A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (2 page)

Part Two—the Six Senses—is high touch. It covers the six essential abilities you’ll need to make your way across this emerging landscape. Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. I devote one chapter to each of these six senses, describing how it is being put to use in business and everyday life. Then, at the end of each of these chapters, marked off by shaded pages, is a Portfolio—a collection of tools, exercises, and further reading culled from my research and travels that can help you surface and sharpen that sense.

In the course of the nine chapters of this book, we’ll cover a lot of ground. We’ll visit a laughter club in Bombay, tour an inner-city American high school devoted to design, and learn how to detect an insincere smile anywhere in the world. But we need to start our journey in the brain itself—to learn how it works before we learn how to work it. So the place to begin is the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where I’m strapped down, flat on my back, and stuffed inside a garage-size machine that is pulsing electromagnetic waves through my skull.

One

RIGHT BRAIN RISING

T
he first thing they do is attach electrodes to my fingers to see how much I sweat. If my mind attempts deception, my perspiration will rat me out. Then they lead me to the stretcher. It’s swaddled in crinkly blue paper, the kind that rustles under your legs when you climb onto a doctor’s examination table. I lie down, the back of my head resting in the recessed portion of the stretcher. Over my face, they swing a cagelike mask similar to the one used to muzzle Hannibal Lecter. I squirm. Big mistake. A technician reaches for a roll of thick adhesive. “You can’t move,” she says. “We’re going to need to tape your head down.”

Outside this gargantuan government building, a light May rain is falling. Inside—smack in the center of a chilly room in the subbasement—I’m getting my brain scanned.

I’ve lived with my brain for forty years now, but I’ve never actually seen it. I’ve looked at drawings and images of other people’s brains. But I don’t have a clue as to what my own brain looks like or how it works. Now’s my chance.

For a while now, I’ve been wondering what direction our lives will take in these outsourced, automated, upside-down times—and I’ve begun to suspect that the clues might be found in the way the brain is organized. So I’ve volunteered to be part of the control group—what researchers call “healthy volunteers”—for a project at the National Institute of Mental Health, outside Washington, D.C. The study involves capturing images of brains at rest and at work, which means I’ll soon get to see the organ that’s been leading me around these past four decades—and, in the process, perhaps gain a clearer view of how all of us will navigate the future.

The stretcher I’m on juts from the middle of a GE Signa 3T, one of the world’s most advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. This $2.5 million baby uses a powerful magnetic field to generate high-quality images of the inside of the human body. It’s a huge piece of equipment, spanning nearly eight feet on each side and weighing more than 35,000 pounds.

At the center of the machine is a circular opening, about two feet in diameter. The technicians slide my stretcher through the opening and into the hollowed-out core that forms the belly of this beast. With my arms pinned by my side and the ceiling about two inches above my nose, I feel like I’ve been crammed into a torpedo tube and forgotten.

TCHKK! TCHKK! TCHKK!
goes the machine.
TCHKK!
It sounds and feels like I’m wearing a helmet that somebody is tapping from the outside. Then I hear a vibrating
ZZZHHHH!
followed by silence, followed by another
ZZZHHHH!
and then more silence.

After a half hour, they’ve got a picture of my brain. To my slight dismay, it looks pretty much like every other brain I’ve seen in textbooks. Running down the center is a thin vertical ridge that cleaves the brain into two seemingly equal sections. This feature is so prominent that it’s the first thing a neurologist notes when he inspects the images of my oh-so-unexceptional brain. “[The] cerebral hemispheres,” he reports, “are grossly symmetric.” That is, the three-pound clump inside my skull, like the three-pound clump inside yours, is divided into two connected halves. One half is called the left hemisphere, the other the right hemisphere. The two halves look the same, but in form and function they are quite different, as the next phase of my stint as a neurological guinea pig was about to demonstrate.

That initial brain scan was like sitting for a portrait. I reclined, my brain posed, and the machine painted the picture. While science can learn a great deal from these brain portraits, a newer technique—called
functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—can capture pictures of the brain in action. Researchers ask subjects to do something inside the machine—hum a tune, listen to a joke, solve a puzzle—and then track the parts of the brain to which blood flows. What results is a picture of the brain spotted with colored blotches in the regions that were active—a satellite weather map showing where the brain clouds were gathering. This technique is revolutionizing science and medicine, yielding a deeper understanding of a range of human experience—from dyslexia in children to the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease to how parents respond to babies’ cries.

The technicians slide me back inside the high-tech Pringles can. This time, they’ve set up a periscopelike contraption that allows me to see a slide screen outside the machine. In my right hand is a small clicker, its cord attached to their computers. They’re about to put my brain to work—and provide me with a metaphor for what it will take to thrive in the twenty-first century.

My first task is simple. They display on the screen a black-and-white photo of a face fixed in an extreme expression. (A woman who looks as if Yao Ming just stepped on her toe. Or a fellow who apparently has just remembered that he left home without putting on pants.) Then they remove that face, and flash on the screen two photos of a different person. Using the buttons on my clicker, I’m supposed to indicate which of those two faces expresses the same emotion as the initial face.

For example, the researchers show me this face:

Then they remove it and show me these two faces:

I click the button on the right because the face on the right expresses the same emotion as the earlier face. The task, if you’ll pardon the expression, is a no-brainer.

When the facial matching exercise is over, we move to another test of perception. The researchers show me forty-eight color photos, one after another, in the manner of a slide show. I click the appropriate button to indicate whether the scene takes place indoors or outdoors. These photos occupy two extremes. Some are bizarre and disturbing; others are banal and inoffensive. The photos include a coffee mug sitting on a counter, several people brandishing guns, a toilet overflowing with waste, a lamp, and a few explosions.

For instance, the researchers display an image like this:
*

So I click the button that indicates that this scene takes place inside. The task requires that I concentrate, but I don’t much strain. The exercise feels about the same as the previous one.

What happens inside my brain, however, tells a different story. When the brain scans appear on the computers, they show that when I looked at the grim facial expressions, the right side of my brain sprang into action and enlisted other parts of that hemisphere. When I looked at the scary scenes, my brain instead called in greater support from the left hemisphere.
¹
Of course, parts of both sides worked on each task. And I felt precisely the same during each exercise. But the fMRI clearly showed that for faces, my right hemisphere responded more than my left—and for gun-wielding bad guys and similar predicaments, my left hemisphere took the lead.

Why?

The Right (and Left) Stuff

Our brains are extraordinary. The typical brain consists of some 100 billion cells, each of which connects and communicates with up to 10,000 of its colleagues. Together they forge an elaborate network of some one
quadrillion
(1,000,000,000,000,000) connections that guides how we talk, eat, breathe, and move. James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for helping discover DNA, described the human brain as “the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.”
²
(Woody Allen, meanwhile, called it “my second favorite organ.”)

Yet for all the brain’s complexity, its broad topography is simple and symmetrical. Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon Line divides the brain into two regions. And until surprisingly recently, the scientific establishment considered the two regions separate but unequal. 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 had outgrown.

As far back as the age of Hippocrates, physicians believed that the left side, the same side that housed the heart, was the essential half. And by the 1800s, scientists began to accumulate evidence to support that view. In the 1860s, French neurologist Paul Broca discovered that a portion of the left hemisphere controlled the ability to speak language. A decade later, a German neurologist named Carl Wernicke made a similar discovery about the ability to
understand
language. These discoveries helped produce a convenient and compelling syllogism. Language is what separates man from beast. Language resides on the left side of the brain. Therefore the left side of the brain is what makes us human.