Phantoms in the Brain

"I just couldn’t get over this book. The description of people with only one arm who believed they could clap. It’s just wonderful. It’s really about how people who have some physical injury to their brain can have fantasies that bear no relationship to reality whatsoever. No, not at all. He’s really a serious neuropsychiatrist. I’m very impressed by him. I do think there’s a connection, and in my book, I argue that we have religious beliefs, mystical beliefs, embedded in our brain. One of the arguments is that if you take LSD, a boring bloody molecule, how could you possibly have these extraordinary experiences unless the experiences were already there? Well, that’s my story, but Phantoms in the Brain is a wonderful book. A really marvellous book. Yes, The Revolution of Wisdom . I’m interested in the origin of science, and Sir George Lloyd is the best writer on that. You see, all science – people don’t like this – but all science as we know it began with the Greeks. They were the first society to think in that way and a lot of my ideas on this come from Lloyd. I am a scientist and I care about science, and Lloyd just writes so well about it. So the first scientist we know about is Thales [sixth century BC] who said that everything in the world was made out of water. It wasn’t a mystical thing. He was really trying to understand the world. One of my heroes of course is Archimedes, who I think is one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Because he had nobody else’s shoulders to stand on, and I want to tell you that working out buoyancy and specific gravity, quite apart from all his mathematical things, was just absolutely brilliant. Greek science is so important. Not that people didn’t make enormous contributions later, but it all started with the Greeks. The Chinese had no science at all. They had wonderful technology but understood nothing. Technology is about building things. The elephant, for example, is wonderful technology, yes? But evolution knows no science. It just selected those things that work. Yes, the difference between science and technology is absolutely fundamental. If you want to understand why the sun goes round the earth and things like that – that’s not technology."