“Right-brainers will rule the future.”
I was racking my brain to remember where I had read that while I was preparing for an online panel discussion on the future of design at the The Creative Solstice Summit organised by Pepper Content.
I was gathering my thoughts on the advances in technology, the impact it was having on the world at large and on the creative profession in particular. I wanted to tell designers, strategists and content writers that their skills will be a premium in the fourth Industrial age. While writing my notes and going over my points, I suddenly remembered Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future.” It was a book that a colleague had gifted me during the lockdown. The book is now dog-eared and full of my underlines and notes on almost every single page. I went through it again and revisited all my notes. Naturally, it became the topic for this week’s newsletter.
Daniel’s core thesis of the book is that we are now living in the conceptual age. The skills that will be at a premium today and in the future - those that will give us a competitive advantage at the workplace - are a balance of the traditional ones and a set of six newly important traits which together help us have a whole new mind.
We learn about a soft-spoken Caltech professor named Roger W. Sperry who won The Nobel Prize in Medicine for showing us that human beings are of two minds. Until his work, the view was that the left brain was what made us human and that the right brain was insignificant. Sperry studied patients who had epileptic seizures that had required removal of the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of fibres (300 million of them) that separates the two brains. This is when he discovered that the right brain was not only conscious (it had been considered unconscious by many before his time) but in fact it emerged to be “the superior cerebral member when it came to performing certain kinds of mental tasks. In other words, the right wasn’t inferior to the left. It was 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. Human beings were literally of two minds.”
So now you know a little bit of the science behind left-brain and right-brain thinking. People mix up the two all the time and often misattribute.
One easy way in which I remember which is which is that left = logical.
We also learn that over the years there have been a deluge of studies and books of giving the right brain over-importance which Daniel Pink calls “New Age gobbledygook.”
Finally, we settle with a view that left-brain attributes are what distinguish humans from animals (we can reason analytically) but that the right brain plays an important complimentary role in seeing the big picture, decoding emotions etc.
“Together, they are actually two half-brains, designed to work together as a smooth, single, integrated whole in one entire, complete brain.”
Four key findings of the key differences:
The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.
The left hemisphere is sequential; the right hemisphere is simultaneous.
The left hemisphere specialises in text; the right hemisphere specialises in context.
The left hemisphere analyses the details; the right hemisphere synthesises the big picture.
The kicker is the growing importance of R-Directed thinking in a world of rapidly advancing technology in which automation will take away low order jobs. Our broader culture has always valued L-Directed thinking more highly but this is changing
“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.”
Three reasons are given for the growing importance of right-brain thinking.
Abundance. There is a sea of sameness in every category and huge lack of differentiation between brands. Pink says that in this age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical and functional needs will be “woefully insufficient.” In order for individuals and firms to stand out in the crowded marketplace, they need mastery of design, empathy, play and other so-called “soft” attributes.
Asia. This is the outsourcing story. Low value jobs will be handled more efficiently by lower cost labour. High value jobs need R-brain attributes.
Automation. AI and other technologies will take care of routine jobs. The higher order tasks will need master of R-directed attributes.
In the conceptual age, right-brain attributes are the absolute need of the hour. Daniel Pink urges us to develop these six essential R-Directed aptitudes.
I’m going to be devoting my next six editions to each of the six senses:
Design.
Story.
Symphony.
Empathy.
Play.
Meaning.
There’s so much to to say, and more importantly so many ways in which we can develop each of these senses. That’s what I will be covering in the upcoming editions.
Over to you now:
Where in the spectrum of very left-brained to very right-brained do you operate?
In which industries are you noticing the evidence of R-brainers ruling the future?
Do you have a contrarian view to Daniel Pink’s on the importance of R-brained thinking for the future?