I am actively engaged in summarising Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Matter with Things, but I’ve been remiss in not sharing the introduction. Rather than do that, I’ve happened upon Iain reading these pages himself, hosted on his YouTube channel.
It’s about a half-hour long. In it, he establishes some main themes and rationales. As this book builds on his previous book, The Master and his Emissary, he shares references to that book rather than rehash it in this one. So whilst he expands on some ideas, he doesn’t necessarily go into the same depth and retread the same grounds. This won’t result in a loss of comprehension for the purposes of this book, but additional depth can be achieved by reading the former.
Chapter two is titled Attention. Itâs about how what we attend to tends to shape our sense of reality. This is a story of the functional speciality of the hemispheres and their mediating components. Each hemisphere has its own protocols and modus operandi, each with distinct task specialisation. Important to note coming in is that about thirty per cent of all neuronal activity is inhibitory in nature. In fact, the frontal lobe is what inhibits the reflexive animal-reptilian responses allowing for someâI mean, letâs be honest hereâhuman civil capacity. These mediating elements are designedâidiomatically, not literallyâto orchestrate hemispheric activities so that each side can do what itâs best suited for.
Content
Both hemispheres attend to their environments, but they have different foci. One way to distinguish which hemisphere is focused on what, McGilchrist regards research oriented toward people with damage to one or the other part, whether by a stroke or accident. In some cases, this separation is accomplished clinically. There is a difference between right- and left-handedness, but I am not going to elaborate here.
Persons with left hemisphere damage noted difficulty writing and spelling whilst right hemisphere damaged people experienced a loss of empathy as well as a range of cognitive and emotional impairments.
Selective Attention: Invisible Gorilla Test
In general, the right hemisphere attends to the broader environment with a trade-off on specificity whilst the left hemisphere is laser-focused at the expense of the wider perspective and ability to maintain attention. Evidently, and I quote, âthe left hemisphere has a tendency to âspace outâ for seconds (sometimes 15 or more) at a timeâ. McGilchrist cites the invisible gorilla study where viewers are asked to watch a video clip of two teams of basketball players dribbling and passing a ball to count the number of times one team passes the ball. As this is happening, a person dressed in a gorilla costume walks into frame and makes gestures to bring attention to itself and then walks out of frame.
Focusing on the ball passing is a left-brain function that predominates right-brain activity. As it is laser-focused on the task at hand, it is oblivious to the gorilla in the midst. When re-viewing the clip without the focus activity, the gorilla is quite obviously present. He cites another substitution study that again illustrates what happens when the right brain does not have an audience.
Again, whilst âthe right hemisphere is sensitive to the whole picture in space and time, background and periphery, the left hemisphere is focussed on what is central in the field of vision and lies in the foreground.â This becomes evident with hemispheric damage. When the left hemisphere is damaged, people can still perceive the full view-frame because the right hemisphere remains intact, but when the right hemisphere is damaged, less than half of the world remains. In the book, some examples follow.
The left hemisphere suffers from a stickiness problem. Without a participating right hemisphere, a person can have their attention fixated on some objects in the environment. And he points out that this is not a problem with visual perception, because tests demonstrate that subjects can be made to fixate on imaginary objects in a dark room. In schizophrenics, this fixation always occurred on the right side of the field of vision. This fixation ties into staring, which he describes as âa special kind of vision, in itself predatory: left hemisphere attention gets locked onto its target.â Iâll guess that many of us have been fixated on some activity and an unexpected interloper startles us when they become apparent. He mentions the discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in passing. I wonât bother.
McGilchrist foreshadows chapter four a bit by informing the reader that the left hemisphere is grasping and apprehending whilst the right hemisphere excels at comprehending. More on this in future segments.
Another feature of the left hemisphere is that it not only ignores the majority of the environment it finds itself in, but it is also a master of denial.
Another feature of the left hemisphere is that it not only ignores the majority of the environment it finds itself in, but it is also a master of denial. For example, a person with right-hemispheric damage was paralysed on the left side of his body, yet he was not only unaware of the paralysis. He denied that he was paralysed.
In a second case, another person with right-hemisphere damage and left-side paralysis, when asked to perform tasks would comply with the requests directed toward the right side of the body but ignore or claim not to understand the directions when directed toward the left side.
What this represents is that the left hemisphere had established a map of the body that was unable to be updated because of the damage to the right hemisphere that would have provided an update. One might consider this in the manner of an old SAT-NAV when map updates needed to be manually applied. If you happen to be travelling in a new development on an obsolete map, the map will not correspond to the terrain.
As mentioned previously, the right hemisphere can be thought to present whilst the left hemisphere can be thought to re-present, having codified and archived the contents for later retrieval. The book has more types of examples including people experiencing reality through a set of freeze-frames and time elapses, but the takeaway is that the hemispheres also differ in how they interpret space, time, and motion. In fact, the right hemisphere is instrumental in perceiving three-dimensional space.
I wonât exhaust the many remaining examples in the book, though I may reference some in summary when I share my reaction and perspective. The final topic Iâll mention is that human infants are right-hemisphere dominant. They are practically all about gathering inputs without being concerned with how they map the terrain for later retrieval. They simply experience the world without the analysis and judgment the left brain later brings to bear.
Perspective
At the end of the chapter, McGilchrist provides a summary. The right hemisphere is always vigilant to what might be out there. For the left hemisphere, if it hasnât been brought to attention, it doesnât exist. Consider the invisible gorilla. The left hemisphere’s attention is sharply restricted in space and time. It favours precision over accuracy and at the expense of depth. It is not concerned with the âexpansive, always moving, always changing, endlessly interconnected nature of reality.â The left is all about atomisation and stasis.
Unfortunately, despite all these limitations, the left still thinks itâs right. Revisiting the SAT-NAV scenario, the left brain is akin to a person staring at the screen that declares the destination has been reached. The right brain looks out the window and informs that they are decidedly not in the right place. Does one trust the instrumentation or the environment?
One undercurrent I feel is that McGilchrist wants to play the left and right hemispheres against each other to assess which is more veridical. This is where I think we differ, but the jury is still out. In his case, he wants to compare the way that each hemisphere maps to our experience of the real world. In his view, and I donât think I am putting words into his mouth, our experience is the world because we experience it as it appears to us. In my view, experiences are simply a representative map as limited by our sense-perceptions and cognitive abilities. So, when he assesses the right hemisphere as a better reflection of reality, I say it just better captures the map.
For him, itâs either left or right. But for me, itâs right, left, or none of the above. I believe our disagreement is that I subscribe to a fitness before truth paradigm whilst McGilchrist doesnât. I feel that fitness is the evolutionary litmus, and evolution doesnât care about truth. In fact, assessing truth comes at the expense of energy and attention, the subject of this topic. The reason the case studies cited in this chapter are interesting is not that they illustrate some truth deficit that would render them easy prey in a Darwinian world, itâs because their perception leaves them with a fitness penalty. There is no reason to invoke some spectre of truth.
This was an interesting chapter with over a dozen clinical anecdotes. It does well to articulate the differences in hemisphere function and lends credence to left and right brain asymmetry. I feel itâs worth cracking on to the next chapter, Perception.
Before I bring this commentary to a close, I want to make an orthogonal comment. McGilchrist mentioned case studies where people reported freeze-framing. It is understood that certain birds have a faster frame rate than humans, so if they were viewing a movie running at 60 frames per second, they would not see the same continuous motion picture as a typical person; rather, they would perceive it as how we might perceive a slide show or a slow flip book. Of course, this is unrelated to the brain conversation, but the topic reminded me of the difference. For anyone who feels they need to educate me about the fact that the ocular systems donât operate in frames per second, allow me instead to direct you to the domain of metaphor and analogy.
What are your thoughts on the split function of brain hemispheres? If youâve read the book or at least this chapter, what was your favourite story? Did I omit your favourite? Leave comments below or on the blog.
I’ve decided after all to share my thoughts as I journey through Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. Come join me.
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Intro and Biographical
Iâve decided, perhaps against my better judgement, to have a run at Iain McGilchristâs The Matter with Things. At almost 3,000 pages this seems a bit daunting at the start. I debate whether I wish to pursue this course because it slows my pace significantlyâperhaps allowing me to progress at a rate 15 to 20 per cent of what I might have otherwise been able to maintain. However, creating content affords me at least two offsetting benefits. Firstly, I get to share my experience with a wider audience and do so in the moment. Secondly, it allows me to better absorb and comprehend the material. As a former professor of economics myself, I internalised the aphorism âto teach is to learn twice.â Of course, this is not teaching so much as regurgitating and providing my own reactions and perspectives in places. It may be akin to learning some one-point-some-odd times. Letâs round up to two.
Biographically, McGilchrist was a lecturer of Literature at Oxford before refocusing on Medicine and then Psychiatry with an interest in Neuroscience. Interestingly, he was particularly interested in hemisphere differences in the brain and was advised strongly not to pursue this academically, as it was a certain career-killer. Besides the domain was already over-studied and summarily disproven. Iain persisted.
As it happens, the older notions of hemispheric differences were facile nonsense, but there was evidence of brain asymmetryâwhich will become readily apparent in the opening chaptersâ, and this has been his passion project ever since.
Structure
The Matter with Things is a two-volume set presented in three parts, the first two contained in the first volume. Neuropsychologyâboth neurological and neuropsychologicalâis the theme of the first part, which is comprised of nine chapters. The second part consists of 10 chapters with a focus on epistemology. The second volume, being the third part, is about metaphysics.
Content
The first chapter is aptly named, Some Preliminaries and How We Got Here. Per the author, this is the most technical chapter with the added encouragement: âIf you survive this, youâre good to go.â
This chapter provides some basic history of the evolution of the brain. He establishes that the âraison dâĂŞtre [of the right hemisphere] is to enable us to be on the lookout for potential predators, to form bonds with mates, and to understand, and interpret the living world around usâ whilst the left hemisphereâs purpose âis to enable us to be effective predators.â
This is a gross oversimplification, but details will follow. Essentially, the right hemisphere experiences the external world rather holistically as presented whilst the left hemisphere interprets, codifies, and maps this world for later access. He doesnât mention it in this chapter, but since Iâve read a bit ahead alreadyâso weâll return to it presentlyâthe left hemisphere does not, loosely speaking, interact with the external world. It creates map based on what the right hemisphere conveys of the terrain, as I like to call it, and refers only to the map from then on. This sets us up for some peculiar behaviours, but weâll get to that in upcoming chapters.
Perspective
I donât have much to say about this first chapter as it is pretty much scientific facts, and I donât have any unique perspective to offer. As I expect to reserve the tail of these segments for perspective, Iâll use this allotted space for some general thoughts going in.
I am not sure where McGilchrist falls on the Realism versus Idealism front. As I understand from other sources, he believes there is an out there out there, and without our brains, perception couldnât happen. I also understand that heâs a Panpsychist, which is to say that he believes that everything has consciousness, so it will be interesting how that all comes together. Unfortunately, I feel this is second-volume fare.
As I am an Analytic Idealist, I believe that there is an out there out there as well. But I donât believe we have any access to its veridical nature. What we experience is a Bayesian approximation, the best guess necessary for us to survive and evolve. I mention this as I believe it is a difference of opinion I have up front, so I am offering full disclosure of a potential bias. Also, I get the feeling that he conflates this paradigm with those espousing views that we live in a Matrix-style simulation, or everything is a hologram or holograph, and one day Iâll understand the difference between the two.
If you know the difference between a hologram and a holograph, let me know in the comments or on the blog.
Have you read this book already? Are you interested in reading it? If so, stick around and perhaps youâll gather enough information here to catch your attention.
Several of my esteemed colleagues prompted me to become familiar with Iain McGilchrist. I had viewed hours upon hours of his lectures before I decided to commit to his latest book and likely magnum opus, though I don’t want to sell him short. The Matter with Things is an approximately 3,000-page, two-volume tome. To be fair, it’s about 1,600 pages of narrative content with the remainder being appendices, a bibliography, an index, and other such back matter.
Podcast: Audio rendition of the content on this page.
I’ve mentioned much of this before, but I am writing this post with a particular LinkedIn audience in mind, whom I don’t expect to be familiar with my prior commentary, though they are invited to explore more. McGilchrist’s thesis is that the human brain operates with asymmetrical hemispherical differences. These differences are not the facile “left-brain analytical, right-brain creative” distinction of yore, rather the differences are more nuanced. If you are interested in the minutiae of this, stick around and read past and future posts when they arrive, as I’ll be documenting my journey through these volumes presently.
So, what’s the matter with project managers? And why bring up project managers? In my workaday life, I’ve often been asked to perform project management functions, something decidedly not my forte. I could be reading into and am guilty of reductionism, but in reading The Matter with Things, I may have stumbled onto something with explanatory power. So let’s pause for a quick reflection.
Pistachio in hand
In a very small nutshell. I’m talking, perhaps, pistachio-sized here. The right brain hemisphere is the part that experiences the world as it is. The right brain is not about making judgments and categorising. Rather, it’s about just absorbing without interpreting, per se. On the other hand, the left brain hemisphere interprets, codifies, and maps this world for later access. Again, forgive the over-simplification, but this is the information pertinent to the matter at handâa very left-hemisphere control function, I might add.
It turns out that the left brain is not so much concerned with the outside world at large. Once it has its map, it is rather content to reference it from there on in unless the right brain nudges it to pass along more information. Whereas the right hemisphere opens possibilities, the left hemisphere shuts them down. If you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s work, Thinking Fast and Slow, you may notice certain parallels. I’d be interested to know if McGilchrist comments on this. Perhaps a later topic.
Borrowing from some aspects of Design Thinking, there is a double diamond design process model. I purloined one from the internet that will work for my purposes.
Double Diamond Design Process Model
I feel that I can simplify and assume that the diverging activity represents a right hemisphere strength whilst the converging is more apt to be a left hemisphere activity.
The right brain is not only always open to seeing options and opportunities, it actively seeks them. The left brain just wants to close any discussion and settle on a decision or an answer.
From an evolutionary perspective, the âraison dâĂŞtre [of the right hemisphere] is to enable us to be on the lookout for potential predators, to form bonds with mates, and to understand, and interpret the living world around usâ whilst the left hemisphereâs purpose âis to enable us to be effective predators.â
A right-hemisphere dominant person will likely continue to play what-if until the cows come home. A left-brain dominant person will take the first semi-viable solution and want to run on it. No need for deliberation. In a balanced scenario, the left and right hemispheres will battle for dominance, but they will arrive at a good-enough solution.
And this is where project managers enter the picture, and where I exit. I am decidedly over-indexed on the right brain. Among other things, I see options and possibilities. And, sure, I have enough balance to resolve to take action, but I don’t lose track of the possibilities and I am always ready to change course at a moment’s noticeâwhat we call pivot in the businessâor perish as the case might be.
The project manager, on the other hand, sees the map. This represents practically inviolable marching orders.
Disney Sorceror’s Apprentice Brooms-Flood Scene
One aspect of a good project manager is the ability to filter out the noise. Rather, this is what a right-brain person would surmise. Instead, the left-brain person doesn’t even register the noise. Where a right-brain person has to expend energy continually filtering out options and possibilities, the left-brain person never registers these options from the start. So, where I as a right-brain person may find it exhausting to actively and continuously limit this noise, this threshold is never triggered for the left-brainer.
In closing, I want to remind you again and again and again, that this is a gross oversimplification and rather metaphorical in nature. Nonetheless, I feel the that it is germane and offers insights into why some people are more apt at certain tasks than others.
I want to emphasise that one side is not better than the other. A right-dominant person is not superior to e left-dominant person, and vice versa. As with the brain itself, these can be complementary. Some people are very capable of tasking whichever hemisphere is necessary, but this is rarer than one might at first assume. McGilchrist provides many examples, so you can read them for yourself firsthand, or you can follow along as I call out key highlights in The Matter with Things.
If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the space provided.
Iâve only read the first four chapters of Iain McGilchristâs The Matter with Things. My intent is to build up to how his ideas intersect with my workaday life in a future segment, but for now, I’ll summarise some main themes.
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content (< 5 minutes)
The chapters Iâve read are
Some preliminaries: How we got here
Attention
Perception
Judgment
The next chapter is Apprehension.
Philosophically, or rather I have an interest in McGilchristâs ontological model, but that appears not to arrive until the second volume, perhaps in chapters 24 or 25, respectively Space and Matter and Matter and Consciousness. Being that this underlaid my reluctance to engage with this book, I did take liberties and skimmed these chapters quickly in an attempt to discern whether he is a Realist or an Idealist.
Until recently, Iâve been a Realist with reservations, but now I consider myself instead to be an Idealist with reservationsâthough I may have fewer reservations, so perhaps I am moving in the right direction.
As a Realist with reservations, I felt that there was some underlying reality, but sense-perception and cognitive limitations limited access to it, so correspondence to it was necessarily limited.
As an Idealist with reservations, I feel that there is some underlying reality, and sense-perception and cognitive limitations limit access to it, so correspondence to it is still necessarily limited, so we generate an approximation.
I agree with Donald Hoffmanâs assertion of Fitness Before Truth, in summary, that it is faster and more efficient to assess environmental fitness and take penalties where the assessment may have been a false positive. If one recoils in error from a coiled garden hose initially perceiving it to be a snake, the penalty is low. If a delay is incurred to assess some âsnakenessâ truth value, we may have already been bitten. If we see something charging at us, better to avert and assess than to take time to discern. Itâs of little consolation to consider, âAh. Iâm being mauled by a cheetah.â Better to have ducked and covered.
My chapter skimming was not enough to ascertain McGilchristâs position. Iâll wait until I arrive there in due time. No need to spoil the ending. Given the bookâs title, I am leaning toward Idealist, but I may be mistaken.
Moving on, these chapters build on each other. Not so much with narrative content as to represent the necessary chain of perceptual events: attention, perception, and judgmentâin this order.
We cannot judge what we can’t perceive, and we can’t perceive what doesnât come into the sense-perception space. McGilchrist reminds the reader that just because something is in a space where it can be perceived does not mean it can or will be perceived. He cites the example of the invisible gorilla in a basketball game study, which Iâll link to separately.
What we attend to is a matter of the situation and experience. Once we bring our attention to it, we can attempt to perceive it. Is it a snake or just a garden hose? Finally, we can make a judgmentâit was just a garden hose. Silly old bear. Or, I sure am thankful my reflexes are lightning quick.
Winnie the Pooh: Silly Old Bear
McGilchrist provides a plethora of examples, though most are tied to split-brain scenarios, which brings me to my last point. One of his theses is that left-right brain hemisphere differences are real and significant. Some had argued that the left-right representation is false, and he wants to take it back and regain that space by asserting arguments to the contrary.
I expect to discuss this more in an upcoming segment and apply my preliminary thoughts to my comprehension.
As a result of these recommendations, I’ve watched some 6 or more hours of video interviews with Iain, some of which are hosted on his own site, Channel McGilchrist, including this one. Before I get to the topic promised by the title of this post, I’ll say that I like Iain. I respect his intellect, his demeanour, and his approach. If you are a credentialist, his an Oxford-educated psychiatristâso he’s no slouch.
Iain’s positions are well researched, informed, and articulated. I could listen to him for hours. In fact, I have. And yet I disagree with a fundamental position he takes on intuition. Allow me to build up to that.
My first recommendation was due to a reaction I shared that depicting left-right brain hemisphere as analytic-creative was overly reductionist and quaint. McGilchrist was recommended because he disagreed. But it turns out his disagreement was more in the way it was being portrayed. The answer was wrong because the question was wrong. In a nutshell, his contention is that we shouldn’t be asking what each hemisphere processes, but how it goes about processing. I agree with this.
we shouldn’t be asking what each hemisphere processes, but how it goes about processing
His point is that in cases where an experience (inputs) might be processed on one side versus another, the interpretation (outputs) would necessarily differ. To make a false analogy, the left brain might be performing an exponential function whilst the right brain might be performing an arithmetic function. So, if Ć(left) = xx and Ć(right) = x+x, then an input of 3 would yield 27 and 6, respectively. There is nothing wrong with either side, they just produce different results. In context, this difference might matter: How many feet across is that chasm I must leap. I say, ‘Oops’, as I am falling to my demise having underestimated the difference, having used the right rather than the left function.
False Analogy by the Numbers
So where is this showdown you are wittering on about? A little more setup.
Science is stereotypically an analytic function, which is the say it requires a lot of left hemisphere processing. Psychologyâand keep in mind that I cast psychology as pseudoscience, or para-science when I am being more charitableâelevates the notion of intuition as not only having value but of being largely ignored by science.
Those who have been following me for a while, know that I am also critical of Scientistmâ˘, the blind-faith devotion to the current state of science as being some infallible truth. But neither am I an advocate for metaphysical claims. This is what I feel Psychology⢠is trying to do with intuition. It feels like they are not only trying to inject a metaphysical claim; they are simultaneously making a normative claim that you should have (and trust) intuition; further, they are staking out the territory to be able to say an absence of this acceptance is pathological, so this is a power play. We’ve got the tea leaf readers taking up arms against science.
Of course, I am being hyperbolic and polemic for effect, but this division exists. Iain is not the first to attempt to elevate intuition. A central idea that Jonathan Haidt tries to sell the reader on in his book, The Righteous Mind, is that we need to be more accepting and trusting of intuition. Even Malcolm Gladwell pushed this point in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
I do think that this will escalate. Even if it doesn’t materialise into a full-scale war, people will take sidesâthey already haveâ, and we’ll see more us versus them fingerpointing. Whilst I am not fully on the side of science, my propensity is to lean in that direction.
UPDATE: Even before I post this, I discover that I am behind the times with this prediction. In searching for a suitable image for this post, I find the book Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, which calls out pseudoscience presented as fact not only in the obvious realm of pop psychology but in the offices of practising psychologists. I have not read it, so I am not in a position to recommend it. I may get a copy for myself, if only just to have it on hand.
Before I end this, I also wish to anticipate a point of disagreement. I’ve encountered practitioners of ‘scientific psychology’ who vehemently defend their vocation as science. Without addressing this directly, let’s just raise the point that applying the scientific method and maths to a discipline doesn’t graduate it to become a science. I can apply this to Tarot or haruspicy. If fact, this is how, in general, social sciences became so-called soft sciences: ‘Look at me, mum. I’m using numbers’.
Where do you fall on the topic of intuition? Am I exaggerating and making mountains out of molehills?
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Philosophics 