A Whole New Mind
Every time I have a few hours transit time in an airport abroad, I look for a book that I haven’t seen in Philippine bookstores. That’s how I discovered Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate in the Frankfurt airport a few years back. That’s also how I missed my flight once from Copenhagen, engrossed in rapid scanning of a book I can’t even recall anymore.
In transit from Phnom Penh to Manila, I had two hours in Bangkok’s year-old sprawling airport, and picked up a very stimulating book, the updated edition of A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink.
The subtitle caught my eye: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, but that would not have been enough to make me buy the book; there are enough books on my shelves about left-brain and right-brain thinking.
What made me buy the book, after scanning it rapidly, is the argument it makes that at least from the vantage point of the so-called advanced world, there is a “seismic shift” as yet undetected, from the Information Age to what he calls the Conceptual Age.
What also surprised me is his description of the Information Age as an economy and society built on “logical, linear, and computerlike capabilities” and the Conceptual Age as an economy and society built on “inventive, emphatic, and big-picture capabilities.” Other authors I have read about the knowledge economy do not make this distinction.
But Daniel Pink lays out a compelling argument in the three chapters in the first part of the book, which I managed to read before boarding the PAL flight to Manila.
The first chapter on “Right Brain Rising” gives a succinct and readable summary of the literature on the human brain with its 100 billion cells, each one of which can connect and communicate with 10,000 fellow brain cells. James Watson calls it “the most complex thing we have discovered in our universe.”
I had to smile at the quote from Woody Allen who calls the brain “my second favorite organ.”
Pink cites the historical distinction between the left half of the brain as “rational, analytic, and logical” and the right side as “mute, non-linear and instinctive.” For a long time, the left side was believed to be what makes us human, since it is where our ability to speak and understand is lodged; the right side is subsidiary, “the remnant of an earlier stage of development.”
Roger Sperry’s studies in the 1950s (which later earned for him the Nobel prize) proved that the right brain is not inferior to the left brain. It is just different. “The left hemisphere reasoned sequentially, excelled at analysis, and handled words. The right hemisphere reasoned holistically, recognized patterns, and interpreted emotions and nonverbal expressions.”
But after the right brain achieved a measure of legitimacy, there arose two extreme views about it that the author decries. The first is the right brain as “savior” and the second is the right brain as “saboteur.”
There are those who leap “from legitimacy to reverence” and would make us believe that the right brain is the repository of all that is good and just and noble in the human condition. Partly in reaction, others argue that right-brain thinking risks sabotaging the economic and social progress that has been made by applying the power of logic in our lives.
But as the author argues, the right brain will neither save us nor sabotage us. His book’s title is his message - we need our whole brain, using both L-Directed Thinking and R-Directed Thinking.
Furthermore, his more nuanced argument is that the relationship between the left and right has to change, away from the current strong tilt toward the left.
In Chapter Two “Abundance, Asia and Automation” Pink presents a left-brain analytical and logical argument for his advocacy for greater right-brain thinking. His first point is that the very success of the application of left-brain thinking has created a level of material abundance that boosts the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerates individuals’ search for meaning.
Secondly, Asia (including the Philippines) is performing large amounts of routine white-collar L-Directed work at lower costs; hence knowledge workers in the North/West have to master abilities that cannot be shipped overseas.
And thirdly, automation will affect white collar workers in much the same way that it has affected blue-collar workers; hence professionals have to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.
Chapter Three “High Concept, High Touch” carries the argument to a conclusion even beyond Naisbitt who was the first to write about the idea of “high-tech, high touch.” The book’s intention to address primarily a North/West readership is reflected in the three questions Pink says must be asked: 1) Can someone overseas do it cheaper? 2) Can a computer do it faster? 3) Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance?
High tech is not enough. He says what is needed are “high concept and high touch.”
High concept involves “the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.”
High touch involves “the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.”
The second part of the book presents the six essential aptitudes, which he calls “the six senses” on which professional success and personal satisfaction increasingly will depend: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.
The book is an easy read, but it packs a lot of insight. What the author writes about R-Directed Thinking resonates deeply with my personal and professional experience.
But he uses the three A’s - Abundance, Asia, and Automation, to make the case for the more strategic importance of R-Directed Thinking vis-a-vis L-Directed Thinking. What does this mean for those of us who live and work in an economy and society where material abundance is not yet a reality, and where the work that is transferring from the North/West is that which calls for L-Directed Thinking?
