A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

Guns are dangerous. He’s pointing a gun at me. This is a scary situation. So my left amygdala leaps from its chair, breaks the glass, and pulls the alarm. By contrast, the left amygdala was relatively quiet (though not entirely inactive) when I viewed the faces. That’s because the right hemisphere, as countless studies have shown, is specialized both for recognizing faces and for interpreting expressions. Those skills depend not on sequential, analytic reasoning—we don’t look at the eyes, then the nose, then the teeth—but on the ability to interpret the parts of the face simultaneously and to synthesize those details into a larger conclusion.
    There are also other reasons for my differing responses. Understanding that a man pointing a pistol represents a threat is something we’ve learned. According to Ahmad Hariri, the neuroscientist who headed this portion of the NIH project I participated in, the response to such images is “likely learned through experience and social transmission and, thus, may be derived from, if not dependent on, responses in the left hemisphere brain regions.” 16 If I were to show that image to someone who’d never seen a gun, and therefore had never learned that they were dangerous, the reaction might be bewilderment rather than fear. But if I showed the face on page 10 to someone who’d never seen a Caucasian woman, or perhaps had never encountered anyone outside of his own village, he’d still likely be able to identify the expression. In fact, that is precisely what University of California, San Francisco, professor Paul Ekman, who developed this set of images (called the Facial Action Coding System) and whom we’ll meet in Chapter 7, has found in thirty-five years of research testing these expressions with subjects ranging from college students to remote tribes in New Guinea: “There has never been an instance in which the majority in two cultures ascribes a different emotion to the same expression.” 17
    My brain, then, is not merely ordinary in its looks. It is also ordinary in its actions. Both sides work together—but they have different specialties. The left hemisphere handles logic, sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right takes care of synthesis, emotional expression, context, and the big picture.
    A Whole New Mind
    There are two kinds of people in the world, an old joke goes: those who believe that everything can be divided into two categories—and the rest of you. Human beings somehow seem naturally inclined to see life in contrasting pairs. East versus West. Mars versus Venus. Logic versus emotion. Left versus right. Yet, in most realms we usually don’t have to pick sides—and it’s often dangerous if we do. For instance, logic without emotion is a chilly, Spock-like existence. Emotion without logic is a weepy, hysterical world where the clocks are never right and the buses always late. In the end, yin always needs yang.
    This is especially true when it comes to our brains. The two sides work in concert—two sections of an orchestra that sounds awful if one side packs up its instruments and goes home. As McManus puts it:
However tempting it is to talk of right and left hemispheres in isolation, they are actually two half-brains, designed to work together as a smooth, single, integrated whole in one entire, complete brain. The left hemisphere knows how to handle logic and the right hemisphere knows about the world. Put the two together and one gets a powerful thinking machine. Use either on its own and the result can be bizarre or absurd. 18
    In other words, leading a healthy, happy, successful life depends on both hemispheres of your brain.
    But the contrast in how our cerebral hemispheres operate does yield a powerful metaphor for how individuals and organizations navigate their lives. Some people seem more comfortable with logical, sequential, computer-like reasoning. They tend to become lawyers, accountants, and engineers. Other people are more