Will The Right Brain Rule The Future? This article first
appeared in IMPO's October 2012 issue. For many decades we have
been in an information age dominated by engineers, computer
scientists, programmers, and other left brain thinkers. In
Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, he makes the case that we
are in transition from an information age to a conceptual age,
and from L-directed thinking to R-directed thinking. Pink
defines L-directed (left brain) thinking in terms of logic,
sequence, literalness, and analysis. R-directed (right brain)
thinking is defined in terms of synthesis, emotional expression,
context, creativity, and the big picture. This transition to
R-directed thinking and the conceptual age is based on the fact
that we are slowly losing many L-directed jobs to foreign
workers. The theory here is that any work that can be reduced to
rules such as programming, building computers, reading X-rays,
or basic engineering is in danger, because technical workers in
foreign countries can do the same work