Everything You Know About the BRAIN is WRONG! Here’s How the Brain ACTUALLY Works | Iain McGilchrist

[music] Dr. Iain McGilchrist, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure, Tom. Dude, I am really excited by your work. I I'm obsessed with the brain. So, in the early days of my career of transitioning from feeling completely lost and hopeless in my life to realizing that just because I was underperforming that day in my early 20s did not mean that that had to be forever the thing. What really gave me hope was learning about the brain and brain plasticity, specifically. And that work led me to V.S. Ramachandran, who I've actually had on the show and just shaped by his work in ways that I I can't convey. And now encountering your ideas, which really take the form and function of the brain and I don't know if you would say make predictions as much as explain the world, but for somebody like me who's so far behind you in terms of research, it it has this predictive quality of, you know, my own thoughts and feelings, but also societal movements. And in the book, The Master and His Emissary, and your new book, The Matter With Things, you seem to really take the form and function of the brain and spell out some of the pathology that we're all living through. And I find that idea really interesting. And I want to start with split-brain patients, which I think will help us understand the difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, and the massive confusion that people have by oversimplifying the idea of what the left and the right brains, as people call it, do. So, first, if you don't mind, just defining what a split-brain patient is. And then the idea of being able to interrogate one hemisphere and then the other and the differences that we see. Yeah, sure. Well, the split brain brain procedure callosotomy as it's called was a technique devised in the 60s in Caltech to apply to patients whose lives were effectively unlivable because of epilepsy, severe epilepsy. And one of the ways it was positive that you might be able to make life more livable was to stop a seizure spreading right across the brain. If you cut the divide between the two halves of the brain, you might be able to do that. For those who are not familiar with looking at brains, I should point out that your brain is deeply divided down the middle like a walnut. And there's only a commissure at the bottom, the corpus callosum, that connects the two Well, there are a couple of other small commissures, but effectively that's it. [snorts] And so the the brain works well as a whole, but it's also quite clear that the two parts need to be distinct as well as working together. Anyway, this procedure gave the opportunity to enterprising psychologists to find out a little bit more about the differences between the right and left hemispheres. And one of the most Really fast, before you go into that, one thing one thing that I want to understand is the corpus callosum is passing what in the case of a seizure? Electrical impulses? Like what what is going on that that is passed? Exactly that, electrical impulses. A sort of electrical storm. Instead of the the properly massively complex coming and going of stimuli that are correctly following some kind of uh direction, you're just getting a massive storm of electricity. It's like, you know, blast the system. And so people, you know, in the in the worst cases lose consciousness completely. And sometimes people were having these seizures more often than they were not, actually. So, you can imagine their lives were simply not livable. So, it was a brave experiment. And do do seizures start on one side more frequently than the other? Like, is this a it starts in the right hemisphere and goes left or They can start from they usually, but not always, do start from a focus. And that focus can be in either left or right hemisphere. And it it may be something that is just an abnormality that's there from birth in the way the brain was formed, or it may be the result of some other uh, in insult to the brain, as we say, that has caused a problem in an area, and it begins to act in a in a strange way, giving off these rhythmical discharges. Um, and so, the point of the split-brain procedure problem that when you send out Sorry, is the problem when you send out the electrical impulse, the reason the next one catches on fire is it has to do something with that impulse, or is the impulse saying, "You should specifically be firing"? Well, you if you if you can imagine that normally the connections between neurons are very cleverly gated. I I This was something that fascinated me when I started learning uh, in medical school. Because the brain takes a lot of trouble to be able to communicate very fast. So, some nerve fibers are coated in myelin, which is a white sheath, which makes it the white matter in the brain. And most of the long tracks that are really connecting things, uh, are fast transmission. And yet, you know, while it takes next to no time for that to go from one end of a neuron to the other, then there is this clunky process where there's a gap called the synapse between the the nerve and the next nerve. And when the impulse arrives at the end of the nerve, it triggers the release of a neurotransmitter, which then has to pass across the gap, triggering something on the end of the other neuron, and and starting to send another signal. And I used to think, "Well, this is very odd. I mean, the brain's trying to do stuff quickly, and it's actually managed to do that down a nerve, but it's got this clunky business of gating. Either it will or it won't, and it can be blocked or it can be enhanced or it can be partially transmitted or or wholly transmitted. So, you've got some sort of control all the time at all these billions of uh synapses, trillions of synapses. So, uh the answer is that when when a nerve gets a stimulus from another nerve, it will respond appropriately, but not under these circumstances. Because you've just got masses of nerve fibers all together being overwhelmingly excited. And so, you get inappropriate excitation. So, um I mean, by the way, a very, very little of my research is based on what we learn from split-brain patients, although it is very interesting. Because you can just find out a lot of different the reason that I'm starting here, just to explain the reason that I'm starting with split-brain patients is I don't think most people understand the the real nuance of what you talk about in your book and the way you lay it out and will understand will be coming into this interview with a deep understanding of of what the hemispheres do, why they are separated, what the purpose of the corpus callosum is, what we learn by snipping it, and, you know, getting into the story of all this to really make your work accessible to a broad audience, I think is is when we get into interrogating the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and like the the pathology that have It is so weird and so fascinating. I think it will immediately open a gate to people to say, "Your brain works some kind of way. Like it has a form and a function that you take for granted. You don't realize that you're misinterpreting the world." And this is like my sort of core life thesis is people mistake emotion for objective truth. And as you begin to understand the brain, you begin to realize how that comes to pass. And so forgive me cuz I know for you this is like 101 or even pre-101, but I think it'll help. Well, we we can we can come on to your last supposition later cuz it's a very interesting one. Uh but something that may not strike people as very significant, but is and what I'd like to say at this stage is that everything that exists, not just in the brain, but in physics, in the world at large, in nature, depends on a combination of division and union. That just to be wholly unified is not good. Just to be wholly divided and atomistic is not good. There needs to be the synthesis of union with division. And I sometimes put it like this, it's not that it should be either or. And it's not that it has to be both and. We need both either or and both and. Now, that might seem a long way from what we were just talking about, but it isn't. Because one of the basic misunderstandings is that as it were, these uh brains are either war with one another or are actually cooperating to do the same thing. They're They're doing either of those things. They do compete and they do collaborate. Actually, this is just like the rest of nature. Although we've been sold this story that nature is red in tooth and claw and it's all about competition and the rest of it. Most of the history of the evolution of life is to do with collaboration, which includes at times competition. And so you see competition, but you also see staggering cooperation. And the cooperation and the competition together make what I would call collaboration. Now, the the two hemispheres of the brain collaborate. And in order to do so, they have to be different but able to talk to one another. It's no good having a team in which they both do the same thing cuz then you've suddenly lost the point. And it's no good having one where they just both go off on their own. So, when they started cutting the corpus callosum, what on earth is going to happen to these people? And the interesting answer is that very much less than had been anticipated. In other words, people were surprisingly normal. And that's partly because there were lots of other ways in which the brain, certainly by the time you're at the age when you would have had this procedure, you'd be a young adult probably. At that stage, your both sides of the brain have been stocked with information from the other part as well. But in the immediate aftermath of the operation, there were some famously odd instances like somebody um picking up a book with one hand and the other one closing, taking away and putting it down. Or a woman going to a cupboard to get a dress out and reaching with her right hand and her left hand coming over, taking the dress and putting it back on the hook. So, clearly there were two different kind of views of of life going on here. And one of the more robust uh differences actually is can be put in this way that it's like two different approaches to the world. In a way rather like two different persons, two different personalities. So, that one character prefers this kind of thing, the other character prefers another. But, what it is not is what was often said at the time, which was that the left hemisphere seemed to be rational and a bit cold, uh but it leaves it with reliable, a bit like a boring accountant. And the right hemisphere was way off its head somewhere, um uh creating wonderful pictures, but really needing anchoring down cuz it was a bit pink and fluffy and didn't know how to get on with the business. Now, that is just completely untrue. And even a slightly more sophisticated idea of that which lingered for a long time, which was that like maths and reasoning go on in the left hemisphere, and pictures and emotions go on in the right hemisphere. These are also completely wrong, okay? Because both hemispheres do everything in some way. But, it's all about that in some way. It's the how, not the what. So, they they do the what of the same things, but they do the how of them completely differently. Now, why is that? Well, I don't know any better explanation than the one I put forward in that book, um which is that every animal, every organism that we know of has to do two competing things to stay alive. It has to eat, and it has not to be eaten. And actually, that's more difficult than it sounds because in order to utilize the environment, manipulate it for your own good, like get something to eat, pick up a twig to build a nest, or uh you know, whatever it might be, you need to pay a certain kind of already committed attention to some very perspicuous detail, highly focused but very narrow beam attention. If that's the only attention you paid, then you quickly end up being someone else's lunch instead of getting your own because all around you there are other things going on. Some of them, as we say, as I have said, competitive, so a predator, but some of them, you know, collaborative, like this is my mate. I need to keep an eye on her, make sure she gets some food, too, my little ones, whatever it is. So, however you look at it, you have to have these two different ways of being in the world at once, and this is what the hemispheres make possible for us. Because attention is much more significant than it sounds. I I It took me a while. You call attention a moral act. Yes, I do. And that's because it I'd be curious to to understand, does that tie into this more mechanistic stay alive thing or or is that going to sort of prematurely for where I want to take the conversation open us up into a much broader place? We can go there, but but we if you want to talk about the nitty-gritty side first briefly, then Yeah, I think Yeah. [laughter] Let's stay nitty-gritty for a second. Okay. Well, I think the point there is that we attention is, as I say, something that sounds like one of those cognitive functions that people talk about. A cognitive function. I love it. It's basically like a not very efficient procedure that a computer would do better. But a computer can't attend at all. Attending, it can do all sorts of things. It can't conceivably attend because what attending means is a way of disposing your consciousness towards the world. It's the how of your consciousness. Now, if you are in a certain frame of mind or you have a certain purpose in mind or you just a certain kind of person or it's just one of those days, you may have a very driven manipulative attitude in which you see things as stuff to get, to grab quickly, hoard, use, you know, whatever. But you may on another day actually think, "This is madness. This is no kind of a wisdom. Actually, there's a a whole vibrant living world there that I need to be connected to and listening to. And it is speaking to me and I need to speak to it." So, I'm going right from the most nitty-gritty to the [laughter] the most philosophical, if you like. But what I basically realized quite early is that how you attend to something changes what there is in the world. At least the the weaker claim is what there is for you in the world. We may get but we might have a lot of time to get there to the point where I can explain that I believe that it doesn't just make a difference to what I find in the world but to what actually exists as well. Um to a degree. Yeah, that that's big and and we will certainly get to that but one thing before we go off the corpus callosum and splitting it, I like to ask because this if this is true, this feels extraordinarily revelatory to me which is that there was a split brain patient and one half of the brain and you even said I heard you say that you can think of the different hemispheres almost as having their own personalities and in the split brain patient that I'm thinking of, one half was devoutly religious and the other half was devoutly atheist in the same brain. That that's what And what I would like to know, can you verify? Yeah, that's one of Ramachandran's patients. Um and and Ramachandran is one of the the the the great neurologists, I think, because unlike so many, he's able to see beyond the wiring diagram. You need to know that, but he's not shy of seeing that this actually has something to do with living human beings. Now, I can tell you an awful lot of neuroscientists don't think that. [snorts] And so I mean, I came to science from a background in the humanities, philosophy, literature, you know, art. And I then studied medicine, went into the neurology psychiatry interface. And so [snorts] I approached medicine right away as about human beings and their lives, not just about mechanisms. But an awful lot of people were very good at the technical side. Perhaps I I then never trained with patients or only experimentally. And they kind of see the mechanisms as very interesting in the abstract and what you'd see down a microscope or with a particular investigation, but they are very uncomfortable about uh about [snorts] applying that to real people. And he says, "Mike Gazzaniga is a lovely guy and I respect him greatly, but we interviewed him for a film about my work called The Divided Brain." And he [snorts] he's a man who's, you know, mainly lived in in the world of the lab. And he said, "Um you know, he takes all these findings from neurology and then applies them to real living people in the world. And I'm not comfortable with that." And I'm thinking, "Oh my god, [laughter] you said it." Uh but anyway, um he then says, "The brain's just a machine, get over it." Well, my 1,600 pages that's just about to come out is devoted to the idea that that is just nowhere near sophisticated enough an approach, but we may get there later. So, the trouble is we're dotting around a lot and I don't know where you want me to go quite [laughter] next. Cuz think I think going into that is Let's let's go into that. So, why So, now that we understand that there are these very profound implications to the way that the brain is split. And I'm going to sort of recap what we just went over, and then we'll go into um why our sort of current under understanding, if we're taking a mechanistic look at this, is is wrong. So, we've got this brain, it's split in half. Nature did not do that on accident. In fact, if you look back just an obscene amount of time through the evolutionary tree down to like worms and nematodes and all that, they all have split brains that are asymmetrical. So, this was something that we happened upon very early. Your thesis on why we ended up there is because the these the how of of it all. Uh the great example you give is that you have to both focus in on something very specific. How I can grab this branch, how I can get this seed, but also more broadly to make sure that I'm not eaten. And so, I think that will land for everybody. I think they're going to really understand that. Yeah. But there are other deep complexities, and as we begin to think about how much information is that the two hemispheres are really working together, and you go to great lengths in the emissary, and uh his the master and his emissary, um you go into great detail about how what ends up happening is the emissary, so the hyper-focused, really looking at something specific, but in danger of losing track of the whole, because of its layer of intentional designed ignorance, unfortunately begins to think of itself as the master. And like, I I know more. I don't need all this nuance. I don't need all this holistic view. Like, come on. It's It's a branch, you grab it, it's a seed, you eat it. And because of that, there's a tendency for that to run away with things. And so, we have this competition and collaboration between the two that's really finely tuned, very sensitive to perturbation, and we're going to get into what those perturbations are and how they go pathological. But, okay. So, now we have this grasp of all right, we have a mind it's intentionally divided. One side can be religious, the other not. One side can grab the dress, the other can put it away. So, we know there's there's like this inhibitory signal that's often going between the two. So, a lot of what's happening in the brain is ah I've got it. Back off. Let me deal with it. And as we begin to take in that richness, the complexity, we now realize that we have to extend our understanding. So, now I want to understand because it's very easy to grasp the mechanistic. It is very easy to get excited when a neuroscientist or anybody gives you an atomized view of the brain and says, "The left does this, the right does this." And yay, everybody feels like they understand. Yeah. What's really going on? If that atomized view isn't accurate, what's really happening? Especially with the we're creating the world as much as the like there is a physical reality. Let me ask you a question. Do you know the difference between someone who crushes big goals in their life year in and year out and someone who can't seem to get ahead? What is up my friends? Tom Bilyeu here. In my opinion, there are seven strategies that you must use in order to achieve any goal. The more of them that you can take action on, the greater the chance that you'll achieve your goal. I say that the difference between someone who is an overachiever and someone who fails to hit their goals is that the overachiever does everything they can possibly do to be successful. I said a second ago that there are seven strategies you must use to hit any goal. I'll be teaching them later this month on a live workshop called how to make any goal stick. 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Yeah, I used the image of the person or the personality on Craig Good Authority because um there's a researcher called Onur Güntürkün in Germany who won Germany's most prestigious prize for science which is basically all about the differences between the two hemispheres. And he uh he wrote in Die that I was right to see this as effectively two personalities that have different ways of thinking. But when you come to imagine daily life, what is the truth about something quite simple like where I live? I'm surrounded by mountains. This mountain, is it just a lump of rock? Well, you could say that. Uh, is it, um, a beautiful shape that can be drawn? Is it a marvelous example of columnar basalt formation? Uh, is it, um, a means of somebody getting wealthy by exploiting it? Is it the home of the gods as it was to the Picts uh, who lived under it? Uh, you know, what what which is the truth? And the answer is all of these things have a type of truth. And it's no good saying, "Oh, well, it's just really a lump of rock." Because that's just to jump into a certain very subjective point of view. It sounds subjective, but it's really just a very narrow point of view in which everything that you know about that mountain, everything you experienced with that mountain has been cut off so that you can say it's just a lump of rock. Now, it's that mentality that I want to get away from and beyond because it's not sophisticated, it's destroying the world because we misunderstand who we are and what the world in which we live is because of this uh, allegiance to the left hemisphere's take. And you alluded to the story of the master and his amanuensis. And this is a story where the master is the right hemisphere and the amanuensis is the left hemisphere. And in that situation, the master knows the big picture and just wants the amanuensis to go and do a particular job. But exactly because it knows so little, it thinks it knows everything. Now, in most of the cultures of the and tribes therefore to depose the the master. And so you do get this rebellion. And in every culture that I've looked at around the world from the circumpolar regions through uh, China, India, um the uh native uh peoples of America and all the rest, you find stories which are myths about this antagonism between two beings that are related. They're like brothers or they they have a a relationship, but the one that knows least thinks it knows everything and as a result of that civilization goes to ruin. In fact, I actually found that there is a phrase in the I Ching that says precisely this, which is wonderful. And also in the Secret of the Golden Flower. So, what what I say about attention is that it changes the world and it changes you. So, the kind of attention you pay customarily changes who you become. And and that has moral implications for you and for the world. So, how we attend And I'm not the only person who said this. I think Simone Weil, who you know, people probably know the French philosopher of the last century said something very similar to that. Um but anyway, there we are. So, where would you like us to take the story next? [snorts] Yeah, so the I I want to dwell on this idea of um co-creation. I don't know if you would use that word, but the idea so I love the quote and I've heard you say it and I've used it many times, which is that it doesn't matter what you look at, it matters what you see. And in that statement implies that you can choose to see something else. And that in all of your work, I would say that there's an underlying idea that we can choose, perhaps through great effort, but that we can choose to either over index on the left or begin to swing back to the right. So, we can either let the world be created by the emissary, which your thesis is basically what we're doing right now. Um or it can we can swing back to the right and and take this more holistic view. So, one of those ideas is easier to understand. I think most people are going to get this idea of holistic versus hyper-specific, the the sum total of a mountain versus the ability to extract or from it, right? So, extracting or is the left hemisphere, wants to know what's usable, how do I grasp it? The you can have a uh communion with nature by being on the mountain. You can see a vista that leaves you in awe by climbing up the mountain. You can get in better health by scaling the mountain. You could have a picnic on the mountain with someone that you love. All of those things are part of the whole and certainly get lost in the exploitation. Yeah, I think people are going to take to that very easily. Um and I think is is is amazing language for people to understand some of the cultural difficulties that we're having right now, which we will get to. Uh but the part that I think is more difficult is that you're very clear to say there is objective reality, but you're also very clear to say, but there is also co-creation going on. In the mind and the outside world together sort of shaping each other and creating this this whole. Help me better understand that. Yeah. Uh which is a very important point and it's related to two things I just wanted to gloss when you were talking there. That um one is that we could get carried away with the idea that somehow this uh beautiful communion with the mountain was a little bit airy-fairy, but I'm not talking about that at all. I'm talking about a really much more sophisticated philosophical understanding of what uh environment is. It it and interestingly, the the emotional brain is as much the left hemisphere as the right. It specializes in anger, irritability, uh and uh doesn't like being crossed. And so it's not a cool customer, and it is less rational than the right hemisphere. Get that. It it It certainly helps us reason, but the reasonable conclusions about reality need to be formed by the right hemisphere. In the absence of the right hemisphere, we're really into the territory of delusions, hallucinations, and all the fascinating psychopathology that you were hinting at earlier. And I write a lot about that in this new book. So, yes, there's that. But the other thing is that we shouldn't think of it as an antagonism, because that would be the left hemisphere's way between the unified picture and the more differentiated, divided picture. It is a union of the unified picture with the more differentiated, divided picture. And I see the whole business of the cosmos, um you may say, "Well, how can you use that phrase?" But that would take me another talk, but I see that there's a drive. There's something that drives this cosmos. Uh there's no question of that. It's It's doing something. And what it's mainly doing is differentiating. So, if you imagine a complete ball of everything the same, it goes out like some amazing flower that is unfolding and showing all these things. It's not destroying that flower. It's not taking it apart. It's unpacking it and unfolding it. So, in a phrase that David Bohm, the philosopher and physicist, used, this is an implicit world, and it nature is the business of beginning to make it more explicit, but nonetheless taking it back into the realm of the implicit in the end, so that that's not lost. Can I just say something about that, because a very key point is that the implicit is not somehow the explicit that we haven't been clear enough about. [snorts] The clarity is illusory when we're explicit. It comes from the fact that we've cut away almost all the meaning from something and are just left with one little idea. When we are dealing with with the things that are most profound to us, to love, to uh feelings for nature, to religion, to the things that move us and make us morally motivated, these things are not easy to put into a simple phrase. And that's why we have the greatness of art. That's why we have poetry and narrative and myth and drama and music and great buildings and and these express these things in an implicit way. If you say, "Well, what does it really mean?" then I'm reduced to kind of a handful of platitudes, which don't really help you at all because now you've lost it. You had to be in communion with that thing and not something else that I'm paraphrasing. It The easiest way to think of this is it's like humor. You know, you tell a joke and [snorts] if somebody says, "I don't get the joke." and then you explain it, they go, "Oh, huh huh." Uh because once you've explained a joke, it's completely gone dead. So, implicitness is very important. And let me give you a very practical example, which I'm afraid I often use, but there you go. I think it's because it is very helpful. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument knows this sequence. You think, "That's a really great piece. I want to play that." So, [snorts] you sort of bond with it and you try to play it. So far, we're in the realm of the right hemisphere encountering something new because the left hemisphere deals with things in a way, "Oh, I see. It's familiar. It goes into that box or category." Whereas when it's still new and unique, the right hemisphere is is is encountering it. [snorts] And then some part of you says, "Yeah, but if I'm going to make any headway with this, I've really got to practice that difficult passage at bar 24 or whatever it is. And I see at this point we get a return to the tonic or you know, whatever it might be. Um [snorts] but then that helps you be a much better performer. But when you go and perform it, when you go out onto the stage, you must forget all of that. Cuz if you even think about it for a fraction of a second, the performance will have gone. So that doesn't make it a waste of time this business of explicitness. It's creative in its own way, but only as an intermediary phase. So that I often talk about this progression from right to left and back to right again. What I mean by that is that you begin with the engagement. You then send stuff to the left hemisphere to get unpacked a bit, and then you take that unpacking back into a whole. And if you don't, and at the moment we go from right to left and then stop there, you're left with a heap of meaningless fragments. Because if you're constantly paying piecemeal attention to things because you want them and grasp them and manipulate them, not to understand them, then you end up with a world that is just a heap of atomistic fragments that seem static and dead. Whereas with the left hemisphere, you see that they're never actually static and they're never actually dead. They're living, flowing, changing, and ultimately interconnected. But just to round this off, it's not that I think we should just go, "Oh, all is one." That's true up to point, but it's importantly half of the story. The other half of the story is all is many. And that's why we have this thing in Oriental philosophy of the one and the many. And as I say, you don't become more whole by getting rid of the parts. You get more whole by bringing the parts together with the whole and make you know, so that in Bohm's terms, you are making what is implicit explicit and then re-embracing it in the implicit. And interestingly, there is a 15th century uh actually scientist, I mean, he's probably one of the first modern scientists, um discovered some things that were only proved in the 19th century, but he was also theologian and I think one of the great thinkers of all time called Nicholas of Cusa. He's sometimes called Cusanus, which is his Latin name. But uh he's worth finding out more about for any listeners. Uh but he actually had already seen this process that is in a way embodied in the brain, is also embodied in physics. And this structure, what's exciting me about my new book is that I use three main pathways to examine what is the world and who are we. One is neurology. One is philosophy, and one is physics. And from these three starting points, around if you imagine the globe, and they're far, far apart from one another. As you as we say drill down, as you get closer and deeper, you find the same pictures and the same patterns coming. They're not neurology and theology are not at war with one another. They are seeing the same realities just at slightly different levels and in different ways. Okay, you you have to take us in deeper. That is so fascinating. So, one, why those three? Be please be very specific. Uh and then two, in from the left side of my brain, it really does feel like they are at war. It it feels often super jarring when I find a scientist who is deeply religious. And I would love to better understand your take on that. Well, yes. I mean, just an interesting aside on that. Um a book-length study has been made of all the Nobel Prize winners since 1900 when the prize was instigated. And uh they're asked about their religious beliefs amongst other things. And anyone who says that they were ever at any time an agnostic even doesn't count as being religious. Well, when you look at these people over the last 100 years or more, what you find is that those in the humanities uh a good third of them say, you know, that that they they have no no time with religion. As you go into science, the heart of the science, the more religious people become. So, biologists at something like only 7. 6% or 7.8% uh fall into this uh atheistic category. Um and then when you come to chemistry, it's uh I think six something, and in physics, it's 4. 8 or something like that. So, 95.2% of all the really top physicists um were religious. And and I've looked at their lives and read their stories. There's no question about this. When you get into the realm of physics, you have to be a bit of a dumb chuck not to think that there's possibly something in this idea that the world may be divine. Uh and there's nothing in science that tells us that it isn't. Science doesn't deal with that kind of thing. There's a chap called Jerry Coyne who got famous for writing a book called Faith versus Fact. [snorts] And he starts, I think, on page one by saying, "I'm not going to go into epistemology, you know, which was the the study of how we know anything. I'm just going to say a fact is a fact, and if it's not a fact, then it isn't true." [snorts] And I sort of feel like saying, you know, "Okay, mate, but if you're going to really stay clear of what he calls the murky waters of epistemology to that extent, why waste your time writing the book? Because it's [laughter] it's only possible to write it if you start to understand what understanding is and where it comes from." So, the answer to why those three, there are three things that have always fascinated me, but I can't pretend in any way to be in any way to be a physicist. Um what I do, though, is I'm fairly cautious with the physics. Um I rely on about eight or 10 highly respected physicists and what they say, and I have a little group of what I call friendly physicists with whom I exchange ideas before I publish them and say, "Am I being an idiot here?" And uh usually, thank God, they say, "No, you're not." So, [snorts] but it and and and I don't base anything on the physics. So, it's like I base it more on the philosophy than anything and the neurology and neuropsychology. And then I just show, "And look, the physics shows just the same picture that we've been looking at." So, that's why those three things, because if you want to know about a human being, the brain is a pretty central place to start. You know, there was a neurosurgeon called Wilder Penfield, who's a Canadian neurosurgeon, and he was operating on uh brains in the '50s. And he was one of the first people to realize if you stimulated the cortex of the brain uh at operation, which you can do with the patient conscious, because uh the brain is not has no pain sensors at all. You can do anything to the brain and it you don't it doesn't hurt. [gasps] So, at operation, he would stimulate different areas of the brain, and they would say, "Oh, I can hear the voice of my sister saying something or other, we're out in the garden when I was 10" or whatever, you know. So, anyway, what I'm really That's beside the point, what I'm really interested in is his remark that the business of neurology is to understand man himself. Now, Schrödinger, you know, famous physicist, um also said in some lectures given in Cambridge in the 1950s, he began by saying, "No specialized knowledge is of any use unless it contributes in some form to answering the big question, who are we?" And in fact, he says it in Greek, uh cuz he's quoting Plotinus, third-century Greek [snorts] philosopher. Tenes ta hemas. So, there we are. So, that's a very good place to start. Philosophy, as it sometimes merges with theology, is a very good other place, but I allow the philosophy to speak before even touching on theology at the end of the book because I think people are very, um easily put off by mentioning even certain things because I'm afraid very sort of simplistic stereotypes have been fed to us that, you know, as I say, the world is a mechanism that only simple people believe there could be anything divine or sacred in it. And so on. So, I I get there by degrees, and the last substantive chapter, which is pretty much book length, is called the sense of the sacred. And I explore really whether it is rational or not to accept that there probably is something that is divine or sacred. I don't very much To to really meaningfully have that conversation, what we're going to have to define what what is divine, what is sacred. So, I'll give you my interpretation of spirituality. I'm not sure what the right word's going to be, and that'll be sort of our grounding mechanism. So, I'm not religious, meaning that I don't subscribe to any of the, the written down traditions. It don't have to be. Because I am right, I agreed, and because I am, uh, at least partially aware of the just massive nature of my ignorance, um, I have to conclude as I look at how little I understand about the world and that I can't even conceive of, you know, what this would be without time or time being an arrow or, you know, any of those things, that there's something I don't understand. And once I recognize there's something I don't understand, then I can certainly can't claim to know everything. And so, it seems self-evident to me that the, you use the word cosmos, I'm far more familiar when people say universe. I don't know if you use them inter, uh, interchangeably or not, but that the universe was created by something I can't comprehend. And if that's what we're calling the divine, then I understand it. But if we're talking about a specific religion and a man in the sky, I start to lose you. Well, of course, um, we're not talking about a man with a beard sitting on a cloud. [laughter] There's so much to say about what you've just said. Um, the first is that I think it's, it, it's an area where it's wise not to think you know everything. Um, William James, a great psychologist, a far greater man, in my opinion, than his brother, the famous novelist, um, one of the greatest philosophers and psychologists that ever lived said, uh, "Ignorance is a sea and knowledge is a drop in that ocean." And that was, you know, 100 years ago, but really, the more we learn, the more we understand what we don't know. And what that's what the great physicists are now saying. They've always said that. Basically, the greatest scientists, people like Einstein, didn't pretend that that we know everything. He said the world would be a lot better if we all recognized there's a great deal to be modest about. We don't really understand anything of the basics here. Um, he didn't want to be branded as religious, but he was also annoyed when he was wheeled on to say, uh, you know, Einstein says the current be, uh, anything that we would call divine. But your thing we first have to define terms is it looks a very reasonable, uh, thing to say. And of course it [snorts] gives the way that in the west we've been trained. You know, everything is a problem. We start with a proposition. We then work through certain things. We then conclusion, preferably with an equation, and either God does exist or God doesn't. But the very words exists, I mean, uh, some people will will love me for saying this and some people will just think I'm I'm, you know, yeah, lost lost lost the plot. But the important thing is that we don't know exactly what God is. If we could define it, we'd have got it wrong. And this is not just me. This is what all the great minds of the religious traditions, of the mystical traditions, and indeed in philosophy have said. You know, about this we cannot know, and that is its defining feature. At least we can't know in the sense of the word savoir in French and wissen in German. I I need to make this distinction because in most languages other than English, there are two words at least for know. And we only have the one and it causes so much confusion in philosophy. One is knowing by experience, and the other is knowing the fact that. So, I know that Paris is the capital of France. That is savoir, and in German that's wissen. But I also know Paris because of the time I once spent there living there and getting to understand it. And that is in French connaître and in German kennen. And these are quite different ideas. Now, you can come to know God perhaps, but only by abjuring all your knowledge. [laughter] Uh your your knowledge in the sense of, you know, reasoning is not going to help you with this. Except [snorts] that you can use reasoning, which is very important thing to be able to do, to show the limits of reason. And that's not at all controversial. Um probably one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers that ever lived, Pascal, said reason is very feeble indeed if it can't see that there are many things beyond reason. [snorts] And everything that is beyond reason is not irrational. It may be transrational. So, for example, um my experience of Schubert's C major quintet is not irrational. It's not against reason. It's just the reason can't help with it. It's an experience that is very, very deep and very, very real. And that anybody who opens themselves to it and has enough understanding of that kind of music will experience it. So, it's not in any way um false or irrational. It's transrational. And one of the problems is that we've argued ourselves into a box whereby the bit of our minds that understands least and can express least in words is the one that does all the all the uh like well, not express least in words, but has the drive to express things in words and therefore expresses the least amount of that reality. [snorts] Um so, that's that's where the problem starts. So, at the beginning of my chapter, I say, you know, all the traditions that I've looked at, they have some sense of the universe, as you would prefer, as not just chaotic, random, and meaningless. As something orderly, we can't necessarily grasp the order, but we can sense the order and know there is order, and also beautiful and complex. [snorts] And there's just no question about that because you know, unless you're a half-wit. I mean, if you if you if you if you look at science, if you if you read you think philosophically, you can see that even if you don't understand all these processes, it's not just an irrational heap of nothing. There's something going on here that is complex, beautiful, and orderly. And physicists describe this, and philosophers describe this. Now, in most other languages, there is a different term for this. So, for in China Chinese, it's called Li. And um in uh in other traditions such as the Hindu tradition, it's called Rita. Um long before Islam actually in uh the what is now the Islamic world, it was called Allah. Um and so on. You can go on with these words that describe this thing that has form. Uh when Heraclitus, one of my favorite philosophers, one of the first Greek philosophers, and I don't think there's ever been a greater Greek philosopher, [snorts] um used the term logos, not in the way way that it got later used to mean a sort of logical thinking. But he says the logos is so deep that the soul cannot encompass it. So, he's talking about something that has to be approached in a spirit of a a degree of humility, a degree of openness, and and then see what comes of that. Um and so I start right away by saying and in the Western tradition, this is called God. But oh dear, what a lot of trouble that little word God causes cuz it immediately sets up all these ideas that now we've got a word for it, we know what it is. And I don't think it exists. I think it doesn't. It's all in a book. No, no, no, no, that was just written by people, you know. And you get into these stupid disputes. And [snorts] in a way, both the psychology and the philosophical position of hardline atheists and hardline fundamentalists is almost exactly the same. They're Mr. Right, entirely left brain. It's all in a book. I'm right, you're wrong. There's a whole set of rules and procedures that must be followed, you know, and there's no room in here for uncertainty, for the subtle that is in fact the realm that this divine, whatever it is, inhabits. [snorts] And so, I always think the argument is not between atheists and believers. It's between the atheists and the fundamentalists on one side and on rational people on the other who mostly say they don't know. But if you ask people, "Do you believe in God?" in this country, cuz we're we're rather heathen compared with America, something like 11% of people only say they do. But if you ask people, "Do you think that the scientific materialist account is enough to encompass reality?" 90% of them will say, "No." So, it's that kind of thing I'm talking about. And [snorts] I can't really condense it satisfactorily for the purposes of this, but I did spend a lot of time. It cost me great pains to express it rather carefully in this new book. [snorts] Because I don't think, you know, some people said, "Leave that out. You've written about time and space. You've written about um purpose and value. You've written about reason and intuition. You've written about it science and imagination. Why spoil it all by bringing religion or anything like that smacks of it in at the end?" And I thought, "How strange a reflection that is on the world in which we live." Most people since time began thought that this was the really key thing. And now we're saying, "Anything but I don't want to go there. Don't trouble my pictures of the world. So, I thought no, I will create some people who will just go, "Oh, he's a faith head or something." By the way, I'm not. I mean, I I don't go to church or anything like that. I I I am enormously interested in the rich spiritual literature of so many traditions around the world. And again, although superficially they seem you can find differences, yes, but effectively what they are trying to get at and what they convey is very much the same thing. So, I want to ask a question that I know runs the risk of forcing you to put a point on something where the whole point is to not put a point on it, but at some point it's interesting you and I both share a passion for Taoism. At one point I actually considered myself a Taoist. If you had asked, I would say that I am Taoist. I I think I'm a Taoist. It's a good that's really interesting. So, we'll definitely have to discuss Taoism. So, there's a really cool, in fact, I think it's the first line of of the Tao Te Ching, which is the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. And it gave me the chills just to say that. So, there that's very interesting and I love it and like over enough time you can sort of crack someone open in into, I would say, what your your opening them up to is openness itself, but you go to great lengths to explain all of this stuff. Why does it matter? Why does what matter? Why does it matter to include uh religion? Why the making sure that people take a holistic view? Like there you talk about the cosmos having a drive, which I find utterly fascinating and actually hope we get a chance to talk more about that. But as the cosmos has a drive, you have a drive. And I would like to understand what What driving you, why you want people why you couldn't because you might sell more books if you never talked about whatever God is, right? But you don't care about that. It's somehow important to you to to include it and I'm just curious what's driving you. What is up, my friend? I'm Bill Yu here. Every week inside Impact Theory University, I get to mentor and coach people just like you on how to achieve their biggest goals, reach their potential, and live an extraordinary life. One thing that I hear again and again from my students is that they're more focused and motivated than they've ever been in their lives to achieve their goals, but [music] when they work harder and harder to be successful, they don't actually see immediate and fast progress, at least not at the rate that they want. They tell me that they feel stuck, overwhelmed, or like they've been working and grinding so hard for so long without anything to show for it. And I get it and if that sounds familiar, first off, you're not alone. That is where [music] basically everybody is at one point in their journey or another. Now, second of all, I'm hosting a live workshop later this month before Thanksgiving and I want you to go to this link or click the button on your screen and get yourself [music] registered. When you do, I'll teach you the same thing that I teach my students inside Impact Theory University so you can actually take action towards your goals and have confidence and certainty [music] that the work you're putting in is actually going to bring you results. It's free to join. I don't often [music] do live teachings like this. So, if you've ever wondered what it's like to get coaching from me, join me and let's get to work on your goals and dreams. I promise they are achievable, but it's a process. You have to [music] learn the process. I'll also be giving a bonus class on how to become unstoppable to everyone who registers. We're going to take that idea out of this sort of airy concept and really make it tangible so that you [music] actually can't be stopped. I got a whole thing around it. Trust me, you're not going to want to miss it. All right, guys. Click the link on your screen and reserve yourself a seat until I see you in there. Take care and [music] be legendary. Peace out. No, I I I I would be giving the wrong impression if I if I said that I know anything about what God is or um am a believer in whatever. But it would also be equally wrong, equally wrong to say I dismiss this or I don't believe it. It's an area where you see, the thing is we now think belief is a matter of propositions because Western philosophy for 300 years has gone into this extremely sterile analytic mode. Um which it wasn't prior to that and has become less since with the emergence of phenomenological philosophers and so forth and Wittgenstein and many others. But setting that aside, the word belief, its root is love. It is is cognate with belief in in in German. In Shakespearean English, the word leaf meant my dear, my dear one, my dear lord, my dear whatever was the one's leaf lord, one's leaf uh husband, wife, whatever it was, friend. So it's about and even the word glauben in German, which is the word for believe, is related to love, lieben. So uh initially belief is not about believing six impossible things before breakfast. It's about a a disposition of your mind towards the world and that's why I think it's so important because we started from attention. And indeed, one of the primal things about all the religious traditions and all the good practices is about paying attention to the world, stilling your own monkey mind as they they call it, you know, your own little chatter about it and opening yourself to the possibility of learning something and becoming just a little bit wiser. Now, if we don't do that, we're lost. And in fact, I think it's through being over arrogant, over confident that we know everything, can fix everything, and understand everything. First of all, anyone who knows the literature on this knows that people who are like that are not very intelligent. There's only called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that effectively the more stupid you are, the cleverer you think you are and vice versa. So, that that's a problem. But, what I'm trying to say is we we want to get away from this to an idea of a disposition of ourselves towards the world. Because if we can face these very dire practical problems that we have now, the destruction of nature, the devastation of the lives of indigenous people all around the world, and and dismantling apparently of our own tradition in the worst way, what, you know, what would good come of it if we could carry on living and we'd still be the unhappy, spiritually sterile, destructive people that we are because we just repeat history. So, we need a wake-up. We need a spiritual awakening. Not in some sort of ghastly evangelical football arena way. I mean about thinking that there's more to the world than I know. And this is the three really key things are not to lose a sense of wonder or awe. Because so easily you can think that a description of some process either explains something or even worse, helps you understand it. Often it doesn't even explain it, never mind help you understand it. [snorts] So, we need to be able to keep away from this way of reducing our understanding, keeping ourselves open to awe and wonder, keeping ourselves with a little humility about what our intellects can actually do, and having compassion for people who disagree with us. Now, in the world I see, all I see is black and white positions, hatred, um you're one of them. Can we have an adult conversation? There are degrees of right and wrong here. You know, I would love to live in that world. I would love to live in a world where we don't just see that we rape nature in order to get what we can and then leave a dying world to our children and our grandchildren. And then I'm a grandparent. I worry about this stuff. So, no, I really think it's very important that that we we wake up effectively. And that's why I didn't want to cut this chapter out because it it it would be like sort of playing um [snorts] the whole of some wonderful Bach fugue and then just stopping before the last bar of resolution, you know, it'd just BE WHAT? [laughter] SO, [snorts] THERE WE ARE. AND IT'S I LOVE THAT. I I think that that's that's really insightful. Nobody needs to be frightened of being asked to sign up to any kind of religious proposition at all. I'm not asking anyone to sign up to anything. I'm asking people to open their minds, you know? And and, you know, cosmos, by the way, cosmos is a Greek word which means not only orderly but beautiful. It means the beautiful and the orderly. And it's been reduced now to the word cosmetics. So, when people put cosmetics on, they're beautifying themselves. But the word cosmos comes from the idea of a single beautiful whole. And I think that is a more useful image. All images are only metaphors. All stories are myths, including the one that we're all just machines. They're all just myths and stories. It's which myth and which story are you going to pin your soul to, pin your life to, and live according to? That's what matters. And I would say that the picture we've been offered is um intellectually shoddy. I mean, the idea that it's just all mechanism, you know, no, it is not. There's far more there. Even [snorts] the most basic science will tell you there's far more there that can be accounted for in this purely mechanical way. And the idea that we're just these competitive monkeys who want to kill one another and and take power from one another. This is not true either. This is a terrible thing to tell people cuz if you believe these things, you behave worse. So, we know, for example, the study was done on um populations of people who believe that um everything is just pre- predestined by physics, you know, if you could know the position of all the atoms in the universe, you could predict everything including, you know, what I'm saying to you now and the feelings that are going on in in in your mind. Um that that's absolutely insubstantial. I mean, it might have been a nice myth in the 18th century, but we know, I mean, physics has completely killed that one. But people who believe it are less moral than people who don't. And I didn't realize until I'd almost finished the book. I'd done a lot of research. Some of it's in the master and his emissary on the importance of societal cohesion. It's in the last chapter where I talk about how the effects of belonging in a community of people who are, you know, living together in a give-and-take sort of way within a sort of compassionate relationship. They their health of mind and their health of body is staggeringly better than that of people who don't. And the effects of very striking. So, the effects are as much as on stopping smoking, um reducing your blood pressure, going to the gym four times a week. That's just social cohesion. Then I started looking at the literature on the relationship to nature, which I'm sure you know. And this this has become a big research area. And time spent in nature, opening oneself to nature, it has a myriad benefits on one's emotional state, uh diffusing anger, on making one feel more stable and settled. And it induces a sense of purpose in life, a sense of meaning in what is going on. The whole process, in other words, is exactly the one I was describing of opening oneself and attending to something other than you. Which is why, as I say, it's not all made up in here. There is something out there that we need to contact. And then [snorts] anyway, to cut a long story short, I hadn't really thought about the effects of religion on people. And it is staggering because it's stronger. It's stronger than the effects of nature and it's stronger than the effects of societal cohesion, and they are very, very strong. The effects on health and happiness, physical health, whether you likely to have a heart attack or, you know, what some cancer, things as simple as that. And on the other hand, you the your your frame of mind, your peace of mind, your anxiety levels, your anger levels, all of these things are affected by it in a very positive way. And I had no idea about this, and I didn't go looking for it. I just thought, well, I better look that one up and see. And it it's absolutely extraordinary. I include that in this new book just in an appendix because I'm not arguing that people should should think of becoming Oh, I better become religious then. It It's like stopping smoking. No. No, you don't get it. [laughter] And you shouldn't [snorts] meditate because it's good for your blood pressure or make you a better stockbroker. The thing is, you do it because it is useless, because it is valuable in itself. It can't be utilized. And we now live in a world in which what can't be utilized is thought of as useless in the negative way. But the Greeks actually thought that everything that we we felt was most important in the world was useless. It couldn't be utilized. It was beauty. It was dignity. It was the encounter with nature. It was leading a moral life. It was these things that we've seemed to have lost sight of that were the useless things. Uh and the paradox, of course, is that if you don't seek them for their own value, they will bring value to your life. If you seek them because you think it'll bring something to you, it won't do. And most of the structure of what I call the cosmos is paradoxical in this way. I mean, I [snorts] the first two chapters of part three of the book are on the coincidence of opposites and on um the one and the many, which is another kind of paradox. [snorts] So, I start with the idea that paradox is something that is basically what the left hemisphere doesn't understand. It just doesn't compute. And often the reason is that the left hemisphere has seen the world in a very strange way. Let me try and be very um practically uh uh concrete about this. So, in philosophy, one of the most well-known and fascinating paradoxes is Achilles and the tortoise. And I I apologize if if everyone knows what it is. I'm just going to describe it very briefly. Achilles was famous for being the swiftest runner. And he was challenged to a race by a hare. Uh by tortoise. And the tortoise said, "I can I can go where you can never reach me. You You You'll never win the race." And Achilles kind of laughs and says, "Okay. Okay. I'll do it. But anyway, I'm going to give you a head start." So, he gives him gives the tortoise, you know, 100-yd start. And the the the uh Zeno, who invented the paradox, explains that in fact the tortoise was right. Because Achilles first has to get to where the tortoise starts from. But the by the time he gets there, the tortoise has moved on. So now he's got to go to the place where the tortoise has now got to. But by the time he gets there, the tortoise has moved on. And you see where this is going. He can never actually catch up with, never mind overtake the tortoise. Now we all know that he can actually bypass the tortoise in two or three strides. So that kind of thinking is clearly mistaken, but we can't see why. And what I've done [snorts] in this book is try and give people an insight into what the world looks like when the left hemisphere deals with it. And one of the first things that it does, and this may not sound that important, but I hope it will do because you're a Taoist, is it stops flow. Flow is not present to the left hemisphere. Flow is appreciable by the right hemisphere. What the left hemisphere substitutes for flow is something like an old cine film, a lot of themselves absolutely static pictures. And it then looked backwards at something. So I often say the right hemisphere is the world as it presents is. The left hemisphere is the world that it is represented, literally present afterwards, when of course it isn't actually present at all. So it's it's just an image. It's an afterimage. It's like a a diagram. It's not the actual experience. And so to understand motion, you have to get out of the left hemisphere state. Bergson, a philosopher I very greatly admire, said, "When you move your arm from A to B, it's true that in retrospect you think that it passed through a point halfway in this arc. Let's call it X. But it didn't actually go to point t u v w x or anything. It didn't go to any point at all. It went straight through the movement. And afterwards, the movement is then represented in two dimensions, fossilized, no longer moving, on a chart, and you can go there is the point. And it's similar to the problem of how do you get from a point to a line? Well, you could have lots and lots of points. No, you can't, because a point has literally no extension at all. And if you put a load of them, a million of them, an infinite number of them together, if they've got no extension, you can never reach a line. If you think of like a pencil point, you're cheating, because the pencil point has already got some extension. But what you can do is after you've got the extension of a line, you can look back at it and say, "There's point A or B or whatever in it." But that's because you have destroyed extension. The extension's no longer there. Instead, there's a mental map in the left hemisphere dead, and it can be dissected. So, this is why there are paradoxes. And I look at about 30 So, one thing I I want to get into Sorry, yeah. What's the way out? How do we shift at a societal level back to a more holistic, integrated, right-left view? It's a very reasonable question, and a very good question, and a very difficult question. Um and you'll probably expect me to say what I'm going to say, which is that first of all, we have to be careful not to be um submitting ourselves to the desire of the left hemisphere, which is "Panic! Things are out of control. We need eight bullet points. Yes, eight. And if you can do those eight bullet points, it'll all be fine. But we must enforce them and make sure that by law, nobody depart." No, that is never, ever going to save us. What instead we need, because I can't say this more clearly, because it's so important. It's the how that matters, not the what. And that is also true of what you say. It seems to me that we should live in a world where there is virtually nothing that you can't say. It's how you say it. If you blatantly say it in order to cause violence or something, then okay. But if you don't, you know, we need to sort of go back from this world in which everything is micro-controlled and take a few risks. You know, life is risky. From the moment you're born, you're dying. You know, get real. That's the moment none of us gets away from. Um so, I would say we need to think about how we look at the world. And lots of people write about what we might do, and I I'm not in any way um knocking the value of that. It's It's essential. But it's only a part of the story, because as I can't keep saying, if we only do certain things, but don't change the way, the how in which we relate to the world and to one another, and as I would say, to the cosmos, it's no good, because we won't break out of this. If we survive at all, we won't be able to keep it up for long, because we'll just fall back into the same problems. But to me, almost more important is we won't deserve to survive. You know, I have an unpopular vision that actually life is not just about getting pleasure. I love loads of things in life that give me enormous pleasure. My family, my friends, my music, good food, nice wine, my garden, uh you know, hundreds of things. I'm not some ghastly old Puritan. But I do think I do [snorts] think that we've lost the idea that there's a bit more to it than that. As Wittgenstein said, you know, I don't know why we were born, but I'm pretty certain it wasn't just to have a good time. And having a good time is not a bad thing. But, of course, once again, it's one of those things that tends to come better if you're not focused on it. The more you focus on, "I must have a good time. I'm going to be happy." the less easily it comes because happiness is famously elusive. And famously, people find happiness often by sinking their own aims, their own needs in those of others. So, it's [snorts] a very complex picture. But, what I've I can only do a little bit. I mean, I'm only one person, and I've only got a few years left. [snorts] Um so, the little thing I think I can do while I've got time is what has practically killed me is writing this book because it's a demon has taken me up and said, "Write this book." And at to begin with, I thought it was going to be a shorter book. And it said, "No, no, you haven't finished yet. No, we're going there, there, there, there." And I just have. And all I can say is I've done my best shot at, as it were, taking the reader by the hand and not arguing with the reader, not going, "Listen, it you're irrational. If you see it like this, or if you look at the brain like this." I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, [snorts] "Come with me because I think the way we tend to see things now is not the full picture. And I want to show you something that's beautiful. And what's more, I think when I show it to you, you will not be surprised cuz you will know it somewhere already. You will recognize it." A lot of people who've read my book have said to me, "You know, you've changed my life. But, it's only because you opened my eyes to something that I knew all my life. But, I didn't know how to say it. I had no words for it. And you've given me that confidence. So, what what I really want to do is give people a taste of I'm not talking down to them. It's a it's a you know, be prepared for some strenuous stuff, but I try to make everything um so that any, you know, college level person can read it without any special inside knowledge. Um so and I try to explain and it that's why it, you know, takes me pains and a long time to write is I try to make things that are really quite difficult to say fairly simple. But what I want to offer is that That's my answer to your question, what do we need, what can we do? I I can only say uh here's my book. And at the end I quote from a German poet called Angelus Silesius that says reader, surely this is enough. But if you want more, then you yourself go and you be the book and you be the life. And that's, you know, that's basically my message. That is a phenomenal place to wrap this up. Um I do want to read a brief quote from you that I think really um says exactly what you just said uh in a beautiful way. Here it is. There are four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition, and imagination. Any worldview that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail. And with that Dr. Iain McGilchrist, thank you so much for joining me today. Your work is unbelievable. I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to put all of that into words uh so that the rest of us can use it as an orienting mechanism. It's truly breathtaking. Thank you so much for joining me today. Totally enjoyed it, of course, and thank you very much for inviting me and giving me a platform. Of course, where can people find you if they want more with you? Um if So, Google my name, uh the first thing that will probably come up is channelmcgilchrist. Um, and even if you don't know the spelling, you'll probably get get there. Um, that's one of the good things about Google. But, [snorts] channelmcgilchrist, um, has a large, um, open area. You don't have to become a member. If you're interested, there's a lot of other material that members get, but we have a lot of stuff that's there for public browsing, and you can learn more about my thinking, my work. You can see little video clips, and there's all about the new book, including a few reviews I've already got of it. A quarter of an hour's talk by me trying to explain what the book's about, and even, um, rather nice CGI image where you can look into a book that hasn't yet been made, but it it [snorts] it's using the typeograph pages. So, it's actually quite quite nice. So, that's where to go. Uh, channelmcgilchrist.com. Thanks. Amazing. Hi guys. I know that you will be blown away by further engagement with his work, and speaking of things that will blow you away, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.