Iain McGilchrist: Great discoveries are not made following the scientific method

We assume advances in science are driven by rigorous adherence to the scientific method. Reductive analysis, reason, and evidence are said to be the engines of progress. But according to world-renowned psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, the great advances in science occur not by following a rigid set of rules, but by breaking them. In conversation with Oliver Adelson, he argues that only by seeing the world in its holistic, interconnected form are we able to make the leaps of logic which science needs to discover new paradigms.

Oliver Adelson: The left hemisphere of the brain is said to be the rational, analytic side. And yet it’s your contention that what we’ve had is too much, not too little, of left hemisphere thinking. Can you explain what led you to this view?

Iain McGilchrist: What we’ve got here are two halves of the brain. For evolutionary reasons, all creatures have had to develop two ways of attending to the world, and one is with a very narrow, targeted attention to a detail—they already know what it is, and they know they want to get it, and having it will make them powerful. So that’s very important. One whole half of the brain is dedicated basically to that process. The other half of the brain is doing everything else. It has open, sustained attention to everything, and this is the one that actually understands the whole.

Now, when you come to look at how they construe the world, the left hemisphere sees the world as made up of bits. And the bits are separate from one another. They don’t change, they don’t move, they are fully known, they are explicit. They’re also abstract, they’re taken out of context, they’re categorical in nature, and effectively inanimate—something like a diagram or a map of the world rather than the world itself.

The right hemisphere, however, sees the closest we get to knowing what the world is like. It sees a world in which everything is connected, in which everything is not fixed and unchangeable, but is constantly flowing and changing, in which the implicit is vastly more important than the explicit, in which context is everything. Things are unique and they’re not just exemplars of categories. And this world is a living world, and it presences to us, as Heidegger would have said, rather than just being represented in the way the world of the left is. So that’s it in a very, very brief nutshell.

If the relationship between the world presented by the left hemisphere and reality isn’t simply a mirror relationship, if the left hemisphere doesn’t just mirror reality with its categorical bits—what then is the relationship between the world presented by the right hemisphere and reality? Do you think that is a sort of mirror of the way that reality is, or we need to discard the mirror metaphor altogether?

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I would suggest that the right-brain skill is not in immersion in experience, but in pattern matching. This provides us the axioms that fuel rationality (logic and calculation). What troubles theoretical physics is that subscription to the fascination for symmetry that mathematics has been exploring for the last two centuries. The right-hemisphere activity has been focused towards reconciliation of the different fields of mathematical study. When turned towards physics, however, it has fostered a divorce from simple facts.

This feeds into my delight regarding the question of consciousness. I not only agree with McGilchrist, I can explain. Among the fermions, mass is found only with the charged particles. In other words, mass arises from the binding of charge to what the general relativity specialist loosely speak of as the "fabric of space." From the pattern of fermion generations, it should be clear that the two more massive generations are excitations of the lightest generation, with each excitation being more disrupted to the "fabric of space." This implies that the fermions, currently considered "fundamental," possess another layer of discrete structure, just as did molecules, atoms, and nucleons.

If the fermions have discrete structure, then the best way to understand the weak interactions is as the mechanism by which charge is exchange between them. This means that charge is separable. If it is separable, then it is possible for it to float freely in the fabric of space.

To build a complete picture, we need a model of the fabric of space. This is the subject of my paper, "Mass and the Structure of the Void." But what is inescapable is that spiritual experience reflects interactions between charge that is not bound to the fabric of space (as a fermion). It is in those interactions that consciousness first arose.

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