Questions for Iain McGilchrist
- That eg I might ask him if I were interviewing him on a podcast.
- The most deep pragmatic question I'm interested in is something like:
- Say someone reads your book and is like "wow, I really see the value of having my right hemisphere holding my left... how do I learn that?" What training methodologies, spiritual practices, etc, do you think are most helpful here?
- Put another way: based on your research, if you were to encourage a bunch of people to practice a particular skill, what would it be?
- On a meta-level: what criteria might you suggest someone use for assessing whether something is likely to train this new hemisphere relations?
- On yet a different level: do you think this challenge is more about:
- learning some new capacity with the right hemisphere
- learning better models of the world with the left hemisphere, so that it can better make sense of the right hemisphere's perspective (your book helped with this a lot!)
- as the left hemisphere, learning to surrender to not-knowing rather than grasping
- People of course have many misconceptions about the brain hemispheres from the original Gazzinga research & theories, and you’ve talked about that.
- I’m wondering if you’ve noticed any misconceptions that commonly show up based on your work—ways that you find what you’re saying being misinterpreted that are different than the old confusions?
- If I were to have a longer conversation with him, I'd love to lay out my models of how the hemispheres relate to buddhism & dzogchen, and ask him what he thinks of that.
- Unknowns
- What do you most wish you understood about the hemispheres and their relationship with each other, that you haven't yet been able to figure out based on your research, your clinical practice, and your own phenomenology?
- What experiments would you most like to see run, to understand more about how the hemispheres get along (and don’t get along)?
- The Wada test has been used to test the behavior of each hemisphere while the other hemisphere is essentially shut down. Have you considered what might be able to be learned by administering other drugs to one hemisphere at a time? (In particular, I recently listened to a podcast that suggested giving psychedelics to one hemisphere)
- Emotions
- You describe "anger" as being the most lateralized emotion, and it as being left-lateralized. How many emotions total are we talking, out of which anger is left lateralized? Panksepp's 7 circuits? The 4-emotion model of "happiness, sadness, fear, anger"? More like a few dozen? eg "frustration" seems to me like it would be at least as left-lateralized as anger.
- I imagine that rage would also be LH, but what about contempt? frustration? scorn? Where does grievance fit in?
- (Is it a LH thing that happens when RH grief is blocked/confused?)
- When Douglas Tataryn was interviewed on Emerge, he said something about studies finding that emotional words don't move across the corpus callosum as well as other concepts, so you need to say aloud so you can hear it...
- what do you know about the role of externalizing thoughts? (speaking or writing or drawing) for creating more communication between the hemispheres
- In certain places (intro to 2019 edition of The Master and his Emissary) you point at a connection between the fight-or-flight response and the right hemisphere
- which I feel like I sort of understand in the context of birds looking out for danger
- but which seems to me inconsistent with the right hemisphere being oriented towards peripheral vision and fight-or-flight response being associated with tunnel vision
- < something about scarcity? >
- something about monism as a left hemisphere distillation of right hemisphere non-dual perspective
- gender archetypes
- > "Perhaps the most absurd of these popular misconceptions is that the left hemisphere, hard-nosed and logical, is somehow male, and the right hemisphere, dreamy and sensitive, is somehow female. If there is any evidence that could begin to associate each sex with a single cerebral hemisphere in this way, it tends to indicate, if anything, the reverse—but that is another story..."
- what is that evidence and what is that story?
2 linked references
September 2nd, 2024
- Questions for Iain McGilchrist: “If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them.”
- riffing on Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
- "La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour déguiser sa pensée."
- "Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts."