Transcript
You made a point earlier about how the mechanistic worldview is a slightly autistic worldview. To debate the left hemisphere and then to more or less equate it an autistic worldview seems to make a moral judgment which some might take onbridge with. And some might also point the fact that there is a high correlation between creativity and autism. And I'm wondering what your response is to
That. Well, first of all, may I take the opportunity to say that I don't by any means wish to denigrate people with any kind of mental condition.
I'm sure. That's why I wanted to-
Autism I think is not a single entity. I think there are autisms rather than just autism. One way of thinking about that is for some people with autism, they cannot imagine thoughts in words. They can only imagine thoughts in images. Temple Brandon, who's one of the best known people with autism and a spokeswoman for autism. It says that she was astonished when she learned that people often thought in phrases. She can only think in images. And there are people with autism who have the exact opposite. The language is in a way excessively dominant and they can't get outside of the use of language. So both of these extreme conditions can occur in autism. And it's not clear to me that you can summarize it in a hemispheric way, except that there is a strand in autism which is extraordininarily similar to the way in which the isolated left hemisphere thinks. (01:47): And I'm saying that on a fairly confident basis because a number of people, either subjects with autism or specialists have written me saying that what I have written about the left hemisphere is so accurate about autism. So it's not just an idea I dreamt up. And when I say that I think our culture may be becoming more autistic, I'm not also using the expression lightly because if you ask somebody to say, "Okay, what are the least controversial things that we can say the right hemisphere is largely responsible for? " One would be sustained attention. And that is overwhelmingly obviously right hemisphere mediated. Another would be reading faces. I mean, it's not disputed that the right hemisphere is enormously much better at reading faces. Damage to the right hemisphere fear can cause problems with attention, sustaining attention and problems with faces. And the other thing is empathy. (02:54): I mean, fairly clearly the right frontal cortex and the right hemisphere in general, damage to it causes loss of empathy and it is the seat of social understanding. So all those things are there and they are all things that are now happening in our society. I was very struck when I was in Toronto a few years ago because after my talk, a woman came up to the microphone and said, "I teach five to seven year olds." And my colleagues and I have noticed just in the last three or four years, this was in 2012, I think, that we actually have to teach children how to read the human face. That really struck me because I'd never heard that until that moment. I would have said that anyone who needed to be formally instructed in how to interpret a human face was clearly quite a long way down the autistic spectrum. (03:51): And then I put that together with information I have from, again, correspondence, teachers who know nothing of one another, but who write to me with essentially the same story, that they've been giving tests to their classes for a lifetime of teaching and they've never had more than a handful of people who've had difficulty with them, but now they find something like a third of the class can't do this test regularly. And what are these tests? These tests are tests of sustained attention. And then you put that together with the evidence, apparent evidence. Anyway, it doesn't tally with my experience of young people who maybe I meet the right young people who are very empathic, but in any case, all I'm reporting is research that suggests that empathy is less part of the makeup of young people these days compared within the past. So if that's-
Society in general,
I see. And society in general. So if we are exhibiting all these features, we are going down the path of right hemisphere decay.
Which is rather worrying. In fact, I've got one friend who lost mine, she has paid a considerable sum of money to go into banks and give talks on empathy. Yeah, unbelievable (05:05): Really. But the silver lining there is at least she's being paid to go in and give the talks. I'm sure that is the sort of diagnosis is the start. You made the point earlier that this shift isn't because there's been a change in the structure of the brain. It's more that there's been a change in the ideas of our time and a change in who it is that we imitate. And I think that's what we tried to talk about earlier, but I think this imitation thing is really important in terms of how we become who we want to become. There are many who say you are the average of your five friends and there are others who say you can choose who you imitate. And if we live in a society that is dominated by an autistic point of view, using your sense of the word autistic, then that then creates a world where if you want to have more power, you ought to imitate that sort of way of being and it then it becomes embedded. (06:12): Putting my confident hat on again, it leads me to believe that it must be possible to have another way of being twimitate and it leads on to the question, what role can teachers play (06:27): And what role can education play in awakening the way of being that is more embedded in something that we can touch and see and hear?
When I think of my own life and development, it concerns people who are important influences and exemplars to me. And I think that's probably a general experience. We are not driven to do the things we do by forces behind us that propel us blindly to a certain end, but we are attracted to certain goals and to certain people who embody a way of being that we admire or just simply find attractive. And if the people that we have in front of us day after day to emulate are shallow, narcissistic, unempathic, not really very deep or well rounded people, then this is a pity for everyone. Education is totally misconceived at present as a training, it's getting more and more like this rather than as a business of truly leading something out of a person, which is what education means as a melodically speaking.
Educary.
So to bring out a lead out, and that brings in the idea of a leader, that there is a person who is the leader, the person who does that leading. And that is the teacher and it's not about putting things in to young people. It's about drawing things out from them. And actually if they don't have them in them, there's nothing you can do. In other words, education is not about inserting something. It's about enabling what's there to grow. It's a bit like the garden again. You can only make grow what is there to grow. You can't create a flower just because you like a flower. You have to plant the thing and allow it to unfold itself. And what we are doing is gardening in education. We are allowing things to grow and we're encouraging them to do so. And that is through a dialogue as everything is. (08:43): It's a between us, a relationship. So the teacher is not somehow over here and the pupil over there and somehow there is transmission from here where the teacher is to there where the pupil is. There must be a relationship and that is obviously not an equal relationship. It would be a disaster if it were. It shouldn't be an equal relationship, but it's got to be one in which there is mutual respect and mutual value and that out of that will come the flourishing of a person. There has to be enthusiasm. There has to be life in it. The more you microcontrol education and have targets. I mean, first of all, the more you have to audit and assess and achieve levels of things, the more it distorts the educational process. Number one, it takes up a lot of your time. It's estimated it can take up to half the time in nurses, half their time is spent on paperwork. (09:45): And I think teachers will tell you a similar story. So it's incredibly wasteful. And I read a fantastic book lately called The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Mueller, who's an American philosopher. And what he is essentially saying is that the evidence shows that all this mania of constantly auditing and making assessments of things hasn't ... Except in two or three cases that are constantly trotted out, which were very special sets of circumstances that generally speaking, it's a vast squandering of potential and it sort of changes the relationship between, for example, a nurse who is paying attention to the computer screen in order to fill in an audit is not actually watching patients on the board or having a relationship there. But also all these targets and so forth skew the way in which you teach. You no longer have the freedom to be an inspiring teacher. (10:42): You have to follow certain rules. And what I remember about my education was that it went all over the place. If somebody was teaching us, had read something they were enthusiastic about, they would spend the period talking to us about it. We didn't go, "But that's not on the curriculum," because that's how you get educated is by listening to other people's enthusiasms and sharing them. So a good teacher is inspiring and there must be a spark there that goes from the teacher to the pupil or from the pupil to the teacher. In fact, it's a mutual process. And if there isn't that spark there, then it's not education.
I can't remember who said it, but this idea that we all have a flame that we're trying to bring into this world and the role of the teacher is to help foster the flame for the pupil. And going a little further back when we were speaking about this responsibility in terms of helping to guard the flame as a teacher, but also responsibility for individuals to choose who you want to help guard your flame because that seems to me to be a way we can all, as individuals, help move society towards a place that is more balanced by being very, very careful to look at the world around you and consider how different personalities conduct themselves and what response the world then gives to those personalities. And if you see a handful of people that seem to be leading to responses that you don't particularly admire, but avoid that. (12:27): And if you see people who are leading to responses that you do admire, then follow that flame.
And we've got to be more reasonable. We've got to stop making everything so weightily overburdened with administration. We've got to somehow cut loose with that. Of course, people get anxious that certain things will go wrong, but plenty is going wrong already. The really important things are already going wrong. For example, all this admin is not making disasters on wards never happen again, nor is it improving education. Back in the 50s and 60s, and I'm not saying we should go back to the 50s and 60s, let me say, before people start going off on that one, but back in the 50s and 60s, the fact that we had one of the best educational systems in the world, and people taught to a very high standard, and lots of the people who are of my generation benefited from that. We've lost the idea of a rigor as well. (13:27): I mean, I'm not making a plea, play as the ... We need some play in education. It's a very important part of education, and that's one of the things that's wrong with it now is there isn't enough room for free imaginative play, but the quick quote for that is that there needs to be rigor. That means self-discipline, and that means also discipline, because that's how you learn self-discipline. And it means not going soft on people, and not saying, "Oh, they can't manage this or push people. " Yes, but not by saying, "You must get six right answers to what's special about Jane Austin. That's not an education." You should instead challenge them to learn more, to find this exciting, and therefore to learn more maths, to learn more of a language or whatever, because you can see where it's leading to.
Yeah, no, and it's exciting when you see someone where the spark is left.
Absolutely.
And they're then doing their own little flurrying. And I connect with the word play there, and it's interesting because when we were interviewing this chap, Jaid Pravi at the George Business School of Cambridge, he was saying that at the school, it's by fostering a spirit of play that ideas arrive, but then that needs to be balanced, as you say, against the idea that scholarship is the daughter of diligence. You can't purely just sit around playing. There then needs to be action in response. And it's a fascinating point.
And I mean, I know about this personally, because in a way I've needed fallow periods in which I've not been forced to produce things. I've had time to allow things to gestate, but I've also spent countless hours, I mean, not only just in a 14 year medical training, as you can imagine, in days when we had to work 120 hours a week, but actually as a scholar of a kind, I have had to acquaint myself with a colossal amount of literature and it's extremely hard work and it's very relentless. It's long, long, unromantic, unexciting hours of doing the work. So one needs both.
Yeah. So now what's rather worrying is that we've lost both. We've lost both. Yeah. We've lost both. That's exactly right. Which is rather concerning
Because
I also want to draw out the idea that education doesn't stop at school.
Indeed. I think one of the enemies of learning after school is the idea that going to university is compulsory. What that means is that universities become degree factories for people who haven't really had the experience of being fired up at school, have been over controlled, and then they go to university and think, "Thank God nobody's breathing down my neck anymore." So I can have a great time partying as well. I'm not against that, but I'm also rather concerned about what is happening to self-motivated scholarship in universities. And my own view of it is that it should be impossible to go straight on from school to university, that compulsorily you should get a job and that you should work in the real world for ... And you can combine that with being a poet and musician or whatever you want to be, but you must do a job. (16:48): And if after five years of doing that job, they then have a burning passion to know more about eth or Y, then they should go and do it. And I certainly don't think you should go into medicine straight from school because you don't know enough about the world to know whether you want to become a doctor. In America, one of the good things about the American system, I can't say there are too many, but one of them is that you can't read medicine as your first degree. You have to have a background in something else. And I would say that background should not be biochemistry. It should be something like philosophy. I don't think anyone should go into medicine without having been almost compulsory exposed to the humanities, because it is a humanity as well as a science. And it's no good just saying, "Oh, I was terribly good at chemistry and physics at school, so I'm going to be a doctor."
Yes, this is something I don't know much about, but just off the top of my head, medicine was always about relationships.
Of course it
Is. Whereas it's now becoming about diagnosis.
Well, there's an interesting notes again, which is that when doctors could do practically very little for their patients, when my grandfather was in practice as a GP, there were only six things that you could give to a patient that would do many good, and yet doctors were likes, admired, and did very good work. They were important members of the community and almost members of the family. They were there when people were born, they were there as they grew up, and they were at the bedside very often. When my father was also at GUP, was young, he used to take me on his rounds, because everything happened in the house in those days, weren't health centers. So there was a surgery attached to the house, and after he'd done his morning surgery, my father would go out and do 30 to 40 home visits, and I would go around with him in the car. (18:33): I'd sit in the car, but he didn't bring me to the house, but I remember that he did that, and that was a different way of being a doctor, to sitting behind a computer, not looking at your patient, making eye contact, but sort of tapping away at the keyboard. And when I was a psychiatrist, people said to me, "How wonderful to be talking to a doctor who's not tapping into keyboard." Because I would be discreetly taking notes in handwriting, which is perfectly possible to do while carrying on a conversation and engaging with somebody. Doctors are trained more and more to think of themselves as technicians. Good ones, of course, and there are very, very many of them don't, and wonderfully engaged with the whole person, not just with sending tests and interpreting the answers, but there we are.
I want to speak a bit about this phrase, people there. You were talking about how your father would go round
And
He would be there.
Yes.
And similarly, the postman is there.
Yes, yes.
And when you go to the bank, the bank teller is there.
Yes.
And there's certainly a loss of people being there.
Where there used to be banks.
Well, there used to be people. There's now things. Yes, exactly. And I think there's something to be said in that that's really important. Often people look to automate every single process, but if you're elderly, there are very few touch points with humans, and some of those are going to the supermarket.
Correct.
And if that then becomes automated, you then end up being more isolated.
100% agree with that. And the answer to the problems of supermarket queues is to have more people, not to have more machines. However, no doubt machines are much cheaper than people. So as usual, the quality of life is degraded constantly in lots of tiny ways every day by the pursuit of profit. I mean, of course that's a vast topic and I'm not even going to embark on it, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. But