Conversation of Michael Levin with Iain McGilchrist

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[00:01] Michael Levin: Fantastic to see you. I'm so glad we have the opportunity to chat.

[00:10] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, I'm very pleased indeed. It was lovely to have that little moment together on that other podcast. I've been very interested by your work. What interested you in mind? How did you get to hear about it even?

[00:28] Michael Levin: I've been aware of it for a long time. I'm not sure where the first time was, but I'm super interested in this notion of understanding nature in both directions. I like the reductive quantitative stuff, but I also think it's really important to go at it top down, as it were, in my language. You integrate it very beautifully and you write about the importance of it. In connection with neuroscience, but also more broadly, I'm friends with people like Mark Solms, who take a psychiatry-psychology approach to it. I think it's very important to have both ends. I've been following your writings for a really long time.

[01:26] Iain McGilchrist: No, that's great to know. I gather you're on the editorial board of Laterality, which is interesting. You're obviously interested in lateralization as well.

[01:44] Michael Levin: I have three things that I wanted to ask you about, and then of course anything that you would like to talk about, but the asymmetry thing is one of them. When I was a grad student in Cliff Tabin's lab, we characterized the first set of asymmetry genes. This is the pathway that sets the laterality of the organs of the body. I haven't done any work on brain laterality per se, but this was the question of how do your internal organs reliably determine left from right in embryogenesis. This is how I ended up on the board of laterality, not from brain asymmetry, but for years we studied mechanisms of left-right determination. I think it's a very profound problem. It goes well beyond the issues of heart positioning. The way to amplify these chiralities that exist — we chase it down to the single cell level, and other people have as well. I saw your quote on Pester and the importance of asymmetry. I was hoping you would talk about that a little bit.

[03:03] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, definitely. And that goes back a bit further than the positioning of the heart. As I point out, Thomas Holstein found that in Nematostella vectensis, the oldest extant organism we have, 700 million years old, there is already lateralization in what he calls the ancestor of the vertebrate brain. So in this neural network, there is already asymmetry. And it's fascinating. As you say, Pasteur thought that this was a fundamental aspect of the cosmos, and Pierre Curie said the same: asymmetry in living organisms is a reflection of that. It's certainly a primary problem. If I remember rightly, wasn't your research on how an organism gets to know its left from its right part of the argument, which I know you've taken very much further, that it's to do with bioelectrical gradients? Is that not right?

[04:20] Michael Levin: One of the many things that bioelectricity does is scale up left-right decisions made by individual cells. People have now found chirality in bacteria, in single human cells, in culture, in a dish. We found it in slime molds, all kinds of — as you say, it's completely fundamental. One of the things we found the bioelectric system does is scale up the very early left-right decisions made by individual cells into a collective decision as an organ — a collective of these cells: what side of the body am I located on? Everything we've been focused on is the idea of scaling. How do you go from tiny competent agents to big ones that integrate with a larger cognitive light cone? This was the first example of this that I really got to work on as a grad student and then a postdoc: how the bioelectrics actually serves as this glue that binds individual decisions into organ-level decisions.

[05:29] Iain McGilchrist: There's a lot more to say about asymmetry. One of the things is when you take that to the level of the morphology of an organ or something as extraordinary as the eye or even the brain, I guess you're not claiming that you've cracked it, but I'd like to know how your theory about bioelectrical gradients fits into orders of explanation, because it seems to me that it explains things at one level. How did Holbein paint this incredible portrait of Sir Thomas More? He used striated muscles in his arm and his hand. There was also input from the higher centers in the brain. Is it not just a description at a rather reduced level of something that still requires unpacking and is not explained by talking about bioelectrical gradients?

[06:37] Michael Levin: So I 100% agree with you that explanations purely at the physical level miss the mark. I do think, however, that one of the neat things about bioelectricity is that it allows us to merge levels. It is a kind of mechanistic explanation which leads us directly to a cognitive explanation. In other words, I think that the nice thing about bioelectricity is that it shows how large-scale information processing, which can rise up to the kinds of explanations that we really want for these complex events, arises from individual mechanisms. What I like about it is that I think what evolution does is it uses bioelectricity to get meaning and computation out of physics. I think that's what we need in the end. The physical events are great, but what we need is to find out where the meaning comes from. I think that bioelectrics is a step in that direction. I'll just take a step away from the asymmetry for the moment. In our work from the regenerative medicine angle, we want to understand how the cellular collectives know to make one organ rather than another. The treatment is not going to be bottom-up, which is what molecular medicine works on now, which is tweaking the genes and the pathways. I want to literally convince the cells that they should be building something different than what they're building now. I'm completely serious about that. So what we need to understand is how these electrical networks store memories, how they have preferences, how they navigate the space of possible anatomical outcomes. I think what they're doing is a tiny precursor to what happens in the brain. I think they allow us mechanistically to talk about the memories, the beliefs, in a proto form of tissue that is not neural tissue. I'm hoping, I'm trying to develop that link, exactly. I don't think that the mechanistic explanation is sufficient, but I think the bioelectrics gets us beyond that. It literally lets us cash out what it means for a collective of tissue to hold a counterfactual memory. For example, we've seen that in planaria, where we actually have animals whose tissues hold a counterfactual memory of what they would do if they got injured in the future. I can tell a similar story about the asymmetry as well.

[09:31] Iain McGilchrist: How does the counterfactual become instantiated over time? How does it contain information about hugely complex, three-dimensional configurations, such as the way in which intricate parts of the brain need to be organized? How can it hold that information, and where does it store it? Slime molds are able to do extraordinary things like solve mazes and escape from their jars. They don't have neurons. So where, for them, is this memory stored?

[10:25] Michael Levin: The slime molds, I'll start with that because so much less is known that I can tell that quickly. We have a particular assay where you put a little slime mold piece in the middle of a Petri dish, about 10 centimeters diameter, and then you put some glass discs at the edges, three glass discs at one edge, one glass disc at the other edge. These are just glass. There's no chemicals, there's no food, there's no attractant, just glass. They're very thin, they're very light, but there are three on one edge and one on the other. What the slime mold does for the first few hours is it gently, rhythmically tugs on the medium that they're all sitting on, an agar slab. It makes these waves, and it turns out that it senses biomechanically the strain angle that comes back to it after it pulls on this thing. For the first four hours, it builds an internal something, and we don't know exactly what, although I'll give you a hypothesis. It integrates that information, doing not much for the first four hours. Then it grows out towards the three disks, not the one. It always chooses the three. During that time, it's pulling together a representation of what's going on in the outside world. For some reason, it likes the heavier masses better than light masses. I don't know why. Then it makes a decision and you see the observable behavior. One of the things we've done is inject fluorescent beads through this thing. When you watch the beads flow in and out, you see that as it branches, its structure is very branched, almost fractal in nature. When the beads are going down one particular vein and there are branches, sometimes they go to the branch and sometimes they don't. These juncture points open and close. The thing has complete control over every juncture point. It's a biomechanical synapse at that point. If you can control the flow going this way or that way, this is the beginning of a hydraulic computer, where you can start to process information by directing where the flow of molecules will go through your network. It's not a garden hose where everything just goes under pressure. It has millions and millions of selectable points. People like Andy Adametsky think about how you take that architecture and do computations with it and make decisions. They have a very rich cytoskeletal network. They have bioelectrical phenomena, which we really haven't studied yet, although Andy has. They've got this hydraulic thing going on, but it's very clear that they have periods of integrating information and then acting on it, in addition to the memory kinds of things that you talk about.

[13:16] Iain McGilchrist: Yes. That sounds fascinating. I still find it difficult to know where we jump the gap from a mechanism in which a pathway can be closed or opened to where something like the three-dimensional structure of how you get through a maze is stored, but that's surely something to be working on.

[13:41] Michael Levin: Audrey de Souture in France has this amazing data where she's got these slime molds and the slime molds dislike salt. They don't want to crawl over salt. She'll train them to crawl over the salt to get the reward. It takes, I think, about 10 exposures for them to get the idea that it's okay and that at the end of the salt, there will be a nice piece of oat and whatnot. What she found is that the way they remember to do this is they literally store some of that salt internally. So it's a memory, it's pre-symbolic memory. I don't have a symbol for salt. I have the actual piece of this thing that I now need to know is okay. So it sounds to me like a very nice, you're on your way to having some later maybe a representation of it, but now you've got the actual, the actual thing.

[14:35] Iain McGilchrist: That's wonderful. That's a lovely idea. Yes, you internalize the idea that this salt is okay because it's in me now.

[14:42] Michael Levin: The previous thing you asked, which is the key question, is how do you store pattern memories in these at all? One of the stories that we have is this. We've developed a voltage imaging method, which is brain imaging, except that instead of rapid spiking, what we're looking at is very stable, spatially distributed resting potentials in tissue. It's a much slower set of phenomena. What you can see in these planaria is that there's a particular pattern, and much like what we've seen in the face of the frog and the nascent brain of the frog, there's a pre-pattern that we've learned to decode. The pre-pattern indicates how many heads you're supposed to have. That pattern by default. I think what evolution has given us is an electric circuit with particular ion channels such that by default it settles onto an attractor that says one head. That's the pattern. Why does it mean one head? Because I'll describe in a minute: the cells interpret it. So it has this pattern. What we can do is not touch the genome whatsoever but give it a particular experience in physiological space using a blocker or an ionophore, various ion channels, and change that pattern so that it says 2 heads. When you do this, nothing happens until you injure the animal. You can have an animal that has a completely normal anatomy, so one head. It's got completely normal gene expression corresponding to a one-headed animal, but it has a different representation of what a correct planarian looks like. Because if we were to cut that animal, it would then use that pattern memory to build what it says, which is 2 heads. Prior to you doing that, it's a primitive counterfactual because it doesn't reflect what's going on right now. It's an early form of this mental time travel where you can hold on to an idea that it's not true. Either it's a memory of something that happened or it's a prediction of something that's going to happen, but it isn't a reflection of whatever inputs you're getting right now. You've got these schizophrenic worms that have a certain kind of body, but the memory of what constitutes a proper worm is quite different and it's already been rewritten. This is an early precursor. Then you have to work out how this pattern is interpreted. We have computational models that show how a collection of cells looks at a pattern. Not each cell reads its own voltage, but it's a group phenomenon. It only works in a group—how the collective of cells reads a pattern, and first of all decides whether that's correct or not, which is required for regeneration and repair, but also how it will decide which organs to make downstream. This is how in the frog we can now rewrite these patterns. We can put eyes on the tail and have six-legged frogs and things like this, because that's the reference point they're using. If you change the reference point, there's nothing else for them to compare it to. The same genetics, the same hardware will execute a completely different program. In fact, you can hop species this way. We've had planaria that make heads of other species. With 150 million years of evolutionary distance, no genetic change needed.

[18:27] Iain McGilchrist: Something very important about this: you use the word "attractor," which I think is interesting because, of course, it's a non-mechanical propulsion. It's a sort of drawing together from something that is exerting an influence, and where that is and what it is are interesting questions. You also use words like "compare" and "decide." But one's wondering what it is; it suggests some kind of decision making. Well, that's exactly what it is. Not just the following of something blindly, but actually a decision. And so this is intriguing. You said also that it doesn't work on the level of a single cell, but then it does, doesn't it, sometimes when parts of the cell that are remote from another part of a cell know that they need to be generating something that is deficient or defaulting in another part of the cell. So that is intriguing because that seems to happen at the single-cell, monocellular level.

[19:37] Michael Levin: When I said it doesn't happen, I just meant the bioelectrics is not, that's not the code. There's a different mechanism that will do that. You're absolutely right. One of the things that we did recently was to examine models of gene regulatory networks, which are extremely simple paradigms of deterministic genetic things. And what we found is that if you treat them as learning agents, meaning you pretend that the different nodes could be conditioned stimulus, unconditioned stimulus, response, they actually can exert six different kinds of memory. So they can do associative conditioning. They can do habituation, they can do sensitization, they can do associative learning, they can count to small numbers. And all of this is just in the super minimal kinds of model.

[20:35] Iain McGilchrist: Extraordinary. What a wonderful area to be working in. It's too late for me. I've hijacked things by plunging into things I wanted to ask you. I know there were things you wanted to ask me, so please feel free.

[20:52] Michael Levin: I have three things on my mind. I wanted to hear you talk about the asymmetries as broad as you want all the way up the scale to human life and so on. The other thing — I'll start with the second thing, because I think it's more self-contained and simple. I've been asking people this and I would like to hear your opinion. Imagine a discrete, positive experience, something pleasant that you enjoy; it doesn't matter what it is. I'm going to give you two choices. The first choice is that you will get this experience now, but then all memory of it will be wiped afterwards. You will have no memory of having had it. The other option is the exact opposite. I'm going to give you a memory of having had this experience and you will go on, but we're not going to actually do it; I'm going to implant the memory. I'd love to hear what you think about that and which you prefer. I found people split about 50-50 and they feel very strongly about which is obviously the thing to do.

[22:05] Iain McGilchrist: It contains one of the elements in many irresoluble philosophical problems: that it is so counterfactual. There are a number of these things that come up in my line. What does it mean? We have no way of knowing what it would mean to have a memory implanted, but there wasn't anything that caused it. If it's a real memory.

[22:36] Michael Levin: No, please, go ahead, go ahead.

[22:39] Iain McGilchrist: Let's assume a memory with all the force of the idea that it really has happened. What it draws me back to was when I was training as a doctor. I remember taking part of the number of endoscopies, and you would see somebody really suffering. They were squirming, they were in pain, and I thought, God, I never wanted to have one of these. I remember saying to the person who's doing it, what do you feel about this? They said, you go and talk to them afterwards. They have no memory of it at all. Then I thought, how would it feel if somebody said to me, I'm going to torture you within an inch of your life, but never mind, later you won't know anything about it. It struck me that this wasn't a satisfactory answer to say that the Valium or whatever it was would have wiped out the trace of it. I believe that at some level, experiences are stored even if they're not consciously stored and they are part of you, and your experiences make up who you are. It's just very difficult to say yes, you can do what you like as long as I don't remember it afterwards, because presumably there is a part of you that actually does remember it. I wouldn't know quite how to go with this because I'm not sure that memory is single. Since it's a thought experiment, you can set it up in any way you like. You can say, let's assume that you can't have any trace of memory or you must have absolutely full recall of this as though it were completely real. I've got an answer to that one.

[24:39] Michael Levin: I believe it was Tonegawa who did this and had examples of incepting false memories in mice of experiences they've never actually had. People are working on it, and I've seen papers from his lab and others where they are using optogenetics to give animals, right into the brain, a clumsy version of what would have been written if they had this experience. They trace what the experience would be and try to mimic it with optogenetic tools.

[25:21] Iain McGilchrist: How can we know what a mouse remembers? Do we have the knowledge to say that a whole experience is stored somewhere you can find physically in the brain?

[25:35] Michael Levin: I completely agree with you that I don't think we understand the encoding or where it's located or anything like that. But the kinds of work that he does look something like this. You have a mouse that experienced being in a particular cage and it was very pleasant. Later, you give this mouse an electric shock in some other environment and it's unpleasant. They can go in optogenetically and link those two experiences even though those two experiences never went together. Those mice, but not the control mice, when you put them in the cage, show all the evidence of being afraid that they're about to be shocked. The idea is you've created an association that never existed. The mouse has never been shocked in that environment. In fact, everything was fine in that environment. But you've now created an association. I'm not an expert in this stuff; I'm sure there are ways to critique it, but I think that's the evidence. It's this kind of behavioral result. What I find when people try to explain is this. One set of people will say, "All I have is memories of the past. Anything that happens now is going to be gone moments from now. All I have are my memories, and so the experience means nothing to me long-term. I collect memories of things, and that's what determines me: my memories. So I'll take the memory. The actual experience is too fleeting. I'll take the long-term memory." The other people say the opposite, and they say there is nothing but the current experience. "These memories, I can't even be sure of whether my memories are vertical or not. Who knows what happens with these memories. I want the actual experience and I am right now; it's me and I want to do this. So I pick now." It's exactly what you said. It's very much related to this torture-and-forget kind of thing. Because if somebody offered you $1,000,000 for that experience, you might think future me was going to wish I'd taken the money. Present me doesn't want, doesn't like it, but future me is going to say, "You dummy, you should have taken the money. I'd be in great shape now. I wouldn't have the trauma, but I'd have the million bucks."

[27:56] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, another thing.

[27:58] Michael Levin: Yeah, please go ahead. Okay.

[27:59] Iain McGilchrist: Go on.

[28:00] Michael Levin: I think this really gets at the core of how people think about themselves and whether they're persistent or right.

[28:09] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, well, there's a lot to say about that. One immediate observation is that it is absolutely impossible to recapture the rapture of a transcendentally wonderful experience. You had it in a technical way. It's there in the memory. But you can't remember what it is, much as, thank goodness, you can't remember what it was like to be in terrific pain. When you're in the pain, it's the time you know about it. So the memory is not really worth having. To that extent, it's only the having it that matters. But on the other hand, if what it has communicated to you and told you cannot be taken forward in your life, then that's also hugely diminished in value. Our personalities, our preferences, our whole character or person are made out of the experiences and the reactions to those experiences that go to weave a very rich tapestry. And so if they simply don't get to be stored anywhere or become part of the picture, then they've been rather pointless. So in a way, what you've done is you've eliminated how each of these is really rather pointless on its own. You've made a beautiful argument for the necessity of a degree of permanence. And the probably more interesting point that needs to be made is about the continuity of persons. As you know, in "The Matter with Things," I have a lot to say about time and flow through time. And essentially a difference which you can find already in the way in which people respond to Zeno's paradoxes between the idea of time or space as made up of an infinite number of fragments, and the continuous space, the continuous extension in space or time, and the continuity of the person. Now, it seems to me that this is distinctly, and I have quite a lot of neuro-pathological evidence about this, that the left hemisphere tends to fragment the flow of time into this now, but there's no continuity between them. And it has the same problem in causing space to have what Bergson called durée. As you get from the point, how do you get from a point to a line? What is a line? Well, it's an infinite number of points. Well, no, it isn't actually, because a point doesn't have any extension. And so you can add as many as you like. You will never produce extension. There's a difference between extension and particularity. And there is also in time and there is also in the experience of the person, which is more like a piece of music.

[31:10] Iain McGilchrist: So all of these things have the continuity of a piece of music. Where you can find a note, but it doesn't constitute anything on its own. So what I think is that the left hemisphere tends to say, I am just this here, and I and the world have to be recreated all the time. In fact, Descartes said this. Descartes thought that everything had to be recreated moment by moment, because otherwise, how would there be me now and me a minute ago? Now that seems to me to be a problem that you get into when you're using this kind of left hemisphere thinking, which introduces all kinds of other problems, like how do I know when I look out of the window and see somebody down there in the square outside the house? How do I know that they're not an automaton dressed in a man's hat and cloak? Which is another thing he asked. These are typical problems for people with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is very much like a condition of left hemisphere overdrive with the right hemisphere attenuating. The important thing about the right hemisphere is that which produces continuity and sees the whole. For the right hemisphere, a fragment is never just a bit and a whole made-up of those bits. Everything is a whole at its own level. So a whole is made-up of things that are wholes at another level, which are also wholes. I can't remember what exactly you were describing, but this is in a way a kind of fractality in nature. I don't mean just human nature. I mean, I think in the order of things that we can know. So with the right hemisphere at work, it seems obvious that I am continuous with my former self. But for people who don't have that insight, they see it as a problem. How do I now relate to myself in the past? Famously, both a friend and a colleague at All Souls, Derek Parfit, the philosopher, believed that there was no particular continuity between the person and the same person in the past or in the future. He was, admittedly, a very brilliant autistic person. Autism has some of these same very strongly left hemispheric tendencies in it. I think it depends on how you think of yourself. For anyone who sees themselves as an evolving process rather than a thing followed by another thing followed by another thing. In other words, more like a river than a train of trucks where each truck is linked to the next one, it is a problem breaking up a person's experience in the way that you have just described.

[34:13] Michael Levin: Interesting. I didn't realize. I've been playing around with this idea of having to be recreated moment by moment. I didn't know that Descartes already said this.

[34:28] Iain McGilchrist: And as I say, he's not alone. Parfit didn't say exactly that, but he did atomize, in a way, the flow of the person, the experience of the time, by seeing it as slices. This time-slicing or space-slicing, and the two-dimensionality that goes with it, is typical of two things: people who have right hemisphere brain damage and people who have schizophrenia. In "The Matter with Things," I have an old chapter, chapter 9, on the parallels between right hemisphere brain damage and the phenomenology of schizophrenia. It's fascinating, because schizophrenia is not as unusual, and it's also a spectrum. So people who are on the schizo-autistic spectrum may display many of the phenomena of the full-blown condition up to a point. And it influences the way they think about what it is they're looking at.

[35:28] Michael Levin: The other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on, which relates to this issue of identity and so on, is a story of a therapist who had a patient, and the patient developed a problem with dissociative identity disorder. What would happen is he had this other personality; the patient had a job, and there's this other personality that likes to have fun, doesn't like to go to work, and he would pop up in the middle of the day and mess up his career. They're working with the patient on integration to try to pull it together. One day he walks in and it's the other personality. He says to the therapist, "What's this I hear about integration?" The doctor says, "We'll integrate you to be better." He says, "Integrate? What's going to happen to me?" The doctor says, "You'll be gone and it'll just be the other guy that knows how to go to work." He says, "Excuse me. What happened to your Hippocratic oath? I don't want to be gone. Make the other guy gone. I have a life. All he does is go to work all day. Have him gone. I'd like to run the show." The therapist has a real problem, because if he does his job, that personality, which is not a tick or a reflex, is a full-blown thing that can talk to you, knows what the Hippocratic oath is, and has rational reasons. It'll be gone in some sense. I wanted to hear you talk about that and what you think about those kinds of issues.

[37:15] Iain McGilchrist: Well, you've hit on another fascinating topic there. Dissociative identity disorder is very problematic. We do know from the viability of hypnosis that different aspects of a person can be suppressed or brought forward. We don't know how. I don't think anybody understands how hypnosis works. Bernardo Kastrap actually describes doing an experiment, maybe not done by him, but in which a subject with dissociative identity disorder is given an EEG, and she claims she's blind, and the areas of her visual cortex — there's nothing wrong with them; normally they do work, but they just are absolutely not responding. So some kind of suggestion or some kind of self-suggestion can make bits of the person temporally suppressed or repressed or whatever one likes to call it. I'm not saying that this is anything to do with the two hemispheres, but it is nonetheless experimentally verifiable that by suppressing one hemisphere at a time, you can produce different aspects of cognitive and emotional functioning in individuals. We used to be very much reliant on split-brain procedures. Those patients are relatively few and far between now, but it's well known that after the procedure for a while — although the astonishing thing was that they functioned remarkably normally — it was possible for them to be in manual conflict. So one person would pick the flame-coloured dress out of the cupboard and the other one with the other hand would put it back and take out a black one. So you've got that kind of problem going on, which sounds a little bit like the patient you described. We do know that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different values. One of the world's authorities on brain lateral asymmetry is on record as saying that, effectively, "I believe McGilchrist is right, that the two hemispheres instantiate different parts of a person." So I think that's the way I would think of it. It's a mistake to think that for most of us, two halves of our brain are constantly at war. It's not like that. That's a very crude and inaccurate way of thinking. But it is nonetheless possible that we are harmonizing and balancing different ways of looking at the world that come from different parts of our mind, and most probably from different parts of our brain. So that's the way I would think about that. I like it because it is a demonstration of the fact that we're not always just this integrated entity that we think we are.

[40:34] Michael Levin: Yeah.

[40:35] Iain McGilchrist: I thank God for most purposes, we do a pretty passable show of being an integrated entity.

[40:43] Michael Levin: The experiment that you talk about with the visual region being silenced, I think, is really interesting. It sounds to me like an example of a more general dynamic, which is this top-down control, and this goes to placebo effects and normal functioning. I say to people, if I told you that with the power of my mind I can depolarize 30% of my body's voltage and say, you're crazy, I say this is what you do when you voluntarily get out of bed in the morning. You decide you're going to stand up, and what you've done is depolarize a bunch of muscle fibers. So this high-level executive control you can muster to do voluntary actions has to control electrical states in cells. So there has to be this: we're currently writing this piece on the intersection between pharmacology and beliefs and placebo. I think it's hugely important because that's where you cross levels. Normally, hypno dermatology, Albert Mason's kind of stuff, where he was treating skin diseases and getting new skin cells to pop up. So what do you think about this issue of transcending levels, from a belief structure in the top-level control down to cells?

[42:19] Iain McGilchrist: It's fantastically important, and it's a pure dogma of a kind of science that is less scientific than it should be, that such things can't happen. The idea that mind cannot change or have an impact on matter is ridiculous. Of course it does. The placebo effect is a perfect example. Indeed, even things like cognitive behavioral therapy, if you believe that improvement in levels of depression and anxiety is dependent on changes that can be measured in various neuroendocrine functions and neurochemical changes in the brain, then CBT is dependent on getting you to think differently. Your brain actually changes. So it's very clear. And I have quite a lot to say about that in a long chapter on consciousness and matter, in which I effectively suggest that it is actually completely irrational to suppose that consciousness can somehow simply emanate from matter unless you have a different idea of matter, which I'm perfectly happy with, that matter is no mere matter. I often say materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter. We don't really know what matter is. Matter is capable of amazing things. I mean, if matter is all that is making you and me have this conversation, then matter is bloody amazing. So I take the view that matter and consciousness are not wholly distinct and that they are in fact, manifestations at different levels, or to put it a different way, phases of the same elemental entity. So much as water can look like the stuff that passes my house in a stream and is translucent and can run over your hand and there it is, it can also be a block of ice, such as we had last week, which is immovable, opaque and doesn't go anywhere until you move it, or it can be in this room and you can't see it, but without it, I couldn't breathe. So water has phases that don't look like one another, but I think consciousness has phases that don't look like one another. I would say that matter is an importantly resistant element in consciousness, because I believe for reasons that are probably too long to go into here, but people can find out more by reading "The Matter With Things". I believe that resistance is essential to the coming into being of something. The creation of something is not done by a mere single pathway or gesture, but it requires some hurdle to be overcome, some resistance to shape it. As William James says, "My voice is the air that comes from my lungs. But if I didn't have an obstruction in my throat called my larynx, I would have no voice." So it's actually the larynx; all it does is obstruct the flow, but it gives him his voice. So it's a bit like that. Perhaps I'm getting too far away from bioelectric currents. But maybe not.

[45:34] Michael Levin: I don't think it's that far away at all. And I think I'm in complete agreement with people like Chris Fields and Carl Friston really trying to give a different account of matter that really places it as a phase, exactly as you said, as a behavior of mind that is more fundamental. I think that's exactly right. Towards the end here, I'd love to get your thoughts on a more personal, not necessarily for you and me, but for anybody. What would you say is the — what do we take away from all this on a personal level? We can do science and we can do scholarship, but what do you think are life lessons here? What does this mean for us in terms of beings?

[46:34] Iain McGilchrist: I think there's a lot, but the most important thing to go to would be the concept of attention, because it is the fundamental difference between the two hemispheres. And this is not something that I've come up with on my own. It's a very well-known fact that the left and right hemispheres pay attention to the world in different ways. I don't think you'll find any neurologists who would dispute that. The difference is largely that one offers detailed, focused, very narrow attention to a detail in order to acquire it. It's narrow, it's detailed, it's highly focused, and it's just something that we already know what it is, and we know we want it. The other attention is doing everything else, so that while you're getting and grabbing, you're not going to be got and grabbed by something else. It's looking at the whole picture. Its attention is broad, open, sustained, everything the left hemisphere attention isn't, and completely uncommitted as to what it may find. It might find a predator, which is very important news, or it might find your conspecific, which is equally important news. It is a highly relational attention to something that is constantly reverberative, modifying itself according to what it's finding, and is not integrating because its attention is already integral. It doesn't need to integrate the fragments. The fragments come from the left hemisphere's attention. If you think about it, how you attend to something utterly changes what you find. If you adopt a certain highly detached, rationalistic, absent way of looking at something, you see a mathematical pattern or you see a mechanism, but you don't see the rest. I sometimes say where I live in Skye, there's a mountain behind my house. The name of this place is Taliska, which comes from a Norse word meaning the sloping rock. We know what this place meant to Norsemen. It meant a landmark, which means danger, because there's a very dangerous bay here for shipwreck. But that same place was something completely different to the Picts who lived in the shadow of it and who found shelter there and saw it as the home of the gods. When people travelled here in the 18th century, they saw the mountain as a wonderful, many-coloured shape to paint and draw. In the 19th century, they realised it was an exquisite example of columnar basalt. To a physicist, it's 99.99% space. Even the other 0.01% we don't know what it is. Which of these is a real mountain? There isn't a real mountain. There are all different ways of experiencing that mountain. If you take that as a metaphor for the way we experience life and the world, we can see many different things there.

[50:06] Iain McGilchrist: And if we adopt this very narrow window of a hyper-rationalistic, nothing against reason, I think the cult of reason and the neglect of science in our age are far more important than the supposed subjugation of everything to them. We're not scientific enough because we have dogmas which rule out various possibilities that I sense you and I might be more open to. And I think it's very irrational of us to adopt many of the positions that seem rationalistic on the surface, formulaically, theoretically, but are not rational at all if you think about the whole business of human life. So what I'm really saying is that I think the whole purpose of writing this last book, "The Matter with Things", which is a pun on several levels, is that we have adopted a very reductionist, materialist vision of the world, and we don't have to cast away either science or reason. In fact, we need to embrace what science tells us and what reason tells us more wholeheartedly, and we will see that there is a much richer, more complex, more beautiful entity there that we are in connection with and that it is our privilege, duty, whatever, while we're here to respond to it. And so I'm painting a different picture. You ask, what is the payoff of this for us as human beings? And the answer is, I think it can radically change people's lives and not to appear to be saying how marvellous the book is, it is a fact that I constantly get from all over the world people writing to say, "your book has had a total impact on the way I think about things, my life is better, my work is better, my marriage is better," whatever. So something is changing in people. And I think that's real. Tell me it's not. I don't believe you. So that's what I'd say. It has philosophical importance, but it has everyday importance. I'll just say something about the philosophical importance. Up till now, we've only been able to say when it comes to arguing a matter in philosophy, well, this school thought this, school thought that. Take your pick. And so philosophy has gone on in this way. But what I think I've been able to offer is that we can see the imprint of a left hemispheric, limited way of thinking on how we would take the world. And we can see the hallmark, if you like, of viewing the world as the right hemisphere would see it. And what I've undertaken to show is that the left hemisphere is more prone to delusion, more mistaken, less reliable than the right hemisphere. Now, if that is the case, someone can try to refute it. I've drawn on a vast body of literature. If that is the case, then when we take the well-known paradoxes and I look at about 30 in chapter 16 of "The Matter with Things", you can see that one way of looking at this paradox is the way the left hemisphere would take it. And the other way of looking at it is the way the right hemisphere would be. So for example, according to the left hemisphere, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise. It's just impossible. But everybody knows that Achilles can easily overtake the tortoise in two or three strides. So what I think I can show is that there are at least four aspects of that particular paradox that show that the reason we get caught up in it is because we've espoused the left hemisphere way of looking at it. When we look at it from the right hemisphere's way of looking at it, there isn't a problem anymore. Now, if that is the case, and if I'm right, then I have actually added in a modest way something to the history of philosophy, which is that we can now make more weighted decisions about which path is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful.

[53:40] Michael Levin: Super interesting. I'm not surprised that people react that way to your work. It's so important. People, I think, are really looking for that. I get emails all the time from people looking for meaning in their life and saying so. In fact, with a couple of collaborators, we're actually trying to tackle this thing, the loss of meaning. With physics, with evolutionary theory, some of these things have drained away, some of the stuff we used to lean on — and some of that is correct because we weren't looking at it the right way — but it needs a replacement. We need to build it back up. It's fine to destroy some of those things, but then we need to build it back up in a better-grounded, more meaningful way.

[54:40] Iain McGilchrist: I couldn't agree with you more. And from my point of view, it is not part of the left hemisphere's evolution that it should be looking for meaning. It's looking for stuff, things. And that's why I say the matter with things. Whereas the right hemisphere is actually interested in purpose, in meaning, in what is all this about. And what we now believe is that we're meaning-seeking animals, and that we must have meaning. So we invent meaning. But I say, no, it's not that we invent meaning. It's that we either do or don't discover meaning. The meaning is not something we made up. The meaning is part of the process of living if looked at more fully. What we are looking for is often a substitute for that, which we can paint onto reality and say, this is the meaning I've found to paint onto it. But that actually gets between us and what the meaning is. And don't ask me to say in a few words what the meaning is because I'm talking about something that transcends language.

[55:48] Michael Levin: So much to think about. I've taken a bunch of notes here. Thank you so much. This has been incredibly enjoyable. I'll follow up. I have many other questions later.

[56:03] Iain McGilchrist: It's been a huge pleasure for me too, Michael, and thank you for your time. I'd love to do something again with you at any point.

[56:13] Michael Levin: Wonderful.

Iain McGilchrist: So thanks a lot.

[56:15] Michael Levin: Thank you so much. I'll be in touch again. Very interesting.

[56:19] Iain McGilchrist: OK, good. All right. Good.

[56:20] Michael Levin: Bye. Have a good one.

[56:22] Iain McGilchrist: And are we still recording?

[56:24] Michael Levin: I'll send you a copy.

[56:28] Iain McGilchrist: OK, that's good.

Conversation of Michael Levin with Iain McGilchrist

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