going to waste. I don’t know about you,
but frankly, I can use all the brain power I can get. And there’s a
lot of interesting, underutilized power over on the R-mode.
Why Emphasize R-mode?
We want to use R-mode more than we have because the R-mode
provides intuition, and that’s something we desperately need in
order to become experts. We cannot be expert without it. The Drey-
fus model emphasizes the expert’s reliance on tacit knowledge;
that’s over here in the R-mode as well. Experts rely on seeing and
discriminating patterns; pattern matching is here too.
R-mode’s analogic and holistic thinking styles are very valuable
to software architecture and design—that’s the stuff that good
designs are made of.
And you might already be reaching for synthetic learning more
often than you think. When faced with a difficult design prob-
lem, or an elusive bug, good programmers generally have an urge
to reach for code and build something that they can learn from.
That’s R-modesynthesis, as opposed to the L-modeanalysis. That’s
why we like prototypes and independent unit tests. These give us
the opportunity to learn by synthesis—by building.
In fact, synthesis is such a powerful learning technique that
Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab suggested in Don’t Dis-
sect the Frog, Build It [Neg94] that to really learn about a frog, tra-
ditional dissection is not the way to go. The better way to learn
about a frog is to build one.
That is, task the students with building a being that has froglike
characteristics. It’s a great way to really learn what makes a frog a
frog and how frogs are adapted to their particular environment. It’s
a perfect example of learning by synthesis.
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Learn by synthesis as wel as by analysis.
But embracing synthesis as a learning technique is just the begin-
ning. In fact, you can do a lot of things to increase the amount of
brain power you can bring to bear on a problem, by leveraging both
modes of thinking as appropriate—from simple techniques such as
fiddling with something with your hand while you think to doo-
dling while on the phone to some really interesting—and exotic—
techniques.
We’ll take a look at all of these as we see just how we can put you
in your right mind (pun intended). But first, I’ll digress to point
out a slightly bigger picture that’s afoot here and hint at why this
R-mode thing might be even more important than you think.
3.4 Rise of the R-mode
As you may have felt from looking at the characteristics of L-mode
and R-mode, we have a bit of cultural bias toward L-mode think-
ing and related activities, and we might tend to dismiss R-mode
thinking as being the province of lesser mortals. R-mode seems
like a quaint leftover, a vestigial appendage from some previous
age when people believed the world was flat and thunder was the
result of unseen gods at war.
And indeed, it was the strengths of L-mode that differentiated
humankind from common beasts; it brought humanity out of the
forests and jungles and into villages and towns, out of the fields
and into the factories, finally to land behind a desk and a copy of
Microsoft Word.
But although the analytical and ver-
bal capabilities of L-mode thinking have is necessary but not
brought us this far, we’ve lost some key sufficient.
capabilities from an overreliance on L-
mode at the expense of R-mode. To progress, in order to move on
to the next revolution in human development, we need to learn to
reintegrate our largely neglected R-mode processing with L-mode.
Now before you toss the book down in disgust, afraid I might ask
you to get in touch with your inner child or some other lame,
weenie-sounding thing, let me tell you about Robert A. Lutz.
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Mr. Lutz is a former Marine and pilot. The picture of him in the
New York Times shows a no-nonsense, square-jawed fellow with a
crew cut. As I write this, he’s the chairman of General Motors North
America. Pretty serious business.
And yet, when interviewed in the Times about the future direction
of GM under his leadership, Mr. Lutz was quoted as saying, “It’s
more right brain...I see us being in the art business. Art, entertain-
ment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to
provide transportation.”
He’s not talking about engineering or features. Everyone has those
pop-up cup holders and iPod connectors these days. Instead, he’s
talking about aesthetics.
But this is not some artist holed up in a loft or researcher espous-
ing some crackpot theory. This is the chairman of the third-largest
corporation in America.11 Lutz thinks this focus on aesthetics is
the right course of action at this point in history.
Author Dan Pink agrees. In his popular book A Whole New Mind:
Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age [Pin05], Dan
makes the case that economic and societal forces have taken us to
the point where these artistic, aesthetic, R-mode attributes aren’t
a neat luxury for Martha Stewart types who want to craft their own
greeting cards; instead, they are positively required for plain old,
mainstream business.
Design Trumps Features
For example, consider the effects of com-
Commoditization means moditization. Suppose you are a large
you compete on
retailer, and you need to sell some com-
aesthetics.
mon item, such as a toilet brush. You
can’t compete on price; anyone can get toi-
let brushes made in China for fractions of a cent. So, how do you
differentiate your product?
Well, giant retailer Target decided to address this problem by fea-
turing toilet brushes created by the famous designer and architect
11. That was in 2006. The automotive business remains tough, however.
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Michael Graves. Since you can’t compete on price, you have to com-
pete on aesthetics.
Beyond toilet brushes, look at something closer to our hearts and
ears: the iPod. Is the market-leading iPod feature-for-feature bet-
ter than any alternative? Or is it just better designed and more
aesthetically pleasing?
Start with the package itself. The iPod package isn’t very verbose;
it says how many songs and videos it will hold. And it has a nice
picture. It’s star
k but elegant.
By comparison, there’s a parody floating around on YouTube that
shows what the iPod would look like if Microsoft had designed it.
The parody is pretty brutal—the box is far from simple. It’s packed
with a dense assortment of text, branding, icons, disclaimers, and
so on.
The box is replete with a multipage foldout of legal disclaimers,
third-party endorsements, and, in big print, the fact that it’s a
30GB model* (complete with an asterisk explaining that a giga-
byte ain’t exactly a billion bytes, your mileage will vary, and you
don’t actually get all that space anyway. I think it also mentions
that you’ll burn in eternal torment if you rip your own MP3s, but I
digress...).
That’s an important point: the iPod says how many songs it holds.
The Microsoft-flavored parody (and many
real competing devices) say how many It’s about the songs, not
gigabytes it will hold. Consumers don’t
gigabytes.
care about gigabytes; only we geeks do.
Real people want to know how many songs it will hold or how many
photos or videos.12
The iPod is well-designed and attractive, from the packaging to the
user interface. And as it turns out, that’s not just marketing sugar-
coating. Attractive things actually do work better.
12. Rumor has it that this parody was in fact created by a design group within Microsoft, possibly to complain about the constraints they were operating under.
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Attractive Works Better
Several studies13,14,15 have conclusively shown that attractive user
interfaces are easier to use than unattractive (or to use the scientific
term, ugly) interfaces.
Researchers in Japan did a study of a bank’s ATM interfaces; sub-
jects found the aesthetically pleasing button layouts much easier
to use than the ugly ones, even though the functionality and work-
flow was the same.
Thinking that maybe there was a cultural bias
at work, researchers repeated the experiment in
Israel. The results were even stronger, even in a
completely different culture. But how could this
be? Aesthetic considerations are merely an emotional response.
That couldn’t possibly affect cognitive processing. Could it?
Yes, it can. In fact, additional studies16 have shown exactly that:
positive emotions are essential to learning and creative thinking.
Being “happy” broadens your thought processes and brings more
of the brain’s hardware online.
Even corporate logos can affect your cognition. One study at Duke
University17 showed that brief exposure to the Apple logo made
people more creative. Once you’re primed with a stereotypical
image of some sort, your behavior becomes influenced according
to those behaviors you associate with the stereotype. In this case,
the Apple logo, which many associate with nonconformity, innova-
tion, and creativity, influences you to be creative and innovate.
The converse has been well-established. When you are fearful or
angry—filled with negative emotions—your brain starts shutting
down extra resources in preparation for the inevitable fight or flight
(we’ll look at that side of the reaction in Section 7.5, Pressure Kills
13. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things [Nor04].
14. Apparent Usability vs. Inherent Usability: Experimental Analysis on the Determi-nants of the Apparent Usability [KK95].
15. Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues [Tra97].
16. A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition [AIT99].
17. Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior: How Apple Makes You “Think Different” [FCF07].
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Cubicles Kill Neurons
You may have always heard that you start off with a certain
number of brain cells, and that’s all you get. These brain
cells might die off, but you’ll never get any new ones. Alco-
hol and aging can kill brain cells, which makes old age look
pretty unappetizing, because you’d be left with a lot less
brain cells than when you started.
Fortunately, professor Elizabeth Gould thought otherwise.
In a discovery that turned the field on its ear, she discov-
ered neurogenesis—the continued birth of new brain cells
throughout adulthood. But here’s the funny part. The rea-
son researchers had never witnessed neurogenesis previ-
ously was because of the environment of their test subjects.
If you’re a lab animal stuck in a cage, you will never grow
new neurons.
If you’re a programmer stuck in a drab cubicle, you will
never grow new neurons.
On the other hand, in a rich environment with things to
learn, observe, and interact with, you will grow plenty of
new neurons and new connections between them.
For decades, scientists were misled because an artificial
environment (sterile lab cages) created artificial data.
Once again, context is key. Your working environment
needs to be rich in sensory opportunities, or else it will lit-
erally cause brain damage.
Cognition, on page 208). For that matter, things in the environment
that are obviously broken can create havoc as well. We’ve seen
the Broken Windows theory (see The Pragmatic Programmer: From
Journeyman to Master [HT00]) in action for years. Known prob-
lems (such as bugs in code, bad process in an organization, poor
interfaces, or lame management) that are left uncorrected have a
debilitating, viral effect that ends up causing even more damage.
Aesthetics make a difference, whether it’s in a user interface, the
layout of your code and comments, the choices of variable names,
the arrangement of your desktop, or whatever.
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Strive for good design; it real y works better.
But we’re slipping into some ill-defined waters here; what makes
something “attractive” or not? How do you design something to be
beautiful? What does that even mean?
One of the foremost building architects of the twentieth century,
Louis Kahn, offers a useful explanation of the relationship between
beauty and design: “Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges
from selection, affinities, integration, love.”
Kahn explains that beauty emerges from
Beauty emerges from
selection. That is, art comes not so much
selection.
from the act of creation itself but rather
; from selecting among a near infinite sup-
ply of choices.
The musician has a near-infinite palette combining different
instruments, rhythms, scale modes, tempo, and the hard-to-define
but easy-to-sense “groove.” The painter starts with some 24 mil-
lion distinguishable colors to choose from. The writer has the full
breadth of the Oxford English Dictionary (all 20 volumes; some
300,000 main entries) from which to select the perfect word.
Creativity comes from the selection and assembly of just the right
components in just the right presentation to create the work. And
selection—knowing what to select and in what context—comes
from pattern matching, and that’s a topic to which we’ll keep
returning.
3.5 R-mode Sees Forest; L-mode Sees Trees
Pattern matching is a key ability demonstrated by experts. It’s how
they can narrow their choices and focus on just the relevant parts
of a problem.
And for the most part, the pattern matching we’ve been interested
in lies in the neglected R-mode activity. But both L-mode and R-
mode have their separate approaches to pattern matching, and in
the end you need both.
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Consider the following figure:18
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I I I I I I I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
Here we have an H character made up of individual I characters.
This kind of pattern is known as a hierarchical letter. Psychologists
present this sort of figure to subjects one eye at a time—quickly—
and ask them to identify the big and small letters.
The hemispheres in your brain tackle this problem of identification
differently; one hemisphere is better at identifying the local criteria
(the small letters), and the other is better at the global criteria (the
big letter).
Subjects do very well when asked about the global pattern using
their left eye, which uses mostly R-mode. They also do very well
when asked about the local criteria (the parts) using their right
eye, which uses mostly L-mode. But when asked the other way
around, the results are considerably poorer. There looks to be some
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