Start the Week

15/11/2010

Andrew Marr talks to the forensic psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead about the medicalisation of evil. While human nature in a different guise is explored through William Boyd's literary everyman, Logan Mounstuart, who moves from the page to tv screen in the adaptation of his novel, Any Human Heart. The poet Craig Raine compares the composition of a poem to the art of dress-making: "We are waiting till it feels exact,/ ruthless till we feel the fit." And the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist concludes that the problem with modern society can be found in the left side of our brain.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 15 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello. Now I don't want to cause a quiver of unease, but if we have a theme today, it is how we ruin our lives, or at least fail in early promise. Gwen Ad said it's a forensic psychotherapist at Broadmoor, dealing with some of the most dangerous people in Britain. Ruined pieces of nature, she calls them after Shakespeare. Craig Rain, poet critic and novelist, reflects on his mother's death, an old relationship, and the bitchy, dried-out lives of Oxbridge Donnes in his new collection, How Snow Falls. And later on, we're going to try to draw together some wider lessons about how our struggling and divided brains shape our lives with Ian McGill-Christ, who, like Ad said, has worked with a mentally ill as consultant psychiatrist. And, like Rain, was long and Oxford Donne. We're going to start, however, with the novelist William Boyd, and a life of early promise, which flags and stumbles. Not I hasten to add. William Boyd's life, but that of his protagonist, Logan Mount Stewart, in any human heart, which arrives on Channel 4 next week as a winter blockbuster. William Boyd, let's just talk about Logan Mount Stewart to give people a sense if they haven't read the book yet. This is a man who is a, sort of, classic 1920s, 1930s, rising literary figure. Yes, he's a young man who has a huge success with his first novel called The Girl Factory, rather racy, shocking tale that sells in vast quantities. And so he peeks too early in a way. You see this happening with all sorts of people, but the story of his life is really the long slide downhill from that early peak. And, in fact, you could find representatives of Logan types throughout all literatures, I suspect. But certainly, the 20th century English literature provides us with a good few. The Cyril Connolly, who's famously talked about the enemies of promise, all those things which stop people, any of us, achieving what we might think we can hope to. Yes, I mean, Cyril Connolly is one of my favourite writers, a very lazy man, though he kept writing right up to the end. The real model is a man called William Gehardy, who's completely forgotten nowadays. But in the 1920s, it was a fantastically famous young writer. Publishers last book in 1940 died in 1977, so there were 37 years of silence and neglect and oblivion and poverty. So he's a terrible warning to us all in the writing profession. William Gehardy, the wheels can fall off and your life can turn into something that you never envisaged. So it's a long, rakety roller coaster of a life that I'm telling, though it has some of the three models at the background. And for those people wondering how this can possibly be turned into a television blockbuster, it should be told through his journals. He's also a man who sort of ricochets across much of the sort of interesting landscape of the Spanish Civil War. The war, he meets Big Casso, he meets the Duke of Wales before he becomes King Edward VIII and indeed afterwards. Yes, no, he, it's a long life. I wanted to write and tell the story, as we do in the television films, of a long life. He's born in 1906 and he dies in 1991, so he lives in every decade of the 20th century. And because he's a writer, perforce, he meets some interesting people, Virginia Woolf, for example, Ernest Hemingway. Entirely plausibly, I think, you know, I think back to my own life and people I happen to have bumped into. And Logan is typical in that way. I think the most unlikely one is probably his relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which turns very poisonous at the end. But one of the wonderful things about writing a novel or adapting the novel for a film is that you can explore characters and situations that intrigue and fascinate you and I have not held back. You certainly haven't, and including in the case of the Duke of Windsor, where he was governor of the Bahamas during the Second World War. Yes. And you thought that you feel that he's implicated in a terrible cover-up over a murder. Yes, I'm absolutely convinced that I've proved the case against the Duke of Windsor for conspiring to prefer the course of justice. He was packed off to the Bahamas to be governor during, for the entire length of World War II, just to get him out of the way. But while he was there, there was a brutal murder of the richest man on the island and the Duke called in to corrupt Miami detectives to kind of fit up a playboy figure who was the murdered man son-in-law. And I, you know, I send all the evidence and I think that the case I make is pretty damning, but of course, he was never asked and never questioned, but though it was a sore point later on in his life. So it was, that was one of the episodes that Logan's long and rambunctious life allowed me to investigate and pour over. Comparing the novel and the television adaptation of it, it seems to me that the main thing is to find almost a visual connectives, in this case, girlfriends. You strip away quite a lot of the novel or a little stripped away in order to provide a kind of thumping narrative system. Yes, because the novel is a world of absolute freedom and film is a world of constraints and parameters. And when you move from one art form to the other, as I have done, you suddenly realise how lucky you are to be writing novels, because it's very difficult. Film is photography is relentlessly ruthlessly objective and of course the novel is effortlessly subjective. So we had to find ourselves a narrative structure that would allow us to give shape to Logan's life. And so we, because he has three wives and lots of girlfriends that the story of his love life in a way is the best narrative skeleton on which to place our sumptuous flesh. Gwynn Ad said we were mentioning a violent murder there and we'll come on to talk about Broadmoor. Do you actually, do you pick up crime books, do you pick up novels and recognise anything of your subjects or in terms of fiction, do you think that the sort of inner life of the killer and so on is something that actually fictional writers never get close to? Oh, no, I don't think so. No, I love detective fiction and many of my colleagues also love detective fiction, because I guess that for me, anyway, that detective fiction is doing exactly or something very similar to what we're trying to do in the hospital, which is trying to understand, it is indeed trying to understand the mind of somebody who does something violent. And indeed, there's a sort of parallel here because for me, anyway, I like the, I like the procedurals and the ones with the story where you're trying to explore the motives of the person who's acting. But we have the, you see, we have the criminal, but we're also trying to find out what happened. The book, no, the books I really dislike most are the sort of mad serial killers. They are monstrously dull, monstrously, monstrously dull in my view. But I wondered if I could ask Gwynn in my question, because I was very struck by the, you say in the book that everybody's a construction of selves through time, and I think that's a very interesting idea, but I was also wondering to what extent people are a construction of the relationships they've had, along the lines that you've just been saying. It's my theory, and it fits the project of the book, that we become different people as we age, and things happen to us. And I, at the age of 58, I think I'm a different person from the person I was at the age of 18, and luckily I have the journals to prove it. I kept journals between the age of 18 and 20, and I just don't see myself as that anguished, tormented, moody soul. Craig Ren. Yeah, Tom Stoppard in Howgood has a marvellous thing where he says, you know, when you sleep at night, you know, you are all these kind of different people, and when you wake up in the morning, you choose the kind of personality you build, and it's clear that we all of us have the same paintbox. You know, we have black at one end, and we have yellow at the other, and all these possibilities are there in all of us, and somehow we kind of choose a limited few, but they're all open there, and they're all there, I think. And we'll come on to talk about your project collection in a little while, but the notion of later in life looking back at some of the possibilities of the other cells one could have been and feeling regret and perplexity at how one's ended up with this one is something I think common to a lot of what's being talked about today. Actually, I don't think you, I mean, I think it's true that you do change, but I don't think you leave behind the old cells and the old loyalties. I think they're there. I have somewhere, so this is rather name-dropping, but over up, up-dike, where he says, he's commenting about one of my poems, and he said, the thing is, one wants to revisit all one's old girlfriends constantly, and he has a story in which he discusses the different textures of women's behinds, and actually, of course, they are very different, and that's the kind of stuff that never goes away, so you change- I'm not sure that's a kind of start-the-week discussion of intriguing and interesting though, it certainly is. It is also somewhat gendered, I find myself wondering whether women might feel that they're menfolk in the same way, but I do agree with you, there's something about, you just say it makes me think about music and the idea of traces, of moral traces, and the idea to which the people that you meet leave traces in your lives, they get incorporated into your lives, and when you lose them, what you're losing, you have to reorganize your identity around the loss of them, and this is much in my mind, I've lost two or three people I've been very close to in the last 12 months, and very conscious of reorganizing my identity around those losses. Do you dream about them? Yes, yes, I do. And that's an interesting thing, is it not? Yes. You have this vivid dream and it stays with you all day and colours of the day, so they never really go away. I think they're sort of, that's really what ghosts mean. Or you can reconfigure the narrative of your life, depending on what's happened to you, or depending on what set of colours you're using, and I'm thinking of your patience abroad more, and the fact that you encourage them to construct a kind of narrative that maybe explains how they ended up in this terrible situation, done the terrible things they've done. But it's a bit like Logan Mount Stewart reconfering his life through all the women he knew. You can do it by all the illnesses you've had, or all the houses you've lived in, or something like that. So there are ways and means of reshaping the story of your own life depending on your mood. You know, thinking of stories when I said, I was wondering as if a simplistic way, what do you actually do at Broadmoor? Is it about giving these incredibly dangerous people who will never be at liberty, new stories or clearer stories about what has happened to them in their lives that allows them to start to think about and explain at least to themselves what has happened to them? Yes, I think that's a part of what we do. There's a fairly straightforward type of medical psychiatric part in which we admit and we make diagnosis and we treat for those diagnosis, and that's fairly straightforward. And then there's an aspect about risk reduction, because as you say, most of our people have done something very frightening, and helping them become less dangerous. The idea that they will leave the hospital a bit more secure inside than they were when they arrived is an important goal. That's an important aspect. And when they leave Broadmoor, they will be going probably to another institution. To another secure, yes. Very few of our people, almost unheard of for anybody to go straight from the hospital into the community. But I think in terms of the psychological therapies of what we do, I think constructing a story or looking at the story that they tell and reconstructing it is a very important part of what happens, because people come in with a number of different narratives. There's a narrative that the court tells about them, and then there's the narrative that perhaps the tabloid press, or their victims, or tell about them. There's a narrative, the medical narrative of this disease, or this disorder that helped to make the violence more possible and more likely. But then there's a narrative who they themselves think they are and what happened. And of course, there are many of our people will arrive with a very distorted and deranged type of narrative, which may involve paranoia. So, it may involve the devil, it may involve spirits, it may involve powers, CIA, telepathy, all sorts of things. And then the idea, I think, is to move, try and help people to reorganize a narrative and to say, well, yes, I was mentally ill when I did it, but to, yes, actually, I did this thing. And now, where do I go? Because without a strong sense of, without a sense of I or identity at the middle of it, you can't have any kind of moral responsibility, which is, I suppose, where all of this is heading, because it seems to be that you've got, that you can tell stories, true stories about the shape of the brain and different disordered, disordered rings inside the brain, and also about the way people have been brought up, childhood abuse and cruelty early and so forth. And yet, at the end, you have to arrive at some sense of, of individual moral responsibility, don't you? And I think that's, I think that's exactly where it's at. And that's interesting how these things converge, because many of the mental disorders that Dean and I are familiar with, actually, impair people's sense of agency, you know, classic, I'm being pushed about or prescribed by some sort of force, but then childhood abuse and neglect also impairs your sense of agency, and so people come up with narratives of being done to all the times, always somebody else's fault, it's never their own. And what is very clear, particularly from the rehabilitative literature with offenders, is that actually, if you need to be able to achieve a greater sense of agency of owning your own story, because if you own your own story, you can change it, but you can transform it. But if it's constantly just happening to you, and this, of course, comes out in William's novel, that Logan actually has a life that he is living as an agent. He's not just being done to. They may have, it has a roller coaster of ups and downs, but he engages with it. Ian McGill, Chris, you worked in the morn's life a long time in a very different institution, of course, but in London. Yeah. Now, I was fascinated by this idea of narrative and explanation, and I wonder how much, when you think that is to do with our need to make sense of it. I noticed that you mentioned that some of your patients very much resist the narratives that are given to them, and indeed resist all the sorts of explanation that we give, and I was thinking of Iago, and that moment, when he says, demand me nothing, what you know, you know, from this time forth, I never shall speak word. There's something rather that they perhaps treasure about the fact that they're in touch with something that really shouldn't be explained away, and that gives them a sort of power and mystique. And Coleridge famously said about Iago that he represented the motive hunting, of motiveless malignity, and I wonder if you're dealing with motiveless malignity, but it's we who are motive hunting. We're trying to find motives, and they're saying, "No, that's not right." Actually, I'm evil, because that's what they seem to be returning the discourse to. You see, I think what's interesting about this, I have never met a person who's done something horrible, who says that. Everybody's got a self-justification story. I've yet to meet someone who's done a horrible thing, who says, "Well, actually, I did it because I'm unable, and I hate no, and I just like being evil." Most people seem to have a justificatory story, which ranges from the sort of merely distorted to the frankly deranged, and all points in between. But you're right, Ian, I think there's something- But there's sort of a banal cover-up. Well, they vary, of course, from the very straightforward one, which was, you know, he- I wasn't there. It was somebody else's gov. Or, you know, she made me do it to the sort of, say, the frankly fantastic. Well, we need to distinguish between the psychotic and the frankly psychopathic. Well, you see, but I know you could argue, and actually, I'm rather anticipating you might argue in your book, using some of the arguments in your book, that these are indeed types of explanations that we draw on. And some indeed have more intuitive appeal than others. But the medical one is an interesting one, because it carries with it a type of a slightly mechanistic, algorithic thing that, and if you've got a diagnosis, then you can do this, and then we'll be free of the anxiety about that. Great, Rayne. I wondered if you- if you knew Brian E. Lavery's Great Play Frozen, which is about a child sex murderer. Yes, I do, yes, I'm sorry. Brian E. Lavery puts forward the idea not of evil, and obviously more responsibility as part of the play, but with the physical configuration of the brain. Ralph, who's the sex murderer, has his head bashed as a small child against a wash basin. And she also floats an eye with you. I've now- I assume she did her research very well. You will tell me that the human brain releases a hormone called cortisol under stress, and this is what kind of normalizes things. So if you're being abused, you release this. But if you're being abused constantly, you go on releasing cortisol, which is toxic. So it eats into the hippocampus and destroys your memory. These are all physical causes, really, of what we might roughly call evil. And I think that in a way it's a kind of more productive way of looking at it than to go into, as it were, the metaphysical. You talk in, I think you do anyway, you talk about that psychopaths have an increased use of amygdala, which is this kind of primitive part of the brain. But although lots of people share this, but they don't commit crimes. But it seems to me that it would be a good place. I mean, if you were talking about cancer, the connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, you would say that this is proven, but not all smokers get lung cancer. Similarly, it seems to me, is it a productive way to look at the configuration of the brain? Well, I'm skeptical about this when it comes to explaining complex types of behavior. And I would apply that as much to a murder as I would to write a piece of poetry. I think there's something here about when you're getting to complex types of behavior, complex stances towards another person. I am doubtful. And the reason I'm doubtful is precisely if the use of relational psychopathy is a very good one, because how do we compare somebody who ruthlessly exploits and cons people and perhaps even kills them? How do we compare him to say any of the member people who were present at the Vansse Conference in 1941, planning the destruction of a number of the citizenry for no better reason than they were Jewish? And I'm not quite sure how you compare those minds and whether your brain science is helpful. Yeah, yeah. And in terms of the narratives that you are giving people, presumably, you're not saying to somebody, it's as it work works, all right, because you have a problem with your brain. You're looking for their own stories to try to dig back to find out why they did what they did and get them to understand that and thus change. I think absolutely because it's impossible to say it's all right. And that's why the work is so as we're phenomenologically interesting and existentially interesting. It's impossible to say it's all right when something terrible has happened. I've read that having children of your own had quite a big effect on how you viewed these ruined pieces of nature, these extremely dangerous people that you deal with, almost all of the men. Well, in the hospital, all our people are, all our people are men. There are services for women. I must emphasize that women can be just as absolutely fiendish as men when they choose to be so. But yes, I would say that becoming a parent had enormous impact on me because, I mean, I don't know, I saw these men as the small boys. You saw the promise. You saw the promise that was originally there and then was ruined. Well, and yes, absolutely. In what steps might need to have happened for them to have gone a different way, I think, and then for this terrible thing not to have occurred. I'm not saying there are other factors. I'm saying that the obvious place to look first would seem to me is the brain being damaged or differently configured. For instance, my father had a huge chunk of his brain removed after a war accident and was replaced by a silver plate. Now, he didn't turn out to be a psychopath. But supposing he'd murdered me, I think that would be a good place to start looking. That's all I'm saying. Well, let's turn to another place where we can investigate these matters again, which is Craig's own collection, a new collection of poems, House No Falls. Let's not start with what we've just been talking about, however, and let's start with the art of making a poem, which you describe yourself in this book as being a bit like dressmaking. We're waiting till it feels exact, ruthless, till we feel the fit. Is a poem continuing inside your mind for quite a long time as you're writing it before you're writing. Is it something that's always sort of there and then suddenly it's right? You work at it, you have your idea, and then you have to be incredibly patient, and sometimes it comes right absolutely immediately and you have a tangle, you pull the piece of string, it all kind of opens out. More often though, you're left kind of filling around with it, and this is the stuff you don't want to show the reader, all the kind of mistakes. But the reason I made the analogy with the dressmaker is that my son Isaac, who's 32, is a fashion designer, and I watch him kind of pinning up close the whole time, and you're looking for the weight of the material. It's the thing itself that you're kind of playing around with, as well as the subject you're kind of introducing to it. I can explain it any better than that. This is a collection that's got three or four quite long narrative poems in it, one particularly about the death of your mother, and at the same time you've broken out as a novelist, and I just wondered what is the relationship between a piece of narrative that comes to be a poem and a piece of narrative that comes to be a piece of prose. The poetry is more minute, more to do with its kind of internal laws, I think, and prose absolutely eats up material. Virginia will say about Dickens that when it began to flag he just picked up a handful of characters and threw them on the fire and created a blaze. Well actually it's a bit like that. I had notebooks for this stuff, and I thought it was going to be a very long novel, about a thousand pages. There it was down to 250 or something, in no time at all. Basically the novel eats material, you get about 300 yards to the gallon, whereas poetry you fiddled more. I think there are different sets of mental gears are engaged. Not many novelist-strike poems, a few, but I've tried early on, because I love poetry, I read it constantly, but I just find the way my mind works is maybe not that absolute minute attention to detail. It's a bigger, longer picture. And so I go to poetry for exactly that precision, as you say it's language on point, which I thought was a beautiful definition which I shall bandy around. But it's moving from writing poetry to writing a novel. I would imagine it's almost like moving writing a novel to writing a film, that's a whole different set of factors at play. Yeah it's very different, but actually I want to kind of force them together. I mean I want actually for poetry to deal less with the weather, love, and the moon, and more to do with kind of Ferraris, petrol pumps, headphones, all the kind of stuff that gets left out of poetry. You've got some good skin. What attracted me to the skiing poem was that I thought this is really difficult to turn into poetry. How do you do blacks, reds, and all of that stuff? And falling over and losing your ski and falling into the snow and thinking I might never ever ever be able to get up again. I might die as actually what I thought. But the actual challenge was to write an interesting poem about skiing, as it happens all of that's true. Everything that happens in that poem is was serious and rather terrifying. Whereas it's very easy to write that as a chapter of a novel, or relatively easy compared to doing it as a poem. Again there's this world of limitless freedom that you inhabit. That's the example that constantly comes to mind, that you can write a novel about skiing and the accident. The unit of poetry is the line. It's full of constraints that you can't imagine, but everything has to be seen as a line or a line change for a particular reason. So that's the kind of particular difficult rule. That's what makes it hard to do something like skiing or American football or a rodeo. I actually quite like to write about a rodeo. But this is, as I said earlier on, there isn't a momento mori aspect to this. There's a long poem about looking back at the love affair after the death of a lover and indeed a mother as well. And I wonder to what extent this collection is gray-grain looking backwards and trying to make sense of a life, trying to put structures in place. Well, I suppose that's true. I mean it's bound to be inevitably. I mean it's what Gwen was saying about, you know, writing your own narrative. But really, yeah, I'm 65 now, just retired, and people are dying all around me. It's very difficult to kind of ignore this. It's very important. And these people haunt you, the poem about the old girlfriend of mine. I mean, in some sense, I'm absolutely used to in love with her. You know, I never stopped loving her. So she's a real presence for me. And I want to to write about this and to recreate her. And I suppose I'm vaguely appealing to some sort of magic property of poetry, which says, "If I do this well enough, if I make this person live, in some sense, they are living." It sounds kind of rather high-minded, but I think that's it. Shakespeare, isn't it? There isn't one of the Shakespeare songs that says exactly this, that you will live in my poetry. And I thought the girlfriend did indeed come beautifully to life. She was very, she was indeed very, very present. And I was thinking that in a way it reminded me of what we sometimes say about the process of psychotherapy, is trying to bring something into being that wasn't there before, an articulator thought that wasn't there before. But the girlfriend is present because so much of it is specific and concrete and non-abstract. And I suppose that's what, really, from your first collections you've been known for is taking something hard and specific and inserting it into those lines and avoiding too much of the generalization. Well, the goddess in the detail, I agree with that. And so does Will. I can see this part of the process. No, all writers, I think. I don't know any writers who deal in abstractions, actually. I mean, you can have Shelley. Well, I was stereotyped, so it might be the better word. I think that the worse writer you are, the more you rely on stereotype of story, of character, of language to express yourself, the better you are, the further away it is from Shelley. Because you're not looking hard enough if you're in the reliance. Or trying hard enough, or trying to make it fresh, trying to make it zing. You just, every villain has a scar. There's a sort of first level of images, a sort of what I think of as a sort of supermarket, instantly available level of images that you can use for writing and constructing. But then the real art somehow is, again, the deep level and putting things together in ways that are very surprising and new. I think that's true, Gwen. But actually, I have to confess, there is a low pleasure in simply remembering things. I mean, I assume you all have it. You think, oh yeah, fries chocolate, the one that had the delight chocolate and the dark chocolate together, anything like that will give you enormous pleasure. So both the poem about my mother dying, which was over a period of about three or four months. I remembered lots, and I was kind of frankly thrilled by it. And the old girlfriend thinking, I remember her de-strainer. That was a wonderful thing. So in a curious way, it's full of straightforward pleasure for me, the pleasure of memory. Well, let's turn to an attempt to set a lot of what we've been talking about in a kind of philosophical framework. Ian McGilchrist, you're going to be talking at the Royal Society of Arts this week. And your book is, your big book is about the divided brain, the two hemispheres of the brain. Now, we need to unpack a little bit of the theory behind this. Physically, neurologically speaking, it is absolutely clear that the brain is divided into the two hemispheres of the brain, do different things. And you can look at animals, and you can look at birds, and you can make that case. They're structurally distinct, and indeed the separation, which is a bit curious in an organ that's supposed to make connections, has got more marked over evolution. And not only is the brain, obviously, in two hemispheres, but it's sort of kinked or skewed. That seems to be... It's asymmetric in structure at all levels, and in function, neurochemically, neuropsychologically. Now, lots of people will say, "Oh, yes, yes, but I know about this stuff, the left hand, the left brain, you know, is... It's not a respect to the topic. It's analytical, and the right brain is romantic, and you argue that this is far too crude. And yet, towards the end of your big book, you come quite close to accepting some of that, at least." Well, I think that the problem is that we've had glimpses in the past, but we've been thinking all the time about things the brain does as if it's a machine, and so it's been, you know, well, one bit does language, another bit does numbers or something, a reason, an emotion, and so forth. But this is all rubbish, because we know that both hemispheres are deeply involved in absolutely everything. The difference lies not in what they do, but in how they do it, explain. And, well, this is to do with the take, if you like, that they have on the world. And I suppose my books, really about the nature, it sounds a bit, you know, a big thing to say, but it's about the nature of existence, in that the existence that we experience, whatever it is, is clearly mediated to us by our brains. And the brain has this bipartite structure. And in each part of the brain, it has a different take on the world. That's to do with the kind of attention it pays the world. This may well have developed for evolutionary reasons. So the left-hand hemisphere, what kind of attention to the world does that? Well, if you think about a bird trying to eat a little piece of grain against the background of pebbles, it's got to have very focused detailed attention to be able to seize it. And it knows exactly what it's after before it even starts focusing. But it's also got to keep a very broad open attention for whatever might be, a completely uncommitted attention. Otherwise, it's going to end up being somebody else's lunch. So it has to do a rather difficult thing, in fact impossible, probably in one lump of neuronal tissue, which is probably why we have two. It has to keep a very broad open attention and uncommitted attention and a very narrow, focused detail. And the left-hand brain is the narrow, focused, analytical part, and the other side is the big picture. And you're convinced that there are hard biological evidence for this division, which is kind of irrefutable. Well, I give it in the book. No book can be comprehensive. No one person, this, it could do a book on the whole of neuroscience. But it is, well, I'd like people to take me up on it if I think I'm wrong. So far, so good. But the bigger picture is that you think that the left-hand analytical side of the brain has, as it were, dominated and taken over the right-hand side of the brain because of what has happened to human culture in the last 500 years. I'm putting it very, very crudely. And that is quite a thing to say. Yeah. It might help if I just explain one or two of the things that do differentiate the hemispheres. It seems to me that the left hemisphere represents what presences to the right hemisphere. So things are sort of more connected, more alive. Literally, in fact, it turns out that the right hemisphere is more interested in animate things than the left in inanimate things, tools and machines. But it has a different view of the world, which is alive and so on, whereas the left hemisphere has this more represented, clear, static world made up of different bits which are then put together to achieve a whole. That means that things are represented rather like on a map. If you're fighting a battle, you don't want to know everything that's going on. You want to have the details on the map with little flags. It's very crude, but it works. So we need that. I'm not knocking what the left hemisphere does. It's absolutely crucial to everything we do. But it gives a limited picture. It doesn't know what it doesn't know, whereas the right hemisphere is more open to what it doesn't know. And what I think has happened over time is that we've moved more and more to a very simple picture of the world, which we think we understand, which is built up from little bits and is internally coherent, largely because we've cut out all the things that don't fit. So we're seeing the dangers that we're seeing the world as a kind of flow diagram or mechanical system. Yeah. Once you cut out the things that don't fit with your logic, then the world is very simple. You narrow and you narrow and you narrow. And it becomes like a hall of mirrors, very difficult to break out of. And I think we've reached that point where every attempt to, through art, through spirituality, through nature, has been reflected back inwards and deconstructed. What do the rest of us make about this, Gwen? Well, I suppose I'm still thinking, but it's very interesting question that Greg was posting earlier on about what extent the using brain explanations is helpful for understanding behavior. Because I was thinking about, thinking about a man in the hospital who killed somebody close to him. And he doesn't really have a very good explanation for why. And one explanation is the mental illness. And one explanation is does he have anything wrong with his brain? So we've been around his brain several times with various types of sort of visionary tools. And the question is, so I find myself wondering where you think the horrible, horrible things we do might fit in. Well, I'm not, I must make clear, I'm not, this is not a reductionist project. I'm not going to say you're in danger of using the left hand side of your brain to analyze the brain to produce a book about the right hand side of the brain. Well, I hope I've used both, Andrew. But the thing is that this is absolutely not a reductionist project. There's no reason to prioritize description at the neuronal level. All I'm really saying is that whether we like it or not, I didn't make this tick or tickle to me. But the brain offers us these two different takes on reality. And we're all the time blending them. It's not all or nothing absolute business. But we have these two different ways that we need to use. They're fundamentally incompatible and yet they need to be combined. What would a world where the right hand side of our brains had its proper place? What would that world be like? Well, if it had its proper place, it would also involve a partnership with the left hemisphere. Let me make that clear. Because they have different attitudes to their separation. The left hemisphere thinks it knows it all and can go it alone. The right hemisphere knows it needs the left. But I think the times in human history where one can, and I try to demonstrate this by looking at aspects of those various cultures, the times one can see this in Western civilization, are probably the great moments of the 6th century BC in Greece, possibly the Augustine era in Rome and the Renaissance. Because there was a big picture. Because the reality meant that people bought into an understanding. There was a big, well, they were able to see that, you know, things that are opposites or apparently self-contradictory are not. They were able to hold those things together. They were able to see themselves as part of an embodied culture, not purely abstracted, and so they balanced these things. It's the tolerance of ambiguity. -Tolerance of ambiguity. -Tolerance of ambiguity, yeah. William Boyd. -But your thesis, if I understand it, Ian, is that we're now getting to left hemispherical, too analytical, too focused. And yet I look around me at the world of what's going on. I sometimes think the right hemisphere seems to be dominating. You take one example, the film industry, the kind of films that are being dominantly produced at the moment are either about superheroes or comic book heroes or vampires. -That's nothing whatever to do with the right hemisphere. -But it's fantasy. -Fantasy is not the same as imagination. -Well, is that what you say? -They're very, very different. Fantasy deals in stereotypes in the superficial. Imagination is something very deep. Wordsworth notices that imagination can transform a pebble. I mean, it's something very different. So I look, I am very worried about the misuse of language and the abandonment of reason in our culture. I profoundly believe in the importance of careful use of language, careful use of reason. But I even more profoundly believe in keeping them in a context which is to see a broader picture. And no, I mean, the world that we live in is not rationalistic in the best sense or reasonable. It's rationalistic in the sense it's a heap of fragments. -Great, great. -And representations. -Yeah, listen, if this is all down to the two hemispheres working in these different ways and things have gone to the dogs because the left hand is dominating the right hand, isn't there a sense in which we can't do anything about this? What can we do about it? -I was about to ask the same question, Ian. -Well, you know, I've always- -Sausage civilization. -I've always asked this and, yeah, an easy thing to say would be it's a bit of a left hemisphere question. But you know, what are the bullet points? But I think what I want to do is raise awareness. People think that their brain is a rational machine and therefore the way to look at the world must be profoundly that way. What I'm saying is no. Deep inside you, at the most basic level, your brain offers you two completely different versions of the world, one of which we are neglecting. -So completely romantic. One impulse for a verbal would may teach you more of man with more evil and of good than all the sages can, weren't we? -Well, yes, yes. -I'm great believe in words of it. But I do actually think, you know, the label romantic is unhelpful because nowadays we think of it as sort of signifying something a bit woolly or self-indulgent. In fact, the philosophers that came out of that period, people like Hegel and so forth, incredibly important and insightful. So I think we need to re-sophisticate our thinking. -Well, thank you. Well, this programme's policy up to now has been anti-words-worth, I have to say, but we may have to revisit that, I think, in the last few minutes. Thank you. All Grey Grey's collection of poems, House No Falls is published in December. William Boyd's adaptation of his novel, Any Human Heart, starts next Sunday on Channel 4. You can hear Gwen Ad's head on exchanges at the frontier on the BBC World Service on Wednesday and Ian McGill-Christ will be giving a talk about the divided brain in London. Tomorrow night, all the details are on our website as usual. Next week, we are more satirical with PJ O'Rook, Armando Enucci, Mary Beard and Simon McBurney. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.