Our Divided Nature & Reasons for Hope: A Conversation with Dr Iain McGilchrist
Vložit
- čas přidán 2. 11. 2022
- Psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar, Dr Iain McGilchrist are joined by American School of the Hague students Antonia and Erwan and International Baccalaureate Director General Olli-Pekka Heinonen to talk about how our divided brains have divided nature and how we might respond.
Join us here: ibo.org/festival-of-hope/
"Education is that what remains when you forget everything you have learnt at school" ~ A. Einstein
Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me....
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact that the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by consciousness endeavor. It is something to be able to paint or carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium, though which we look....To affect the highest quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.
Thoreau, Walden
Thankfully, we all have the availability to listen to Dr. Iian McGilchrist and to all of you who support a new way to observe life and grow with his books.
Appreciative of Antonia and Erwan’s candid comments at the end. Very useful as a point of reflection since I am an IB Educator. Perhaps we are too results driven (left hemisphere) and instead need to focus more on understanding our deep connections (right hemisphere).
Having gone through the IB program during high-school, I'm proud to report that I've successfully disabused myself of everything I picked up during it. This includes the hollow success-oriented culture and the loss of real friendships thereby, the total dismissal of any profound cultural perspective or inheritance, and the parody of benevolence suggested by the program's extra-curricular requirements. One may become a great person and better student simply by listening to Bach, reading Shakespeare, or stepping into a cathedral, all three providing large parts of my cure; these are especially urgent alternatives, compared to malforming the minds of ordinary (or worse, extraordinary) teenagers by deafening/blinding them to real beauty and achievement.
Superb..... Compassion
Depth!
Has Iain's book laid the intellectual platform for a rivival of resurrection philosophy as we experience an age of consequence, an age of prophecy? Iain lives in Scotland & if you care to contemplate Iain's theory of the brain & our grasping needs of survival alongside R.D. Laing's dictum: "we are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced during infancy," you may begin to understand the grasping nature of the mind? IMHO Iain's Achilles Heel is a conceptual level of consciousness that doesn't self-cross-examine the momentary nature of his own experience. He likes to use the metaphor of a river outside his house yet doesn't grasp how this famous motif applies to his flow-state experience of attention + awareness too stuck in a process of reifying reality by grasping ideas of reality. A behavioral pattern we adapt to while learning to grasp objects with our hands & idea's with our minds.
a wise philosophical contribution David...we are all indeed swimming in the river while viewing it...nevertheless, McGilcrist offers some directions for action...without which we will be swept away by the river
The division of the left and the right hemisphere of the brain is directly connected to the fragmentation of the body and mind. This fragmentation is caused by the nature of the content in the modern educational paradigm which is using linguistic information as readymade knowledge and the nature of the process used which is top-down (teaching-oriented).
Rationality comes from the nature of the content itself as the only way linguistic data can be given is in a very organized way. Organized input wires the brain not to do any further processing but to use reason to store this information. The second reason is again the nature of the content which is in the realm of ‘known’, certain, complete - knowledge as a product. The questioning mind is killed when children are fed with readymade information and the only way the brain can organize this input is by using make-believe reason. This means there is no need for observation, staying with exploration, having doubts, etc. If the learner is encountering.
The holistic brain is formed when it is encountering the real world autonomously. The real word awakens the senses and makes the learner open, and the ever-changing nature of the content makes the learner observant, open, explorative, and humble. This also enables the retention of curiosity, mystery, and wonder.
The integrity of the real world and the nature of cognizing the world retain the integrity of the body and mind. One thing that the modern educated have not understood is that the world can only be accessed and experienced by the senses and it is through senses that the mind gets to know the world. This means the body and mind have to function together to comprehend the world.
The only way to address the alienation and fragmentation of modern man is by re-imagining the cognitive conditions that we provide to children.
Perhaps more books, tv shows, podcasts, dramas, class rooms, book clubs, would put into practice what Dr Mcgilchrist suggests. Very importantly always makes time for tea and chat at any the slightest opportunity.
What if education itself is the cause of the domination of the left brain over the right brain?
The present educational paradigm can never solve this problem because it is teaching-based. When has anyone spoken about knowledge creation in the present paradigm or asked what is the process that leads to knowledge creation? It is taken for granted that what needs to be done is to transfer ready-made information masquerading as knowledge.
Even though human beings are equipped by life to create knowledge of the real WORLD- autonomously we are being trained from childhood to analyze LINGUISTIC information. We are solely existing in the realm of language and mind which is the left brain. We have hardly ever used our bodies and sense in our whole educational paradigm.
Literates learn the WORD where as illiterates learn the WORLD and it looks like the fragmentation of the left and right hemispheres is a problem of the educated minds. The indigenous knowledge system is by default based on sustainability and unlike modern knowledge, not an afterthought.
We have to reimagine the whole modern paradigm based on how we are biologically equipped to learn and create knowledge as this knowledge is bound to be sustainable. There are some fundamental differences between these two paradigms and it is worth exploring this without any bias. The notion of ‘progress’ gives the west a superiority complex and find it difficult to learn from and about the indigenous cognitive proves.
Check out this very original exploration of why what and how children create knowledge czcams.com/video/EAY_t0Ad0Ew/video.html
Consequences of LITERACY - Exploring the impact of literacy on the formation of 'beingness' czcams.com/video/WG9uJN-UoSc/video.html
www.jinankb.in