A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (4 page)

Context is also important in other dimensions of language. For example, many studies have shown that the right hemisphere is responsible for our ability to comprehend metaphors. If you tell me that José has “a heart the size of Montana,” my left hemisphere quickly assesses who José is, what a heart is, and how big Montana is. But when the literal meaning of the sentence doesn’t compute—how can a 147,000-square-mile heart fit inside José’s modest chest cavity?—it calls in the right hemisphere to resolve the incongruity. The right hemisphere explains to the left that José doesn’t have some bizarre cardiac condition but instead is a generous and loving person. “Neither side of the brain . . . can do the job without the other,” Ornstein writes. “We need the text of our lives to be in context.”
¹²

4. The left hemisphere analyzes the details;

the right hemisphere synthesizes the big picture.

In 1951, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about
War and Peace
and gave it a room-emptying title: “Leo Tolstoy’s Historical Skepticism.” Berlin’s publisher loved the essay but hated the headline, so he changed the title to something catchier: “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” after an ancient Greek adage, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The retitled essay helped make Berlin famous. And the concept provides a useful way of illuminating a fourth difference between the two sides of our brain. The left side is a fox; the right side is a hedgehog.

“In general the left hemisphere participates in the
analysis
of information,” says a neuroscience primer. “In contrast, the right hemisphere is specialized for
synthesis;
it is particularly good at putting isolated elements together to perceive things as a whole.”
¹³
Analysis and synthesis are perhaps the two most fundamental ways of interpreting information. You can break the whole into its components. Or you can weave the components into a whole. Both are essential to human reasoning. But they are guided by different parts of the brain. Roger Sperry noted this key difference in a paper he wrote (with Jerre Levy-Agresti) in 1968:

The data indicate that the mute, minor [right] hemisphere is specialized for Gestalt perception, being primarily a synthesist in dealing with information input. The speaking, major hemisphere, in contrast, seems to operate in a more logical, analytic computer-like fashion. Its language is inadequate for the rapid complex syntheses achieved by the minor hemisphere.
¹⁴

The left converges on a single answer; the right diverges into a Gestalt. The left focuses on categories, the right on relationships. The left can grasp the details. But only the right hemisphere can see the big picture.

All of which leads back to those brain scans.

Fear and Loathing in My Amygdalas

Toward the base of the brain sit two almond-shaped structures that serve as the brain’s Department of Homeland Security.
¹⁵
They’re called the amygdalas—and they play a crucial role in processing emotions, especially fear. With one located in the left hemisphere and the other in the right, the amygdalas are ever on the lookout for threats in our midst. Not surprisingly, when I was inside the MRI machine looking at pictures of upset people and unsettling scenes, my amygdalas issued alerts. But which amygdala—left or right—sounded the warning differed considerably depending on which images I was viewing.

As the brain scans later revealed, when I looked at the faces, both of my amygdalas activated—but the right was much more active than the left. When I looked at the scenes, the left was more active than the right. This turns out to be consistent with what we know about the two sides of the brain.

Why did the left side respond more actively to scenes than to faces? Because accurately assessing each scene depended on the rapid-fire sequential reasoning at which the left hemisphere excels. Consider the photo on page 12 and the chain of logic it unfurled:
This is a gun. Guns are dangerous. He’s pointing a gun at me. This is a scary situation.
So my left amygdala leaps from its chair, breaks the glass, and pulls the alarm. By contrast, the left amygdala was relatively quiet (though not entirely inactive) when I viewed the faces. That’s because the right hemisphere, as countless studies have shown, is specialized both for recognizing faces and for interpreting expressions. Those skills depend not on sequential, analytic reasoning—we don’t look at the eyes, then the nose, then the teeth—but on the ability to interpret the parts of the face simultaneously and to synthesize those details into a larger conclusion.

There are also other reasons for my differing responses. Understanding that a man pointing a pistol represents a threat is something we’ve
learned.
According to Ahmad Hariri, the neuroscientist who headed this portion of the NIH project I participated in, the response to such images is “likely learned through experience and social transmission and, thus, may be derived from, if not dependent on, responses in the left hemisphere brain regions.”
¹⁶
If I were to show that image to someone who’d never seen a gun, and therefore had never learned that they were dangerous, the reaction might be bewilderment rather than fear. But if I showed the face on page 10 to someone who’d never seen a Caucasian woman, or perhaps had never encountered anyone outside of his own village, he’d still likely be able to identify the expression. In fact, that is precisely what University of California, San Francisco, professor Paul Ekman, who developed this set of images (called the Facial Action Coding System) and whom we’ll meet in Chapter 7, has found in thirty-five years of research testing these expressions with subjects ranging from college students to remote tribes in New Guinea: “There has never been an instance in which the majority in two cultures ascribes a different emotion to the same expression.”
¹⁷

My brain, then, is not merely ordinary in its looks. It is also ordinary in its actions. Both sides work together—but they have different specialties. The left hemisphere handles logic, sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, context, and the big picture.

A Whole New Mind

There are two kinds of people in the world, an old joke goes: those who believe that everything can be divided into two categories—and the rest of you. Human beings somehow seem naturally inclined to see life in contrasting pairs. East versus West. Mars versus Venus. Logic versus emotion. Left versus right. Yet, in most realms we usually don’t have to pick sides—and it’s often dangerous if we do. For instance, logic without emotion is a chilly, Spock-like existence. Emotion without logic is a weepy, hysterical world where the clocks are never right and the buses always late. In the end, yin always needs yang.

This is especially true when it comes to our brains. The two sides work in concert—two sections of an orchestra that sounds awful if one side packs up its instruments and goes home. As McManus puts it:

However tempting it is to talk of right and left hemispheres in isolation, they are actually two half-brains, designed to work together as a smooth, single, integrated whole in one entire, complete brain. The left hemisphere knows how to handle logic and the right hemisphere knows about the world. Put the two together and one gets a powerful thinking machine. Use either on its own and the result can be bizarre or absurd.
¹⁸

In other words, leading a healthy, happy, successful life depends on both hemispheres of your brain.

But the contrast in how our cerebral hemispheres operate does yield a powerful
metaphor
for how individuals and organizations navigate their lives. Some people seem more comfortable with logical, sequential, computer-like reasoning. They tend to become lawyers, accountants, and engineers. Other people are more comfortable with holistic, intuitive, and nonlinear reasoning. They tend to become inventors, entertainers, and counselors. And these individual inclinations go on to shape families, institutions, and societies.

Call the first approach
L-Directed Thinking.
It is a form of thinking and an attitude to life that is characteristic of the left hemisphere of the brain—sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic. Ascendant in the Information Age, exemplified by computer programmers, prized by hardheaded organizations, and emphasized in schools, this approach is directed
by
left-brain attributes,
toward
left-brain results. Call the other approach
R-Directed Thinking.
It is a form of thinking and an attitude to life that is characteristic of the right hemisphere of the brain—simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic. Underemphasized in the Information Age, exemplified by creators and caregivers, shortchanged by organizations, and neglected in schools, this approach is directed
by
right-brain attributes,
toward
right-brain results.
*

Of course, we need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies. But the mere fact that I feel obliged to underscore that obvious point is perhaps further indication of how much we’ve been in the thrall of reductionist, binary thinking. Despite those who have deified the right brain beyond all scientific evidence, there remains a strong tilt toward the left. Our broader culture tends to prize L-Directed Thinking more highly than its counterpart, taking this approach more seriously and viewing the alternative as useful but secondary.

But this is changing—and it will dramatically reshape our lives. Left-brain-style thinking used to be the driver and right-brain-style thinking the passenger. Now, R-Directed Thinking is suddenly grabbing the wheel, stepping on the gas, and determining where we’re going and how we’ll get there. L-Directed aptitudes—the sorts of things measured by the SAT and deployed by CPAs—are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. Instead, the R-Directed aptitudes so often disdained and dismissed—artistry, empathy, taking the long view, pursuing the transcendent—will increasingly determine who soars and who stumbles. It’s a dizzying—but ultimately inspiring—change. And in the next chapter, I’ll explore the reasons why it’s happening.

*The photos I saw during this phase of the research came from a standard set of images called the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The creator and owner of the IAPS, Professor Peter J. Lang of the University of Florida, requested that I not reproduce any of these images in this book. “Making these materials familiar to the general public can seriously compromise their value as stimuli in many research projects,” he explained. The image I’ve reprinted, therefore, is not from the actual IAPS collection. But it is similar in subject, tone, and composition to the photos in this experiment.

*Because very few things human beings do are governed exclusively by one hemisphere or the other, I’ve chosen the terms “L-Directed” and “R-Directed” instead of the more convenient “left-brain thinking” and “right-brain thinking.” This is not a book about neuroscience, of course. It’s a book that uses neuroscience to create a metaphor. But even (perhaps especially) in the realm of metaphor, it’s important to be true to the science.

Two

ABUNDANCE, ASIA,

AND AUTOMATION

R
eturn with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear—the 1970s, the decade of my childhood. When I was a kid, middle-class parents in the United States typically dished out the same plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that will deliver a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science, you should become a doctor. If you were better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant. A bit later, as computers appeared on desktops and CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were
really
good at math and science chose high tech, while many others flocked to business school, thinking that success was spelled MBA.

Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and executives. The great Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an enduring, if somewhat wonky, name: “knowledge workers.” Knowledge workers are “people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill,” Drucker wrote. What distinguished this group from the rest of the workforce was their “ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge.” (In other words, they excelled at L-Directed Thinking.) They might never become a majority, said Drucker, but they nonetheless “will give the emerging knowledge society its character, its leadership, its social profile.”
¹

Drucker, as always, was spot-on. Knowledge workers and their thinking style have indeed shaped the character, leadership, and social profile of the modern age. Consider the tollbooths that any middle-class American must pass on his way to the land of knowledge work. Here are some examples: the PSAT, the SAT, the GMAT, the LSAT, the MCAT. Notice any similarity beyond the final two initials? These instruments all measure what is essentially undiluted L-Directed Thinking. They require logic and analysis—and reward test-takers for zeroing-in, computerlike, on a single correct answer. The exercise is linear, sequential, and bounded by time. You answer one question with one right answer. Then you move to the next question and the next and the next until time runs out. These tests have become important gatekeepers for entry into meritocratic, middle-class society. They’ve created an SAT-ocracy—a regime in which access to the good life depends on the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and speedily. And this is not just an American phenomenon. From entrance exams in the United Kingdom to cram schools in Japan, most developed nations have devoted considerable time and treasure to producing left-brained knowledge workers.