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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>Who has discounted right brain/left brain
differences, and on what evidence? Anyone with experience with aphasia knows
that right brain/left brain differences are powerful: language is organized in
the left hemisphere in over 90% of humans (right or left handedness makes
little difference: people are right or left footed and eyed as well). And
there is considerable evidence that the right hemisphere is associated with
emotional expressiveness (facial expression and vocal prosody) as well as
spatial abilities. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>Ross<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face=Tahoma><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma;color:windowtext;font-weight:bold'>From:</span></font></b><font
size=2 color=black face=Tahoma><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma;
color:windowtext'> paleopsych-bounces@paleopsych.org
[mailto:paleopsych-bounces@paleopsych.org] <b><span style='font-weight:bold'>On
Behalf Of </span></b>Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Sent:</span></b> Sunday, April 24, 2005 10:07
PM<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>To:</span></b> <st1:PersonName w:st="on">The
new improved paleopsych list</st1:PersonName><br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Subject:</span></b> Re: [Paleopsych] Wired
13.02: Revenge of the Right Brain</span></font><font color=black><span
style='color:windowtext'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 color=black face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 color=black face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>I thoroughly disagree with the premise. First, the
idea of right-brain / left-brain has been thoroughly discounted. Second, the
author is creating a false dichotomy. Most technical people are creative and
artistic. Both my brother (Ph.D., chemical engineering) and my son (mechanical
engineering) play jazz guitar. <br>
<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Lynn</st1:place></st1:City><br>
<br>
Premise Checker wrote:<br>
<br>
<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 color=black face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Revenge of the Right Brain <br>
<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain_pr.html">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain_pr.html</a>
<br>
<br>
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information
Age. <br>
Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and <br>
emotion. <br>
By Daniel H. Pink <br>
<br>
When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, in the
middle <br>
of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a familiar <br>
plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college,
and <br>
pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and <br>
perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and
science, <br>
become a doctor. If you were better at English and history, become
a <br>
lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed
work, <br>
become an accountant. Later, as computers appeared on desktops and
<br>
CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were really good at
math <br>
and science chose high tech, while others flocked to business
school, <br>
thinking that success was spelled MBA. <br>
<br>
Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software
engineers. <br>
Management guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an <br>
enduring, if somewhat wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are,
he <br>
wrote, "people who get paid for putting to work what one
learns in <br>
school rather than for their physical strength or manual
skill." What <br>
distinguished members of this group and enabled them to reap
society's <br>
greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to apply <br>
theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join
their <br>
ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of
the <br>
meritocratic regime. That was the path to professional success and
<br>
personal fulfillment. <br>
<br>
But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the
<br>
grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to
people <br>
who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It <br>
belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of
mind. <br>
Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from
boom <br>
to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going
on. <br>
And it's right inside our heads. <br>
<br>
Scientists have long known that a neurological <st1:place w:st="on">Mason-Dixon
line</st1:place> <br>
cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right
hemispheres. <br>
But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional
<br>
magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify
more <br>
precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left <br>
hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right <br>
hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional
expression, <br>
and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion
cells <br>
forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The
two <br>
hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly <br>
everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain
the <br>
contours of our times. <br>
<br>
Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work,
and <br>
business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the
<br>
sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and <br>
deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary.
But <br>
they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, <br>
deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that
matter <br>
most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right <br>
hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and
pursuing <br>
the transcendent. <br>
<br>
Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a
slow <br>
but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is
ending. <br>
Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in
which <br>
mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued
marks <br>
the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind. <br>
<br>
To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical,
<br>
sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on
the <br>
inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds <br>
delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the
painters and nurses <br>
exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove
it!" I hear <br>
the programmers and lawyers demanding. <br>
<br>
OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift,
using <br>
the mechanistic language of cause and effect. <br>
<br>
The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style
thinking. <br>
The causes: <st1:place w:st="on">Asia</st1:place>, automation, and
abundance. <br>
<br>
<st1:place w:st="on">Asia</st1:place> <br>
<br>
Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those <br>
squadrons of white-collar workers in <st1:country-region w:st="on">India</st1:country-region>,
the <st1:country-region w:st="on">Philippines</st1:country-region>, and <st1:country-region
w:st="on">China</st1:country-region> <br>
are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North
America <br>
and <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. According to
Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> <br>
information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And
it's <br>
not just tech work. Visit <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">India</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s office parks and you'll see
<br>
chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers <br>
researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans
for <br>
US hospitals. <br>
<br>
The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to <st1:place
w:st="on">Asia</st1:place> is overhyped <br>
in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all <br>
going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to
<br>
offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> labor <br>
force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of
the <br>
globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the <br>
country with the most English speakers in the world, and as
developing <br>
nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge <br>
workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change <br>
dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing
can <br>
be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly
via <br>
fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go. <br>
<br>
But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only
certain <br>
kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of
<br>
rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain
work <br>
such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and <br>
financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also
why <br>
plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less
<br>
routine work - programmers who can design entire systems,
accountants <br>
who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the
intricacies <br>
of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do <br>
left-brain work cheaper, we in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> must do right-brain work better.
<br>
<br>
Automation <br>
<br>
Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle.
This <br>
century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left <br>
brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational
work <br>
better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the
highest <br>
IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.) <br>
<br>
Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely
execute <br>
transactions are history. Online trading services and market
makers do <br>
such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have
morphed <br>
from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who
can <br>
understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the <br>
client's emotions and dreams. <br>
<br>
Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice
services <br>
are reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an <br>
uncontested divorce for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a <br>
divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web is cracking the information <br>
monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers' high
incomes <br>
and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you can
download <br>
- for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills, <br>
contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside <br>
exclusively on lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer
for 10 <br>
hours to craft a contract, consumers can fill out the form themselves
<br>
and hire a lawyer for one hour to look it over. Consequently,
legal <br>
abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or
understanding <br>
the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable. <br>
<br>
Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old
days," <br>
legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody
with even <br>
routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true <br>
anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over
to <br>
machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded,
engineers will <br>
have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity
than <br>
competence. <br>
<br>
Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a <br>
$500-a-month accountant in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">India</st1:place></st1:country-region> doesn't swipe your accounting
job, <br>
TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere
skills, <br>
we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres. <br>
<br>
Abundance <br>
<br>
Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's <br>
knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard
of <br>
living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents'
youth. <br>
Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by
abundance. <br>
Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your
garage. <br>
Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there
are <br>
more automobiles in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> than there are licensed drivers
- which <br>
means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their
<br>
own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, <br>
you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our
<br>
extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the <st1:country-region
w:st="on">US</st1:country-region>, nearly <br>
double <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:place></st1:City>'s
yearly box office take. <br>
<br>
But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age
has <br>
unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less
rational <br>
sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and <br>
entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a
service, <br>
or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately
functional. <br>
In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out
<br>
your bathroom. If you're like a few million Americans, you've got
a <br>
Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you <br>
bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the
left <br>
side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting
was <br>
rare a century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US,
candles <br>
are a $2 billion a year business - for reasons that stretch beyond
the <br>
logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country's more
inchoate <br>
desire for pleasure and transcendence. <br>
<br>
Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people
are <br>
searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such
once-exotic <br>
practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in
the <br>
workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and
politics, <br>
the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of <br>
everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children
of <br>
abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their <br>
lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life,
now <br>
that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain
<br>
yearnings will demand to be fed. <br>
<br>
As the forces of <st1:place w:st="on">Asia</st1:place>,
automation, and abundance strengthen and <br>
accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual
Age. If <br>
the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the
Information <br>
Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being
built on <br>
people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of
farmers <br>
to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers.
And <br>
now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and <br>
empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. <br>
<br>
But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape
in <br>
which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or
right-brained <br>
and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive
BMWs <br>
and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, <br>
analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer
enough. <br>
<br>
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our
well-developed <br>
high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high
concept" and "high <br>
touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and
<br>
emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a
<br>
satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world
didn't <br>
know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to
empathize, to <br>
understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in
one's <br>
self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the
quotidian <br>
in pursuit of purpose and meaning. <br>
<br>
Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy
for <br>
everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or
at <br>
least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are <br>
fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah,
our <br>
caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or
<br>
debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating
empathy, <br>
and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part
of <br>
what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations
in <br>
the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles
have <br>
atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape. <br>
<br>
Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you.
Instead, <br>
do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers
can't do <br>
faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial,
transcendent <br>
desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man
and <br>
woman, go right. <br>
<br>
Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to
the <br>
Conceptual Age, copyright © by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in <br>
March by Riverhead Books. Printed with permission of the
publisher. <br>
Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink (<a href="mailto:dp@danpink.com">dp@danpink.com</a>)
wrote about Gross <br>
National Happiness in issue 12.1<br>
2.<br>
<br>
<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<pre><font size=2 color=black face="Courier New"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></pre><pre
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style='font-size:10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></pre><pre><font
size=2 color=black face="Courier New"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>_______________________________________________<o:p></o:p></span></font></pre><pre><font
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