Matter and Mind: Rethinking Consciousness with Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist

I don't think there is one thing. It's grown very organically. I've always been interested in ideas — they have an almost erotic charge for me. They're not just abstract things; they actually have life. There's been a continuous path through my early days at school, my days at Oxford, the first book I wrote against criticism, through to The Master and His Emissary, and finally The Matter with Things. It's been a seamlessly evolving organic process concerned with resonance — the resonance between what is me, my consciousness, and the world.

It's also the very obvious point that when wholes are broken into their parts, a good deal is lost — above all, the relations between those parts. Over a lifetime, I've come to see relations as more and more important, and as primary. Relations are prior to the relata that emerge from a web of relationships, not the other way around. Everything is unique. We approximately gather things into groups for ease of thinking, but that individuality is always being eroded by the way we now think. The implicit is richer than the explicit; all the important things can only be hinted at in language. Language needs to rely on poetry rather than simply prose.

Iain McGilchrist

The title has three levels of meaning. First, in the colloquial English expression, there is something that is the matter with things — something wrong. What is it? I want to address what I believe that wrongness comes from. Second, there is something wrong with our preoccupation with matter as simple. Materialists are not people who overvalue matter, but people who undervalue it, because matter is something very extraordinary — not just lumpen matter sitting there inertly. Third, and most deeply, there is the problem with things: I believe we see the world as made up of things, whereas that is starting from a very late stage of apprehension. Certain aspects of reality stand out to us as things that attract our attention, but I believe reality is in fact a seamless whole — vastly differentiated, but not really made up of bits.

Iain McGilchrist

One of the differences between the hemispheres is that the left sees things as either/or, whereas the right sees them as both/and. We need both — not either either/or or both/and, but both. So the right hemisphere sees things as unified while their whole nature is differentiation within a nonetheless integral whole, the integrity of which is not threatened by the differentiation within it.

People say, "all is one," and I say yes — and all is many. Now what? What I believe is going on in the cosmos is that something relatively simple and one is unfolding into ever greater complexity that doesn't destroy its wholeness, but spells out the potential that was within that wholeness all along. Going back to David Bohm's concept of the implicate order: it is the making explicate of what was implicate, without destroying it. And then that new explicateness is itself implicate for something else. The image I like is that of a bud unfolding into a full flower. The bud is not destroyed; it is fulfilled in the making of the flower, which inherits what was in the bud and makes it something new beyond what the bud could do.

Iain McGilchrist

Because of the entirely non-controversial difference in mode of attention between the hemispheres, they bring about different experiential worlds. The left hemisphere pays piecemeal attention — highly targeted, highly focused on a detail — because its aim is to get and grab. Whether it's food, a tool, or anything else, you need to be precise in picking it up. It also controls that aspect of language with which we pin things down.

The right hemisphere, simultaneously, is keeping a completely different kind of attention: broad, open, sustained, and vigilant — because if it didn't, you would become somebody else's lunch while you were getting your own. These two kinds of attention lead to two kinds of world. The left hemisphere's piecemeal attention produces a world of bits that are already known and desired by us — decontextualised, abstracted, general in nature, explicit, effectively inanimate. Whereas the right hemisphere sees that everything is ultimately connected to everything else, that it is changing and flowing, that a lot of its meaning has to be implicit, that its nature is to see the individual and unique while at the same time seeing that as part of a whole. It also sees a world that is embodied and animate.

If you think about those two: the left hemisphere's world is like a map — a highly abstract, stylised, diagrammatic version of reality that helps you negotiate the world, purely for utility. A map would be totally useless if it had loads of information; it just has to stick to what you need to know. Whereas the right hemisphere is seeing everything else — the full experiential picture of life in all its depth, with all its moral and aesthetic modes of being. If we live in the map, we live in a very simplified, skeletal, inanimate version of the world. If we live in the world described by the right hemisphere, the world becomes alive.

Iain McGilchrist

Imagine you want to play a piece of music. You hear it first as a whole, and you want to play it. After a while, you realise that if you're going to play it proficiently, you have to take it apart — practise certain bars over and over, see the harmonics and their progression. So you have a theoretical understanding, a partwise understanding. But if you stop there, you've got nothing. This is only of use if it makes you more able to go back and now play the whole, with all that the analysis has added to its meaning. When you're playing it as a whole, you're no longer thinking about the parts or the analysis; you're thinking of the thing as a whole.

That is an analogy for our understanding of everything. And it seems to me that for a very long time in the West, there has been a tyranny of the analytic frame of mind at the expense of the more synthetic — the frame of mind in which one sees how things fit together.

Iain McGilchrist

Everything is actually organic, but in an organic structure, if you focus in, you can find in this immensely complex system — with feedback loops onto others and interactions that are almost impossible to model — little areas where there is a linear chain, where A leads to B leads to C. Even in the most complex diagram of an organic system, you can see these little chains. Those are where a mechanism can be brought to bear: you interrupt this chain and cause something to be different. And it works. But this is the trouble with that success — it makes us think that the structure of the whole we're looking at is mechanical, but it's not. It's organic.

Iain McGilchrist

I'd make a big distinction between ritual and dogma. Dogma is conceptual; rituals are embodied. Even if they're only verbal rituals, they emanate from our embodied being. Whereas the problem with dogma is that it is conceptual, and when it's held with a fixity that is inappropriate — and when one comes to the nature of God, any fixity is problematic — I think there is no upside to that dogma. It encourages people to feel that they've grasped something, when they'd be better off feeling that they hadn't fully grasped it, because that leaves it open for there to be things beyond what we can imagine or conceive.

Those who really were in the best position to know — the truly wise, such as the Buddha, Christ, St Paul, Montaigne — ended up not with certainties, but expressing something in their lives or in what they wrote that spoke to us, not in a dogmatic way. Wisdom leads to seeing the importance of not knowing. The whole purpose of Zen is to put you off guard so that you no longer cover the world over with your ready-made concepts, but are suddenly exposed to something that may get through and speak to you — like Shelley's lines about the imagination, that it can take from reality the cloak of familiarity which has fallen over it and disguised it.

Iain McGilchrist

The right hemisphere understands language as a whole — it has prosody, the meaning of intonation, which makes all the difference. "Yes," "yes," "yes" — five hundred ways of saying yes, all meaning different things. It also has pragmatics: what does this really mean in the experiential world? If someone says "it's hot in here today," they don't mean to supply meteorological information — they mean, would you open a window? The right hemisphere understands where the person is heading; the left hemisphere is stuck with the literal.

I'm a follower of Lakoff and Johnson's belief that language is essentially metaphorical. This is particularly true of science and philosophy — their language is almost entirely based on metaphors, because new words have to be made from embodied experience. Even the word "abstract" comes from dragging something away from its context. "Immaterial" traces back to "matter" meaning wood, the basic substance. Language is narrowed down when we try to make things too explicit. What if the truth is, in fact, multiple, complex, and requires things to be held in the mind together, even if they seem contrary to one another? As Bohr said: the deeper the truth, the more it will be contrarian in nature.

Iain McGilchrist

What I saw in literary criticism at Oxford was that we took something unique and made it general in nature by paraphrasing it. We made the implicit — which was rich — crash into simplicity by making it explicit, rather like explaining a joke, which just ruins it. And the third thing was that we took something embodied and made it entirely abstract. These three moves struck me as deeply wrong.

At that time I was reading Oliver Sacks' Awakenings. It had only just come out. I thought: here's a man who's philosophically minded and he's using the experience of patients where something has gone wrong with their brain to illuminate how their world has changed. I read around in the psychological literature about context, abstraction, implicit, explicit — and I realised these quite possibly had something to do with the hemispheres. I needed to know more about how the brain works. So I went off and had to start at the beginning as a first-year medical student — the lowest form of life known in a hospital — and worked my way up to being a consultant.

Iain McGilchrist

In trying to understand what the implications of hemisphere lateralisation are for what we can know as reality, I went back to first principles. The portals through which we get any handle on reality are: attention itself; perception (which is not the same as attention); judgment; emotional and social intelligence; cognitive intelligence; apprehension — the way of grasping and testing things in the world; and creativity, because a percept comes to us not as a blank, but we're already working on it creatively to see where it fits.

What I discovered was that apart from apprehension — grasping something to use it — the ways in which we evaluate the world and come to know anything about it are all better done by the right hemisphere than the left. And then there are four pathways: science, reason, intuition, and imagination. Nobody would disagree with science and reason. But intuition and imagination have been given a bad rap recently. The history of science and mathematics shows that imagination was extremely important in virtually all the important discoveries made in either field. You can't do with just one or two of these. Each has limitations; each can only answer certain kinds of questions.

Iain McGilchrist

In the last part of The Matter with Things, I look at the fabric of reality: time, space, matter, consciousness — and, partly to my surprise, values, purpose, and the sense of the sacred. Science dogmatically rejects these, and there are advantages to ruling them out. But it is naive as a guide to the nature of reality; it can only tell us certain things within certain bounds.

What I've discovered is that values and purpose seem to be inherent in the cosmos, not just in the living world. There seems to be directionality in the evolution of the cosmos towards things that are complex and beautiful. And goodness, truth, and beauty — the three Platonic virtues — are not things that we make up to cheer ourselves up. They're not invented. They're discovered. They exist. We either get to recognise them and respond to them, and by doing so help them to become more themselves, to grow and to be manifest — or we fail to discover them, and our life is robbed of much of its meaning.

Iain McGilchrist

One sees matter as just lumpen matter initially, and then goes through a phase of thinking there must be something more, over and above matter. But there is a way of coming back to a position — which I hold — in which matter is just a version of the ontological primitive, which is consciousness. All is consciousness. This doesn't mean I'm a straightforward idealist in the sense of Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup, and certainly not in the sense of Berkeley. But it is an example of where you thought you knew something, you went through a process of thinking about it differently, and finally there's a reconciliation.

Iain McGilchrist

There are a number of sorts. One is uttering formulaic words — I have collections of prayers that I particularly like. One I say very regularly is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged after being tortured in a concentration camp by the Nazis for helping Jews. It goes: "At the beginning of the day, O God, I call to Thee. Help me to pray and to gather my thoughts to Thee, for of myself I am not able. Within me all is dark, but in Thee is light. I am alone, but Thou wilt not abandon me. I am weak, but Thou wilt help me…" That does a lot of things — it asks without making specific demands; it says, I don't really know, but You know, and I'm placing my faith in You.

Another form is just being open and listening, because a lot of prayer is about listening. Conventionally, prayer is divided into four species — adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. When I was young, I thought supplication was what prayer was mainly about. I now think it's mainly about adoration.

As for discernment between a genuine spiritual insight and something pathological: one never knows finally. Faith is not certainty, because if it were certainty, it would just be a fact. Faith is literally a fidelity — an allegiance to something more beautiful, more true, and better than we are. One thing I'd say as a clinician: if in a normal working state, without drugs, you start hearing voices saying weird things, you should see a psychiatrist. One of the effects of psychosis is to take away your insight, so that you think what you're hearing is very real.

Iain McGilchrist

People sometimes ask whether psychedelics liberate the right hemisphere from the control of the left. I don't think they do. In fact, there is experimental evidence from the 1960s that the left hemisphere is the source of hallucinations, delusions, and the sort of things people experience on psychedelics — even if they're pleasant. In one series of patients having a temporal lobectomy, those who had their right temporal lobe removed and were then given LSD had a trip they'd never had before, based purely on the fact that the left temporal lobe had no balancing by the right. I think the current drive to use these drugs clinically should be met with a great deal of scepticism. At least half the time for most people, they don't have good trips. They remember the good ones — but there are bad trips too.

Iain McGilchrist

Death is not the antithesis of life. The antithesis of life is the machine. It is the machine that is waging war on life, on the spirit, on the body, on nature. There are strident voices promoting machines and machine-like thinking over against life, nature, the body, and the soul. I think of death as a perfectly natural thing, and I'm absolutely ready for it when it comes.

Mary Midgley, who died at around 96 or 97, made — when she was about 92 — an absolutely stunning point: if there were no death, you would never, ever be able to stop your existence going on and on and on. That, to me, is an awful thought. The Japanese understand this so well — the importance of transience, the fact that things don't last. If they did, they would be somehow completely devalued; they'd lose much of their power and value.

Iain McGilchrist

Jung's five conditions for a happy life map well onto what the research consistently shows: three things above all lead to a fulfilling life. The first is our relationships with other people — whether family or friends. The second is a relationship with the natural world. The third is a relationship with what one variously calls the sacred, the divine.

What I wouldn't accept is when these were put forward merely as coping mechanisms — as though it doesn't matter whether they're true, they're just useful to have. I would say no: when we are in communion with other human souls, when we are in communion with nature, and when we are in communion with the divine, we know that this is communion. It is not something made up. It is something more real than anything else that can be named — far more real than all the superficial material things around us that we count as reality.