The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

This would fit with the finding that higher IQ means a higher risk of a lifetime diagnosis of depression, but also a better level of mental health at age 50.

One interpretation that would fit with the data is that low IQ may be associated with depression, while ‘averagely high’ IQ (around 120) may be protective against depression, and ‘super high’ IQ (over 150) may be once more associated with depression.

Is it conceivable that elements of the way of being in the world embedded in a culture might start to resemble one hitherto largely confined to the mentally ill?

Two statements most commonly endorsed by schizophrenics were: ‘I cannot immediately recognise other people’s faces’ and ‘I have no common sense’,

It is a matter of interest that large white matter tracts, such as the superior longitudinal fasciculus, that integrate functioning between anterior and posterior regions of each hemisphere, come to their full potential only when they are myelinated in the late teens and early 20s – precisely when schizophrenia tends to become manifest.

absence of the corpus callosum from birth – occurs in at least 1 in 4,000 individuals, probably more, since many cases go undetected during life.128

Here is the report of a schizophrenic patient: Everything seems to grip my attention although I’m not particularly interested in anything. I am speaking to you just now but I can hear noises going on next door and in the corridor. I find it difficult to shut them out and it makes it more difficult for me to concentrate on what I’m saying to you. Often the silliest little things that are going on seem to interest me. That’s not even true; they don’t interest me but I find myself attending to them and wasting a lot of time this way.

We met the third-person perspective in schizophrenia before. A common feature of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia is that voices speak about, not to, the self, using the third person: not ‘you are just a machine’, but, discussing among themselves, ‘he is just a machine’.

These tendencies lead us to live in a world in which abstractions are more real than whatever it is they represent, in which the individual being is swallowed up in a category, in which words become more important than acts or facts, and in which the living is turned into something inanimate. Reader, do you recognise this world?

In all forms of dialogue today – everything from a conversation with an office employee to a debate with a politician – I feel these words find an application: in fact it often feels as if one is talking to a machine.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy; He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.

‘There is a pane of glass between me and mankind’, a schizoid patient remarked, an observation which Kretschmer describes as of ‘extraordinary significance’.

What I am suggesting is this: in animals there may be no such thing as schizophrenia because, except in humans, both hemispheres still maintain their groundedness in the pre-conceptual world. Because of the ‘virtuality’ that has necessarily followed the left hemisphere’s primary preoccupation with the world of symbols, as far as reality is concerned we have ended with ‘all our eggs in one basket’: the one on the right. As a result we are particularly vulnerable to anything that impairs the right hemisphere, since it is our mainstay in reality.

The single most profound difference between the hemispheres, which I will have cause to return to repeatedly, is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the right hemisphere, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left.

It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, and aspects of things. The verb ‘to be’, which he uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to dwell. For him, the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged:4 he conceives not the living, lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable dish which he calls ‘things as they really are’. So complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough ‘understanding’, garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the principle of life and growth has been ejected.

(Heidegger often used the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which literally means ‘un-forgetting’, allowing something to emerge from oblivion.)

It might be pointed out, however, that two thousand years of insistence, in the West, on the idea of truth as single, timeless and correct has demonstrated only how multiple, contingent and fallible it seems to be, since it has notably failed to coerce the wisdom of philosophers to any one point of view.

One of the hemispheric approaches, that of the left hemisphere, aims to close down on truth. The game lasts, while it does so, only because the longed for close-down has not yet happened. Once it has, the game is over. The other, that of the right hemisphere, aims to open up to truth, and sees the truth as a never-finished seeking after, and evolving of, something that is disclosed by the very process, which the ‘game’ of life continues.

The popular reaction to this has been only to intensify the mechanistic vision: no longer seeing complex, unique individuals but only representatives of groups, no longer open to appropriately nuanced, but simple ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ positions, and shouting more and more loudly.

It happened to him as it always happens to those who turn to science … simply to get an answer to an everyday question of life. Science answered thousands of other very subtle and ingenious questions … but not the one he was trying to solve. —Count Leo Tolstoy

Andrei Tarkovsky pointed out that ‘objectivity can only be the author’s, and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel’.

In fact, science is a matter of probability and certitude a matter of ignorance.

Faraday performed in his brain the work of a great mathematician without using a single mathematical formula … it is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula.

Even today, more than three decades after its initial articulation, most string practitioners believe we still don’t have a comprehensive answer to the rudimentary question, What is string theory?

Richard Lewontin comments: Genes are said to be ‘self-replicating’, they engage in ‘gene action’, they ‘make’ proteins, they are ‘turned on’ or ‘turned off’ by ‘regulatory’ DNA. But none of this is true … Genes ‘do’ nothing, they ‘make’ nothing … DNA is among the most inert and nonreactive of organic molecules.

With an estimated 100 billion neurones, a quarter of a million of them are created on average during every minute of the nine months of gestation, at times more. Each of these neurones, needless to say, must then make thousands of connexions with other neurones, and all this must end up in a minutely specific, hugely complex architecture with every part of the whole in exactly its required location. Where was that information in the ‘programme’ that DNA is said to enshrine?

The cell nucleus, which is around six millionths of a metre in diameter, contains two metres of DNA, a feat which is ‘geometrically equivalent to packing 40 km (24 miles) of extremely fine thread into a tennis ball.’50 That’s not all, since the 46 separate chromosomes (each averaging, if we continue the analogy, the equivalent of over half a mile long), have to be kept distinct and functional, not hopelessly entangled.

Before the heart has developed walls (septa) separating the four chambers from each other, the blood already flows in two distinct ‘currents’ through the heart. The blood flowing through the right and left sides of the heart do not mix, but stream and loop by each other, just as two currents in a body of water. In the ‘still water zone’ between the two currents, the septum dividing the two chambers forms.

There are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the human body.64 Each one of these cells performs many millions of complex reactions every second.65 In doing so the cell does not act atomistically but within complex feedback systems with other cells. Biological enzymes promote extraordinary rates of change. In the absence of catalytic enzymes, the decarboxylation of amino acids would proceed with a typical half-life of about a billion years: in the presence of enzymes these half-lives are reduced to less than a thousandth of a second.66 And a single molecule such as carbonic anhydrase – of which the body contains unimaginable numbers – can catalyse upwards of a million reactions per second.67 Each protein may combine with ‘several hundred different modifier molecules, leading to practically infinite combinatorial possibilities’ and each ‘protein itself is an infinitesimal point in the vast heaving and churning molecular sea of continual exchange that is the cell’.

The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical … This means that the term ‘quantum mechanics’ is very much of a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called ‘quantum nonmechanics’.

while some gene mutations clearly do cause cancer, the majority of mutations found in cancer are the consequences, rather than the causes, of disruption of intercellular communication.111 (The situation is made still more complex by the fact that, depending on context, the same gene can either promote or suppress the formation and growth of a tumour.)

Although antler growth is peculiarly shielded from environmental influences, and although no two sets of antlers are the same, any one animal’s antlers are perfect mirror images of one another, and, if both are cut off, will regain the same shape from memory.

In one case a planarian, a type of flatworm, was cut into 279 pieces, each of which proved capable of generating a new body within a few weeks.158 Each part appears to know what it lacks, and can thus regenerate a new whole. What is still more extraordinary is that if flatworms – the ‘first’ class of organism to have a centralised brain with true synaptic transmission,159 and to share the majority of neurotransmitters that occur in vertebrate brains160 – are decapitated, they not only regrow a head, but retain their memories;

Single cells can take decisions; single cells can plan responses; single cells contain memory.

the developmental information expressed in the organism is not present in the starting point of development, but is itself created by the process of development, through feedback from the current state of the organism to the states of the resources that will influence future development.

The rain that falls at a random moment in time in a random distribution on a landscape encounters potential stored in the landscape; that potential is actualised in the predictable flow of water down to a river mouth into the sea. Similarly, accidental deaths are by definition unplanned. Yet roughly the same number of accidental deaths, around 17,000, occurs in the UK every year.

For example, the adaptive evolution of tetrapod limb structures requires coordination between the development of bone, muscle, nervous, circulatory, and integumentary systems (at least). If each system had to wait for a fortuitous mutation in order to produce the appropriate accommodation, complex evolutionary adaptations might never arise.

‘Classical science emphasized order and stability’, wrote the chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine. ‘Now in contrast, we see fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation.’

As philosopher of science Mark Bickhard writes: the best contemporary physics demonstrates that there are no particles at all. The fundamental constituents of the world, according to quantum field theory, are dynamic quantum fields in a dynamic space-time. Quantum fields manifest particle-like properties in virtue of their interactions being constrained to occur in multiples of fixed quanta, and the conservations of those quantised properties. The quantisation is reminiscent of particles, but it is in fact a quantisation of wave-like processes, not particles … there are no physical particles

Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view. —William James

an expert – one who has been defined as knowing more and more about less and less. As the physicist John Archibald Wheeler memorably observed, ‘if you’re working on something new, then you are necessarily an amateur.’

In 1991 Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said: ‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?’

Two of the best-known analyses, from psychology42 and cancer biology,43 found reproducibility rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. A survey of 1,576 researchers across scientific disciplines published in Nature revealed that more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiment.

As Richard Feynman said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1965: ‘A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.’

This was a point pungently made by Samuel Johnson, replying to a ‘pertinacious gentleman’ who was unfortunate enough to say, ‘I don’t understand you, Sir’; to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding’.

In the history of philosophy no more than the history of music should one imagine that worse only gives way to better over time.

much Western philosophy has suffered from a ratiocentric bias – the notion that calm and detached rational analysis provides the unique key to understanding ourselves and our activities. At its worst, ratiocentrism involves a fantasy of command and control, as if by sufficiently careful use of reason we could gain an exhaustive understanding of the human condition.

almost the only pleasure that men have in judging [using their reason] better than others, consists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority, which arises from thinking rightly … a pleasure which does not immediately result from the object which is under contemplation.’

Speech is much less prized than silence in Japanese culture; silence is considered more conducive to thought. According to psychologists Timothy Takemoto and Thomas Brinthaupt, ‘Japanese culture, it would seem, is best described by the absence of words, including those to describe it’.37 Visual thought is predominant among the Japanese and is preferred to verbal thought.