https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=23N4lQfBxyI
I was rereading the introduction to your new book this morning and I was struck by many different topics, but I was particularly interested in your conception of attention. And so you talk about attention as something that in some sense brings things into being. I don’t think that’s a misreading of your writing. And maybe I could get you to expound on that a bit and to tell me what you think attention is, because I’ve had a hell of a time differentiating it from fluid intelligence, for example, or from consciousness. It’s a word that makes sense when you hear it in the context of a bunch of other words, but when you extract it out from that context and try to grip it, it falls apart in your grasp. So I think one could say that attention is the way in which the individual disposes his or her attention. It’s a disposition of one’s consciousness. So attention is how you dispose your consciousness towards the world. And when I discovered when I was researching The Master and His Emissary, the book that’s now 10 years old, I came across this fascinating thing that one of the most fundamental differences between the hemispheres is their way of attending. And it didn’t entirely hit me at the time how important it is. But we can talk about that later. But you were asking the rather sort of interesting philosophical question about how attention helps to bring things into being. And I think it does both generally and rather particularly in a very particular sense in the left hemisphere. Generally, what I mean is that how you attend to the world depends, you know, on that depends what world you find. The qualities of the world that comes to your attention is determined by the quality of the attention you bring to it. And that’s a very significant statement. I was talking to someone the other day who’s somewhat theologically minded, and he was also very interested in the role that attention played on in constituting the world. I mean, you pay attention to things that you value one way or another. And what that means is that the world tends to be a place where you have a lot of people who are interested in the world. And what that means is that the world tends to manifest itself in relationship to your value structure. And that’s a very troublesome idea in some sense with regards to our conceptions of the objective world, because it’s not easy to parse out what’s objective when what manifests itself to you is dependent in large part on what you value. It’s very complicated to sort that all out. Well, possibly very much later, we can come to the question of what objective and subjective mean and how one can. I think it’s a mistaken dichotomy. I think one can interpret the words in important ways that give them meaning. But I think to think of just being an objective world out there and a subjective world in here is one of the problems with modern Western philosophy. But to come back to the creation of the world, I was going to say that not only does it sort of bring into the world the world that you know, which is, after all, by definition, the only world you will ever know. But it also changes who you are. So the quality of the attention you pay changes you, the attender. So it’s a very profound difference. And in the first book, The Master and His Emissary, one of the things I was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world. So the hemispheres have have evolved to to two different sets of values. You mentioned values and it’s very germane. They have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to. And what I have tried to explain in that book is that this gives rise to a whole way of seeing the world in a whole world, which is not just for the individual, but also at times it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture. Because, of course, we as individuals never entirely distinct from our culture, we are partly created by our culture and make it what it is. So it’s a very fundamental thing. Well, you take pains in The Master and His Emissary to to promote the idea or to call attention to the idea that something extremely mysterious is going on in relationship to hemispheric specialization. So it’s a very ancient phenomenon. Yes, many creatures or most creatures with developed nervous systems have a bifurcated brain. And the hemispheres differ substantially in terms of their neuroanatomical structure. And the question arises, why is it necessary, assuming that that differentiation of structure reflects some profound differentiation of function? Why is it necessary to look at the world, so to speak, in two ways? And why is it so necessary that that bifurcation is conserved across evolutionary history? You’d think that one way would be sufficient, but it doesn’t seem to be. And so the first question is, why do you have to look at the world in two ways? And the next question might be, well, what what are those two ways? One of the things you outline that’s particularly fascinating to me is that the right hemisphere seems to be specialized more for what you don’t know. Well, whereas the left hemisphere is specialized more for what you do know. And I’ve sort of defined knowing pragmatically, you know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is what you specified and you don’t know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is other than what you specified. And that sort of reflects that novelty of organization division that was Goldberg, I believe, that that originated that that the neuropsychologist. Well, Jordan, you’ve raised a whole bunch of points there, so I need a little bit of time to to explain that. First of all, every neural network that we know of is asymmetrical, going down to the very most basic network that we know and the most ancient one that we know. That number to Stelovec tenses, a sea anemone that is 700 million years old is already asymmetrical in its neural network. And that’s the earliest neural network we know of. And it’s true of insects. It’s true of worms. It’s true of, you know, all the way up to to human beings. And the three questions that really got me going on this was, if the brain is there for making connections and its power is largely lies in the question, the connections it can make, why is it divided down the middle? Why is it divided down the middle? Whoppingly divided. I mean, most people don’t realize quite how big this differentiation is, and if they haven’t actually seen a brain. The second thing is, why is it asymmetrical? Because if you just need to grow this brain, you’d grow it symmetrically, the skull that contains it is symmetrical. And the third thing is, why is the connection, the principal connection between the two hemispheres at the base of the hemispheres, the corpus callosum, why is it at least as much, if not more, in the service of inhibition than facilitation? So it’s as though there’s something really important about keeping two things apart. Now, my my hypothesis, and it’s just that, is that this results from something that all creatures need to do. All creatures without exception need to eat and not be eaten. They need to live and to manipulate their environment, to get food, to catch something, to pick something up quickly, deftly, to pick up a twig, to build a nest. In other words, for all the kind of day to day stuff, food, shelter, they need to be able to manipulate the world very precisely. But at the same time, they must pay a precisely opposite kind of attention, which is sustained, vigilant, open without presupposition as to what it may find. And so on the whole, the way in which this has been addressed by evolution is that there are two neuronal masses that can direct attention at the world. And the left hemisphere tends to specialize in targeted, precise attention. And the right hemisphere in a much broader, vigilant kind of attention, which actually sustains the being of the world. Nothing about these tiny fragments that are isolated, disconnected, meaningless, gives you any idea of their meaning. It’s only when you see the broad picture and you understand that they’re not actually things that go to be put together to make that broad picture, but the things that are isolated out of an already connected picture. So that’s the basis of that. I just wanted to pick up your thing about, because I don’t think it’s quite right to say that the left hemisphere is about what you know and the right is about what you don’t know. Somebody, I can’t remember who, some philosopher said that knowledge is what we’re uncertain of. Things we’re certain of are things that we don’t really know properly. I think there’s a good deal of truth in that. The left hemisphere tends to jump to conclusions. It’s much more quick and dirty than the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the one that says, hang on, wait a moment, you may be getting this wrong, because it wants to get things quickly. It’s job is to manipulate, it’s job is to get, it’s to catch, it’s to grab stuff. It’s the one that controls the right hand that does all the grabbing. So the left hemisphere tends to prize certainty and it’s very uncomfortable when there’s ambivalence. Whereas the right hemisphere… Well, what’s the ambivalence? You can’t act. Exactly. Whereas the right hemisphere seems to appreciate the possibility that we have to hold multiple views, multiple possibilities together. And so it has a quite different take on reality. It’s more interested in discovery and exploration rather than capture. The left hemisphere is more interested in capturing a thing that it thinks it’s more interesting. It’s often, you know, not in any deep way. It’s just identified an object it needs. But to understand things, the right hemisphere is better. And the idea of the master and the emissary is… I won’t go through the myth of it. I’ve explained it so many times. But the basic idea is that the master, the right hemisphere, knows that it needs an emissary to do the sort of functional administration work. So it’s aware that the stuff that it mustn’t get involved with and that it can’t know. Whereas the left hemisphere knows everything, as it were, in its eyes because it only knows a tiny bit, which is explicit. And, you know, there it is in broad daylight, down in black and white, no shades of meaning, no nuances, nothing implicit about it. So it thinks it knows it. And if you like the downfall of the left hemisphere, and therefore, if I would go of the society, the civilization, as it once was, that we belong to, is that the left hemisphere doesn’t know what it is it doesn’t know. It’s, you know, you know the famous thing, the Dunning-Kruger effect, that the more you know, the more you think you don’t know, and the people who know least think they know everything. It’s a little… That’s not quite fair, but there’s something of that about it. Yeah. But you know, the thing that’s interesting about the left hemisphere is that it’s not just a