Charles Bukowski: Depression and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Creative Juices (NSFW)

in Life, Poetry, Psychology | May 22nd, 2012


Pico Iyer once called Charles Bukows­ki the “lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can lowlife,” and that’s because he wrote poems for and about ordi­nary Amer­i­cans — peo­ple who expe­ri­enced pover­ty, the tedi­um and grind of work, and some­times frayed rela­tion­ships, bouts of alco­holism, drug addic­tion and the rest. Bukows­ki could write so elo­quent­ly about this because he came from this world. He grew up in a poor immi­grant house­hold with an abu­sive father, took to the bot­tle at an ear­ly age, worked at a Los Ange­les post office for a decade plus, and had a long and tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with Jane Cooney Bak­er, a wid­ow eleven years his senior, who drank to excess and died at 51, leav­ing Bukows­ki bro­ken.

And then there’s the depres­sion. Bukows­ki expe­ri­enced that too. But he knew how to chan­nel it, how to turn days of dark­ness into sources of per­son­al and cre­ative renew­al. He explains it in some char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly NSFW detail above.

To gain a more in-depth under­stand­ing of depres­sion and its bio­log­i­cal basis, we’d rec­om­mend watch­ing this lec­ture by Stan­ford’s Robert Sapolksy.

Here’s a tran­script of what Bukows­ki has to say:

I have peri­ods where, you know, when I feel a lit­tle weak or depressed. Fuck it! The Wheaties aren’t going down right. I just go to bed for three days and four nights, pull down all the shades and just go to bed. Get up. Shit. Piss. Drink a beer down and go back to bed. I come out of that com­plete­ly re-enlight­ened for 2 or 3 months. I get pow­er from that.

I think someday…they’ll say this psy­chot­ic guy knew some­thing that…you know in days ahead and med­i­cine, and how they fig­ure these things out. Every­body should go to bed now and then, when they’re down low and give it up for three or four days. Then they’ll come back good for a while.

But we’re so obsessed with, we have to get up and do it and go back to sleep. In fact there’s a woman I’m liv­ing with now, get’s around 12:30, 1pm, I say: “I’m sleepy. I want to go to sleep.” She says: “What? You want to go to sleep, it’s only 1pm!” We’re not even drink­ing, you know. Hell, there’s noth­ing else to do but sleep.

Peo­ple are nailed to the process­es. Up. Down. Do some­thing. Get up, do some­thing, go to sleep. Get up. They can’t get out of that cir­cle. You’ll see, some­day they’ll say: “Bukows­ki knew.” Lay down for 3 or 4 days till you get your juices back, then get up, look around and do it. But who the hell can do it cause you need a dol­lar. That’s all. That’s a long speech, isn’t it? But it means some­thing.

via Bib­liok­lept

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If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Bukows­ki:

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

The Last Faxed Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

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Sigmund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Recording of His Voice, 1938

in Psychology | May 7th, 2012

On Decem­ber 7, 1938, a BBC radio crew vis­it­ed Sig­mund Freud at his new home at Hamp­stead, North Lon­don. Freud had moved to Eng­land only a few months ear­li­er to escape the Nazi annex­a­tion of Aus­tria. He was 81 years old and suf­fer­ing from incur­able jaw can­cer. Every word was an agony to speak.

Less than a year lat­er, when the pain became unbear­able, Freud asked his doc­tor to admin­is­ter a lethal dose of mor­phine. The BBC record­ing is the only known audio record­ing of Freud, the founder of psy­cho­analy­sis and one of the tow­er­ing intel­lec­tu­al fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry. (Find works by Freud in our col­lec­tion of 300 Free eBooks.) In heav­i­ly accent­ed Eng­lish, he says:

I start­ed my pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty as a neu­rol­o­gist try­ing to bring relief to my neu­rot­ic patients. Under the influ­ence of an old­er friend and by my own efforts, I dis­cov­ered some impor­tant new facts about the uncon­scious in psy­chic life, the role of instinc­tu­al urges, and so on. Out of these find­ings grew a new sci­ence, psy­cho­analy­sis, a part of psy­chol­o­gy, and a new method of treat­ment of the neu­roses. I had to pay heav­i­ly for this bit of good luck. Peo­ple did not believe in my facts and thought my the­o­ries unsa­vory. Resis­tance was strong and unre­lent­ing. In the end I suc­ceed­ed in acquir­ing pupils and build­ing up an Inter­na­tion­al Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Asso­ci­a­tion. But the strug­gle is not yet over.  –Sig­mund Freud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Gus­tav Jung Pon­ders Death

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Down­load Sig­mund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion on His 160th Birth­day

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Hitchcock on the Filmmaker’s Essential Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

in Film, Psychology | May 2nd, 2012

Alfred Hitch­cock once said that all art is emo­tion, and that the task of the film­mak­er is to use the tools of his medi­um to manip­u­late the audi­ence’s emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence. In the scene above from the 1964 CBC doc­u­men­tary A Talk with Hitch­cock, the great direc­tor demon­strates one of the most fun­da­men­tal tools at a film­mak­er’s dis­pos­al: the Kuleshov effect.

In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, Russ­ian film­mak­er and the­o­rist Lev Kuleshov dis­cov­ered that a sin­gle shot of an actor with an ambigu­ous expres­sion on his face could con­vey a mul­ti­tude of very dis­tinct mean­ings in the mind of the view­er, depend­ing on the nature of the shot imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing it. In 1918 he con­duct­ed his famous exper­i­ment (below) using a sin­gle shot of the silent film actor Ivan Moz­zhukhin’s face look­ing at some­thing off-cam­era.

Kuleshov spliced it in with a series of quite dif­fer­ent images–a bowl of soup, a dead child, a scant­i­ly clad woman–and dis­cov­ered that the audi­ence would inter­pret Moz­zhukhin’s emo­tion (hunger, pity, lust) depend­ing on the jux­ta­po­si­tion.

Kuleshov’s dis­cov­ery was the out­come of a very delib­er­ate process. In 1916 he and sev­er­al col­leagues made a sys­tem­at­ic study of audi­ence reac­tions at movie the­aters across Moscow. They quick­ly found that the bour­geoisie were too reserved, so they spent most of their time at the­aters in work­ing class neigh­bor­hoods, where the emo­tions flowed freely. They noticed that audi­ences react­ed dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing upon where the film was pro­duced. As Kuleshov writes in his essay, “The Prin­ci­ples of Mon­tage”:

When we began to com­pare the typ­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can, typ­i­cal­ly Euro­pean, and typ­i­cal­ly Russ­ian films, we noticed that they were dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent from one anoth­er in their con­struc­tion. We noticed that in a par­tic­u­lar sequence of a Russ­ian film there were, say, ten to fif­teen splices, ten to fif­teen dif­fer­ent set-ups. In the Euro­pean film there might be twen­ty to thir­ty such set-ups (one must not for­get that this descrip­tion per­tains to the year 1916), while in the Amer­i­can film there would be from eighty, some­times upward to a hun­dred, sep­a­rate shots. The Amer­i­can films took first place in elic­it­ing reac­tions from the audi­ence; Euro­pean films took sec­ond; and the Russ­ian films, third. We became par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigued by this, but in the begin­ning we did not under­stand it.

Kuleshov even­tu­al­ly con­clud­ed that the essence of cin­e­ma is mon­tage, that a film sto­ry is best told by cut­ting between dis­crete pieces of film. His stu­dent Sergei Eisen­stein saw the basic struc­ture as a col­li­sion between shot A (“the­sis”) and shot B (“antithe­sis”) to cre­ate a com­plete­ly new idea (“syn­the­sis”) in the mind of the view­er.

The noto­ri­ety of Kuleshov’s exper­i­ment with Moz­zhukhin tends to focus atten­tion on the human face (it has even inspired sci­en­tif­ic research on the con­tex­tu­al fram­ing of emo­tion­al attri­bu­tions), but the effect is far more gen­er­al. “We are accus­tomed,” writes Eisen­stein in Film Sense, “to make, almost auto­mat­i­cal­ly, a def­i­nite and obvi­ous deduc­tive gen­er­al­iza­tion when any sep­a­rate objects are placed before us side by side.”

Kuleshov showed this in sev­er­al oth­er exper­i­ments. In one, he depict­ed a sin­gle woman through a series of shots show­ing the body parts of mul­ti­ple women. In anoth­er he cre­at­ed an “arti­fi­cial land­scape” by splic­ing an image of the White House into a sequence of images of Moscow. The will­ing­ness of audi­ences to make mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions between unre­lat­ed images gives a film­mak­er con­sid­er­able expres­sive pow­er.  In his book On Direct­ing Film, David Mamet writes:

Doc­u­men­taries take basi­cal­ly unre­lat­ed footage and jux­ta­pose it in order to give the view­er the idea the film­mak­er wants to con­vey. They take footage of birds snap­ping a twig. They take footage of a fawn rais­ing his head. The two shots have noth­ing to do with each oth­er. They were shot days or years, and miles, apart. And the film­mak­er jux­ta­pos­es the images to give the view­er the idea of great alert­ness. The shots have noth­ing to do with each oth­er. They are not a record of what the pro­tag­o­nist did. They are not a record of how the deer react­ed to the bird. They’re basi­cal­ly unin­flect­ed images. But they give the view­er the idea of alert­ness to dan­ger when they are jux­ta­posed. That’s good film­mak­ing.

There is an old say­ing that a work of art is only com­plet­ed in the mind of the behold­er. Kuleshov showed that it’s true.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Cre­at­ing Sus­pense

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

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Neuroscience and Propaganda Come Together in Disney’s World War II Film, Reason and Emotion

in Animation, History, Psychology | April 30th, 2012

Last Fri­day, we post­ed Saul Bass’ Why Man Cre­ates. For anoth­er short film which drew Acad­e­my recog­ni­tion by using ani­ma­tion to illu­mi­nate basic human impuls­es, you could do worse than Dis­ney’s Rea­son and Emo­tion. Just as Bass’ pic­ture, a prod­uct of 1968, bears the mark of that era’s ascen­dant free-your-mind coun­ter­cul­ture, Dis­ney’s pic­ture reflects the con­cerns of 1943 Amer­i­ca. Mankind has always and prob­a­bly will always strug­gle with the con­flicts between what we con­sid­er our ratio­nal minds and what we con­sid­er our emo­tion­al impuls­es, but at that par­tic­u­lar time and in that par­tic­u­lar nation, mankind found itself even more con­cerned with the con­flict between the Axis and the Allies. Under­stand­ing how per­sua­sive a mes­sage they could send by unit­ing the cur­rent with the eter­nal, Dis­ney’s wartime pro­pa­gan­da came up with this eight-minute comedic illus­tra­tion of how our rea­son and emo­tion coex­ist, what an ide­al bal­ance between them looks like, and why you, a good Amer­i­can, should hold your emo­tion in check. “That’s right, emo­tion,” insists the nar­ra­tor, “go ahead, put rea­son out of the way. That’s great, fine — for Hitler.”

Enlight­ened 21st-cen­tu­ry view­ers will find plen­ty of the stiff, the square, and the stereo­typ­i­cal to object to here. Ven­tur­ing inside the head of an aver­age Amer­i­can man, the film sees a sober, bespec­ta­cled embod­i­ment of Rea­son at the steer­ing wheel. Behind him sits the jit­tery, club-swing­ing cave­man Emo­tion. When our man spies a “classy dish” on the side­walk, Emo­tion wrests con­trol from Rea­son, but suc­ceeds only in get­ting their humanoid vehi­cle slapped.

We then enter the mind of the slap­per to find Rea­son’s female equiv­a­lent, a syn­the­sis of all char­ac­ters ever named “Pru­dence,” at the wheel. Back-seat dri­ving is a rotund, excitable, (rel­a­tive­ly) skimpi­ly dressed Emo­tion. Rea­son believes she has done jus­tice with the slap, but Emo­tion argues, “He was cute! You wan­na be an old maid?” She then pro­pos­es an eat­ing binge, while Rea­son looks on in hor­ror at their con­trol room’s rapid­ly bal­loon­ing, sag­ging, “CHIN,” PROFILE,” and “FIGURE” charts.

Yet in its old-fash­ioned, super­cil­ious, and sim­plis­tic way, Rea­son and Emo­tion looks frankly at the chal­lenges we all face on a reg­u­lar basis when decid­ing, whether we be male or female, what to do, which foods to eat, and whom to try to meet. Research on what our cen­ters of rea­son and emo­tion actu­al­ly are and how they deter­mine our choic­es has risen to the height of neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic fash­ion, and as for the film’s indict­ment of the Third Reich as a vast emo­tion-manip­u­la­tion machine, the unset­tling but sub­stan­tial field of dic­ta­to­r­i­al mind con­trol in all its forms has accu­mu­lat­ed its own enor­mous body of aca­d­e­m­ic study. We’ve grown just a lit­tle smarter about rea­son and emo­tion, war and peace, and men and women in the past 69 years, which makes Rea­son and Emo­tion a rich­er and more fas­ci­nat­ing watch now than it would have been then. The film has been added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Find more Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Films Here:

The Mak­ing of a Nazi: Disney’s 1943 Ani­mat­ed Short

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream (1942)

Don­ald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Tax­es (1943)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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John Cleese, Monty Python Icon, on How to Be Creative

in Comedy, Creativity, Life, Psychology, Video - Science | April 11th, 2012

A cou­ple of years ago, Maria Popo­va high­light­ed for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a hand­book for cre­at­ing the right con­di­tions for cre­ativ­i­ty. Of course, John Cleese knows some­thing about cre­ativ­i­ty, being one of the lead­ing forces behind Mon­ty Python, the beloved British com­e­dy group.

Now, we have anoth­er talk, record­ed cir­ca 1991, where Cleese uses sci­en­tif­ic research to describe what cre­ativ­i­ty is … and what cre­ativ­i­ty isn’t. He starts by telling us, cre­ativ­i­ty is not a tal­ent. It has noth­ing to do with IQ. It is a way of doing things, a way of being — which means that cre­ativ­i­ty can be learned. The rest he explains in 37 thought-filled min­utes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Amy Tan: The Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Conformity Isn’t a Recipe for Excellence: Wisdom from George Carlin & Steve Jobs (NSFW)

in Comedy, Life, Psychology | December 6th, 2011

Dur­ing the 1960s, George Car­lin had some­thing of an epiphany. Con­front­ed by the coun­ter­cul­ture, the young come­di­an real­ized that he was­n’t stay­ing true to him­self — that he was try­ing to be Dan­ny Kaye, a very main­stream star, when he was real­ly an out­law and a rebel at heart. (Watch him on The Tonight Show in 1966). Even­tu­al­ly, Car­lin learned “not to give a shit,” to break with mil­que­toast con­ven­tions that restrained oth­er come­di­ans, and that’s when his com­ic genius bloomed. Note that some of Car­lin’s com­ments here are … not sur­pris­ing­ly … not safe for work.

Steve Jobs, anoth­er child of the coun­ter­cul­ture, did­n’t learn Car­lin’s les­son over time. As Wal­ter Isaac­son makes clear in his new biog­ra­phy, Jobs under­stood from the begin­ning that excel­lence is rarely achieved by walk­ing down the path of con­for­mi­ty. In a 1995 inter­view, Jobs boiled down his basic approach to life. The mas­ter­mind behind the leg­endary Think Dif­fer­ent tele­vi­sion cam­paign (watch the ver­sion nar­rat­ed by Jobs him­self) said:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice fam­i­ly, have fun, save a lit­tle mon­ey.

That’s a very lim­it­ed life. Life can be much broad­er once you dis­cov­er one sim­ple fact: Every­thing around you that you call life was made up by peo­ple that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influ­ence it, you can build your own things that oth­er peo­ple can use. Once you learn that, you’ll nev­er be the same again.

You can find more pearls of wis­dom from Jobs over at Brain­Pick­ings, and we’ll leave you below with more cul­tur­al fig­ures med­i­tat­ing on life:

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18

Paulo Coel­ho: Suc­cess Nev­er Hap­pens With­out Tak­ing Risks

One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cau­tious…

Bono Tells Grad­u­ates “Pick a Fight, Get in It” (2004)

Conan O’Brien: Through Dis­ap­point­ment You Can Gain Clar­i­ty

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grad­u­ates What They Need to Know

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This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion: Experiments in Neuroscience

in Psychology, Science | December 6th, 2011

If you attend­ed the recent Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science con­fer­ence, you had the chance to see some unprece­dent­ed 3D imag­ing of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which wom­en’s brain regions (80 in total) are acti­vat­ed in the sequence lead­ing to an orgasm. For Bar­ry Komis­aruk (pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty), this imag­ing isn’t gra­tu­itous. The whole point is to demys­ti­fy how the brain expe­ri­ences plea­sure, some­thing that could even­tu­al­ly inform our under­stand­ing of addic­tion and depres­sion. Komis­aruk said:

It’s a beau­ti­ful sys­tem in which to study the brain’s con­nec­tiv­i­ty. We expect that this movie [above], a dynam­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the grad­ual buildup of brain activ­i­ty to a cli­max, fol­lowed by res­o­lu­tion, will facil­i­tate our under­stand­ing of patho­log­i­cal con­di­tions such as anor­gas­mia by empha­siz­ing where in the brain the sequen­tial process breaks down.

Mean­while, back at the neu­ro­science ranch, researchers are also using imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy to observe the human brain in anoth­er state, the state where peo­ple expe­ri­ence mys­ti­cal awak­en­ings dur­ing prayer and med­i­ta­tion or oth­er spir­i­tu­al epipha­nies. Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can took a fair­ly deep look at this cut­ting-edge field sev­er­al years ago (read the full piece here), and now NPR has pro­duced a mul­ti­me­dia glimpse into the evolv­ing sci­ence of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. The pre­sen­ta­tion (click here or the image above) com­bines audio, video, arti­cles, book excerpts, etc. and delves into the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: Is God a delu­sion cre­at­ed by brain chem­istry, or is brain chem­istry a nec­es­sary con­duit for peo­ple to reach God?

If you want to learn more about the brain and neu­ro­science, don’t miss the cours­es list­ed in the Psychology/Neuroscience sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

Time and The Guardian have more on the first sto­ry above here and here.

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The Decline of Civilization’s Right Brain: Animated

in Psychology | October 24th, 2011

The mind, they say, is a house divid­ed: The right hemi­sphere of the brain is pre­dom­i­nant­ly intu­itive; the left, pre­dom­i­nant­ly ratio­nal.

In his recent book, The Mas­ter and His Emis­sary: The Divid­ed Brain and the Mak­ing of the West­ern World, the British psy­chi­a­trist and writer Iain McGilchrist looks at the evo­lu­tion of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion through a neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal prism. In McGilchrist’s view our left hemi­sphere has, over the past four cen­turies, pro­gres­sive­ly pushed aside our right hemi­sphere. “My belief,” McGilchrist told The Morn­ing News last year, “is that it has now tak­en over our self-under­stand­ing, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, and is lead­ing us all down the road to ruin.”

McGilchrist is quick to point out that the old left-brain, right-brain clichés of the 1960s and 1970s were great­ly over­sim­pli­fied. Recent research has shown that both sides of the brain are deeply involved in func­tions such as rea­son and emo­tion. But the dichoto­my is still use­ful, McGilchrist says, and should not be aban­doned.

“The right hemi­sphere gives sus­tained, broad, open, vig­i­lant alert­ness, where­as the left hemi­sphere gives nar­row, sharply focused atten­tion to detail,” McGilchrist says in a new RSA Ani­mate fea­ture (see above). “Peo­ple who lose their right hemi­spheres have a patho­log­i­cal nar­row­ing of the win­dow of atten­tion.”  McGilchrist sees this nar­row­ing process occur­ring at the soci­etal lev­el. The left brain, he argues, con­ceives of the world as a set of decon­tex­tu­al­ized, sta­t­ic, mate­r­i­al, abstract things, where­as the right brain holis­ti­cal­ly embraces a world of evolv­ing, spir­i­tu­al, empath­ic, con­crete beings.

Both hemi­spheres are nec­es­sary, McGilchrist says in the Morn­ing News inter­view, “but one is more fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant than the oth­er, and sees more than the oth­er, even though there are some things that it must not get involved with, if it is to main­tain its broad­er, more complete–in essence more truthful–vision. This is the right hemi­sphere, which, as I demon­strate from the neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, lit­er­al­ly sees more, and grounds the under­stand­ing of the left hemisphere–an under­stand­ing which must ulti­mate­ly be re-inte­gret­ed with the right hemi­sphere, if it is not to lead to error. The left hemi­sphere is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly valu­able as an inter­me­di­ate, but not as a final author­i­ty.”

McGilchrist is not with­out his crit­ics. The British philoso­pher A.C. Grayling writes in the Lit­er­ary Review, “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, if one accepts the log­ic of his argu­ment that our West­ern civil­i­sa­tion has declined from a right-hemi­sphere to a left-hemi­sphere dis­pen­sa­tion, we do not have to imag­ine what the for­mer would be like, because his­to­ry itself tells us: in it most of us would be super­sti­tious and igno­rant peas­ants work­ing a strip farm that we would nev­er leave from cra­dle to grave, under the thumb of slight­ly more left-hemi­spher­ic bul­lies in the form of the local baron and priest.”

After The Mas­ter and His Emis­sary was pub­lished, McGilchrist dis­cov­ered a quo­ta­tion attrib­uted to Albert Ein­stein that he felt neat­ly sup­port­ed his the­sis. He uses this quote at the end of his RSA talk: “The intu­itive mind is a sacred gift and the ratio­nal mind is a faith­ful ser­vant. We have cre­at­ed a soci­ety that hon­ors the ser­vant and has for­got­ten the gift.” But did Ein­stein actu­al­ly say that? The Inter­net is awash with dubi­ous Ein­stein quo­ta­tions, and we were unable to locate the orig­i­nal source of this one. If any read­er can ver­i­fy its authen­tic­i­ty (by cit­ing the orig­i­nal text, speech or con­ver­sa­tion) please leave a note in our com­ments sec­tion. Mean­while, you can watch McGilchrist’s entire half-hour RSA lec­ture here.

via Brain Pick­ings

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