Understanding The Matter with Things Dialogues Episode 3: Chapter 3

[@kateoneal4215]

I just sketch and paint and listen to these and feel so perfectly whole, in a calm yet highly attentive space. ❤

[@leobobo27]

G'day from Darwin Australia! School teacher and youth worker here gaining some amazing insight into the workings of the mind I have and am caring for and shaping

[@cheri238]

Thank you both today for this illuminating discussion .

[@cynthiaford6976]

These are great chats! There's a writing exercise in which you walk somewhere deeply familiar, that you know so well that you hardly see it, and you notice and write down only one color, every instance of that color. Or, following the Oulipo school, you notice only the unnoticed, the trash, or detritus, or signs, the unaesthetic. You can actually feel the perceptual shift from the left brain to the right brain as the place changes and becomes new.

[@segasys1339]

Very interesting. Does this practice have a name? Are there more steps or a progression of practices? Thanks!

[@Ac-ip5hd]

Thanks for going through the book chapter by chapter. With such a large work it really helps to be reminded of parts of the book and deepens the learning experience to hear it discussed by the author. I’m sure it is also extremely helpful to those struggling with the book as well. When I first started to read higher level material and it was more difficult to understand it was extremely helpful to hear people like Damasio and Ramachandran lecture on their books.

[@hglatGAIA]

When I was less than 5 years old I remember laying in bed and suddenly the room would be huge and I would be a mere pin point on the pillow case OR it would be the other way around and the room would turn small and my head would feel HUGE. Very peculiar but I remember it still to this day now at 61. Love these talks. Iain you are such an interesting person, thank you for all you do.

[@kt4774]

@helenperala3459 When I was young I had similar experiences. I would feel so huge that I was like a giant squeezed into a room that seemed too tiny for my body. My experience of small being very tiny like a pin point but so small it is almost hard to imagine or explain. I met another person decades ago that had a similar experience. I wondered if the feeling of being so big is prior to birth and out growing the womb. The small part being the beginning of gestation in the uterus just after conception. This has been a mystery to me all my life.

[@sylviekaiser1064]

Dr Mcgilchrist, if I may suggest: I would love to see a conversation between yourself and Daniel Schmachtenberger as well as with Bernardo Kastrup.

[@pemajoakim3804]

Seems like your wish has been granted, and what an incredible triologe it was! 😊

[@Brad-RB]

I suffer from migraines that actually alter my right side vision and also how I think. During the peak of the migraine, I cannot read, speak or even think in words. While they can be terrifying, and frustrating, the experience of having part of my brain temporarily shut off in this way has opened up my understanding of "comprehending" the world. Your work is proving to be quite helpful to me. Thank you for your efforts.

[@alexandermoyle9034]

these talks are great

[@sebastianparker4320]

Thank you. I'm fascinated by this information. In context, I have cared for my 89 year old mother with diagnosed dementia for 6 years. Much of what has been discussed so far, helps me understand parts of her brain that may have been diminished or damaged.

[@penelopehill9710]

Listening to this dialog helps me with reading Ian's big big brilliant book!

[@benniebartels51]

Dear mr. McGilChrist, since a year your books travel with me in weight, mind and thinking I can say they embody me as well. They had and still have some profound ways of how I look at the world and experience this world and myself on different levels. I was wondering if you ever heard of the work of Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) that he considered the somatic reaction on Freuds work. Working through the body, in motion, our sensing and feeling, to get a grip on our mind working with the neurological system. It so much works with the balance between the left and right hemispheres, in how he goes into detail, options and choices, always translating it back to the whole of oneself in relation to our environment. One of his ways is through spoken classes (the maps) students need to translate to actual movement, functioning, to their territory. I can highly recommend you to take in interest in this highly gifted man who intuited many of the developments in modern science long before they could be 'measured'.

[@davidbates9358]

My comment 5 months ago: "A truly brilliant book that arrives at the right time for our increasingly detached, media content cultures of the Western world. For scholastics who are prepared to suffer for the sake of depth-realizations, these aphoristic words are stunning: "Perception is not the same as attention, and not at all the same as thinking. But the world we choose to attend to, indeed choose whether and how to attend to, is nothing without perception. ‘We live in two worlds, the world of sight and the world of thought’, wrote Friedrich Max Müller, one of the most celebrated philologists of the nineteenth century, ‘and, strange as it may sound, nothing that we think, nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary, can ever be seen or heard, or perceived.’ Perception is the act whereby we reach out from our cage of mental constructs to taste, smell, touch, hear and see the living world." McGilchrist, Iain . The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (p. 183). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition. Reminds me of an old Buddhist monk in Thailand who taught me an 'imbibe' form of meditation: "open your eyes an feel how reality pours into them?" Perhaps why Iain used this quote to introduce his thoughts on perception: "To repeat: don't think, but look!" ― Ludwig Wittgenstein And this will feel utterly crazy to secular people with a faith in science, but I believe this book ushers in the Mother of all Prophecies, The Fall. The Collapse of Humanity's Grand Illusion?

[@mrnibelheim]

Indeed. We can only hope that the collapse will treat us gently...

[@lorriheffner2747]

I had am old woman dressed in black accost me once in Madrid… tu ojos! Tu ojos! She yelled at me and pointing her finger at me. She was telling me to get out from behind the camera and just look at the world with my eyes. It was peculiar to me that she singled me out, kind if frightened me. Not sure why Im telling you this but… I have never forgotten her.

[@blurbies3861]

It's great having a genius like Alex give his take on the material. I laughed out loud at his comment on, does the left hemisphere do anything? Because I was thinking the same thing as I was reading the chapter. Of course it does and I felt the comments about how professional wine tasters deal in categories and lables really helped define the LH's role. Thank you so much for these videos, I'm trying to read fast enough to keep up, but I, unfortunately, am NOT a genius.

[@Ableseamansainz]

Great interviewer, sharp and interested guy

[@lorriheffner2747]

Perceiving and precognition, now make sense to me as being one and the same but the latter is way more advanced or has the added layer that we can’t quite explain. I winder what makes it work when it happens, has happened to me several times, usually protecting me from harm, but its just so random. Anyhow. Its just a knowing exactly like perceiving, ie “” a train is coming, so move” it feels like that its just a knowing … and also directs me to move and move now. Like spidey senses lol

[@brendantannam499]

Left-handedness seems to have a bearing on the effects of right hemisphere injury. What is the relationship between the two?

[@gretamordue9139]

What do we know about the balance between the function of right and left hemispheres during development? How do the various developmental stages of the mind during childhood map onto this? In psychoanalytic theory the ability to think in terms of "both and" rather than polarising into "either or"/ "good or bad" is viewed as an emotional, developmental achievement and loss of this capacity, a regression to more primitive thinking about the world and one's relationships.

[@carmenionescu76]

Asking « which hemisphere is better » is like asking « whici face of a coin is more valuable ». I am impatient to have your books . Like so many probably told you : everything you say it is so familiar , so normal . You put words on something that I knew in a « right hemisphere way » Thank you.

[@PerNystedt]

In the conversation it appears that Iain and Alex describe the right hemisphere as superior to the left hemisphere. However if that was the case, why wouldn't evolution have made the left hemisphere smaller? I suspect that Iain will hand us the answer further into the book (I'm in the book where I'm commenting in these videos, whenever I do so) It would anyway be nice already to get a hint why and in what way (more than the grasping examples) the left hemisphere is critically superior to the right hemisphere.

[@kt4774]

Somewhere in Iain's work I'm positive I came across the size of the L hemisphere being smaller than the R hemisphere. L hemisphere is locally attentive and the R hemisphere can do both - attention and perception.

[@archtura7276]

I love the bicameral background behind Iain.

[@AnAlgernon]

Iain's last comment struck me... Paraphrase: That the left-hemisphere attends to the problems of the left hemisphere.. As it perceives the world.. And I thought... Then the right must hold for us: Tao, Nature, God, ... concepts that will not submit to scientific rationalization nor decomposition to parts. The left-mind would approach such things clumsily, symbolically, and without depth. // That could lead to a lack of spiritual connection to the reality in which we find ourselves.

[@melissaholman3498]

The thing he is calling, opaquely, 'umami,' I have also seen called 'savoury'

[@kiljoy3254]

“Yes... thank you...” 😎

[@angelatakano6072]

My mother had olfactory hallucinations when she developed a glioblastoma multiforme. She kept saying she smelled petroleum, poor mommy, she was very upset

[@inamwanda1618]

Compelling, amazing and insightful. Maybe you address this in a future episode, but someone diagnosed with ADHD, is it or could it be due to the left hemisphere that has issues?

[@abcrane]

EVERY FIELD has had a "right brain master serving as emissary to the field at large!" anthropology: Malinowski went against the grain by LIVING AMONG his subjects, thus debunking the "armchair" anthropologists who underestimated the complexity of tribal "civilization" sociology: C Wright Mills, with his Sociological Imagination, encouraged his students to relate the studies to their own lives, for example, their own financial burdens within the context of macroeconomic circumstances psychology: depth psychology, Wilhelm Reich with his study in mass psychology of fascism in sociohistorical context, Nietzsche, Jung, Freud, Foucault, etc., contextualizing individual experience in collective unconscious and sociohistorical "unfolding" primatologist: like Malinowski, Goodall living with the primates, uncovered so much more then meets the eye Vandana Shiva: a physicist who dedicates her life to working directly with farmers in India to fight big farm corruption, contextualizes the crisis within psychology, biodiversity, and economics philosophy: Sloterdijk's Spheres Trilogy food/farming researcher: Frances Moore Lappé : thoroughly contextualized "population crisis" in her World Hunger 10 Myths economics: Smith and Marx, and then Veblen, Henry George (land speculation), tracing economic developments through their contextualized stages, primitive, feudal, capitalist, (KM) communist This is very empowering indeed. It truly is a clear new useful lens of present-day phenomenology.

[@misspy1153]

Wow

[@1965simonfellows]

... be better if they had Don. Hoffman asking and taking questions too.

[@GrimrDirge]

To whomever posts these on Dr. McGilchrist's behalf: does the good doctor have an opinion on Erich Neumann?

[@brendantannam499]

Wouldn't that be interesting! I'll bet it would center on the mother as right hemisphere/creation and the father as left hemisphere/culture.

[@marianwexler5710]

Dr. McGhilcrist, I value your videos very much but really want to engage with the original books. which are much more interesting. I can access The master and the emissary through my public library but they tell me that your latest books are too expensive to offer to me or anyone like me that relies on public access. Could you ask your publishers to offer a limited number of books to public libraries at a reasonable cost, which would be so helpful to people like me who will have to wait for years before these books are available second-hand.

[@akm97]

It will be coming out in paperback later in the year, but probably not for six months. Meanwhile there is always the Kindle ... not the same, I know.

[@oakbellUK]

It's so frustrating! Every time there is an opportunity to give a concrete example, you both move on to the next abstraction!

[@susydyson1750]

UMAMI is a flavour related to mother's milk i believe

[@happtivist]

The interviewer spends too much time interrupting, opining and interpreting Prof. McGilchrist's work rather than allowing the professor to explain his own thinking. This is the 3rd interview where I wondered "Can't they find a better interviewer?"

[@Eudaimonia88]

@MichaelLennon Exactly my thinking. The interviewer is overbearing.

[@kt4774]

Iain and Alex know each other and have come to do this series as a discussion.

[@magdagreatchanellwasilewsk4373]

More than a “fan.” Wonder how many recovering stroke people of right hemisphere patients had regained their senses

[@davidbates9358]

Jesus Iain, did your Grandmother never say "what's wrong, can't you see for looking?" Have you really taken heed of Socrates anti-logical positivism advice: "true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." Have you committed your own sin of looking too much at the 'what' and allowing the primacy of AFFECT to steer your conscious attention + awareness away from a self-cross-examination of 'how' your own thoughts are created? Like the inhibitory activity of your brain, have you built a hypothesis on inhibiting the inclusion of neuroscience knowledge that contradicts your all about the brain myopia? Or do you understand the need to affect the ruling elites of our time, just as wise people have always done? I find it deeply saddening that you haven't tried to provide the much needed synthesis of combining the latest's knowledge we have about our evolved mammalian nervous system & what it reveals about the embodied nature of our make-believe mind's. May I remind you of R. D. Laing's comments: "We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt." - "We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy."

[@PromoMIAR]

Ehhh... I need to read that a few times. I don't get the point. Is that the point (when it comes to conciousness)?

[@evanhadkins5532]

I'm not clear what you're asking Iain to do, if anything.

[@chase1671]

Have you read Iain's latest book in full? Brain science is just part 1. Part 3 dives deeply into metaphysics.

[@davidbates9358]

@@chase1671 Yes l have read the book from cover to cover & don't believe the word metaphysics is the experience of metaphysics anymore than the word consciousness is the experience of consciousness. While the question "who are we," is probably the worst existential question in human history. "What are we," would be a far better frame imho. The universe become conscious, perhaps?

[@abcrane]

The only existential question you need to ask yourself, Bates, is "why do I have this pressing need to condescend to someone I disagree with?" you could have asked intelligent questions without that "dismissive tone." When I debate with someone, that tone signals to me as a red flag, that red flag, being, "s/he's more concerned with being right, sounding smart, than effectively debating the actual topic at hand." in other words, in sharing a productive, enjoyable exchange.