Are you insane John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist on neuroscience and creativity

Good evening ladies and gentlemen Thank you so much for joining us at this How To Academy event I'm Vas Christodoulou one of the curators of our program Tonight's event is going to be an exciting showcase of contemporary art Extraordinary meeting of art and science Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary one of the most profoundly original and meaningful Works of philosophy in our time and now the author of a sequel The Matter With Things He's in conversation with a man whose genius for writing and performing makes him A fully paid-up member in the pantheon of comedy greats Alongside Monty Python Fawlty Towers A Fish Called Wanda and many more extraordinary films and television programs John Cleese is also the author of a new book with direct insights Relevance to this conversation titled "Creativity A Short and Cheerful Guide " Please give a huge welcome to Ian McGilchrist and John Cleese We just had a Chinese meal together Yes it was very good So I think your book was the most important book I ever read and I think a lot of us here feel that and I was saying to Ian and it's absolutely true I find him despite the fact that this is a pretty a complicated subject I find his writing so clear that I can read it much more easily than I can I read most detective novels because most of the time when I'm reading I think wait a moment I thought the author said this or that's ambiguous but this is clarity personified So thank you for that Now I calculated that if we generally go through the book we have three seconds for every page so we're already ahead so basically I want to ask you one question are you crazy I thought you were going to ask me to summarize But seriously this is extraordinary I mean 10 years 1500 pages why Well I often ask myself yes there is a serious answer I think I'm really worried sorry to bring it up but I'm really worried as I imagine a lot of people are Here are some thoughts on the way the world is heading and before I go I wanted to say something I thought was relevant about it from my experience of people and their brains I think the things that I would point to they're pretty obvious obviously the top of the list has to be the The destruction of our home of the planet but also of various strange things like destroying other cultures destroying our own civilization turning ourselves into machines I'm very Alarmed at the speed with which mechanistic and machine-like thinking is taking over everyday life not necessarily in you know strange areas of academe or something But actually the business of leading a life now depends on your adopting a rather machine-like way of being and we're encouraged all of us to think of ourselves as slightly faulty machines You know because we have emotions and bodies and things like that you know which computers are not handicapped by So all of that and the lust for power and control which is extremely worrying and accelerating rapidly and the means by which to acquire it by people who have little wisdom in how to use it So this is the sort of setting and for those of you who've read The Master and His Emissary you'll know that resonates with anyone familiar with the evolution of brain systems effectively the The main two systems are those that are physically and philosophically divided the right and left hemispheres because one of them is designed to enable us to control and manipulate but no Really to understand That's the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere is the one that helps us to understand everything however subtle and complex in context I just felt that were running so far towards what I predicted in The Master and His Emissary a culture that was almost entirely dependent on ways of thinking typical of the left hemisphere That was part of It I was thinking that the current obsession with robots seems partly because people have forgotten that we have functions other than robotic ones Yes I mean it's one of those The more you define what is valuable as what a machine can do the less you value humanity I've written a book which aims to Redress this terrible terrible destructive lemming-like rush towards our destruction by embracing a view that we and the cosmos are nothing but a heap of rubbish I'm a scientist so I'm further worried by the way pop science and popular philosophical discourse rushes to embrace a very simplistic model which is that of reductionist materialism which holds that there is truly only matter and in order to understand it You take it apart and find out what the pieces are You take it all apart and find a handful of dust You say well it doesn't mean anything Yes but it's slightly like taking a wonderful piece of music and listing all the notes in a notebook in alphabetical order and then say well We've got all the notes here but I can't for the life of me see what they mean So that's also a concern and that is not compelled on us That view a way of looking at the world that is intellectually simplistic morally damaging and spiritually bankrupt The world is not imposed on us by anything in science It is not imposed on us by reason It's imposed on us by a very left-hemisphere very simple very procedural vision of what science is and what reason is It's almost as though most scientists especially biologists And psychologists are not aware that physics completely changed in 1920 Absolutely and am I not right Did you not start out reading physics at Cambridge No I went to Cambridge I got in for physics Oh you got in for physics And then I discovered that some of the students coming to Cambridge to study physics were actually I was interested in it It occurred to me that this gave them an unfair advantage So I said what can I do And they said very little because you don't have the A-levels You can do law And I said all right I'll do law And I did that for three years and escaped immediately afterwards When you discovered that actually you could make people Laugh Yes that's right which was the first time I'd ever discovered I had any creativity Ability at all which fascinates me And I've written this little book about creativity and the people least interested in it are educators I wrote to Bath where I have a connection with the university and I offered them twice to give talks to the students you know Remote talks and never heard back from them on either offer And that's what it's all about I think you're too woke probably I think you're probably too woke But no I mean going back to physics physics is so important And there's a strange The paradox that those scientists who studied the inanimate world long ago over 100 years ago abandoned this mid-19th century mechanistic model and have discovered that the universe is very complex and subtle that matter is at least as complex as consciousness And they're Probably almost certainly interdependent elements And Max Planck said that mind came first He wasn't the only one No but Planck stated yes that consciousness is primary And there are many physicists who would certainly hold that I mean not a physicist of course but I am interested in physics And I have some kind friends who are physicists who sort of Check my ramblings in this direction But yes I mean physicists have seen that consciousness is essential to existence And yet biologists who deal with the living universe have decided at it's much simpler than that and that consciousness probably doesn't exist Or if It's just something secreted by the brain rather than urine from the kidney I don' Know how Actually here's a spoiler alert Nobody knows how that could possibly happen Fascinating because the resistance of mainstream scientists to what they discovered in the 1920s You know quantum physics the resistance is almost incomprehensible to me What do you feel about it Well of course there's absolutely no resistance in the world of science outside of it e biology outside of the life sciences And I'm not the only person in that area who said You know I wish our colleagues in biology would catch up with physics But I think there 's a huge investment in the amount of money the amount of grants the amount of positions University that in one way or another come under one of the headings of biology or medicine psychology physiology Well doctors in particular aren't they They have a very e mechanistic view of the body Yes I mean it's sad really sometimes you say It's not entirely obvious that the body is a machine And they look at you in a slightly different way Hurt way How could you say that I mean they're genuinely confused But that's just how they are Taught isn't it Well yes I mean there's so much to cram into a medical education as I discovered I started with the handicap of being 10 years older than most people when I He studied medicine But even then there was a huge amount to cram into your six years Whatever But I would prefer the American system You can't study medicine as a first Degree And I would add as a writer that first degree which is the case in America is that you ought to do something in the humanities Before you become a doctor You're actually going to get to meet people You should know something about human beings and not just about machines So yes anyway But I'm fascinated by the resistance to information I know that Rupert Sheldrake went along to the BBC to discuss something with Richard Dawkins And at some point he said to Dawkins who said there was no evidence for what Rupert was saying he said Did you read any of the stuff I sent you to read before the program And Dawkins said No I didn't bother because I knew it was nonsense You know it's a bit like the Galileo case Isn't it And the Ecclesiastics And he's saying look through my beautiful new telescope at the craters on the moon and they're saying we don't need to look because we know they're there Not there It's an extraordinary attitude What's it about It's left-brain isn't it It's hanging on It's clinging to the need for certainty to the need to believe that you can explain Everything By the way that's a completely irrational claim I mean it's a disprovable point that we can understand everything but it's also an irrational assumption Why would If you believe in evolution which I certainly do we are presumably somewhere maybe quite low down on the rungs of evolution Why would our brains have evolved by 2021 to the point where We could understand everything in the cosmos And actually since I'm very interested in the history of philosophy and the history of ideas my suggestion is that actually we now understand Much less than we used to We know a lot more information but our understanding has not kept pace with the amount of information In fact it's gone into the opposite direction Reverse So but I think there are a lot of reasons As I say it's very powerful Lobby There's no incentive once you're entrained in it to rock the boat by saying things that will make your colleagues think you're unsound Fortunately in physics everyone agrees That nobody understands quantum mechanics and that if you do you're an imposter So they don't have the same hang-up about the idea that we don't really understand everything We understand many things up to a point But the quest for certainty you see seems to me about control which is the left hemisphere And I sometimes feel tha People want to be in control primarily when they feel anxious You know in terms of creativity if people are anxious for some reason even if it's just time pressure they end up relying on stereotypical thinking They can't then play and get into it Something more creative It's so true And in the writing of the book I looked at the history of many scientists and how they made their discoveries and many mathematicians and how They arrived at their now accepted conclusions And there's research as well I mean what that shows sorry before I say what the research shows what's clear from that is that althoug They did a lot of procedural thinking of a very routine kind during certain times in their life that was not how they made these discoveries at all They were made by intuitive insight Seeing connections between often unrelated shapes and forms that nobody had thought of as related before So the myth that science is a matter of making no assumptions at all testing every Possible hypothesis to exhaustion well no idiot did that I mean there wouldn't be time in story of the universe to do it People make what look like good intuitions about what mig What's going on here And then they test it in certain ways But often their insights have nothing to do with that They rely on imagination Science is a highly imaginative enterprise which doesn' It's made up you know Imagination is the way in which we gain insight into things that we don't understand We thought we knew And it's not necessarily verbal Absolutely In fact it's rarely verbal Einstein said that he felt that muscular sensation was actually part of his system of Thought and that while he was thinking he would be unable to explain to anyone what he was thinking words Oh absolutely And he used to play the keyboard or the violin or whatever and come to and then his daughter describes it now I've got it And famously he couldn't explain in words wha He had been discovering things for months after he made the discovery But he's not alone Going back to In fact the Greek world but certainly in our end times there were 18th century mathematicians like Euler who said you know I've got my conclusions but how I'm to get there I have not yet found the answer But he was right his conclusions were correct So I'm not suggesting That we jump to conclusions In fact interestingly the left hemisphere is the one that does a lot of it Quick and dirty jumping to conclusions Does it And it's the right hemisphere that says but hang on it may be more complex than that In fact it's always been observed that things are more complicated than they seem complex and therefore that there need to be shades of meaning that things need to be nuanced and so on which is why I write long books because in the end people ask you to summarize them you know like progress But in doing so you do violence to the fact that what is drawn together There are many shades of things that qualify one another And most of what matters to us in life is implicit not explicit in language It fascinated me that Bernard Berenson I think He was the great Renaissance critic able to always tell when something was a fake because he'd feel ill There wasn't something wrong here the brushstrokes aren't right You could just look at it and start feeling slightly sick That's it So what comes up from intuition is not in a neatly typed-out form of words