Hemispheric Lateralisation, Relationality, Being-In-The-World

hello everyone and welcome back to a very special episode of active inference insights I your host Darius parvey Wayne and today I'm absolutely thrilled to be speaking to Dr Ian mcgilchrist Dr mcgilchrist is a psychiatrist neuroscientist philosopher and literary scholar best known for his two books or rather Toms the matter in his ersary and the matter with the master in his ersary rather and the matter with things in these he explores radically different worldviews presented by the two hemispheres of the brain and the many implications both at the personal and the societal level of such cereal lateralization in mcil Christ welcome to the show and again thank you so very much for joining me thanks Darius it's a great pleasure so I think um as I said sort of off stream plenty of people in the audience will be familiar with your work and and I'm sure have read at least one of the two books but it might be worth just starting with a very general overview of the kind of lateralization hypothesis um which we can use as a sort of launch pad to get into deeper issues yes well um most people who don't know an awful lot about it um know that this has all been rubbished long ago and that differences between brain hemis pop psychology and and all that and and that that's a position that I understand because after some phenomenal experiments that were made possible by the so-called split brain operation carried out in Caltech in the 60s and 70s to enable people with intractable epilepsy to lead a Life by dividing the two hemispheres it was possible for psychologists to interview and engage with one hemisphere of a person at a time and get quite different results this led to a lot of speculation most of which was wrong but when we start speculating in science we usually get it wrong it's not unusual this is the whole process of science you you you refine it you change it you replace it so um there are three things that make it a curious issue and one worth addressing first of all I suppose before I even say that um any neurologist knows that it's not just the site but the side of the Legion that makes the difference so the site is important but the side is crucial but when you think about it in the abstract the brain an organ which has power from making connections and whose power exists in connections is divided why it's also asymmetrical in just about everything that can be measured both functionally and physiologically why and and thirdly there is a band of fibers at the base of the brain called the Corpus kosin which connects the two hemispheres only about 2% of neurons actually cross it and a lot of its traffic is in the service of inhibition it's one hemisphere inhibiting the other as much as exciting it so those questions led me to uh 30 years really of examining this question and uh what I think uh the the explanation of this strange phenomenon of the divided brain is can be put like this it answers a simple evolutionary question how to eat without being eaten so in order to get stuff principally to eat but also perhaps in a bird of TG to build a nest in an ape to pick up something to use as a tool you have to be able to bring a a narrow beam sharply focused attention to Barrel on a detail but if that's the only kind of attention you're paying then you're not aware of the other 357 degrees Arc of attention available to you and in that arena there may be a predator there may also your kin your mate and your offspring that you need to look after so the one Hemisphere and in humans this is and it becomes so over Evolution the left hemisphere that deals with this very narrowly targeted attention of something it already knows in order to grab it and get it is conducted out of the left hemisphere it's the left hemisphere that controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing and getting and the right hemisphere has being left to the task of understanding the whole of the rest of the picture so I mean as a sound bite I…