Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
dr ian mcgillcrest 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 uh 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 um
specifically and that work led me to vs
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 uh 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 uh 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 sprit lane brain
procedure
or calisotomy as it's called
um
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 posited 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 rather
like a walnut
and uh there's only a commissure at the
bottom the corpus callosum that connects
the two
well there are a couple of other small
communists but effectively that's it
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 uh 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 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
um instead of the the properly um
massively complex coming and going of
stimuli that are correctly following
some kind of uh 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 worst
cases lose consciousness completely
um 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
uh 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 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
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 is
the 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
if you can imagine that normally the
connections between neurons
very cleverly gated
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 nerves fibers are coated in myelin
which is the 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 well 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 nerve and
the next net 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 the nerve but it's got this clunky
business of um
gating uh 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 and 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
i mean by the way
very very little of my research is based
on
what we learned from split brain
patients although it is very interesting
because you can just find out a lot
about the reason 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 we'll understand we'll 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
um 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 because i know for you
this is like 101 or even pre 101 but i
think it will help
we we can
we can come on to your last
um
supposition later because it's a very
interesting one
but
something that may not strike people as
very
significant but is and 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
brains are either war with one another
or are actually cooperating to do the
same thing
they're not 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 because 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 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
are 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 taken away and putting it
down or a woman going to a cupboard to
get the dress out and reaching with her
right hand and the left hand coming over
taking the dress and putting it back on
the hook so
clearly there were two different kind of
views 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 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
but at least it was reliable a bit like
a boring accountant and the right
hemisphere was way off but its head
somewhere um
creating wonderful pictures but really
needing anchoring down because 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
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
you know whatever it might be you need
to pay a certain kind of already
committed attention to some very precise
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 uh 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
um
you know uh
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 i it took me a while you called
attention a moral act
yes i do
and that's because i i'd be curious to
to understand does that tie into this
more mechanistic stay alive thing or or
is that gonna um 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
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
uh 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're 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 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
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 uh get to that but one
thing before we go off
the corpus callosum and splitting it i'd
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 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 uh atheist
in the same brain
that's one i'd like to know can you
verify yeah that's one of rahma's
patience
um
and and romer is one of 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 the neuroscientists don't think
that
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 i approached
medicine right away as about human
beings in their lives not just about
mechanisms but an awful lot of people
um were very good at the technical side
perhaps i either never train with
patients or only experimentally
and they kind of see the mechanisms
that's very interesting in the abstract
and what you'd see down a microscope or
with a particular investigation but
they're very uncomfortable about
about applying that to real people you
know there's mike kazaniga 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 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
you said it uh but anyway um
he then says
the brain's just a machine get over it
well
my 1600 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 right next because i 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
why our sort of current under
understanding if we're taking a
mechanistic look at this 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
his
the master and his emissary 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 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
[Music]
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 great
news is it's a process it can be taught
and you can deploy it in your own life
and you can register for this workshop
by going to this link i'll tell you
though right now quickly what they are
first extreme clarity and focus the
average person fails to achieve their
goals not because they didn't put an
effort but because they don't actually
know what it is that they're trying to
accomplish they're not focused on
exactly what they want
second massive excitement and motivation
there are two things that motivate us
pleasure and pain most people don't
properly leverage pain and negative
emotions which means that they're only
half as motivated as they could be or at
least only using half of the tools of
somebody else that finds their way to
success
third is desire
fourth is massive pressure and this goes
back to that idea of negative emotions
if you use it the right way fear of
failure can actually be a very useful
thing
fifth coming up with the right strategy
sixth avoiding the trap of overthinking
rather than taking fast aggressive
action and finally evaluating your
progress building grit and adjusting
your course that loop is critical in
fact that last part is what i call the
physics of progress if you fail to do
that you will never make progress all
right these are the seven steps that i'm
going to walk through in much greater
detail on my live workshop how to make
any goal stick so go to the link on your
screen or click the button below to
register alright my friend i will see
you soon take care and be legendary
peace
yeah yeah
yeah i use the image of the person or
the personality
on great good authority because
um
there's a researcher called owner guntu
kun in germany who won germany's most
prestigious prize for science which was
basically all about the differences
between the two hemispheres and he uh he
wrote in the site that i was right to
see these 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 pigs 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 objective but it's really just
a very narrow point of view in which
everything that you know about that
mountain everything you experience at
that moment 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 hemispheres
take and you alluded to the story of the
master in his emissary and this is a
story where the master is the right
hemisphere and the emissary is the left
hemisphere and in that situation the
master knows the big picture and just
wants the atmosphere 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
and tries 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 to
china india
the
native
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
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 e 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
customers 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 bay who
you know people
probably know the french philosopher of
the last century uh said something very
similar
to that um but anyway
there we are so where would you like us
to take the story next
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 easy er 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
ore from it right so extracting ore is
the left hemisphere wants to know what's
usable how do i grasp it the you can
have a
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 okay i think people are
going to
take to that very easily
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 it's 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 communing 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 our environment is
it and interestingly the the emotional
brain is
as much the left hemisphere as the right
it specializes in anger irritability
and it 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 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
and you may say 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
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
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 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
the easiest way to think of this is it's
like humor you know you tell a joke and
then somebody said i don't get the joke
and then you explain it they go
because once you've explained the 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 you sort of bond with it 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
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
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
because if you even think about it for a
fraction of a second the performance
will have gone
that doesn't make it a waste of time in
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 hole 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 a 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 products you get
more whole by bringing the parts
together with the whole and you know so
that in bones 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 was
probably one of the first modern
scientists
um discovered some things that were only
approved in the 19th century
but he was also a theologian
and i think one of the great thinkers of
all time called nicholas accuser he's
sometimes called cusanus which is his
latin name
but he's worth finding out more about
for any listeners
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 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
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
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 they have no no time with
religion
as you go into science the harder the
science the more religious people become
so
biologists it's something like only 7.6
or 7.8 percent
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
percent 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
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
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
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 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
what i do though is i'm fairly cautious
with the physics
i rely on about eight or ten
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
but 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
brains in the 50s and he was one of the
first people to realize as you
stimulated the cortex of the brain
at operation which you can do with the
patient conscious because
the brain is not has no pain sensors at
all you can do anything to the brain and
you don't it doesn't hurt
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 but what i'm really interested in
is his remark that the business of
neurology is to understand man himself
now schrodinger 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
because he's quoting platinus third
century greek philosopher
tienes de jemis 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
uh 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
very much i think to to really
meaningfully have that conversation
we're gonna have to define what
what is divine what is sacred so i'll
give you my
interpretation of uh
spirituality i'm not sure what the right
word's gonna be uh and that'll be sort
of our grounding mechanism so i'm not
religious meaning that i don't uh
subscribe to any of the
the written down traditions
but
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
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 inner 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
there's so much to say about what you've
just said um
the first is that i think it's it's an
area where it's wise not to think you
know everything
um william james the great psychologist
a far greater man in my opinion than his
brother the famous
novelist
um one of the greatest philosophers and
psychologists has 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 currently 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 is 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
some people will will love me for saying
this and some people just think i'm i'm
you know
yeah
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 vicin in german i i
need to make this distinction because in
most languages other than english there
are two words at least for no
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 vissen
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 connect
and in german canon and these are quite
different ideas now you can come to know
god perhaps but only by observing all
your knowledge
uh your knowledge in the sense of you
know reasoning is not going to help you
with this
except 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 i'm 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
and everything that is beyond reason is
not irrational
it may be trans-rational so for example
um my experience of schubert 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 it
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 trans-rational
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
well
not expressed least in words but it has
the drive to express things in words and
therefore expresses the least amount of
that reality
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
and it's just no question about that
because you know unless you're
a halfwit i mean
if you if you if you look at science if
you you re 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
in other traditions such as the hindu
tradition it's called
um
long before islam actually in
the what is now the islamic world it was
called allah
and
so on you can go on with these words
that describe this thing that has form
when
helicitis one of my favorite
philosophers one of the first greek
philosophers and i don't think there's
ever been a greater greek philosopher
used the term logos not in the 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 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 calls it because 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 does
and it's all in a book no no no no that
was just written by p you know you get
into these stupid disputes and 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 the 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 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 because when 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 ninety
percent of them will say no
so it's that kind of thing i'm talking
about and 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
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 picture 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 think
and
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 dao de
jing which is the dow that can be named
is not the eternal dao
and
they 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 you're you're opening
them up to is openness itself but you go
to great lengths to explain all of this
stuff
why does it matter
well i just what about you
why does it matter to include
religion why
the making sure that people take a
holistic view like they're 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 is 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
tom bill you 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
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 basically everybody
is at one point in their journey or
a