Transcript
Just yesterday, just after you left, the postman showed me that there is a little thing in his car that monitors not just where he is, not just how long he spends anywhere, but whether he's breaking too fast. And he thought, try and drive down these roads and then see whether you need to break or whatever. Around here, Postman is the postal service. It's one of the last vestiges of something that holds communities together. They know people, they look out for people, they help people, they hear what's going on and they do pass the time of day for a few minutes when they stop and deliver the mile. But this is the sort of thing that is being driven out and they're being spied on. We're all being spied on. Is this a good thing? And people say, the most stupid thing I've ever heard, and I never want to hear it again from an intelligent person. (01:00): Oh, if you've got nothing to hide, how blinker is that? Do you imagine that this information can be only benignly used and that we will always live in a society as relatively liberal as our own. We live in a very unusual bubble, in a relatively free, rapidly getting much less free society. But imagine how impossible it would have been to resist the Nazis if they had had access to the sort of technology that now exists, that can monitor everything you're doing or thinking and even saying. So no, I'm not a great fan of that. (01:49): What we outsource is not the same as what we have within us. For example, knowing where to look up a poem is not the same as knowing a poem by heart. Knowing that you can go to Google or a machine and it will compute something or find something out for you. It's very helpful. I do it myself, but it's not a substitute for knowing things and thinking about them yourself. The more we outsource our faculties, for example, using a SATMAV, the less we rely on our innate sense of direction. And this leads to some very strange results. I mean, some of them are just laughable if they weren't so sad, but somebody, an ambulance puts in a postcode or something and it ends up in Lancaster and it's supposed to be an out of London.
But to your point on the memory, the outsourcing of the memory, (02:39): Whether you ... Remembering a poem is different to knowing where to find a poem. I'm quite fascinated by this, whether it is a good thing to be able to outsource one's memory. And I'm biased, but I feel yes. And we've spoken before about how if you want to enable things to grow, you need to have space. And by stopping doing one thing, you enable another thing to appear. And maybe that's my blind optimism, but I personally feel that by being able to outsource my memory, I'm able to remember more things. And as long as I can still draw connections between all of those different points of culture or reference, then I see that as a positive force.
Yes. I mean, I'm not sure that when you outsource your memory, you can say that you are remembering more things. What you're surely saying is that you are knowing where to find more things, but let's let that pass. Of course, what I'm saying is not an all or nothing. I mean, it's not, as always, a question that it's necessarily a disadvantage to have an array of information at your disposal, all of which you can possibly internalize. Having access to an encyclopedia, including Wikipedia, is something that is valuable to have. I'm not arguing that it isn't, but it shouldn't be confused with knowledge that you have internally. That is my point because the knowledge you have internally governs your every thought, your intuitions which guide you, what you can reason about, how you think about and react to everything is dependent on the things that you have in here, not on a shelf in my library or somewhere in this computer that they're in you.
I completely agree that there is a distinction between the books in your library and you yourself, but there is also a sort of threat that is joined between your memory and the books in the library. And you use that to then go to the book and reread the whole passage.
Oh, of course. Yeah.
And- I
Mean, I'm not denying that at all. I'm just saying there's a difference between internalized experience and experience that is not really experienced, but is something one can have if one wants to choose to do so by going somewhere else.
Okay. Let's move on to the next question. What do you feel a left hemisphere world would look like?
Well, in short, I think it would be one we'd recognize as one that's taking form around us. It's one in which the broader picture gets lost amongst focus on small areas. It's one in which information is more important than knowledge and either of the more important than wisdom because wisdom and knowledge are personal and therefore fallible, whereas information wrong as it often is, is inflammable because it comes out of the machine. Pieces of paper would become more real than the things that they recorded or represented. Life would become increasingly bureaucratic and rule bound, procedural, and the procedures would be more important than the processes that the procedures were put in place to further. (06:24): We would become obsessed with measuring and quantifying rather than appreciating the quality of things because it's the right hemisphere that appreciates the differences between things, the subtle differences, the uniqueness, whereas the left hemisphere is more interested in how much of this would be got, not of what nature is it. We'd be faced with more and more black and white thinking more and more, "It must be this or it's got to be that. " All these are tendencies of the left hemisphere that I'm describing. We would become more paranoid as a society because we would feel the necessity to control everything more and more, but as we control things more and more, we would feel control slipping away from us and the tendency would be to try and increase even further the control. So there would be compulsory monitoring, recording, CCDV cameras, no doubt, DNA databases, all this kind of stuff because the end is if we can just control it, it will work out right. (07:28): I mean, actually there's a single instance in history where our attempts to control things were not ended in disaster, but there we are. We would fall apart as a socially cohesive body because of individuals striving, atomistic striving, and there'd be a decrease in our capacity of empathy. And I'm afraid, sadly, that the scientific evidence suggests that people generationation on generation appear to be less empathic than they used to be. We talk about why, but there we are. (08:02): I think there would be a sort of prevalently autistic way of thinking, which there's no relation to flexibility, judgment, tolerance, common sense, but followed inflexibly certain rules and procedures. I think the arts would become rather conceptual, disembodied, concerned purely with clever ideas rather than with the creation of embodied metaphorical beings that are like bringing into being a living thing that can't be summed up in a few ideas, but has an impact on you as a whole, not just on your intellect, but on your senses and on your guts and everything speaks to you. That would be replaced by cleverness. Music would become little more than rhythm because that's the only bit of music that's appreciated by the left hemisphere melody and harmony would be relatively difficult to achieve. We would be obsessed with tiny rules. Everything would have to be made explicit. We'd lose the capacity to make tacit knowledge of things to understand things as they are embodied and implicit. (09:16): Instead, everything would have to be made transparent and that means explicit and we would end up in a situation where we denied responsibility for the things that were happening because the left hemisphere doesn't accept responsibility for itself. It seems it as always somebody else's fault that it is the way it is.
Because it's very naturally denied. I think this would be a good moment to tell the story of the denial of the arm in one step. On the
Paralysis, yes. It's very striking. And more generally, there is something called agnosia, which is the capacity to simply deny a deficit, and that is much, much commoner after damage to the right hemisphere. And it can achieve a really extraordinary intensity. So that, for example, somebody who has a paralysis, after a right hemisphere stroke, you may well, for example, have a paralyzed left arm. And this is not a rare occurrence that there are one or two case reports of. This is something that probably nobody who's trained in medicine has not seen. So it is a common experience.
We should add that the left arm is controlled by the right
Hemisphere. The left arm is controlled by the right hemisphere. Let's just suppose, for example, that you have a stroke in the left hemisphere, then there's no question that when you see people, they're distressed about it. But if somebody has a stroke in the right hemisphere and they've got a paralyzed limb or even a paralyzed leg, it's not just that they're sort of fractuously not concerned or aware of it, which is true, but they will actually deny that there is a problem, explicitly deny. So you'll say to them, "How are you doing?" They say, "Fine." And you say, "Yeah, it's very good.Have you got any problems, for example, with your left arm?" "No, no, none at all. ""That's very good. Can you demonstrate that to me? So could you move your left arm?" And they gave that and nothing moves actually. And if you challenge them and bring the arm right around in front of them, so they're looking straight at it and say, "Now move that. (11:23): " They will say, "Oh, that's not my arm. That's not my arm." That belongs to the person in the next bed. Now these people are not mad and they're not lying. They are simply in profound denial and this denial is one of the key aspects of left hemisphere thinking, which is why it is always associated with factuous blind optimism. And it's very difficult to rehabilitate somebody after a right hemisphere stroke. It shocks some people because it goes against what they would imagine, but it is much harder to rehabilitate somebody after a right hemisphere stroke than after a left hemisphere stroke. Let me remind you that after a left hemisphere stroke, you more than likely got problems using your right hand and you've got problems speaking. Now that sounds like something that's a huge disability to get over, but it's nothing like as big a disability as not understanding the nature of reality. (12:21): And when your right hemisphere goes on the blink, because it is your anchor in reality, you're lost. You don't understand what's going on around you. You hallucinate, you're deluded. In other words, you believe and see things that just aren't credible. Nobody else believes or sees. And it's a really extraordinary business. It's the same in mental illness that we know that when people are in denial, and one of the features of what we mean by a psychosis is that the person denies that there's anything wrong. They believe, for example, the little green men from the moon living in the garden shed, and if you say that can't be right, I mean, they will say absolutely certain that that is the case. As they get better, you can see that their right frontal cortex, which was not functioning, begins to function again, and with it comes back inside. (13:15): But domination of the balance between the left and right by the left, frontal lobe, leads to denial. So if we are in a situation that I believe we are, where things are critical, the survival of the human race is at stake. People talk about saving the planet. I say, "Well, the planet is a big boy and can look after itself, but it's people that won't survive." The planet will take care of itself, but we will not be there to enjoy it.
And when you speak of denial, it made me think about when people are saying, "Oh, well, machines can save us." And anytime you suggest reasons why that is a false viewpoint, then immediately the denial will kick in and all the arguments will be presented for why machines are impossible and it's almost like that arm is missing and the view is that the machine world is the world. I imagine then no one would rely on their senses. They'd be relying on what it's like with the weather, rather than looking outside and seeing it's raining, but looking on their computer at BBC weather and going, "Oh, well, it says it's not raining." I mean, that's an extreme situation, but you can imagine- But we're
Very close
To that. We're not a million miles away.
I mean, just as an aside, there's a great talk on YouTube by a physicist called Al Bartlett. It's one of the most lucid lectures ever given and he simply explains what exponential growth means. And I know most people think they know what exponential growth means, but he makes it so plain how wrong we get it. And he records remarks made by people who ought to know much better, who say that, "Oh, we've got coal reserves that will last us for 500 years or thousand years." When you actually do the mathematics, they might last us for 40 to 50 years maximum, and then that's the end. And we just don't appreciate how close to the end we are. He gives the illustration, which is not original to him, that it's a really good one, that if you have a colony of bacteria, bacteria divide, so one turns into two and two turns into four, and you put one bacterium in a jar and at 11 o'clock, and you come back at 12 o'clock and find the jar full. (15:49): When was the jar half full? At one minute to twelve. That is the power of exponential growth. We've almost completely fished the seas out. It's another exponential curve. If you look at 1970s, it looked like there were lots of fish in the sea. When you get to now, 98% of what the was has gone, and most of what's left, there's not a lot of plastic in it, and it has toxins that are associated with plastic in it, and these are eaten all the way up the food chain, and we then eat them, and you now find traces of plastic in birds' wings. You find them in living creatures, birds choke and kill themselves eating things in the sea. I don't want to be fatalistic, because as I say, only a fool says this will certainly happen, but there comes a point where it's not rational not to give some thought to the fact that we might be getting to a perilous state.
Being tentative can stop you from doing anything. It can. And if we were always playing devil's advocate, we might continue to stay stationary.
Well, that's why we need balance, as always. You may have heard me say that before.
I have. I have, yeah.
I have. But we do need to have a balance. And if there is a pathology associated with the right hemisphere, it is being tentative. So for example, experimentally, the left hemisphere tends to be black and white, i.e. Reluctant to admit gradations compared with the right hemisphere. It also tends to be unreasonably fixed to something it believes. It's very hard to dislodge it. But in fact, if you give the left hemisphere reasons for changing its point of view, it entrenches the point of view it already holds. It doesn't shift it. Whereas if the right hemisphere, even though it's perfectly correct, holds a certain point of view, it will too easily change its point of view. So we need to get a balance between these two things. The right hemisphere is perhaps too tentative. The left hemisphere is much too dogmatic.
No, I mean, I really feel this in my own psyche for sure between going through phases where there's this paralyzed by being too tentative and then going through other phases where anyone tries to present an argument against my point of view and all it does is provide a barrier against which I can fortify my own world view. And I feel this does lead onto the question of bipolar, so to speak, because I wouldn't diagnose myself as someone who is bipolar because I've seen people who are, and the downs are severe, more severe than I feel I've experienced, but at the same time, I feel I can appreciate what it might be. And it seems that when I'm really buzzing high, it almost feels like my left hemisphere is over ... The confidence side is overridden. My tentative side, I get a lot done. And then with the slump, I'm much more realistic, but I don't do anything. (19:25): And I think it's that experience that although I don't trust the confidence side, I'm hugely grateful for how much gets done during that period. And perhaps that's why I'm more of an advocate for it than some are. Gosh,
There's quite a lot to unpack there. Probably the first thing I should say is that the word bipolar has become fashionable and is incredibly overused. I mean, quite absurdly overused. So almost anyone who's got emotional instability says that they're bipolar, but that's a completely different phenomenon, much common phenomenon, true bipolar disorder. All over the place, actors and public figures are saying, "Oh, I'm bipolar." Where only a tiny, tiny fraction of them will really be bipolar. It's a disease which is very distinct and it is not rooted in personality. It's one of those things that has phases and they're very, very sharply. I mean, there are degrees of it and so there's something called bipolar two, which is kind of a mild aversion, but nonetheless, it's different from having your ups and downs. I mean, for example, feeling up in the morning and down in the evening is not typical of bipolar disorder. (20:47): You're up for weeks and weeks and you can't sleep and you're making unreasonable plans and giving away your money, you're having promiscuous sex, you're traveling, you're completely off your tree. And then when you're depressed, I mean, you're just more abundant and it's completely different and these things go on for weeks or months at a time. So having said all of that, interestingly, people with bipolar disorder, quite a lot of creative people do have bipolar disorder and quite a lot of bipolar people are created. But the interesting thing is that when asked whether they're better on or off lithium, a quarter say they're better off lithium, half say they're better on lithium and a quarter say there's little difference because in fact, being manic is very uncreative and very disruptive and in fact being deeply depressed is uncreative and destructive. But the evidence is that while it's good to have energy, there's a much stronger bond or association between depression and creativity. (21:58): So low mood, I mean, I've written about this at some length in the book I'm writing now, but there is an undoubted connection. People think they've rubbished it or debunked it. I mean, one of the fashionable things that people say all the time about deep truth they haven't properly examined is that they have debunked it as a myth, but actually there's a lot in the idea that there is a connection between depression and creativity. And you may say, "Well, how is that if when you're depressed, you're more or less incapable of action." That is true. It's not during the deep depression, it's after when you come out of the depression, the experience that you had somehow eventuates in the creation of whatever it might be, poetry, music or whatever.