The Master and His Emissary: Dr. Iain McGilchrist

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.

[2] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[3] Well, I have a question.

[4] I guess I'd like to know a little bit more about why you specifically chose the title, the master and the emissary.

[5] Yeah, that's true.

[6] in an attempt to explain what I believe to be the relationship between them through brain hemispheres.

[7] And like most other things in life, they're unequal and asymmetrical.

[8] And that one of the brain hemispheres sees more than the other.

[9] That is the one that I've designated the master and is the right hemisphere.

[10] That's a weird inversion because people often think of the left hemisphere as the one that's dominant.

[11] They do.

[12] They do.

[13] Traditionally, that's been the case.

[14] but as is becoming ever clearer the right hemisphere this has been a real steep learning curve for some people but the right hemisphere is in many ways more reliable sees more understands more than the left hemisphere which is like a sort of high functioning bureaucrat in a way and the idea of the story was simply that certain matters needed to be delegated not only because as it were the master couldn't do everything he needed an amissory of together abroad and do some of it, but also that he must not get involved with a certain point of view, otherwise he'd lose what it was that he did see.

[15] So that's what I'm really saying there is that there's a good reason why evolutionally speaking the two brain hemispheres are separate.

[16] When you say doesn't get involved, what's the advantage of that detachment from the involvement?

[17] Well, it's that Ramoni Kahal, who you know is a great histopathologist, one of his findings was that in primates, there are more inhibitory neurons than in any other animals, and there are more in humans than in any other primate.

[18] And that's speaking proportionally.

[19] Proportionately, and there are more kinds as well.

[20] So we think that about 25 % of the entire cortex is inhibitory.

[21] So it's a very strong effect.

[22] And the corpus callosum seems to be very largely in the end inhibiting function in the other hemisphere.

[23] And that is, I think, because over time, the two hemispheres have had to specialize.

[24] There are reasons why actually it can't be, I'm not going to go into now, but I was talking about just a few days ago at the evolutionary psychiatry meeting.

[25] But there are reasons why the corpus callosum has had to become more selective and to inhibit quite a lot of what's going on in the other hemisphere, because it enables the two to do distinct things.

[26] And, of course, they have to work together, but usually good teamwork doesn't mean everyone trying to do the same role.

[27] Right.

[28] So differentiation is very important for two elements to work together.

[29] Inhibition is one way of doing that.

[30] So effectively the two takes on the world, if you like, that the hemispheres have, are not easily compatible.

[31] And we're not aware of that because at a level below consciousness, there's a meta -control centre that is bringing them together.

[32] So in ordinary experience, we don't feel we're in two different worlds, but effectively we are.

[33] And they have different qualities and different goals, different values, different takes on.

[34] what is important in the world and what meaning or whatever it might have.

[35] So let me, let me ask you about, I've got, I've developed a conceptual scheme for, for thinking about the relationship between the two hemispheres and I'm kind of, I've been curious about what you think about it and how it might map onto or not your, your ideas.

[36] So I've been really interested in the orienting reflex and discovered by Sokolov, I think, back in about 1962, right?

[37] He was a student of Lurias and the orienting reflex is manifested when something, at least in their terminology, something unpredictable happened.

[38] I've thought much more recently that it's actually when something undesired happened, happens, and the laboratory constraints obscured that, and that turned out to actually be important.

[39] So, and I kind of put together the ideas of the orienting reflex with some of the things I learned from Jung's observations on the function of art and dreams.

[40] So imagine that you have a conceptual scheme laid out, and we could say that it, it's linguistically mediated, it's enforced on the world.

[41] And then there are exceptions to that conceptual scheme.

[42] And those are anomalies.

[43] Those are the things that are unexpected.

[44] And the orienting reflexes you towards those.

[45] Yes.

[46] And so those are things that aren't fitting property in your conceptual scheme that you have to figure out.

[47] So the first thing you do is react defensively essentially because it might be dangerous.

[48] And then your exploratory systems are activated.

[49] And the exploratory systems, first of all, are in, attention, just from an intentional perspective, but then, and this is where the art issue sort of creeps into it, the idea would be something like the right hemisphere generates an imaginative landscape of possibility that could map that anomaly.

[50] So you can kind of experience that if it's at night, you know, like say you're sitting alone at night, it's two or three in the morning, you're kind of tired, maybe you're in an unfamiliar place, and there's a noise that happens that shouldn't happen in another room.

[51] You can play with that.

[52] So for example, if you open open the door slightly and put your hand in to turn on the light and you watch what happens, your mind will fill with imaginative representations of what might be in the room, right?

[53] So it's like the landscape of anomaly will be populated with something like imaginative demons.

[54] And that's a first -pass approximation, and it seems to me that that's a right hemispheric function.

[55] And then that as you explore further, that imaginative domain, which circumscribes what might be, is constrained and constrained and constrained and constrained and constrained until you get what it actually is, and that's specialized and routinized.

[56] It's something like that.

[57] Does that seem like a reasonable, what do you think about that as a conceptual idea?

[58] I love that for a whole host of reasons.

[59] One is you mentioned defense, and one of the ideas behind my hypothesis is that the right hemisphere is on the lookout for predators, whereas the left hemisphere is looking for prey.

[60] And this has been confirmed in many species of both...

[61] I'd never heard that second part.

[62] Amphibians and mammals, yes.

[63] So when you're in left hemispheric mode, you're more in predator mode.

[64] And when you're right hemisphere mode, you're more in prey mode.

[65] I mean, of course, we are not lizards or toads or marmosets or whatever.

[66] But in animals, generally speaking, this is the case.

[67] Getting and grasping, and after all, our left hemisphere is the one that controls the grasping hand, is left hemisphere and exploring, which you mentioned, is more right hemisphere.

[68] And when a frontal function is deficient, people often go into automatic mode of the hand of that side.

[69] And with the left hand, it's usually exploratory motions, meaningless ones, but trying to explore the environment.

[70] And with the right hand, it's grasping pointlessly at things.

[71] So they, as well, their automatic thing is with the left hand, the right hemisphere to explore, with the right hand, the left hemisphere to grasp.

[72] So when you said exploratory and you said defensive, and you said also opening up to possibilities, these are all aspects of the way the right hemisphere, I often say the right hemisphere opens up to possibility, whereas the left hemisphere wants to close down to a certainty.

[73] Right, right.

[74] And you need both of these.

[75] Chaos and order issue.

[76] Chaos and order.

[77] And, you know, I loved in your talk.

[78] talked about chaos and order, but if I may say so, you seemed, and maybe you'd like to gloss that a little, you seem to suggest that it would be good, we can't get rid of chaos, but you seem to imply that it would be better if we could, whereas my view is that chaos and order are necessary to one another, and there is a proper sort of harmony or balance.

[79] Yeah, well, okay.

[80] I mean, I think that's as deeper question as you could possibly ask, I would say, in some sense.

[81] I mean, some of the, I would say there's a central theological issue there.

[82] And the issue there is, you know, in Genesis, the proper environment of humanity is construed as a garden.

[83] Yes.

[84] And so I see that as the optimal balance of chaos and order.

[85] Right.

[86] Because nature is flourishes and is prolific and is chaotic.

[87] Then if you add harmony to that, you have a garden.

[88] So you live in the garden.

[89] You're supposed to tend the garden.

[90] Okay, so now the garden is created.

[91] It's a walled space because Eden is a walled space.

[92] It's a peridaza.

[93] It's a walled garden.

[94] Now, the thing is, as soon as you make a wall, you try to keep what's outside out, but you can't because the boundaries between things are permeable.

[95] So if you're going to have reality and you're going to have a bounded space, you're going to have a snake in the garden.

[96] Yes.

[97] Now, then the question is, what the hell should you do about that?

[98] Should you make the walls so high that no snake can possibly get in?

[99] Or should you allow for the possibility of snakes but make yourself strong enough so that you can contend with them?

[100] And I think there's an answer there that goes deep to the question of, even maybe.

[101] why, the theological question of why God allowed evil to exist in the world.

[102] I agree with you.

[103] It's like, well, do you make people safe or strong?

[104] And strong is better.

[105] And safe might not be commensurate with being.

[106] Like, it might not be possible to exist and to be safe.

[107] Well, our existence is predicated on the fact that we die, so it's never safe.

[108] Well, it's certainly bounded, right?

[109] Yeah, I mean, it's inevitably wrapped up with that sort of finitude.

[110] Yes.

[111] So there's this old, There's a lovely, lovely Jewish idea, an ancient idea.

[112] It's one of the most profound ideas I've ever come across.

[113] And so it's a kind of a Zen cone, and here it is, is that, so it's a question about the classic attributes of God, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

[114] What is a being with those three attributes lack?

[115] What kind of question is that?

[116] The answer is limitation.

[117] And the second answer is, that's the justification for being.

[118] Is that the unlimited lacks the limited.

[119] And so the limited is us.

[120] For anything to come into existence, there needs to be an element of resistance.

[121] And so things are never predicated on one pole of what is always a dipole.

[122] Right.

[123] Everything has that dipole.

[124] Yeah, it's like a prerequisite for being.

[125] It is, and it's imaged in the Yan Yang idea.

[126] But it seems to me very important, because in our culture we often seem to suppose that certain things are just good and other things are just bad.

[127] And it would be good if you could get rid of the bad ones.

[128] But actually, by pursuing certain good things that are good within measure too far, they become bad and so forth.

[129] But let's go back to your anomaly thing, because Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the anomaly detector.

[130] And so I think that that's a very important point, because there are two ways you can react to an anomaly.

[131] One is to, and both have to be explored.

[132] One is to try and prove that it's not really an anomaly, and therefore you can carry on with things as normal.

[133] Yes.

[134] And the other is...

[135] That's what you hope will happen.

[136] That's the typical left hemisphere approach.

[137] It doesn't want anything to have to shift.

[138] Yeah.

[139] And quite reasonably, you don't want to be chaotically shifting if you're onto a good thing.

[140] Yeah, it's too stressful.

[141] Exactly.

[142] It takes too much work.

[143] And you might actually be mistaken.

[144] So in a way it's perfectly correct to be wary.

[145] But it's not correct to be so wary that you blot out anomalies.

[146] And there's a lot of evidence, as I'm sure you know, The left hemisphere simply blocks out everything that doesn't fit with its tape.

[147] It doesn't see it, actually, at all.

[148] So there's a hugely important element in the right hemisphere going, hang on, but there may be another way of thinking that will accommodate this better.

[149] And actually good science needs, yes, to be sceptical about anomalies, otherwise there'll be chaos, but it also needs to be able to shift when an anomaly is large enough.

[150] Right, right.

[151] Or there are quite a lot of them, and they don't really fit very well into the scale.

[152] Exactly, yes.

[153] So there's another observation that Jung made, which I love this observation.

[154] He was trying to account for radical personality transformation.

[155] And so his idea was this, and I think it's commensurate with the ideas of inhibition between the two hemispheres.

[156] So let's imagine the left is habitually inhibiting the function of the right to keep fear under control.

[157] It does that all sorts of ways.

[158] So imagine that the right is reacting to anomalies, and it's aggregating them.

[159] left can't deal with them.

[160] So the right is aggregating anomalies.

[161] And maybe that's starting to manifest itself in nightmarish dreams, for example.

[162] These anomalies are piling up.

[163] It's indication that you're on shifting sand.

[164] So then imagine that the right hemisphere aggregates anomalies and then it starts to detect patterns in the anomalies.

[165] And so now it starts to generate what you might consider a counter hypothesis to the left's hypothesis.

[166] If that counter hypothesis gets to the point where the total sum, in some sense, of the anomalies plus the already map territory can be mapped by that new pattern, then at some point it will shift and the person will kick into a new personality configuration.

[167] It's like a Pijergetian stage transition except more dramatic.

[168] It is.

[169] And what a Pijetian stage transition is also like and subsumes both is Higalian Alfabung, the idea that a thing is opposed by something else.

[170] But when it, when there is a synthesis, it's not that one of them is annihilated.

[171] Right.

[172] They're both transformed and taken up into the new hole, which embraces what before looked like an opposition.

[173] Right, right.

[174] Okay, so here's a question for you.

[175] You know, when I read Thomas Coon, I was reading Peuge at the same time.

[176] And I knew that Piage was aware of Coon's work, by the way.

[177] And the problem I had with Coon and the interpreters of Coon is they don't seem to get something, who interpret Coon as a moral right?

[178] relativist in some sense.

[179] They don't seem to get the idea of increased generalizability of a plan.

[180] So let's say I have a theory and a bunch of anomalies accrue and I have to wipe out the theory.

[181] And so then I wipe out the theory and I incorporate the anomalies and now I have another theory.

[182] So that's a descent into chaos.

[183] That's my estimation.

[184] That's the old story.

[185] So the anomaly disruption is the mythical descent into chaos.

[186] Yes.

[187] And then you reconfigure the theory with the chaos and you come up with a better.

[188] theory.

[189] Yes, the question is, why is it better?

[190] An answer is, well, it accounts for everything that the previous theory accounted for, plus the anomalies.

[191] Exactly.

[192] So there's progress.

[193] Always, yes.

[194] Yes, exactly.

[195] But Coon is often read as stating that there is no progress, that, you know, there's incommensurate paradigms, and you have to just shift between them, but there isn't, there isn't cumulative knowledge in some sense.

[196] Well, I think one thing that one, we probably would both agree about is that we don't buy the story that, you know, because nothing can be demonstrated definitively, utterly, to be the case, there is no truth.

[197] I mean, I think we both believe that there are truths, things that are truer than other things.

[198] And indeed, if...

[199] You certainly act that way.

[200] Well, we couldn't even talk, could we, if we didn't.

[201] Yeah, exactly.

[202] And even to say that there are no truth, it's itself a truth statement, which is that it's truer than the statement, there are truths.

[203] So everybody automatically has truths, whether they know it or not.

[204] Yeah, it's because you, well, you said, why?

[205] I don't think it's not only that you can't talk, you can't even see, because you don't know how to point your eyes.

[206] You wouldn't know how to discriminate what's coming into your brain at all.

[207] So it's inevitable.

[208] I think we would agree about that, but I think there may be a slight point of difference between us in that I'm very willing to embrace the idea of uncertainty.

[209] And I may be wrong, perhaps you're.

[210] could expand on that, but sometimes you come across as a man who has certainties that...

[211] Well, it's a peculiar kind of certainty.

[212] I'm certain that standing on the border between order and chaos is a good idea.

[213] That's a weird certainty, eh?

[214] Exactly.

[215] Yeah, yeah.

[216] You need to be in the sort of slightly unstable position.

[217] Yes.

[218] You have to be, what would you say, encountering as much uncertainty as you can voluntarily tolerate.

[219] Yes.

[220] And I think that's equivalent to vulgarious.

[221] Godsky's zone of proximal development.

[222] I'm sure that's right.

[223] So when we talked a little bit earlier about the idea of an instinct for meaning, so I think what meaning is, it's the elaborated form of the orienting reflex, but what meaning does, its function, it's biological function, which I think is more real in some sense than any other biological function, is to tell you when you're in the place where you've balanced the stability, let's say, of your left hemisphere systems, with the exploratory capacity of your right, so that not only are you master of your domain, but you're expanding that domain simultaneously.

[224] And I think that when you're there, it's a kind of a metaphysical place in some sense, that you're imbued with the sense of meaning and purpose, and that's an indication that you've actually optimized your neurological function.

[225] Yes, and perhaps we could gloss the idea of purpose, because I think there's a difference between people get very confused, I think, about the idea of purpose, particularly whether there's a problem that suggesting there is a purpose, and I believe there is a purpose, or there are purposes to the cosmos, not just to my daily life, and suggests that somehow it's all been predetermined by God.

[226] But this is to misunderstand the nature of time, that there are time static slices, and God is there and he's sorted it all out, and the whole thing's just unfolding, as Bergson says, like a lady's fan being unfurbed.

[227] It's extremely boring and an entirely static and non -creative universe.

[228] But actually something is at stake.

[229] Things are unfolding.

[230] They have overall a direction, but actually exactly what that direction is isn't known.

[231] That's what it looks like to me. It's a fool who says anything positive about the nature of God, but I'm not convinced that God is omniscient and omnipotent either.

[232] I think God is in the process of is becoming God is not only just becoming, but is becoming, if you do that I mean.

[233] Yeah, so being and becoming.

[234] More becoming.

[235] I think becoming is the important thing.

[236] Why do you think that?

[237] I mean, it's also a strange segue.

[238] I mean, I'm not criticizing, but I'm curious.

[239] What drove you to that conclusion?

[240] An awful lot of things, really.

[241] I think that everything is a process.

[242] In fact, I'm writing a book called There Are No Things.

[243] Oh, what are there instead?

[244] There are processes.

[245] Yes.

[246] And there are patterns.

[247] Patterns.

[248] That's why I think music is so powerful.

[249] Music is one of the most mysterious and wonderful things in the universe.

[250] And I don't think it was at all foolish of people to have thought that the planetary motions were in a some way.

[251] No, it's not at all for a foolish.

[252] No, it's a great insight.

[253] Kind of music.

[254] I think it is a very important insight.

[255] Well, music, you know, I've thought, and I've said this in public lectures, that music is the most representative of the arts because the world is made out of patterns.

[256] And music describes how those patterns should be arranged.

[257] You're using representative in a very different way.

[258] I know, I know, but I mean, it depends on what you mean by representative.

[259] So it's representing the ultimate reality of the cosmos.

[260] Well, I would like to say presentative, in that it's not representing anything.

[261] It is actually, when we're in the presence of music, something is coming into being, which is at the core of the whole cosmic process.

[262] I think that's why people love music.

[263] They do.

[264] And I mean, there's hardly any originality in the idea, because lots of physicists say this, that the sort of the movements of atoms and the movements of planets and so forth are more like a dance or more like music than they are like things bumping into it.

[265] Right, right, right, right.

[266] So I thought of things as patterns that people have made into tools.

[267] I agree with you, and tools are what the left hemisphere is always looking for.

[268] It's always looking for something to grasp.

[269] It reifies processes that if you, it's all a matter of time, every single thing, including the mountain behind my house, if you were able to, which is billions of years old, if you were able to take, as it were a series of, like a time lapse camera, you'd see the thing morphing and changing and flowing.

[270] Everything flows, as Heracus once said, everything flows, it's just a question of over the time period that you consider it.

[271] It's a question of the temple.

[272] And so taking time out of things and considering them in the abstract, erasinated from context, particularly from the flow and from the context of time, changes them into something else.

[273] And I think that what, in brief, what Plato has done and what a lot of the history of more recent Christianity has done is to thingify God and heaven, perfect states that are unaltered and so on.

[274] And I think that it is an ever, ever more wonderfully self -exploring, self -actualizing process that requires a degree of opposition, you know, as a stream in order to have the movement and the ideas and patterns in it.

[275] It has to be constrained.

[276] Death.

[277] When I've experienced, it's hard to describe these experiences, but when I've contemplated, death deeply, it has struck me as a fundamental repair mechanism.

[278] Like, it's part of the mechanism by which new things that are better are brought into being.

[279] Absolutely.

[280] And I mean, you see that in your own being because, of course, without death, you couldn't live.

[281] Yes.

[282] Because you're dying, the things about you that aren't right, even at a physiological level, are dying all the time.

[283] They are.

[284] Unfortunately, you also completely die, which seems to be a bit on the unfortunate side.

[285] But more cosmically speaking, it does seem to me that death is the, is, it's, I don't know, I've had intuitions or intimations that death is the friend of being, and that's, like, it's hard to get my head around that.

[286] I completely agree with you, and indeed that's been said by, you know, many, many wiser people than myself, maybe even than yourself.

[287] I would suspect so, hopefully so.

[288] No, but I mean, I think that that's right, that death is predicated on life, but also that it shouldn't be seen as a sort of something that's the negative.

[289] It's a necessary stage in the process of becoming what it is.

[290] And since everything is ramified, since nothing is just isolated, you and I may look as or feel as ever, but as you often eloquently say, we all have a history.

[291] And we have in time, we come from a place, but also as a culture we have history.

[292] We can't detach ourselves from it.

[293] We're expressions of it.

[294] But we're also inevitably dependent, as all organisms are on the environment.

[295] Where I end and where the quote environment begins is a, I don't like the word environment, actually.

[296] It's a nature, which suggests something that's always being born, whereas environments are something around me from which I'm separated.

[297] But anyway, all of that is connected.

[298] And even opposed to.

[299] Yes, yes.

[300] So I would see us as like an edina stream or like a wave in the sea that is never separate.

[301] Schrodinger talk about life as such as, right?

[302] I mean, the coming together of physics with this, with a process philosophy, a very strong.

[303] So, when does that book come out?

[304] When I finished writing it.

[305] And I'm very worried that it's getting bigger and it's, you know, all the time I'm writing it.

[306] I'm seeing more and more of things that I really must get to know more about.

[307] And it's an ever -receding...

[308] Well, it's a danger of a book that aims at something fundamental because you never run...

[309] You never hit the proper boundaries.

[310] That's it.

[311] I need that war.

[312] Mm -hmm.

[313] Yeah, well, I also had experiences, I would say, that when I was trying to understand, they're imaginative experiences when I was trying to understand, let's say, the necessity of evil, you know, because that's also a fundamental theological conundrum and a metaphysical conundrum.

[314] Why is it that being is constituted such that evil is allowed to exist, right?

[315] It's Ivan Karamazov's, what, critique of Alyosha's Christianity, essentially.

[316] What kind of God would allow for this sort of thing?

[317] It's the ancient question.

[318] Yeah, it's an ancient question.

[319] And I mean, part of what I thought, what I've, I mean, I thought about the adversarial element to that, which is that you need a challenge because you don't, you're not forced to bring forth what you could bring forth without a challenge.

[320] And the greater the thing that you're supposed to bring forth, the greater the challenge has to be.

[321] So you need an adversary.

[322] It's something like that.

[323] But then I also thought that it would, it's possible that being, being requires limitation.

[324] You might say optimal being requires free choice.

[325] I know I'm going through a lot of things quickly.

[326] Free choice requires the real distinction between good and evil.

[327] Without that, you don't have choice.

[328] Also, maybe it's possible to set up a world where evil is a possibility, but where it isn't something that has to be manifest, where it's an option open to you and a real option and it has to be and a challenge that was presented to you, but it's something that you cannot move towards if you so desire.

[329] And that seems to me to be something like the ethical requirement.

[330] That's the fundamental ethical requirement to avoid evil.

[331] That doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

[332] That's not the same issue.

[333] No, it isn't.

[334] It isn't.

[335] And I wonder one could recast it as the need for otherness.

[336] God needs something other.

[337] And that other, if it's not going to be just part of God, has got to be free, otherwise there will be no creation.

[338] I mean, the nature that there is something else, other than God.

[339] It may in the end come from and come back to that God or that divine essence or that whatever.

[340] But there's a wonderful...

[341] Yeah, something I can't figure out either.

[342] Like in the Christian idea, there's the end of time where the evil is separated from God forever.

[343] And I think about that as a metaphysical...

[344] Well, you might think if it's a form of...

[345] Like imagine it's a form of perfection.

[346] A form of striving for perfection.

[347] You fragment yourself, you challenge yourself, you throw what's not worthy into the fire everlasting, something like that.

[348] And so what you end up with retained is much better than what you started with through the trials.

[349] Something like that.

[350] Well, that sounds a bit like the dialectical process that we were talking about.

[351] Right.

[352] And you have alluded to a couple of very good Jewish myths.

[353] And there's one in the Lurian Cavalla.

[354] about the creation which I don't know if you know it but it's it's absolutely riveting to me the idea is that the primary being ains off the ground of all being needs something other to come into being the creation and that creation what does that aims off do this is his first act is it to stretch out a hand and make something not a bit the first act is to withdraw, to create a place in which there can be something other than veins off.

[355] And so the first stage is called simsum and it sounds negative as so many creative things do, withdraw.

[356] And then in that space there are vessels and a spark comes out of Ames off and falls into the vessels and they all shatter.

[357] And that's called Sheffarat Hakka.

[358] Yes, yes.

[359] I've run across that in Yung.

[360] Right, yes.

[361] And then there is the third stage repair in which what has just been fragmented is restored into something greater.

[362] And so this process carries on.

[363] And it's, in my terms, very like what happens with the hemispheres.

[364] The right hemisphere is the one that is first accepting.

[365] It is sort of actively receptive, if you can put it that way, to whatever is new.

[366] You were talking about Elkburn and Goldberg and so.

[367] And then whatever that is, is then sort of, processed by the left hemisphere at the next stage into categories.

[368] So it's a bit of that and try to understand it.

[369] But of course whatever it is is much bigger than any of the categories.

[370] So they all break down.

[371] And it gets restored in the right hemisphere into a new hole.

[372] The tecun, the repair.

[373] That's tycoon, right, T -I -K -U -F.

[374] T -I -K -K -K -A.

[375] Right, right, right.

[376] And the kind of easy way of thinking about it is learning a piece of music.

[377] you're first of all attracted to it as a whole.

[378] You then realize that you need to practice that piece at bar 28, and you realize that at bar 64 there's a return to the dominant or something.

[379] And then, actually, when you go on stage, you've got to just forget all about that.

[380] But it's not that that work was lost.

[381] It's just that it's no longer present.

[382] Right, right.

[383] Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[384] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account.

[385] the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[386] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.