Right Brain-ing It

Daniel Pink is positive- the world will soon rest in the hands (or more appropriately minds) of today's right-brainers. In his book "A Whole New Mind," Pink defines the left brain as the center of logic and information, and the right brain as the complex of emotion and reasoning that puts information in context. It is inevitable that these two sides of the brain must work together in some form for significant output, but how is our society end up being currently left-brained, as Pink puts it? He reasons that the world has gone through several ages which have fixed us in our current state. It began with the agriculture age, where surviving and maintaing land was essential to life. Once land was posessed, we began refining our essential items to make a better living for ourselves, which brought around the industrial age. More recently, we have locked ourselves in an age of information, where, especially concerning the widespread use of the computer, we are thirsting for easily disposable information because it is accesible to us. Although the web is an amazing way of communicating and finding a common ground for the diversities of our world, information has nearly maxed out.

Pink determines that there are three factors that will consume this overload of information and make it mandatory for the rest of us to become creative thinkers: Abundance, Asia, and Automation. Abundance- there are so many various forms and styles of our products today, that it is becoming essential to incorporate more of an emotional or mental connection to the consumer to want your product out of the hundreds available. Asia- there are many phenomenal left brain thinkers in this world, all needed for the same tasks; Pink observes that persons from the middle east and asia who have these brains but lack our well-off lifestyle will be swallowing up the left-brain jobs because they will work for less since it actually is more for them. Machines are being trained to fufill the logic our brains sort. For example, in the 1900s the leading undefeated chess player Garry Kasparov was outwitted by a computer.

Since our success in informational thinking is beign overtaken by these factors, Pink reasons that our society requires a shift into creative thinking to problem solve our way to uphold our individual success. Yet how are we to do so? Pink has laided out six "senses" which he will discuss in the next section of his book: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. I will discuss these as soon as I am done reading the section!