A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (26 page)

Go Back to School

The best way to get in touch with your inner child is to take it outside for some play. So go back to school . . . or at least, back to the playground. Visit a schoolyard, take a seat on a bench, and watch how the real kids play. See if some of their sense of wonder and curiosity penetrates your adult immune system.

To mix business with pleasure, schedule your next staff retreat in an elementary school. Talking about strategic priorities takes on new meaning when you’re in a classroom whose bulletin boards admonish everyone to Play Fair, Don’t Hit, and Be Nice. And if this retro approach is really working for you, head to a children's museum for a day of discovery. You’ll benefit not only from tackling the hands-on museum exhibits, but also by soaking in the learning and laughter of the little people around you. These places likewise offer a nice alternative for meetings and retreats. Check out the Association of Children’s Museum’s Web site for links to children’s museums around the world (
More info:
www.childrensmuseums.org
).

Dissect a Joke.

A nun, a rabbi, and a priest walk into a bar. The bartender looks up at them and says, “What is this? A joke?”

Actually, it is. And, if you ask me, it’s a pretty funny joke, too. But why? Giving that question some thought can strengthen your Play muscles. Next time you hear a joke, laugh (if it’s funny). Then try to figure out what made it humorous. Was it the ambiguity of a phrase? Was it the sound of a particular word? Was it another instance of the right hemisphere’s ability to resolve incongruity?

I don’t want you to take a purely clinical approach to humor. (Your popularity among your peers matters to me.) But if you occasionally step back and reverse-engineer a joke or funny line, you’ll gain a deeper comprehension of which kinds of humor work—and, more important, which don’t.

Play Right-Brain Games.

Two new wireless games are specifically designed to test and enhance R-Directed abilities. Tecmo’s
Right Brain Game
features 12 activities that measure whether you’re right-brain dominant or left-brain dominant. As of press time, the game was available only in Japan, but it should come to North America and Europe soon.
(More info:
www.tecmogames.com
)
Right Brain Paradise, which purports to be perhaps “the most brain-stimulating mobile game ever created,” moves you through nine increasingly difficult levels that test the capacity of your brain’s right hemisphere.
(More info:
www.bluelavawireless.com
)

Nine

MEANING

I
n the early winter of 1942, Austrian authorities in Vienna rounded up and arrested hundreds of Jews, among them a young psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl. At the time Frankl was a rising figure in his field who was developing a new theory of psychological well-being. He and his wife, Tilly, had anticipated the roundup, so they took pains to preserve what was then their most important possession. Before the police marched into their home, Tilly sewed into the lining of Viktor’s coat the manuscript of the book he was writing about his theories. Viktor wore the coat when the couple was later dispatched to Auschwitz. He clung to it his first day in the concentration camp. But on day two, the SS guards stripped him down, confiscated all his clothing, and Frankl never saw the manuscript again. Over the next three years, at Auschwitz and later at Dachau, as his wife, brother, mother, and father perished in the gas ovens, Frankl worked to recreate his text by scratching notes on stolen scraps of paper. And in 1946, one year after Allied forces liberated the concentration camps, those crumpled bits of paper formed the basis of what would become one of the most powerful and enduring works of the last century—Frankl’s book,
Man’s Search for Meaning.
¹

In
Man’s Search for Meaning,
Frankl describes how he persevered in the face of crushing labor, sadistic guards, and scant food. But his book is more than a narrative of survival. It is both a window into the human soul and a guide to a meaningful life. Drawing on his own experiences in the camps, as well as the experiences and mental states of his fellow prisoners, Frankl elaborated the theory he had begun before his arrest. He argues that “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.”
²
Our fundamental drive, the motivational engine that powers human existence, is the pursuit of meaning. Frankl’s approach—called “logotherapy,” for “
logos,”
the Greek word for meaning—quickly became an influential movement in psychotherapy.

Frankl and others managed to find meaning and purpose even in the unimaginably ghastly setting of a concentration camp. (In one of my favorite passages, Frankl writes, “I understood how a man who has nothing left in the world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”) He demonstrates that meaning is possible in spite of suffering—indeed, that meaning can sometimes grow from suffering. But he also emphasizes that suffering is not a prerequisite to finding meaning. The search for meaning is a drive that exists in all of us—and a combination of external circumstances and internal will can bring it to the surface.

This last point is the key to the book—and to its relevance today. In the early years of the twenty-first century, several forces have gathered to create the circumstances for the pursuit of meaning on a scale never before imagined. First, while problems of poverty and other social maladies persist, most people in the advanced world have been relieved from true suffering. As I laid out in Chapter 2, we live in an era of abundance, with standards of living unmatched in the history of the world. Freed from the struggle for survival, we have the luxury of devoting more of our lives to the search for meaning. Surely, if Frankl and his fellow prisoners could pursue meaning from the work camps of Auschwitz, we can do the same from the comfort of our abundant lives.

Other forces are also at work. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the mammoth baby boom generation is reaching a demographic milestone. The typical boomer now has more of his life behind him than ahead of him, prompting the searching of souls and the reevaluation of priorities. The specter of terrorism hovers, offering reminders of life’s fleetingness and raising questions of its purpose. Meantime, technology continues its unrelenting march, deluging us with data and choking us with choices. All these forces have gathered into a perfect storm of circumstances that is making the search for meaning more possible and the will to find meaning the sixth essential aptitude of the Conceptual Age.

“We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.”

—
JACOB NEEDLEMAN

Robert William Fogel, the Nobel laureate economist I mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, calls this moment the “Fourth Great Awakening.” He writes, “Spiritual (or immaterial) inequity is now as great a problem as material inequity, perhaps even greater.”
³
His words echo Frankl’s a half-century earlier: “[P]eople have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”
⁴
Ronald Inglehart, a respected political scientist at the University of Michigan who has been tracking and comparing public opinion in dozens of countries for the last quarter-century, has detected a similar yearning. Each time he administers his World Values Survey, he finds that respondents express greater concern for spiritual and immaterial matters. For instance, according to one recent survey, 58 percent of Americans say they think often about the meaning and purpose of life. Substantial, though lower, percentages of Germans, British, and Japanese report the same.
⁵
Inglehart believes that the advanced world is in the midst of a slow change in its operating principles, “a gradual shift from ‘Materialist’ values (emphasizing economic and physical security above all) toward ‘Postmaterialist’ priorities (emphasizing self-expression and the quality of life).”
⁶
Gregg Easterbrook, an American journalist who has written insightfully on this topic, puts it more boldly: “A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale—involving hundreds of millions of people—and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age.”
⁷

Whatever we call it—the “Fourth Great Awakening,” “Post-materialist” values, “meaning want”—the consequences are the same. Meaning has become a central aspect of our work and our lives. Pursuing meaning obviously is no simple task. You can’t buy a cookbook with the recipe for it—or open a packet of powder and add water and stir. But there are two practical, whole-minded ways for individuals, families, and businesses to begin the search for meaning: start taking spirituality seriously and start taking happiness seriously.

Taking Spirituality Seriously

A little man in a burgundy robe and red sneakers is the last to take the stage. As he emerges from the wings, the audience stands in hushed reverence. He smiles a beatific smile, greets the others, and sits cross-legged on the empty armchair that’s waiting for him. The man I’m squinting at from the back rows of a packed 1,300-seat auditorium on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the man who’s caused all these people, including Richard Gere, hands pressed together Namaste-style, and Goldie Hawn, hands wiggling by her side, to rise and revere—is Tenzin Gayatso, aka the 14th manifestation of the Buddha of Compassion, aka the Dalai Lama—winner of the Nobel Prize, leader in exile of Tibet, and spiritual rock star who the next evening will fill Boston’s Fleet Center with some thirteen thousand adoring fans.

What is the Dalai Lama doing at MIT? He’s here for the “Investigating the Mind” conference—a two-day gabfest about what science can learn from Buddhism and what Buddhism can learn from science. Each morning and afternoon the chairs onstage will fill with scientists wearing professorial earth tones and monks wearing rich shades of red and saffron—a visual display of reason breaking bread with spirit, of the left and right sides of our collective brains meeting in the middle. Fifteen years ago, the Dalai Lama began inviting scientists to his home in Dharamsala, India. He was interested in what they were learning about the brain, and they were curious about what was going on in the brains of people who have developed an almost superhuman capacity for meditation and spiritual transcendence. Over the next decade and a half, scientists such as the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson began sliding monks into MRI machines like the one I entered in Chapter 1, to capture images of their meditating brains and to make new insights into emotion, attention, mental imagery, and other cognitive capacities. Monks such as Mathieu Ricard, who originally trained as a molecular biologist, began reading scientific papers to understand the workings of the mind and perhaps the nature of the soul. The meeting that I attended was their first public gathering—a coming-out party of sorts. “Science and Buddhism are very similar,” the Dalai Lama told some of us at a press conference before the main event, “because they are exploring the nature of reality, and both have the goal to lessen the suffering of mankind.”

“I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear.

Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness.”

—THE DALAI LAMA

What happened at the conference—lots of talk, plans for future research—is less significant perhaps than that it happened. Even MIT is taking spirituality seriously. As the well-known molecular biologist Eric Lander told the crowd, science is merely one way to understand the world. Across many different realms, there’s a growing recognition that spirituality—not religion necessarily, but the more broadly defined concern for the meaning and purpose of life—is a fundamental part of the human condition. Indeed, our capacity for faith—again, not religion per se, but the belief in something larger than ourselves—may be wired into our brains. Perhaps not surprisingly, this wiring seems to run through the brain’s right hemisphere. For example, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Ontario’s Laurentian University, has conducted (somewhat controversial) experiments with a device that’s come to be called a “God helmet.” Persinger fastens the helmet onto subjects’ heads and bathes their brains’ right hemispheres in a weak field of electromagnetic radiation. Most of those who have strapped on the apparatus report feeling either the presence of God or a oneness with the universe, suggesting again that spiritual and mystical thoughts and experiences may be part of our neurophysiology.
⁸
Meantime, at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrew Newberg has scanned the brains of nuns when they have meditated to the point of religious ecstasy and connection with God. His images show that during such moments, the part of the brain that guides a sense of self is less active—thus contributing to the feeling of being unified with something larger. Their work and the work of others have given rise to a new field, neurotheology, which explores the relationship between the brain and spiritual experience. As Caltech neuroscientist Steven Quartz puts it, “Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose.”
⁹