Revenge of the Right Brain

I've been trying to upload my refined pattern designs since yesterday and blogger has done nothing more than a swell job screwing it up. Now I'm kinda pissed and have given up on uploading.

Here's an interesting read handed out by my lecturer during tutorial today. Its all about left brain (normal people) vs right brain (artsy people). I think it made sense. Anyhow, you be the judge of that.


Logical and Precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.

When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, parents dished out a familiar plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop of prestige.

Tax attorneys, radiologists, financial analysts, software engineers - people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or mental skill - were distinguished and enabled to reap society's greatest rewards due to their "ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the meritocratic regime. That was the path to professional success and personal fulfillment.

The world is changing. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. it belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today,those capabilities are still necessary. But they are no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialities of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

Beneath the nervous clatter of half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

Abstracted from
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Daniel H. Pink

Right brainers can start popping the champagne. Left brainers should not despair, afterall, we right brainers have been undermined for far too long. It's time you got yours. Haha! No I still love left brainers, just something we could all read and debate over.

*When the cold wind blows... I wanna go home.