes Verstand (rationality) from Vernunft (reasonableness).
“reasonableness which is a very valuable thing which i now see almost nowhere which is the ability to have a conversation in which you accept that there are enormously complex issues here um which has to be a combination of rational discourse and attention wise empathic and decent attention to experience it's judgment which used to be the purpose of an education being able to bring together what reason tells us with what the best of experience tells us and that has been replaced by what i call it rationality which is purely schematic logic of a kind that a computer can handle and in again in many languages there are distinctions to be made the one that i know best is in german between for stant on the one hand and for on the other so i have chosen reasonableness and rationality”
In ancient Greece around 600 BC, there was a simultaneous emergence of multiple phenomena associated with right-hemisphere engagement: expressive portraiture, vivid metaphorical poetry, drama, natural philosophy, individualism balanced with social belonging, humor, and empirical science.
“it goes along with the evolution at this point suddenly of highly expressive poetry making um vivid use of metaphor a metaphor is something the right hemisphere is better able to understand... so richly metaphoric poetry lyric poetry as well as epic poetry and of course the beginnings of drama... a great connectedness to nature so people started to write about the beauty of the natural world pastoral poems... the beginnings of a sense of humor... the balance the value and the rights of an individual with those of society”
In Rome, beautiful proportionate individual representations and art gave way to blockish, bureaucratic representations; when the empire needed to control vast territories, it required sameness and standardization, and art shifted from celebrating proportion, harmony, and particularity to emphasizing power, might, hierarchy, and militarism.
“with the empire gradually you needed sameness to be rolled out across a vast area of the world roman empire overreached itself and it needed to be able to lay down cities as it were by ikea means they were sent out standard issue um and rather than beauty defense became important might power hierarchy militarism commerce... the emphasis on the particular the the small the delicate the beautiful the proportionate the harmonic uh was pushed aside by the the lump and blockish um bureaucratic mindset”
In left-hemisphere culture, wonder would be 'undercut' by the left hemisphere's claim that 'you haven't thought hard enough about this, of course we understand it and there's nothing we can't understand'; the flow of experience would be reduced to 'just a sum of infinite series of pieces.'
“deliberate uncutting of the undercutting of the sense of or wonder which the left hemisphere just means um you haven't thought hard enough about this of course we understand it and there's nothing we can't understand and the flow would be reduced to just a sum of infinite series of pieces they've been discarding of all tacit forms of knowing um replaced by a network of small complicated rules those are detox words on viewing america in the 1830s we'd all be spectators rather than actors in the world”
Louis Sass's book 'Madness and Modernism' makes connections between the phenomena of schizophrenia and the modern condition as conveyed in modern art, literature, and thought, showing that approximately 20-25 core phenomena of schizophrenic experience are reflected in modernism but not in the art and history of other eras.
“he had just written a book called madness and modernism in which he made many connections between the phenomena of schizophrenia and the modern condition as conveyed in modern art literature and thought and he's a very subtle writer and very knowledgeable one and over a long book about as long as the master in his chemistry he takes i don't know perhaps about 20 25 phenomena that are at the core of the experience in schizophrenia and shows that each one of them is actually reflected in modernism but not in the art and history of other eras”
The body has become objectified and abstracted in modern consciousness; rather than experiencing oneself as an embodied subject, one gets into a sports car 'rather than something that is an expression of your spirit,' treating the body as external mechanism rather than spiritual expression.
“there's a loss of the understanding of the body which has become an objectified entity in the outside world that you live in in the sense that you get into a highly tuned sports car rather than something that is an expression of your spirit”
Changes in brain hemisphere balance do not require physical neurological change over time but are more like a radio tuning analogy: the same hardware receives different channels depending on which one is being attended to, a shift in cultural consciousness rather than in evolved brain structure.
“the best analogy i can give you is that um it's like having a radio set which is in some ways what i would um say rather crudely uh is not a bad image of what the brain is a receiver a transmitter and when you have that radio set you might find yourself listening to a whole range of channels for quite a while and then after a while you might find yourself narrowing down to just one channel it's more like that that as it were there are still channels on offer but we're disattending to all but one of them”
Greek reversed the Phoenician alphabet (mirroring it) and introduced vowels, removing the last element of contextual understanding; originally Greek was written right-to-left (driven by right-hemisphere eye movement), then in bostrotodon fashion (alternating direction), then by the 4th century BC purely left-to-right (driven by left-hemisphere eye movement).
“when the eyes move from left to right they're driven by the needs of the left hemisphere when they move from right to left they're driven from the right hemisphere more it's a matter of degree it's not an absolute so one sees these things imaged in language... originally in the 8th century bc from right to left and then between the seventh and the fifth century you see there was something interesting happened which is called boostrotodon which means literally as the ox plows... and then finally by about the fourth century it was simply it's fourth century bc of course i mean it was written purely from left to right”
If we live in a left-hemisphere-dominated world, we would expect: loss of the broader picture, information replacing knowledge, algorithms replacing judgment and skill, loss of wisdom, obsession with matter as mere lump, abstraction divorced from embodied reality, and bureaucratic expansion.
“if we live in a left hemisphere-dominated world let's just do the thought experiment what would it look like well first would be a loss of the broader picture knowledge will become replaced by information tokens or representations there'll be a loss of concepts of skill and judgment which will be replaced by those of algorithms that can be carried out by a computer wisdom would be right out because it's to do with the experience of a living human being can't be understood by a machine or by a bureaucracy”
Education should include 'much bigger emphasis on poetry on drama on music' because 'these are not fringe subjects... it's like the goldman sachs person what i do seriously is make money in a office under strip lighting... and then i go to the opera house in the evening' when actually the office work is 'fantasy' and the opera is what matters.
“and a much bigger emphasis on poetry on drama on music these are not fringe subjects these are not sort of around the edges of life you know it's like the goldman sachs person what i do seriously is make money in a office under strip lighting in london and then i i go to the opera house in the evening and i'm entertained no mate what you do during the day under strip flight is fantasy and it's damaging fantasy and it's ruining the world and what you need to do is to pay attention to what's bloody going on in the opera house”
McGilchrist responded to a question about the experience of awe as an emotion by noting that awe depends on being present to the world as it presences itself, not just recognizing it as a 'beautiful landscape' but being astonished; awe also depends on the ability to stay with something bigger than what one knows, without rushing to verbalize or categorize it.
“well it's a very difficult one um i i've taken it very seriously not surprisingly it is very hard to study because you can't put someone in a scanner and say now feel or partly because being in a scanner is not a place for feeling or but also because it can't be summoned at will um and it really probably wouldn't tell us very much anyway i'm i'm not a great exponent of scanning as the answer to these questions what is much more revealing is what goes missing when certain bits of the brain are damaged you just see that this is gone from somebody's world however even there that's a very difficult one there isn't a big literature on it but one can see from first principles that this will be something that the right hand is better to understand that is because it depends on a being present in the sense of allowing the world to presence to you not just go oh yes it's a beautiful picturesque landscape but my god i don't think i've ever seen a mountain before you know and this is what wordsworth set out to do for his readers”
The left hemisphere's tendency to isolate, fix, and make explicit through focused attention 'renders things inert mechanical lifeless but it also enables us for the first time to know and consequently to learn and to make things this gives us power'—the left hemisphere's utility comes precisely from its ability to abstract and manipulate.
“this kind of attention isolates fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention in doing so it renders things inert mechanical lifeless but it also enables us for the first time to know and consequently to learn and to make things this gives us power”
Religion has become either 'social work' or 'a kind of collection of absurd propositions,' losing its function as a reminder 'that there's more going on here than meets the eye,' which was its place in human life.
“and religion which has just become either social work or a kind of um collection of absurd uh propositions to most people and so has lost its place in our life where it used to remind us that there's more going on here than meets the eye”
The Renaissance portrait of Erasmus by Holbein exemplifies the return of depth: it is one of the most beautiful Renaissance paintings, and Erasmus was a thinker whose work exhibited the subtlety that is lost when the right hemisphere is diminished, suggesting that the Renaissance involved return of both artistic and intellectual depth.
“here we move on to the 16th century of course and this is the famous portrait of erasmus by holbein one of the most most beautiful paintings of the renaissance really and of a man whose thinking had all the subtlety that i've been talking about has lost when the right hemisphere um is lost”
After the Greek efflorescence, there was a gradual substitution of a complex vision of the world (such as Heraclitus's philosophy emphasizing the unity of opposites) with a more prosaic, systematic philosophy in which opposing things cannot both be true and chains of reasoning prioritize logic over empirical observation.
“a substitution of a complex vision of the world such as you find in particularly heraclitus with insights that are common to oriental philosophy of the coming together of opposites an enormously rich and sophisticated understanding of the world being gradually driven out by a more prosaic systematic philosophy in which a thing in its opposite simply can't both be true in which chains of reasoning lead to conclusions in a way that pays less attention i don't say it pays no attention but pays less attention to the empirical so that the theory about something begins to be to have priority over what the the actual data of experience and the senses tell us”
Modern art has become 'clever, trivial, ironized, highly representational abstract, often silly' and has 'deliberately undermined its ability to engage deeply at an unconscious level through the power of visceral imagery and metaphor,' making art a vehicle of alienation rather than meaning.
“art which has become clever uh trivial ironized highly representational abstract um often silly in our world but has tended to undermine deliberately its ability to engage deeply at an unconscious level through the power of visceral imagery and metaphor”
When McGilchrist tries to write about his complex ideas, forcing them into linear language and structure feels like trying to express something that is inherently networked and interconnected through a medium (written text) that demands linearity; there is a fundamental tension between the right-hemisphere understanding and the left-hemisphere medium of language.
“i had grave grave difficulty writing the master in his chemistry the reason was that everything i knew in neuroscience in philosophy in history and literature seemed to be connected to everything else and it was like in a massive caps cradle and i was thinking how do i turn this into a linear structure which you know has to be for a book really... and i got around it by pretending i was writing an outline in the process of writing the outline i wrote 1200 pages”
McGilchrist was advised by mentors 30 years ago to 'drop [hemisphere research] like a hot coal because it would mean career death' in academic medicine and psychiatry; his willingness to pursue it anyway despite this professional risk has been rewarded by finding that 'people seem to find a great deal of substance in the thesis.'
“some very kind mentors of mine when i embarked on this whole business of investigating hemisphere differences about 30 years ago now advised me to drop it like a hot coal because it would mean career death so i have actually um taken the risk and gone ahead and the reward for that is that actually a lot of people seem to find a great deal of substance in in the thesis”
When someone reads McGilchrist's book, they often report that they can 'never see the world the same since'; the book produces a fundamental shift in perception because it reveals how a single way of looking at things manifests in all contemporary problems.
“those who have say to me i have never been able to see the world the same since i read that i see everything entirely differently and that's important because as i say the only way out of this is a change of heart and mind and it needs to be a way of understanding how all these individual problems that we see around us you know 20 different things that are going on are all manifestations of a single way of looking at things which we need to jettison fast”
Historical and contemporary philosophers have spontaneously reported experiencing 'two souls' or 'two ways of looking at the world,' reflecting an intuitive recognition of hemispheric duality that predates modern neuroscience.
“it's of interest to me that many many philosophers have said words to the effect of it seems that i have two souls it seems that humanity has two ways of looking at the world two minds that we are two citizens of two different worlds now that is an interesting spontaneous insight that reflects what i'm referring to here”
Milton Brenner's book 'Faces' traces the history of depicting the human face and shows that in early history representations had no heads or faces; when faces appeared, they were inexpressive and forward-facing; around 600 BC in ancient Greece, faces became expressive and turned toward the viewer's left.
“there's a fascinating book by a man called milton brenner b-r-e-n-e-r faces um in which he traces the history of the depiction of the human face and he has a very interesting thesis which concerns the hemispheres he's not the only person who has seen this there are several people who have spotted what i'm going to be talking about and have researched it and validated it the human face is so central to what we nowadays mean by humanity”
As Greek civilization declined and Rome fell, faces became inexpressive and forward-facing again; during the Middle Ages, the same pattern continued—faces were inexpressive, forward-facing or rightward-facing.
“as the greek civilization declined this disappeared and the same thing happened in rome and during the middle ages we went back to inexpressive forward-facing or sometimes rightward-facing faces”
The differences between hemispheres are general tendencies with significant overlap, not absolute distinctions; the statement that hemispheres are 'more alike than different' is meaningless because what matters are the specific differences that do exist, even if they are statistical rather than absolute.
“nor am i suggesting that any differences that i point to are absolute nothing in nature is ever absolute i'm talking about general tendencies with a degree of overlap people also say things like well they're more liked than they are different i really don't know what that means what does it mean for something to be more likely you know for a pair of things to be more likely they are different but i mean i suppose you could say that you know donald trump and einstein are more liked than they are different but sometimes it's the differences that count”
Chris McManus, in a 1976 Nature paper, established that Renaissance portraitists like Holbein tended to paint sitters facing the viewer's left, and related this to the same hemispheric phenomenon observed in ancient Greek art.
“and although he did paint sitters looking in either direction at this point um as chris mcmanus in an early paper in nature uh had already um i think 1976 had already um established that these tended to look for the viewers left and he related it in the same way to the same phenomenon of hemisphericity”
In one of McGilchrist's earlier lectures to the Weekend University on consciousness, he addressed how dualism and monism relate to the hard problem of consciousness—a lecture available on YouTube that would answer a question about consciousness and hemispheres.
“i think i've got the answer to the question and i think um tell me if i'm wrong now but i think the answer to that question is what i covered in my last talk for you isn't it i mean it's exactly uh what i was on about and it's a two-hour answer so i can't do it but fortunately you can see that talk on on youtube”