Right Turn!

It’s not often that you come upon a book of science and philosophy that bowls you over. The Matter with Things (2021) is a big, beautiful, expensive book about how we see the world and why we disagree so violently about what we see.

Starting with a description of our divided brains, whose hemispheres behave in very different ways – both necessary for our survival – it sails through two volumes and 1,333 pages of elegant prose (nearly 1,600 pages if you count appendices and other apparatus) to end with ruminations on the nature of the sacred and the divine. The secret of this engaging work is that its author, Dr Iain McGilchrist, is a former literary scholar who switched to psychiatry and neuroscience. He’s also a philosopher. In another age he would have been called a polymath. He taught poetry at Oxford University where he was a Fellow of All Souls, before deciding that you cannot teach poetry without spoiling it. He sports a neat square beard and woolly jumpers, loves music and lives on the Isle of Skye. When he is not touring the world with his gospel, he broadcasts it by means of numerous interviews on a busy website. He has written a book of astonishing length, depth and detail. Supported by some handsome colour plates and diagrams, he surveys not only physiology, neuropsychology and evolutionary theory but also philosophy, physics, cosmology, theology and the role of metaphor and myth in the religions of East and West. McGilchrist would not, I am sure, claim great originality. His multitudinous footnotes, comfortably arranged on the outside margins of his text, cite some 5,000 academic works in a bibliography occupying 182 pages. What he has done with this encyclopaedic work, I think, is to sound the death knell of the ‘Two Cultures’ proclaimed by the scientist-novelist C. P. Snow in 1959, and reinstate the dialogue between physics and metaphysics that flourished in the late seventeenth century. And he has issued a timely warning: not to sacrifice our subtle grasp of the world to a lot of little boxes. In this the author has been helped by the disorder created in particle physics and cosmology by the discovery of quantum fields, the Big Bang and black holes. The scientists’ claim to supremacy has taken a big knock, while our political masters face social disorder from the profligacy of the Internet and uncontrolled artificial intelligence. In order to explain the origins of the divided brain, McGilchrist takes us on a fascinating tour of evolutionary history, all the way back to the artful flatworm. He shows how what was once a primitive survival mechanism has become a potent if troublesome piece of equipment. The left hemisphere of the brain evolved in order to grasp things, ‘apprehending’ prey; the right to keep an eye out for predators, so ‘comprehending’ its world. The left likes to simplify things with words, numbers, lists, categories, units. The right has a much wider but fuzzier view: it seeks the big picture, not items but ideas and meanings. The two are separated by a filter, the corpus callosum, which passes the information back and forth. They help each other out, but the left brain cannot be trusted and should never be in charge of the right. More than half of McGilchrist’s first volume is devoted to a detailed account of human brain behaviour: how our senses are deceived, and what happens to us when one or other of the hemispheres is damaged, or temporarily shut down for testing by the scientists. Some of his examples are familiar, like the phantom limb which continues to be felt after it is amputated. Others are eye-poppingly strange. In cases of ‘asomatognosia’, patients with right hemisphere damage can lose complete track of their left arm. Shown it by the doctor, they may say that it’s not theirs but his, or that it has been smuggled into their bed, or that it’s been mistakenly sent out with the dirty laundry. Volume 1 ends with a discussion of reason and truth. And here our friend Intuition enters the stage. Volume 2 reaches down into the sub-atomic world, then up and away into the cosmos to show us what, in the professor’s view, is the Matter with Things. The further we dig down into our world, he writes, the less solid it becomes. Eventually we reach nothing – not even particles – but mere forcefields. We are left in an intangible quantum world of processes and relationships. From space and time he moves on to questions of value, morality and meaning. The reader wonders where he will end up. Does our poetic scientist believe in God? I shall not reveal his answer. McGilchrist had rehearsed this scenario in The Master and His Emissary, first published in 2009. This gives a shorter account of the neurophysiology followed by an enjoyable guided tour through successive phases of European culture, from ancient Greece to postmodernism. His later book, his big statement, digs more deeply and ranges more widely across the world, into Indian, Chinese and other cultures. The Matter with Things gave me especial pleasure because it answers a question which has troubled me for years. Why have we allowed procedure to trump purpose? Why do we find ourselves trapped in a mass of rules and protocols which overwhelm the real object of our efforts? I once planned to write a book called The Misrule of Reason or, more catchily, The Artist in the Attic, to suggest that our creative selves are being confined upstairs while Reason makes itself comfortable in the master bedroom. I collected examples. Banks and other corporate bodies had replaced everyday moral obligations or conscience with ‘codes of conduct’ which had the perverse effect of encouraging staff to look for ways round them. Employers used formulaic admission systems instead of their own seasoned intuition. University admissions tutors struggled with tailor-made and overblown curricula vitae sent in by school-leavers. Judges used computer-generated predictions to decide a criminal’s sentence. The emergency services could be fatally delayed in big incidents by procedural constraints. An early answer to my question was provided by Coleridge. In one of his ‘table talks’ he declared that there were only two types of people in the world: Platonists and Aristotelians. I preferred the idea of a spectrum with artists and mystics at one end, laboratory scientists and trainspotters at the other, and the rest of us somewhere in the middle. Our place on the spectrum might be determined genetically: it might be something we were born with. Or it might have been decided for us by well-meaning schoolteachers. Left-brainers and right-brainers were identified years ago. Some schools even put labels on their children – ‘A’ for auditory learners, ‘V’ for visual ones – to guide the teachers. They were told to stop because it turned out that attempts to allocate functions to one side of the brain or the other had not been very successful. These had a habit of moving around when disturbed. Indeed it was not yet clear, as McGilchrist has pointed out, how the brain really works. In those days scientists and philosophers were more concerned to find out how consciousness could be generated by a lump of grey matter. Some even claimed to have located it. Most had to content themselves with calling the mind an ‘emergent property’ of the brain, which says little or nothing; and that line of research now seems to have expired. Let us return to the hemispheres. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman insists in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that intuition is intrusive and unreliable – and no doubt in some cases it is. But if you ask professionals how they tackle problems, the answer is nearly always the same: intuition backed by experience. A judge from the UK Supreme Court told me that his first response to any new case was to take a view before consulting with colleagues and examining precedent. Medical diagnosis, too, is as much an art as a science: a doctor has to see the whole person because remote diagnosis is unreliable. Journalists know that meeting a public figure in the flesh reveals more about them than any statement they issue or speech they make. Engineers and mechanics use intuition when confronted with a broken machine. Is this not precisely what McGilchrist is talking about when he describes the neural traffic between the two hemispheres of the brain? Artists rarely have words to describe what it is they do. Their imagination is fired by an idea, seizes it and starts to realize it in the chosen medium – paint, stone, words or musical notes. From time to time they stop and take a critical look. Something is not quite right; adjustments are made. And so the work proceeds, wordlessly. That is what McGilchrist describes. But the same is true of scientists, whose great discoveries are often the result of sudden illumination. Albert Einstein used mental pictures, not formulae, to arrive at his concept of space-time and relativity. Henri Poincaré had a flash of mathematical inspiration while getting on a bus. So sure was he of its truth that he did not bother to verify it until he got home to Caen. All these manifestations are confirmed by McGilchrist’s thesis. He is, not surprisingly, a follower of thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead who saw the world as process rather than substance, William James, the American Pragmatist philosopher (and brother of the novelist Henry), and the Continental philosophers who tried to find words to describe our peculiarly human dilemmas but whose work was mocked by the Anglo-Saxons. Here is a spirited demolition of the materialism and reductionism that have dominated science and philosophy for so long. Those desperate, if ingenious, attempts to clean up our language, clear the terrain and ‘hack away the underbrush’ (as one put it) have left us little more than empty desert. Well, the boot is now on the other foot. Iain McGilchrist’s book is a timely warning to our left-brain-dominated world where we are busily uploading our knowledge and delegating our decisions to ‘intelligent’ machines which – since they lack all feeling, sensation, context and imagination, are no more intelligent than the thermostat on your radiator. McGilchrist takes us from inside our skulls out to the edge of the universe. His book is a gargantuan, delicious feast. Eat slowly, and digest.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Christian Tyler 2024