Age of the Right Brain
Janet Rae-Dupree of the New York Times reports on the rapidly changing creative side if business...
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I’M of two minds. As a matter of fact, so are you. And until recently, corporate America wasn’t doing much to take advantage of one of them. But now that we’re hip-deep in what has been called both the “Creative Economy” and the “Conceptual Age,” no one can afford to ignore the artist within: the right hemisphere of the brain.
Although popularized in the 1980s by the artist Betty Edwards in her book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” the right-brain-left-brain dichotomy originated with the research of the American biologist Roger W. Sperry in the 1960s. Through studying “split brain” animals and human patients, whose brain hemispheres had been disconnected (in humans, this was done to prevent severe epileptic seizures), he found that each side of the brain plays its own role in cognition. The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.
That ability to help others see from an artist’s perspective was the reason Ms. Edwards decided to write her book, she said in an e-mail message. “My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.”
That alternate way of thinking has traditionally been marginalized in corporate America, as it has been in the rest of our culture. Dr. Sperry, who had a doctorate in zoology, noted the prejudice in 1973 when he remarked: “Our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”
Mr. Pink hopes his latest book, “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need,” will help set things right. Promoted as “the first business comic book,” the paperback is drawn as if it were a Japanese manga novel. In the story, the office cubicle dweller Johnny Bunko is taught the true rules of the career game — including “There is no plan” and “Make excellent mistakes” — by a superhero fairy godmother who appears when he breaks open a pair of chopsticks.
THE primary moral to the story, Mr. Pink says, is this: There’s power in making career choices for fundamental reasons, such as doing something you love, instead of instrumental reasons, like hoping a job will be a steppingstone to something else.
It’s a message Dr. Sperry seemed to understand when he accepted the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1981. “The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain,” he said, “is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you.”
