Tag: Iain McGilchrist

The Expert Eye

September 19th, 2026
January 11, 2025 @ 6:12pm – Heathcote, Australia

“Tactics flow from a superior position.” — Bobby Fischer

We can’t really know what reality is. The best we can do is to get to know our experience of it, and use other means to flesh out the full picture, remembering that “even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full.”¹

But some accounts of reality are simply more truthful. These accounts come from experts, people who are much, much better at seeing what’s actually happening than the rest of us. They could be a technician scanning an x-ray, a coach studying a serving motion or a hunter staring down a growling bear.

With their expert evaluations, they can quickly and accurately notice important things about reality.

The Art of the Evaluation

Cops, who might take “thirty different assignments in one shift”,² are expert evaluators. In his book 400 Things Cops Know, Adam Plantinga describes how he’d respond to a household that would alarm the rest of us. Looking around he’d think, “okay, the kids are dirty, but they seem unharmed. They’re likely neglected, not abused.” In other words, he might not like what he sees, but he doesn’t see a crime – the main thing he’s looking for.

Over time their evaluations become less “clunkily conscious”. Thinking less is a sign of a “true expert,”³ says Iain McGilchrist: “When you start out … you have to learn and memorize and think consciously about many, many things. But by the time you’re a skilful physician or surgeon, a skilful chess player or a skilful pilot, you don’t think like that, because that would make you a very second-rate performer.”

The observations experts make can seem obvious after the fact. Anything that’s true will feel obvious in some sense. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, an engineer is asked to give his honest opinion on the bridge under construction. He sums up the problem in a few words. “I wouldn’t build it here. The Japanese couldn’t have picked a worse location. There’s no bottom. You see those piles? They’re sinking. Our chaps could drive those logs till doomsday and they wouldn’t hold.”

In The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan points out signals that many troubled dogs show, such as heavy breathing (anxiety), a cool stare (aggression) or a raised paw (a warning). The owners might see these things too, but they simply don’t understand their significance. These aren’t special or unusual behaviours, but they are important.

A problem half-solved

Even though experts can see important things in an instant, it doesn’t mean they’re always right. It doesn’t mean a policeman can “peer into men’s souls and determine whether they are the guilty party”. Even the Dog Whisperer gets bitten. “I didn’t see that coming”, admits Cesar, after an aggressive labrador lunges at his hand.

Experts also face another, bigger problem: the rest of us. Their evaluations can lead to smart strategies and solutions, but someone has to execute. This is where the “real work” is.
- Military intelligence only matters if it’s backed up by guns and bombs.
- A tennis coach might know the secret to winning a Grand Slam, but will need to make sure his athlete sets his alarm on game day.
- An overexcited dog needs longer walks, but who’s going to do the walking?
Whether or not the expert sticks around to fix what they’ve found, at least the action is aimed in roughly the right direction. There’s lots of work to do, but it’s easier, and it won’t be wasted or going round in circles, because it flows from something true and important.

Also published on the Buddha Bike Substack
1. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI – Yuval Noah Harari ↩︎
2. 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman – Adam Plantinga ↩︎
3. The Wisdom Of Intuition – Iain McGilchrist (YouTube) ↩︎
Breaking the habit

June 29th, 2025

February 18, 2022 @ 1:31pm – San Francisco, CA

We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”

Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me

When you have a bad habit, it becomes very easy to do things you don’t want to do, like staying up late watching YouTube.

But when consciously created, a habit can make it easy to do something you want to do, like eat healthier or go to bed a bit earlier.

Habits rewire your brain and eventually even change your identity. James Clear writes about this in his popular self-help book Atomic Habits (2018). You don’t just go to the gym every Monday, you become the type of person who does so.

A habit helps you to show up even when you have temporarily lost interest, motivation or willpower. On a particularly cold night, my swim coach admitted that ‘some nights all that’s left is the habit.’ That could sound a bit sad, but sometimes that’s the difference between sticking at something and giving up entirely.

Habits seem to work so well because humans are habitual by nature. When certain brain circuits are triggered, we react the same way again and again. Most of our movements are habitual and automatic. The way we breathe, stand, talk, scratch, itch, whistle. Our preferences repeat too, like which clothes we select to wear or which yoga mat we like to sit on. When so much of who we are, and what we do is a habit, the harder it is to notice.

And so, the danger of introducing new habits, is that although life may get easier and more efficient, we may also become even more stilted, predictable and mechanical than we already tend to be.

A man decides to run three times a week. Over the course of year his physical and mental health improve. He finds that he has more energy and a brighter outlook on life. But even this healthy habit can become unhealthy. His unconscious desire for perfection means he becomes irritated and frustrated when the weather is bad or his stats aren’t improving. He denies spontaneous impulses to try out different, more interesting routes. He turns down social invites to keep his streak going. And eventually gets injured after ignoring obvious signals from his body to mix things up or to rest.

We want to hammer our lives like a nail, tag it, stereotype it or cram it into a category.

But life isn’t mechanical.

Iain McGilchrist writes that “The only things in the universe that are machine-like are the few lumps of metal we have created in the last 300 years.”

This might be why mechanical things often fail or break in dreams.

So before you install a new habit, see how it feels to eat your dinner in a different place, at a different time or to skip it entirely. Maybe it’s worth removing a something habitual, before adding more.

When we gain the ability to hold our habits lightly, we find freedom, maybe the most important thing in life, or at least much more important than a healthy meal or some saved time.

This is the 100th post on Buddha.Bike

Tag: Iain McGilchrist

The Expert Eye

The Art of the Evaluation

A problem half-solved

Breaking the habit