A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

“Running down the center is a thin vertical ridge that cleaves the brain into two seemingly equal sections […] The two halves look the same, but in form and function they are quite different […].” 

The physicality of the divide is important. Pink describes an image most people are familiar with to convey that most misconceptions about the brain’s functions come from the images we are presented; if there is a division between the hemispheres, then surely one is more important than the other. This, Pink is quick to correct, is not the case. On the other hand, the image of the two halves could suggest that they perform the same functions. This, too, is false. Rather, the book relates that these hemispheres are equal in importance even if they are unequal in function.  

“The left side, the theory went, was the crucial half, the half that made us human. The right side was subsidiary—the remnant, some argued, of an earlier stage of development. The left hemisphere was rational, analytic, and logical—everything we expect in a brain. The right hemisphere was mute, nonlinear, and instinctive—a vestige that nature had designed for a purpose that humans has outgrown.” 

For most of scientific history, the two hemispheres of the brain were universally considered separate and unequal entities. Here, Pink is articulating the scientific phenomenon that informed cultural biases. These biases, which Pink initially argues are due to the economic status of left-brained-centered careers, also prove to be from a perceived biological vestigial function; the right brain, like the appendix or tailbone, was simply something humans no longer needed. This passage lays out the uphill battle for Pink in proving the right hemisphere is necessary and valuable to human behavior.  

“And the secret to seeing—really seeing—was quieting the bossy know-it-all left brain so the mellower right brain could do its magic.” 

The biggest issue most individuals face when trying to tap into their creativity is settling down the side of the brain that is loud and critical. This is the constant battle between the right and left hemispheres. The vision Pink seeks is not physical, but psychological; the left side of the brain takes in information literally, but the right side of the brain pushes past all the noise and sees what is really there. That is why Pink needs to see more profoundly to draw.  

“The left hemisphere handles logic, sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, context, and the big picture.” 

Here Pink is reiterating one of the major ethos of the text but for a different purpose. Rather than trying to convey the different tasks the hemispheres are responsible for to express their distinctiveness, Pink lists traits that complement each other. In doing so, he suggests that the hemispheres work together—that they are indeed two equal parts of one whole organ.  

“These tests have becomes important gatekeepers for entry intro 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.” 

Pink is addressing the problematics of designing life-influencing tests after only one type of thinking. Society has been built for one type of person to succeed. Left-brained thinking has been so highly valued that it has influenced how each generation moves through the world; it influences curriculum, standardized tests, and professional success. 

“Outsourcing is overhyped in the short term. But it’s underhyped in the long term. As the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to the zero, the working lives of North Americans, Europeans, and Japanese people will change dramatically.” 

Outsourcing was a hot-button issue in the early 2000s when Pink wrote and released this book. He touches upon this issue three years before the economic crash of 2008, when many Americans lost jobs or feared they would soon lose their livelihood to workers abroad. However, Pink blames American workers for not offering a service Now, 15 years after the publication of this book, we can see that outsourcing is still a concern, but not as great as he predicted.  

“[A]s individuals age, they place greater emphasis in their own lives on qualities they might have neglected in the rush to build careers and raise families: purpose, intrinsic motivation, and meaning.”

The pressure to build a life that society values often forces individuals to put their own needs on the backburner. As more of their life is behind them, they realize that the qualities they neglected are what make life the most meaningful. Such existential crises lead to a reorganizing of values—values that might have seemed frivolous or unnecessary before. These qualities are distinctly right-brained, and Pink attributes their neglect to society’s underestimation of the importance of personal fulfillment in the face of social—and thereby monetary—advancement. 

“1 percent of the toaster’s time is devoted to utility, while 99 percent is devoted to significance. Why shouldn’t it be beautiful[…]?” 

This passage communicates the gradual economic shift that had to occur for R-Directed Thinking to be more widely valued; there needed to be a demand for it. In an age of abundance, when every toaster company makes a perfectly functioning toaster, there needs to be a market for more. Pink argues that this “more” becomes aesthetics when all functions have been reasonably developed. The toaster is a hyperbolic symbol of how humans interact with objects in the Conceptual Age: We need them to work, but we also want to enjoy looking at them. 

“Our difficulty in retrieving [an] isolated factoid, and our relative ease summoning the sad saga of Garry Kasparov, aren’t signs of flaccid intelligence or impending Alzheimer’s. They merely demonstrate how most minds work. Stories are easier to remember—because in many ways, stories are how we remember.”

When Pink presents this passage he begins with a pop quiz, asking readers to recall data he presented at the beginning of the book and a story he told. His experiment works—the numbers are nearly impossible to recall without flipping back. Humans are narratively driven creatures; stories shape our understanding of the world and often inform our ethics, ideals, and lifestyles. Pink, here, is relating that storytelling is one of the most lasting legacies of humankind, and yet, storytelling as a profession or even just as creative expression is consistently belittled by society. 

“When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” 

Here, Pink is articulating why storytelling has become increasingly important in recent years. The ability to use the aptitude of Story within a business model, Pink believes, will outperform all competitors—and be less vulnerable to outsourcing. The accessibility of knowledge has made fact-knowing less of a skill, making the ability to grasp and create complex concepts superior.  

“We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. […] But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance […].” 

Abundance tends to make universal stories and experiences more widely disseminated and, then, can make archetypes and standardized stories less interesting. Personal narratives, particularly those historically unrepresented, are not only more interesting, but are necessary for improving society. Exclusively valuing L-Directed Thinking has caused business models to lack emotional weight and appear generic.  

“[Symphony] concerns itself not with a particular spruce but with the whole forest—not with the bassoon player or the first violinist but the entire orchestra.” 

This right-brained aptitude is about assessing the big picture. L-Directing Thinking is concerned with the details, but R-Directed Thinking can easily synthesize small components into a larger concept. Pink uses his example of learning to draw to convey that focusing too much on small details often blinds one from understanding how those very details operate within a whole. This is exactly why Symphony can be so difficult to master for those conditioned to prioritize L-Directed Thinking: It relies on the ability to quiet the left hemisphere and trust the right. 

“What’s the most prevalent, and perhaps most important, prefix of our times? Multi. Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia.” 

Here, Pink demonstrates the effects of a fast-paced world economy. Now, having specialized skill in only one area is inferior to having moderate skill in many areas—or so Pink’s vision of the future argues. This makes room for the boundary crossers whom Pink envisions as reclaiming the business world. These individuals are the future high-demand worker because they can provide multiple services for the price of one salary. Pink’s argument suggests that the demand for these workers is in fact a symptom of neoliberalism rather than a shift towards R-Directed Thinking. 

“‘The Western tradition…has excluded metaphor from the domain of reason,’ writes the prominent linguist George Lakoff. Metaphor is often considered ornamentation—the stuff of poets and other frilly sorts […].” 

The Western world’s relationship to metaphor is indicative of its relationship to right-brain qualities. Cultural prejudice against what has been deemed frivolous stems from the assumption that it does not make money. Reason, on the other hand, fits neatly within an economic design that favors productivity, quota meeting, and innovation. Pink’s argument follows that metaphor has always been a part of the business world because metaphor making has always been innate to humans; we make sense of our world—and therefore our products and services—through metaphorical thought processes. Therefore, metaphor is ingrained in reason. 

“They move beyond the reductionist, mechanistic approach of conventional medicine toward one that, in the words of one physicians’ professional association, integrates ‘all aspects of well-being, including physical, environmental, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social health; thereby contributing to the healing or ourselves and our planet.’” 

This passage describes the health industry’s shift towards integrative, whole-body medicine and attributes its popularity to the rise of right-brained qualities being increasingly valued. The mainstream recognition this movement has earned stems from an acknowledgement of the medical field’s propensity for malpractice when empathy is not taught to and demanded from medical students in their practice. Time proves Pink right on this one: The holistic and whole-body medical science movement is pervasively popular today and has resulted in more unconventional practices being adopted by private practices everywhere. 

“Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation.”

Empathy is programmed into every healthy brain. Damage to the right hemisphere can affect one’s empathic abilities and make it difficult for them to feel with others instead of feeling for them. This is a trait that can be strengthened and practiced, but it is also a trait that has been maligned and weaponized against individuals who appear too feeling within the business world. Now, Pink asserts, workplaces are more eager to incorporate empathy into their company ethos in order to keep valuable workers. 

“The assumption in the world of psychology and science was that our faces did express emotion—but that those expressions were products of culture rather than nature.” 

The right hemisphere is hardwired to interpret facial and body expressions. It is the context creator—unlike the left, it can piece together confusing information to make sense of it. In this way, facial and body expressions are exactly a part of humankind’s biological nature. This point undermines the assumption that this function of the brain is secondary to those of the left hemisphere. 

“Play is becoming an important part of work, business, and personal well-being, its importance manifesting itself in three ways: games, humor, and joyfulness. Games, particularly computer and video games, have become a large and influential industry in teaching whole-minded lessons to its customers and recruiting a new breed of whole-minded worker.” 

This concept of the “whole-minded worker” is something that Pink touches upon throughout the text but never directly defines. Here, he does so most explicitly. This worker utilizes their whole mind, not just the left hemisphere. Video games are one of the most effective examples of the whole-minded approach to working; an activity previously condemned in the workplace now becomes integral to building foundational relationships between employees and fostering overall employee satisfaction.  

“For a generation of people, games have become a tool for solving problems as well as a vehicle for self-expression and self-exploration. Video games are as woven into this generation’s lives as television was into that of their predecessors.” 

This excerpt builds upon the previous to exemplify the value of video games in utilizing both brain hemispheres. Video games were rejected from society as a valid avenue for strengthening skills and building relationships with others for the first few decades of their existence. However, now that the world is seeking more avenues for expression as well as profit, the video game industry is proving itself apt in both. Like television before it, the reputation of video games improved as they became more accessible, proving that they offer not only entertainment, but also engagement, education, and enrichment. 

“[N]euroscientists concluded that the right hemisphere plays an essential role in understanding and appreciating humor. even semisophisticated comedy suffers.” 

Humor is a vital part of our lives; it enhances and restores. However, without the right hemisphere, humor would be just out of reach of human understanding. The right hemisphere, because it pieces together the big picture, uses context, and addresses incongruities, is solely responsible for appreciating humor. This is an important part of Pink’s Play aptitude, because it contributes to personal and professional fulfillment. 

“[M]eaning is possible in spite of suffering—indeed, that meaning can sometimes grow from suffering. But he also emphasizes that suffering is not a prerequisite to finding meaning. The search for meaning is a drive that exists in all of us—and a combination of external circumstances and internal will can bring it to the surface.” 

This passage touches upon the resiliency of the human spirit. Pink is referencing the work of Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, survivor of Auschwitz, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. His experiences prove that, even within the darkest of circumstances, humans are prone to make meaning out of their experiences—to find purpose in their existence and make sense of the world around them.  

“Across many different realms, there’s a growing recognition that spirituality—not religion necessarily, but the more broadly defined concern for the meaning and purpose of life—is a fundamental part of the human condition.” 

The right hemisphere also includes wiring for faith—not always religion-centered faith, but the certainty of a power outside of human control. The final sense, Meaning, is entirely involved in spirituality. Pink’s text suggests that the spirituality that humans crave is a combination of purpose and conviction—the desire to achieve fulfillment alongside the certainty that it is possible to attain. This passage articulates the integral role spirituality plays in each individual’s search for self-actualization. 

“Mazes are analytical puzzles to be solved; labyrinths can be centering. You can get lost in a maze; you can lose yourself in a labyrinth. Mazes engage the left brain; labyrinths free the right brain.”

Here, Pink employs mazes and labyrinths to serve as metaphors for the left and right hemispheres. Mazes require logic and focusing on details, utilities of the left brain. Labyrinths, however, are meant to be meditative—to free the right side of the brain through meditation. This is a provoking symbol for Pink to use primarily because of how often mazes and labyrinths are confused for one another; they are misconstrued as one, while the left and right hemispheres are misread as two separate and unequal entities.