The Brain as a Metaphor

A defence of Iain McGilchrist's neuroscientific 'theory of everything'

Iain McGilchrist in a recent discussion with Anil Seth on Justin Brierley’s Think Faith

Recently Substack’s Tommy Blanchard wrote a thoroughly interesting article on the question of the brain’s two hemispheres and right handedness, and in passing commented on Iain McGilchrist’s popular theory that the problems of the modern world are due to the overemphasis of the left hemisphere:

There are other attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain, like Iain McGilchrist’s speculations that the left hemisphere being dominant explains all of Western civilization’s ills. Like the older mythology tying creative versus analytic modes of thinking to specific hemispheres, these claims don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts.

Unlike Tommy I am ill-qualified to comment on the neuroscience of McGilchrist’s hugely ambitious theory of everything, nor on what the general neuroscience community thinks of McGilchrist. However unlike Tommy (I’m presuming) I happen to have read both volumes of McGilchrist’s immense book The Matter with Things, both of which are the size of a substantial textbook, and if I may say, I think Tommy sells him a little short. The book is vastly researched and draws on a huge amount of neuroscience literature and studies of conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, not to mention engaging with an absurdly vast realm of philosophy, and even if McGilchrist is ultimately over-egging the relationship of the hemispheres, which my impression is that he may well be, he is certainly not doing so lazily.

Yet there is something strange you might observe about McGilchrist’s work. Let’s say that tomorrow everything he claimed about hemisphere specialisation was shown to be completely false. It’s interesting to consider that everything else that he argues would, if you accept it, still be true. In other words, as far as his argument goes, his claims are at the very least ‘metaphorically’ true either way. If there are ways of thinking or attending to the world that can blind us, and if narrow focus should be subordinated to an integrated picture, then his idea works either way as an analogy.

This raises a strange question about what neuroscience can actually help us know about ourselves. Since McGilchrist offers no claim about how the apparent change of hemispheric control comes about, and since it seems his belief about the cause seems to exist in the things he bemoans rather than in some pathology of the brain itself, you could argue the neuroscience is strangely, well, irrelevant. He doesn’t even need it to make any of the arguments he makes in order to make his points about what he believes we have lost or the ways we have blinded ourselves.

But The Matter with Things, or it’s previous shorter incarnation The Master and His Emissary, are books that when you have read them stay with you. One of the reasons his works seem to have gained so much popularity is that it enables people to have some compass for what it means to think about yourself as ‘a brain,’ not because of some reductionist ontology but because of a realising that we take for granted something about the way we think and absorb the world, that we can think and pay attention to the world in ways that seem to entirely change the way the world is, and that our brain is the means by which we apprehend it.

By exhaustingly reviewing various forms of pathology that can occur within the brain, McGilchrist’s project is essentially to show or to argue that certain ways of thinking about the world which we may deem to be entirely superior are in fact pathological unless yoked to a more implicit set of assumptions that we take for granted, and that even within a healthy brain we can elevate those ways of thinking to the obscuring of what once may have seemed obvious. Thus he is making a kind of double argument, one philosophical, one neuroscientific.

Whether on the neuroscience side this distinction actually boils down to a clear separation between the hemispheres strikes me as much more uncertain, at the very least an open question, although as I said, I am not qualified to say. What McGilchrist is doing though is far nearer to the employment of neuroscience as a kind of analogy, a way of thinking about how we think and attend to the world. To say the science is wrong is to slightly miss the point, some of the overall claims may be open to revision, but the basic research of various forms of brain pathology on which he draws simply is what it is, and his employment of them to make examples of problems with contemporary thinking is more profound than his critics, and sometimes even his fans, give him credit. In some sense, he is comparing patterns of thought or ways of thinking, showing that in the wrong context ways we assume to be superior can be characteristic of states of delusion without that part of us that holds things in a more implicit context.

It’s interesting then to apply McGilchrist’s theory to his theory itself. Critics have pointed out that one of the things he bemoans is materialism and reductionism, yet a theory based entirely on the functioning of the brain to explain all of the modern ills is oddly, well, reductionist. Yet I don’t think this is so. From McGilchrist’s perspective it seems that there is a distinction between what you might call the map and the territory. Brain science can help us think about thinking not because it’s what is ‘really’ going on in a way that robs the brain of the mind but because it offers us way of better understanding our own phenomenological position, here, where it is really going on. To deny reductionism doesn’t mean to deny the obvious fact that you are your brain, after all, McGilchrist bases large amounts of his argument on evidence drawn from things that can go very wrong with a person’s thinking as a result of something going wrong with the brain. But it is based on a claim that the opposite is also true, that belief, love, beauty and all the things he argues we have demoted can also change us from the top down. He writes in The Matter with Things about the placebo effect as an example of the mind-body relationship not simply being a one way causal relationship reducible to the brain:

The belief that a substance will produce a cure (placebo) -or harm (nocebo)- is a potent predictor that it will do so even if the substance is inert. Although it is one of the most familiar and best attested phenomena in medicine (and one of the most reliable and effective), the mechanism by which the placebo operates has been little researched, for, I suspect, three main reasons: there is no money in it for drug companies — perhaps the reverse; it is an embarrassment to the reductionist materialist mainstream in biological research; and there is little chance of a mechanism being found soon. Recent reviews of the phenomenon demonstrate the chasm open between the silence of neuroscientists when when contemplating the interaction between mind and brain, and their fluency when on home ground, dealing with the brain and body as a closed system.

The point he is making more widely is that reality discloses itself to us in a realm in which beliefs, intentions, meaning, purpose and value are self evident facts, our attention to which can change what the world becomes to us, and that these facts are rejected by a reductionist view of the brain. The claim that may be harder to truly evidence, is that if we are to choose the aspect of reality that is ‘really real,’ it is not the causal properties of matter or function but the implicit, flowing, interconnected whole of conscious experience.

And as McGilchrist passionately argues, there are some reasons why this matters, and I think if you look around there are clear examples that vindicate something of the claims he makes. Let us take as perhaps an archetypical example a quote by physicist Lawrence Krauss in a lecture for his book A Universe from Nothing, a lecture for which Richard Dawkins gave a personal glowing introduction, expressing a view that could not be further from the view McGilchrist is arguing for:

“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.”

It’s worth taking some time to dwell on this statement. Krauss claims science objectively tells us something that affirms an evaluation of value, because of apparent discoveries in physics, we now know that we are a bit of rubbish, we are insignificant.

How do we know that, though? How does one evaluate significance? If there were trillions of other conscious beings on every other planet all of which were cleverer than us, would that make us more or less significant than now, when we seem to be an island on the ocean of the cosmos? Does our apparent uniqueness make us special or insignificant? The problem is that science doesn’t answer these questions, we do. To most people, the fact that there are trillions of galaxies is actually the fact that is really irrelevant since it’s bearing on their phenomenal world is precisely zero. The reality is it is people like Krauss who want to see us as insignificant because it ironically boosts their own sense of self-importance in being the ones who get to say so, and what they claim science tells us it simply doesn’t. If we are being absolutely objective science must be silent about claims of value or significance.

Not only that, what are the moral implications meant to be of calling us insignificant pollution? What is its pragmatic cash value? No doubt to you the people you love have near infinite value precisely because you love them not because of some relation to the physics of the cosmos, because you believe that they matter.

If we employ McGilchrist’s analogy here, the arguments of people like Krauss can clearly be seen as a kind of pathological demoting of certain implicit forms of value in favour of those argued for by detached, meaning deprived sequences of argument that, by claiming to be better revealing the world, oddly obscure it. Krauss’ error is not only a mistaking of the map for the territory, but of holding up the map and saying “look, you don’t matter!” If McGilchrist’s entire project does nothing than attempt to rehabilitate the idea that you matter profoundly, I would argue that even if his overall theory is mixed, as Krauss’ theory of the ‘nothing’ that produced the universe may be, McGilchrist is employing that science in a way that is far more pragmatically useful. At the very least, he seems to have a basic understanding that the science is always an abstraction, a metaphor, a tool. It is we who go seeking its knowledge, and we who decide what to do with it. Unless, that is, we have forgotten ourselves along the way. I don’t think McGilchrist’s theory of the two brains has to be neuroscientifically vindicated in its every detail for it to be true that in many ways, we have.

None of that means that McGilchrist’s claims about the brain shouldn’t be open to criticism, nor that there aren’t areas where the science shouldn’t be taken beyond its bounds. But contrary to the projections of philosophers such as Paul and Patricia Churchland who believe that the future lies in replacing our “folk philosophy” of terms like belief or love or will with the language of brain states, science will always need to be taken from its domain into the wider domain in which we apply it where such symbolic and abstract meaning will and should always be the currency of what matters. This is where other ways of thinking are important, and where they will remain important, in the realm in which you and I are and always were.