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
Return 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.
This arrangement has been a rousing success. It has broken the stranglehold of aristocratic privilege and opened educational and professional opportunities to a diverse set of people. It has propelled the world economy and lifted living standards. But the SAT-ocracy is now in its dying days. The L-Directed Thinking it nurtures and rewards still matters, of course. But it’s no longer enough. Today, we’re moving into an era in which R-Directed Thinking will increasingly determine who gets ahead.
To some of you, this is delightful news. To others, it sounds like a crock. This chapter is mainly for the latter group of readers—those who followed your parents’ advice and scored well on those aptitude tests. To persuade you that what I’m saying is sound, let me explain the reasons for this shift using the left-brain, mechanistic language of cause and effect. The effect: the diminished relative importance of L-Directed Thinking and the corresponding increased importance of R-Directed Thinking. The causes: Abundance, Asia, and Automation.
Abundance
Another vignette from the 1970s: every August my mother would take my brother, sister, and me to buy clothes for the new school year. That inevitably meant a trip to Eastland Mall, one of three big shopping centers in central Ohio. Inside the mall we’d visit a national department store such as Sears or JCPenney or a local one such as Lazarus, where the children’s departments featured maybe a dozen racks of clothing from which to choose. The rest of the mall consisted of about thirty other stores, smaller in size and selection, lined up between the department store anchors. Like most Americans of the time, we considered Eastland and those other climate-controlled enclosed shopping centers the very zenith of modern plenty.
My own kids would consider it underwhelming. Within a twenty-minute drive of our home in Washington, D.C., are about forty different mega-shopping sites—the size, selection, and scope of which didn’t exist thirty years ago. Take Potomac Yards, which sits on Route 1 in northern Virginia. One Saturday morning in August, my wife and I and our three children drove there for our own back-to-school shopping excursion. We began at the giant store on the far end of the site. In the women’s section of that store, we chose from Mossimo designer tops and sweaters, Merona blazers, Isaac Mizrahi jackets, and Liz Lange designer maternity wear. The kids’ clothing section was equally vast and almost as hip. The Italian designer Mossimo had a full line of children’s wear—including a velour pants and jacket set for our two girls. The choices were preposterously more interesting, more attractive, and more bountiful than the clothing I chose from back in the seventies. But there was something even more noteworthy about this stylish kiddie garb when I compared it to the more pedestrian fashions of my youth: the clothes cost less. Because we weren’t at some swank boutique. My family and I were shopping at Target. That velour Mossimo ensemble? $14.99. Those women’s designer tops? $9.99. My wife’s new suede Isaac Mizrahi jacket? Forty-nine bucks. A few aisles away were home furnishings, created by designer Todd Oldham and less expensive than what my parents used to pick up at Sears. Throughout the store were acres of good-looking, low-cost merchandise.
And Target was just one of an array of Potomac Yards stores catering to a mostly middle-class clientele. Next door we could visit Staples, a 20,000-square-foot box selling 7,500 different school and office supplies. (There are more than 1,500 Staples stores like it in the United States and Europe.) Next to Staples was the equally cavernous PetSmart, one of more than six hundred such pet supply stores in the United States and Canada, each one of which, on an average day, s
ells $15,000 worth of merchandise for nonhumans.2 This particular outlet even had its own pet-grooming studio. Next to PetSmart was Best Buy, an electronics emporium with a retail floor that’s larger than the entire block on which my family lives. One section was devoted to home theater equipment, which displayed an arms race of televisions—plasma, high-definition, flat panel—that began with a 42-inch screen and escalated to 47-inch, 50-inch, 54-inch, 56-inch, and 65-inch versions. In the telephone section were, by my count, 39 different varieties of cordless phones. And these four stores constituted only about one-third of the entire shopping facility.
But what’s so remarkable about Potomac Yards is how utterly unremarkable it is. You can find a similar swath of consumer bounty just about anyplace in the United States—and, increasingly, in Europe and sections of Asia as well. These shopping meccas are but one visible example of an extraordinary change in modern life. For most of history, our lives were defined by scarcity. Today, the defining feature of social, economic, and cultural life in much of the world is abundance.
Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker’s knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living in much of the developed world that would have been unfathomable to our great-grandparents.
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Page 3
