Wasting Time

I write this with a nice glass of Pinot Noir next to me in hopes this will aid the creation of moments of insights, as suggested by Jonah Lehrer in his RSA talk on creativity  last night. Indeed he speaks of the increase of alpha waves that lead to those ‘aha’ moments being induced by putting your mind at ease – hence the wine. Do I regard my glass of wine as leading to a wasting of time? Certainly hope so, but Lehrer spoke of how we have too narrow a view of what productive time looks like, critiquing our obsession with efficiency and lists. He quoted Einstein with ” Creativity is the residue of wasted time “ in making his point about wasted time leading to new discoveries.

Joe Hallgarten’s recent blog  speaks of the value of cross disciplinary reflection and it is the potential for new insights unlocked through imaginative interplay between incongruous influences that drives a project we are doing with Kings College.  In the Artist as Citizen and Cultural Intermediary , we are looking at the conditions that enable partnerships between artists and academics from very diverse areas of practice but also at what practical benefits might be realised from these differences.

The project was also inspired by Richard Sennet’s recent book Together which explores how we are losing the ‘cooperation skills needed to make a complex society work’ and of course these skills  exercised through working with people who think and practice differently to ourselves. But I wanted this project to go further and consciously create an environment where curiosity about the ‘other’ and accessing new lenses to re-see one’s work was the driving force with a valuing of difference as the underpinning principle. The invitation for difference worked – the project attracted interest from across the College, mostly from science and medicine and we have attracted artists and small arts organisations, who for the most part, have no history of working with academics. The ‘with’ word is critical. We tend to settle in transactional partnerships,that can suffer from being utilitarian and miss the possibilities generated from real exchange. There can be a failure to grasp what the ‘other’ has to offer.

I’ve long been a believer in epiphanies being more likely in such places as the shower where, as Lehrer suggests, one has the space from incessant external voices such as mobile phones. Putting your mind at ease releases our alpha waves  which in turn offers a chance for the inner quiet voice and those discoveries which can come out of the blue. As an actor, I always learned my lines while walking – the combination of activity, mild distraction of the senses and the rhythm of my steps worked for the most demanding of speeches. But how can you bring a metaphorical shower to a meeting of strangers that will lead to the formation of partnerships?   Interestingly I found many of Lehrer’s prompts for the generation of creativity worked for us in practice this last Tuesday.

We began our first day together with metaphor, each of us sharing an object that would illustrate what excited us most about our work, in the hopes that this would create connections between us. Of course, this also required all our participants to be willing to take a risk, enter a world quite  unfamiliar to their normal working lives and give time for partnerships characterised by difference. Dare I say it, the additional willingness to experiment was a crucial criteria and I think this involves an awareness of the wasting time principle that Lehrer speaks of – getting away from the focused rational and linear approach to problem solving and trying perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive approaches. Lehrer speaks of the brain being particularly good at metaphors helping us to bind things together. This technique of working through metaphor to describe what we are curious about can develop a collaborative  language that helps to transcend the challenges of the differences in our working languages and our usual referential shortcuts. If we agree that we need a different kind of conversation to generate transformation, then a language rooted in metaphor is a good beginning.

Another challenge for this first meeting was how to get beyond politeness and the inevitable desire to please,   natural to a meeting of strangers and move to a dynamic of critical friendship where each partner could assess the relevance of these particular strangers’ approaches  to their own working practices. And this is where we applied the ‘shower  principle’ with enforced moments of observation, reflection and prioritisation. Like many in the arts, I use a technique called the ‘silent gallery’ where participants can observe each others’ ideas in silence in order to conceive critical responses. Dissent and refinement of ideas is encouraged, but importantly within an environment of trust where each voice has an equal status,  silence can have a distinct role in exchange.

Lehrer was very critical of the use of brainstorming techniques and quite right too in the regard that used unwisely, this provides fresh but superficial and ill expressed ideas without critique. However, as a technique to get everyone’s voice heard and to loosen rigid thinking, they can be helpful if used in conjunction with refining and critiquing the ideas expressed.

But for all this commitment to new ways of working, new perspectives and trying experimental approaches, it does also get down to the people themselves and the relationships formed. That’s another thing Lehrer spoke about - that it is still important to be there ‘in the flesh’ so to speak. The extraordinary value of just showing up. He spoke of a very revealing statistic; that in spite of the huge increase in skype as a remote communication tool, attendance at conferences has doubled.  In spite of increasing demands on our time, people value being together. I’ll continue to blog about the development of this project and hope that some of our partners will be doing so as well, but for all of us it will be curiosity that sustains the exchange. And of course, a commitment to wasting time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Networked facts are the new black

Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being.

This is one of the points that David Weinberger puts across in his new book, Too Big to Know, launched yesterday in the US (not out in the UK til 19th January). Weinberger calls these configurations of linked data, in which two ideas are connected by a relationship, ‘triples’. In an interview given to Thomas Rogers for Salon, Weinberger elaborates:

OK, so, if the triple is “Edmonton is in Canada,” ideally each of those should link to some other spot on the Web that explains exactly which Edmonton, because there’s probably more than one, along with which Canada (though there’s probably only one). And “is in” is a very ambiguous statement, so you would point to some vocabulary that defines it for geography. Each of these little facts is designed not only to be linked up by computers, but in itself consists of links. It’s a very different idea than that facts are bricks that lay a firm foundation. The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds.

Now, I think I get this, and when we think about the ubiquity of the hyperlink, it’s pretty clear that Weinberger is absolutely right. But, even before the Internet, information was still linked, and it was still necessary to reference one idea in order to construct a basis for another. Aristotle, Darwin and Newton all did it. It was just a slower process. You had to have located and read the relevant source, be it a book, paper or article and access to these things was far more restricted than it is now. But, the basic principle was the same. I think it’s reasonable to say that Weinberger’s point about metaphors rings true not because of a fundamental shift in what facts are, but rather that the Internet age has speeded everything up and made access to data (almost) universally accessible.

Of course, I may be missing the point, particularly given that I’ve not read Weinberger’s book, but am instead responding to some bits and pieces I’ve read about it online.

The title of the book, Too Big To Know, implies that the volume of information we now have access to could be leading to a kind of overload, and there is a genuinely important (and unanswered) question about the impact of this on our brains. Are we getting cleverer or stupider as a result? Our burgeoning taste for punchy, sound-bitten data is obvious – if you can’t express an important idea in 140 characters, you’ll struggle to be listened to in some circles. Indeed, this review of Weinberger’s book on Inc.com is designed to give you the top line messages in about the time it takes to write a tweet. And, this very blog post indicates that I’m clearly as much as sucker for this as anyone.

Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that Weinberger expresses some important ideas, not least that it isn’t individual cleverness that really matters, but the collective cleverness of the networks in which we operate. In his interview for Salon he says:

With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking, fast and slow

This evening, a lucky audience will have the privilege of listening to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard at an event hosted by LSE. They will be discussing Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the author’s lifetime of work on the triumphs and pitfalls of conscious and unconscious thinking.

Kahneman is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and his ideas have shaped the work of many other important thinkers, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker and behavioural economist Dan Ariely.  In his new book, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make decisions – on the one hand what he calls System One, the fast, intuitive and emotional system, and on the other System Two, a slower, more deliberative and logical system. I’m looking forward to reading it, but until I have, I can’t offer my own appraisal.

There’s been a flurry of recent reviews, all of which suggest that I’m in for a treat. William Easterly’s review in the Financial Times pronounces the book a masterpiece. Easterly is ebullient about Kahneman’s choice to be upfront about the fact that ‘experts’ are as prone to making mistakes as anyone else, including him. Knowing that we are irrational in our decision making doesn’t in itself free us from falling into the same traps as everyone else. Easterly describes having to fight off the preying hands of friends and family members in order to get the book read, and says that it is ‘compulsively readable’.

Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian, is also clearly impressed. In his interview with Burkeman, Kahneman is keen to make clear that this is not a self-help book; reading it will not change the way you think. However, having a deeper awareness of how our minds work can only be a good thing, and with attention, it seems we may be able to learn when to trust our intuition and how to harness the benefits of slow thinking.

So, which system of thinking will drive my decision as to whether to buy it now, or wait for the paperback?

Highlights of the Week

1. The Iain McGilchrist RSAnimate is now live! If you are wondering whether it is worth twelve minutes of your time, take five minutes to read my blog: The Master and his Emissary-The Book of The Century?
2. As Emma noted yesterday we had a great event at the RSA yesterady: What is Madness? The best moment, for me, is when the speaker Darian Leader, a Psychoanalyst, spoke about ‘amygdala fetishism’ and the tendency, particularly among males, to try to explain everything with reference to one discrete thing, especially body parts. He added suggestive words to the effect: “As a Psychoanalyst, I have to wonder what is going on there.” He also asked rhetorically about neuroscience: “I mean, which other science do you know that feels the need to put ‘science’ in their name? It was very funny at the time, but on reflection there are quite a few: cognitive science, behavioural science, social science, political science…ah hang on…he means all the flaky stuff…
3. I attended an event at the House of Commons, hosted by Rachel Reeves MP, to celebrate the anniversary of the charity, Chess in Schools and Communities and encourage MPs to sign up to early day motion 2158 to get chess into primary schools across the country. There is a readable skit about the event in the Guardian.
4. There was a great article in the New Scientist about the Capitalist network that rules the world which gives a much deeper idea about how ‘the 1%’ sustains itself.
5. A curious study suggesting Brain imaging reveals why we remain optimistic in the face of reality but I remain mindful of Leader’s comments above.

Transforming Behaviour Change

An Astrologer once told me that I have an exalted sun in my house of enemies. This positive feature of my chart meant that bad feelings towards me are ‘burnt up’ by the heat of the sun, for which I am grateful. I have never really understood the basis on which astrology might conceivably make sense on even the most charitable interpretation, so I had to take his word for the rationale, but I appreciated the thought, which resonated with my experience.

The lack of enemies in my life means that I lack expertise in confrontation, and I am never quite sure what to do with hostility when it is directed towards me. Sometimes I feel disproportionately shocked and wounded, but mostly I am just bemused.

While chairing a recent RSA event in our Great Room, documented in the Guardian (where I was surprised to see my first name is ‘Donald’) by Carole Jahme, I had to endure some intemperate language from a distinguished guest after I tried unsuccessfully to involve the audience with just fifteen minutes of the lunch hour remaining. This exchange was regrettable, and while I could perhaps have timed and phrased my comments in ways less likely to provoke a hostile response, the sourness of the reaction was bizarre, and there wasn’t much to be learned from the experience.

A more significant case of hostility came a few months ago, when I wrote a Guardian CIF piece in response to The House of Lords report on Behaviour Change(which, alas, received very little coverage because it coincided with Rupert Murdoch giving evidence in Parliament). If you look at the final comment, by Cornelius Lysergic, you will see ‘the old familiar suggestion’:

“F*** off with your change our behaviour s***. Just f*** off.’

That was my favourite comment by far. As I have written before with respect to those who challenge the very basis for RSA’s work on Social Brain it is always interesting to read the ‘enemy’, because they sharpen your sense of purpose. In this case the challenge could not be clearer: Why bother with behaviour change at all?

The simple answer is that when you consider the planet’s most pressing challenges, on debt, on energy, on population, on ageing, on stress, on obesity, on terrorism, you find that most are either at root, or in part, behavioural. Governments have known this for a long time, but they have only recently realised that traditional policy levers relating to tax and regulation are not always enough to change behaviour in the requisite ways, and that some ‘behavioural insight’ – a pleasing phrase that probably has a limited shelf life – is required.

The Institute for Government addressed this challenge, and their Mindspace report appears to be very popular at every level of Government. For instance, I recently attended a meeting of the DCLG Behavioural Research Network where all major government departments gave a short presentation on how they are applying some of the principles in Mindspace, and more.

But the Government being interested will not allay the concerns of people like Cornelius Lysergic, indeed it will positively reinforce them. So given that it seems we need to change our behaviour, is there a way to make the idea of ‘behaviour change’ less top-down, less about elites manipulating the masses, less behaviourist and more human, less like something done to people(or pigeons) and more about doing things with them?

We think so, and in a few days we will be publishing a report called Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania, which will explain how and why.  The challenge is to turn behaviour change into something people are encouraged to do themselves, based on knowledge of their own cognitive resources and frailties. A further challenge is to move away from what Aditya Chakrabortty called ‘cute technocratic solutions to mostly minor problems’ and focus on what we call ‘adaptive challenges‘. We need a richer conception of behaviour that is neither reductionist nor exclusively behaviourist, and recognises the need for individuals and groups to have more understanding of their own behaviour, including how it relates to values and attitudes.

Watch this space for details of that, and an ongoing account of the ideas emerging from our work.

Are we Neuromaniacs?

I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views.  What is interesting is to read the enemy; because the enemy penetrates the defences. – Isaiah Berlin

I don’t often feel nervous before an RSA event, especially one I am not taking part in, but the Neuromania debate between Ray Tallis and Matthew Taylor on July 5th is likely to pose important questions for the legitimacy of the Social Brain Project.

Tallis is the figurative ‘enemy’ that Berlin alludes to above. He is a trained doctor and neuroscientist, but also a respected philosopher and cultural critic. The message of his recently released book: Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity is that we have drastically overestimated the ability of science, particularly neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, to provide guidance on who we are, and how we should live. Tallis also directly attacks our Chief Executive Matthew Taylor, my predecessor Matt Grist, and the entire raison d’etre of the Social Brain Project(at least as he understands it) which I am currently responsible for.

Tallis’s book is nonetheless an extremely important contribution to the public understanding of science. I am definitely with him on the inadequacy of the cruder materialistic theories of consciousness, which I think is his real target and concern. I agree that we are not merely our brains, that humans do differ significantly from other animals, and that consciousness is (probably) more than an artefact of evolutionary biology. I also think he is right that neuroscience cannot and should not serve in a foundational or axoimatic role for social, ethical and political questions.

Like Tallis, I am deeply troubled by the legerdemain that leads froma mis-reading of an FMRI scan, to conceptual confusion on the relationship between mind and brain, to questionable insights into the causes of human behaviour, to a misdiagnosis of social challenges, to value-laden policy positions that existed independently of the brain science, but which find fresh justification through the preceding pseudoscientific process.

But the RSA Social Brain project wants no part of that. I really don’t think we are Tallis’s target at all. His bugbear is with the idea of science as authority, science as reductionism, and science as arbiter on issues beyond its provenance(talking of which, the book is rather funny- in one of his more withering attacks, Tallis refers to ‘colonic material of a taurine provenance’).

Tallis makes reference to Matthew Taylor wanting policy to be informed by findings from the “neuro-lab”, but this feels tendentious. What the RSA is interested in is learning more about ourselves and our capacties as agents of social change- in the language of 21st century enlightenment: our self aware autonomy.

Such awareness is not about deferring to men in white coats but about continually reflecting on the conditions of our action, including but by no means limited to our biological conditions.  To say that we need to be more aware of our biology is enlightened, to say that it fully determines who we are, or that we should stop being interested in everything else, is not.

In other words, Tallis is overreacting. This feeling was confirmed by his sideswipe at Iain McGilchrist (fellow neuroscientist/philosopher/culture critic) and his book, The Master and His Emissary, which he believes is the epitome of neuromania, becuase I suspect McGilchrist is very much on Tallis’s side with regard to the widespread mis-use of neuroscience, and its tendency to (literally) misrepresent human beings.

Tallis seems to be conflating our interest in the educative value of neuroscience with an uncritical reverence for its supposed imperial warrant. The former is healthy, and should not be lost due to fear of the latter. Neuroscience is a new card in the explanatory deck for human behaviour, and a powerful one, but it is not a trump card, and should not be played as such.

It is right to recognise that natural sciences enjoy greater epistemic warrant than social sciences and humanities, and that this represents an intellectual and cultural hazard, but the warrant can be curtailed with the right critical engagement. The prefix ‘neuro’, properly understood, need not be a signal of reductionism, but should instead be about recognising the periodic relevance and occasional salience of the distinct features of our extended and relational nervous systems.

There is a course between neuromania and neurophobia, and we are trying to chart it. The challenge is not to ignore or undervalue neuroscience, but to critically engage with it. The task for the RSA, I think, is to move away from the idea of ‘science as authority’- justifying moral/political positions, to ‘science as provocation’- stimulating reflexive behaviour change. That is what we are now working on building into a unique offer, as will become clear from publications over the next few weeks.

The Embodiment of Life: Francisco Varela (1946-2001)

On Wednesday I will be attending a conference to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of Francisco Varela, organised by the Centre for Real World Learning, and hosted at City University in London. There are still places available for those who wish to attend.

Have you heard of Francisco Varela? If not, I envy you, because you have the chance to experience the excitement of his singular contribution to knowledge for the first time, while I can only read him again, and again, and again.

I was introduced to Varela by my Phd supervisor, Guy Claxton, who is one of the main organisers of Wednesday’s conference. It is difficult to do justice to Varela’s thought with a standard academic description. ‘Cognitive Scientist’ is a good start, but there are thousands of those. What makes Varela particularly special is the confluence of three main strands of thought: Biology, particularly Neuroscience, European Philosophy, particularly the Phenomenological and Existential strands, and Tibetan Buddhism, particularly his own sustained practice of meditation.

What these perspectives gave him was a view of consciousness from third(objective/impartial), second(inter-subjective/relational) and first(subjective/embodied) person perspectives. He was a scientist, philosopher and meditator. He had a unique ability to understand human beings simulatenously as bodies, relationships and minds. His experience in contemplative practice also brought a strong ethical dimension to his work- he was always thinking about the ethical implications of our understanding of what it means to be human.

I enjoyed his classic texts The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (co-written with Maturana) and The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience(co-written with Thompson and Rosch), but the book that made the deepest impression was a small book comprising three lectures called: “Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition.”

When I came upon this book I was at a low point in the process of thesis writing, struggling for a fresh perspective on the concept of wisdom, and disenchanted with the main theoretical perspectives available, including those of Robert Sternberg at Yale and Paul Baltes at the Max Plank Institute of Human Development. These proto-canonical models were basically sophisticated psychometric measures, reducing wisdom to a form of advice-giving expertise. They succeeded in making the concept of wisdm more tractable and amenable to empirical measurement, but could only do so by cutting it off from the embodied, situated nature of wisdom, which is what I most valued, and wanted to understand better.

Varela’s view of wisdom was very different, because it presents it as a form of ethical know how in action. There is no point in being wise in abstract if you cannot act wisely in complex situations when called upon to do so. Varela doesn’t give the particular example that follows, but his perspective helped me to understand this kind of wise action:

There is a classic story of Mahatma Gandhi hurredly boarding a train that was pulling away from the platform. As he boarded, one of Gandhi’s sandals fell onto the track. With no time to retrieve it, and with the train gathering speed, he instantaneously took off his other sandal and threw it down, so that whoever came upon the first sandal would now have a pair of sandals to wear.

What struck me about this example, and what I wanted to understand better, is the difference between thinking of doing such a thing, perhaps five minutes later when it would no longer be effective, and being ready, willing and able to act wisely in an immediate problematic situation, as Gandhi was in this case.

Varela’s view of ethics helped me considerably in this regard,because he has a highly sophisticated view of virtuous action arising from extended inclinations and dispositions, usually cultivated through sustained ethical or spiritual practice, in which we gradually decentre from our egoic impulses by becoming aware of our fragile or ‘virtual’ selves. In the small book I mentioned(p73) he puts it as follows:

“The means of transformating mental constiuents into wisdom is intelligent awareness, that is, the moment-to-moment realisation of the virtual self as it is-empty of any eogic ground whatsoever, yet filled with wisdom. Here one is positing that authentic care resides at the very ground of Being, and can be made fully manifest in a sustained, succefful ethical training. A thoroughly alien thought for our nihilistic Western mood, indeed, but one worthy of being entertained.”

There is lots more to say about Varela, who was originally from Chile and became the Director of Research for the French National Research Council. I hope to report back after the event on Wednesday, but for now, you can get a glimpse of the person and his thought by watching the following video.

Job! RSA seeks social brain to join Social Brain.

Senior Researcher, Social Brain

Shhh – don’t mention the nudges

Nudging, as Jonathan Rowson points out in a recent post on this blog, is already the flavour of the month and looks like being at the top of the menu for the rest of 2011. The government has recently announced that in the coming year we will be ‘nudged’ towards paying our taxes, quitting smoking, insulating our houses and signing up to be an organ donor. The media is lavishing attention on the idea. And the term is gaining such traction that it’s being misapplied to behaviour change measures which are rather more ‘shove’ than ‘nudge’, such as the decision to increase tax on high-strength beer and reduce it on low-alcohol brews.

At the moment, all this publicity and attention seems a bit ironic, given that nudges are meant to be minor interventions which operate unnoticed in the background. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given this is a new idea – in UK policy terms, at least. But for a number of reasons, it risks causing problems in the long run.

First, there’s the point I’ve just made: if nudges are meant to go unnoticed, will they work if we are looking out for them? One of the arguments made in favour of nudges is that they are the antithesis of public approaches to behaviour change, like didactic communication, education and regulation. Apparently, in the past we have ignored, misinterpreted or reacted against these measures. We seem to have an innate antipathy to being told what to do, but because we are not very good at making behavioural choices that are in our best interests for ourselves, we have been making poor decisions in contexts ranging from healthy eating to financial planning.

Nudges are designed to circumvent this active rejection of good advice, and overcome our inability to choose well, by changing the environments in which we make subconscious decisions and thereby influencing our actions. Essentially, they work by making us passive reactors to suggestion rather than active decision makers responding to stimulus.

If nudges are to succeed, then, it’s surely better that we don’t recognise them for what they are and what they are trying to do. Otherwise we might be tempted to ignore or react against them, just as we have with direct communication. HMRC’s plan to nudge people into paying their tax by rewording its tax letters might be more effective if we respond to the suggestive wording without thinking about it than if we are looking out for it when we open the letter. So perhaps they should just go ahead and do it without telling us all about it.

Second, the current focus on nudges attracts the vocal attention of cynics and sceptics, many of whom are arguing that there is something underhand about nudging, that it is just another form of the ‘nanny state’, and/or that it involves ‘playing with people’s brains’. (There’s a wonderful example here, which includes a total misunderstanding of the RSA’s Social Brain project.) It seems to me that much of this criticism stems from a lack of understanding of the idea of ‘choice architecture’ which should underpin nudges – a sensible theory that is not exactly Big Brother and the Thought Police. Still, the negative commentary sounds good, and can’t help.

Third, all this attention risks giving the impression that nudges are the government’s sole response to the problems facing society today. There’s certainly a place for them, but there’s no way they can address deep-seated issues such as obesity, social isolation and binge drinking on their own. They’re more paracetamol than radiotherapy – they might have an impact on the surface and around the edges, but they won’t address the causes of more serious and long-term problems.

I can see why nudges are attractive at the moment – they’re cheap and light-touch, which is just what the government wants. But while they’re useful, they’re clearly not a panacea, and giving the impression that they are risks undermining support for them.

Nudging seems to me to be a good idea, and certainly worth a try. So perhaps the government should stay quiet about what it is planning, and just get on with nudging. If it works, they can tell us all about it afterwards.

Oh, and if I come across another blog post titled ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ I think I’ll scream!

The Master and his Emissary(1): The Book of the Century?

Over the last decade, I have read a lot of non-fiction books, most of them broadly related to human development, from the technical end of popular science to the facile end of self-help. Highlights have been Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Claxton,  The Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt, Ethical Know-how by Varela, Connected by Christakis and Fowler, Into the Silent Land by Brocks, and Immunity to Change by Kegan and Laskow. All of these books (alas, mostly written by middle-aged white men) marshalled evidence to elegantly describe and develop a core thesis about human nature, and all of them answered the ‘so what?’ question about practical implications very powerfully.

However, with respect to all of these immensely impressive contributions, none of them compare with The Master and his Emissary, the book I was blessed to read to prepare for chairing last week’s RSA Keynote Event.

The best books are usually those that could only have been written by a particular person. In this case, Iain McGilchrist has a distinguished pedigree in both arts and sciences, having been an All Souls prize fellow in literature before training in medicine and becoming an accomplished psychiatrist.  He therefore writes with authority in natural science and humanities, and the abundant links that lie between them for those few who know how to look. In addition to this polymathic erudition, one can also sense, between the lines,  an old soul with a dry wit who is immensely generous in spirit.

The book is about the profound significance of the fact that the left and right hemispheres of our brains have radically different ‘world views’(described in the book). The hidden story of western culture, told here, is about how the abstract, instrumental, articulate and assured left hemisphere has gradually usurped the more contextual, humane, systemic, holistic but relatively tentative and inarticulate right hemisphere. The thesis is as strong on science as it is on narrative, replete with nuances, caveats, and references.

If you have ever had the feeling that the world is deeply screwed up in a way that you can’t quite articulate, this book will help you to make your case. If you want some insight into why we might be stupid enough to destroy our own planet, or why the slashing of funds for arts and humanities is even more tragic than you might think, read the book.

I might come to regret being quite so effusive, and there are certainly challenges to the core thesis and its implications that need to be entertained, hopefully in future blogs. Nonetheless, I would currently say it is one of the most important books of the 21st century. It is a grand theory for our times.  If properly understood and acted upon, it has the potential to transform our view of our selves and our cultures, and prevent us from making a huge number of mistakes that might otherwise seem like sensible decisions.

For those who can’t wait to hear more, go to the end to watch or listen, but for those who prefer to read, my understanding of the argument goes as follows:

1) The left and right brain hemispheres are both involved in almost everything we do, such that crude dichotomies like the left being the logical side and the right being the creative side are a great disservice to public understanding of the brain. 

2) However, if we cease to ask what the hemispheres do (language, reasoning, creativity, forecasting) and instead ask how they do it(contextualise or decontextualise, focus on lived experience or abstract models, instrumental or affective feedback, receptivity to counter-evidence, preference for old or new) we find very significant differences in the two hemispheres. The evidence for these differences are meticulously unpacked in the book in a compelling inductive argument- there is no killer fact, but a gradual unfolding of evidence, carefully tied together with an eye for counter-evidence.

3) The hemispheres are divided for good reason, because they perform different functions. The left is broadly about focussing, and the right is broadly about contextualising. These are compatible but occasionally competing aspects of our cognition and they are both essential.  McGilchrist uses the example of a bird that can only focus on finding grain with its beak if it ignores surrounding context, but still needs some background awareness of surrounding context, and a capacity to respond to it, to avoid attacks by predators. The genius of the brain is its ability to switch between these modes in response to the environment.

4) The right hemisphere should be the dominant hemisphere, ‘The Master’, because it shapes the context, meaning and purpose of our experience of the world. The left hemisphere, ‘The Emissary’, should help us to achieve within this contextual, meaningful, purposeful perspective. The right hemisphere keeps us in touch with lived experience- keeps us deeply aware and responsive, while the left hemisphere is more like a very powerful computer that makes use of familiar schemas to achieve familiar ends.  Cognition at its best is slightly different from army marching orders in that it should go ‘right-left-right’ i.e. context-focus-context, when in fact it often goes left-left-left, focus, focus, focus, with insufficient attention to the basis for the focussing, what is at stake, what might be different, and what is trying to be achieved.

5) There is insufficient evolutionary time for these changes to take place at a structural level of the brain. It is not that the left hemisphere is getting bigger or denser or better connected than the right. The point is that slowly but surely the left hemisphere shapes our culture in such a way that it makes its own perspective the dominant one, until we reach what McGilchrist calls ‘a hall of mirrors’ in which the explicit, instrumental, defined, abstract voice is the only one we believe in, and the implicit, intrinsic, fluid, visceral perspective sounds diminished and foreign. This perspective speaks to, inter-alia, the Art, Drama and Music therapists currently struggling to make the case for their immense social value against cruel and blinkered market logics that want to measure their impact in numerical terms.

6) The mechanism for increased left hemisphere dominance is imitation, a subject close to our heart at the RSA. Crudely, the cultural ‘stuff’ of the left hemisphere  is more contagious than the cultural ‘stuff’ of the right hemisphere. Have you heard the expression: “What gets measured gets done”? Or “If you can’t say it, you don’t really understand it?” Both are examples of the ‘emissary’ overstepping his mark, but doing so in a compelling way that is hard to fight back against.

7) Through epigenetic cultural evolution, the left hemisphere gradually colonises our experience. The good news is that left hemisphere tends to be optimistic, giving us a feel-good factor, but the bad news is that it is remarkably unaware of how partial and/or deluded its view of the world can be, and scarily unreceptive to unfamiliar perspectives. In one of the best lines of the book McGilchrist writes:

“If I am right, that the story of the Western World is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead, we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.”

I think this is a truly wonderful book, and it has certainly given me a new set of tools to think about the direction the world is taking and what we might do about it.

Thanks for reading this far, and before we amble into the abyss together, please listen to the audio of the event, which includes the avalanche of questions expertly fielded by Iain McGilchrist, or watch the video below, with just one question posed by me at the end- namely: If this colossal idea is true, which I now believe it to be, how to guard it against widespread simplification or distortion?

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