In the entrance exams for the search giant Google, for example, the candidates are not asked to program computer programs, but are presented with logic puzzles and philosophical questions, only the most original answers win their owners the coveted job.
Does the world belong to hi-techists, economists, and lawyers? Forget that, Daniel H. Fink has news for you - it's worth starting to develop the right side of the brain - the one responsible for creative, humane and outside-the-box thinking, because that's where the future lies. Tomorrow's successful generation?
The brain is simply divided into 2 parts: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is responsible for emotion, intuition, empathy, and creativity, and the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, rationality, and analytical thinking.
During the last decades, the left-brained, rational and calculating people were considered the elite of the population. However, Daniel Fink explains in his book "A Different Head", in the future a change in our mental priorities is expected to occur.
The reasons: abundance, Asia and automation
The term, "people of knowledge", literally, refers to people who acquire an education or some profession in academia, and bring it to life in the world of work. Since the 70s, every mother has dreamed that her child will become a doctor, lawyer, engineer or executive, in other words, humanity has glorified the type of people ruled by the left side.
In the modern world, it seems, conditions have changed. The "world of abundance", as the sociologists and cultural examiners call it, presents us with countless products that must fight for their place and stand out in their uniqueness - dozens of types of jeans in different cuts and colors waiting on the store shelves, hundreds of milk delicacies, confronting us with recurring daily dilemmas, and if we ask To find a professional in the yellow pages, then we will soon get lost among hundreds of similar companies offering identical services.
According to Fink, "the world of abundance has created an ironic result: the victory of thinking dominated by the left has diminished its importance." Moreover, with the entry of Asia into the world trade market, the continent began to export not only products, but also tens of thousands of brains. Today, any mechanical engineer or computer programmer can be replaced by an Indian or Chinese who do the same job for half the price or even less.
Customer service jobs are also flowing and moving to the Asian continent. "For these legions of international knowledge workers, this world order is a dream. But for the white-collar workers, the left-brain workers in Europe and North America, the consequences are more like a nightmare," says Fink.
And finally, the dominant third factor in the equation, is automation, which has made our lives much more comfortable and efficient, but in a way has taken away our work. Already today it is possible to find robots that exhibit human-like abilities in certain fields. "Deep Blue" which defeated Kasparov for the first time in the chess game in 1996 was only the initial pioneering work in the field.
Since then, the good scientists have already managed to issue advanced machines with "artificial intelligence" that demonstrate extremely high capabilities. Already today there are machines capable of understanding the meaning and context of human discourse, such as "Siri" and "Alice". The day will not be far when the machines will start to replace us too. The doctors, lawyers, and programmers of the future may be completely mechanical.
reinvent the wheel
These three factors - abundance, Asia and automation - threaten the old world controlled by the left brain. Today it is no longer enough to do what you were taught in university or college. In order to be truly successful, you need to know how to "reinvent the wheel", use creativity to make your product stand out in a crowd of similar products, or know how to stand out from hundreds of candidates applying for the same job offer.
In the entrance exams for the search giant Google, for example, the candidates are not asked to program computer programs, but are presented with logic puzzles and philosophical questions, only the most original answers win their owners the coveted job.
So how can one prepare for the future world order that has already begun to seep into the West? What can be done to develop the right side? Pink offers diverse and different offers. Among other things, one can find in his book suggestions such as listening to symphonies, developing empathy at work, acquiring perspective skill in drawing, writing a short saga of 50 words, reading design magazines, identifying fake smiles, playing with adding captions to cartoons, developing the ability to invent, and most importantly, finding the meaning of life (not in the mystical sense - everyone finds their own meaning)! The road to riches has never looked so fun.
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Wow! I finally feel at ease that I am a "general" degree student at the Open University. This is a degree that works on emotion only!
I'm a 37-year-old girl. I've already had two strokes in 2001 and two severe brain surgeries. As a result, my left side has not functioned in my body for almost 11 years. Because I have almost no life for 11 years, I would be happy to receive information about experiments on the brain and to participate in them, thanks in advance Danit Avinoam Levin 0506511124 Address: 54-1 Uziel St. Ramat Gan
I agree with the article and strongly recommend learning how to practice the right brain
Left-dominant usage does not indicate rational people. They make use of their "rationale", but their rationale is flawed.
Only a person with a developed sense of empathy, who is able to see many subjects (as many women have), is also more rational.
The "rationale" of those with a "left brain" is actually a straight line that leads them to a certain source, but this straight line is opaque and completely false, for the most part.
"Eureka" is all Archimedes got out of the shower that he did following the recommendation of Aharon and Nasim Taleb
To the other me - explain what you mean
Eureka!
http://www.clalit20plus.co.il/Clalit/Young/Lifestyle/Articles/rightbrain.htm
I read in Dr. Tal Ben Shahar's book that the most effective brain work is every hour and a half to take a complete break and things you love for at least 15 minutes (right brain support) - this corresponds to the ratio in the linked article of 6:1 between the right and the left.
Just a funny quote I read recently by Nassim Taleb "The mind works best when it doesn't make an effort, ask anyone who takes a shower"
thanks, David.
A beautiful lecture, fascinating, short and to the point
Another video from Ted that talks about the differences between the hemispheres, and shows that it's not really a division of emotion versus logic, but something much more complex and beautiful (and regardless, one of the most fascinating lectures). It's hard to follow and there's no translation, but it's worth watching.
http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain.html
I'm glad that the link I sent fascinated you a lot (rightly so). I was referring to the performance itself, which the speaker combined with a somewhat enthusiastic performance.
which looked a bit mystical..
"Illusory"?
I found her very fascinating.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/he/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
A somewhat delusional appearance, but it is interesting to see another (perhaps complementary) angle to the right brain and its contribution to mental harmony
"The right hemisphere is responsible for emotion, intuition, empathy, and creativity, and the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, rationality, and analytical thinking."
Does anyone have any idea how this division was created in the first place?
It is possible to understand evolutionarily how this entire hemisphere is responsible for the motor activity of the opposite side of the body. This is because of the limitations of geometrical optics that cause the image created in the retinas of the eyes to be the opposite of reality; And because of the crucial importance of the sense of sight, the creatures whose brains were changed accordingly gained priority in natural selection. According to this, not all vertebrates are necessarily like this. If creatures have survived to this day in which each eye functions independently and is connected to only one hemisphere, it can be expected that the entire hemisphere in their brain will be responsible for the motility of the side of their body.
A person standing in front of several people, for example lecturing in a hall in front of an audience, may relate (unconsciously) to people on one side of his field of vision differently than to people on the other side. It is possible to divide written languages into "right-handed" and "left-handed" according to the position of the parts of the sentence. For example, in Hebrew it is customary to precede the noun to the adjective, while in English the adjective precedes the noun:
good boy
Good boy
However, in writing, in both languages the noun appears on the right side of the visual field and the adjective on the left. There are other languages, such as French, in which in written sentences you can find the noun on the left and the adjective on the right. The division of languages into "right-handed and left-handed" presented here is according to the position of the noun in the sentence in the field of vision of the one who reads the sentence. A similar division can also be made when reading multi-digit numbers, when the part of the sentence indicating the greater weight of the number appears on the right and the smaller weight on the left: for example, in today's Hebrew a multi-digit number, for example one hundred and twenty-seven, is pronounced in descending order of weight, while in biblical Hebrew it is A number pronounced in reverse - seven twenty and one hundred, as can be seen in at least two examples - the years of Sarah's life and states in the Persian Empire (the biblical expression of the numbers has survived to this day in the Arabic language seven hundred and twenty).
English, which is a "right-wing" language (according to the definition here), has become the most common lingua franca today. The reasons may depend on history, because England is the last of the empires, but then the question remains the same and is only diverted to the search for the factor in this language-speaking nation that made it a more successful imperialist than the others.
The distribution of humanity into righties and lefties is not normal. The vast majority of humans are right-handed while only less than ten percent are left-handed. Assuming that this distribution is the result of Darwinian evolution, the question that interests me is what is on the right side of the body (left brain) that gives it a communicative priority over the left side. The only idea that comes to my mind is to look for a connection with the lack of symmetry in the organs of the body which is expressed, among other things, in the position of the heart and the shape of the lungs.
Regarding the dancer - according to what is written on Wikipedia (the last Kamila's link), the perception of the direction of her movement by the viewer is not at all related to the brain activity of a stronger brain of this or that hemisphere, but to the viewing angle:
Upon inspection, one may notice that in Kayahara's original illusion, seeing the dancer spin clockwise is paired with constantly holding an elevated viewpoint and seeing the dancer from above. The opposite is also true, an observer maintaining a counter-clockwise percept has assumed a viewpoint below the dancer.
For me, she turns sometimes this way and sometimes that way, according to my will.
Ami,
Don't try, just stare at the figure and at some point, like it or not, the figure will "change direction" as a result of getting used to it. It is easy for me to produce the change in my perception voluntarily by focusing on the heel of the "standing" foot.
This illusion has no clear connection with right or left brain and in any case as Sh.R. The clear functional division written in this matter is usually wrong.
You can read more about this illusion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinning_Dancer
By the way Michael,
It is clear that the division into hemispheres is not that simple, but since we feel sorry for our readers and do not wish to bore and put them to sleep in the first paragraph with all kinds of complicated scientific terminology, the subject must be simplified as much as possible. And the main thing is that the general idea passes.
No matter how hard I try, it always turns clockwise for me, I can't change the direction of rotation.
Michael,
Asia is indeed expected to change. The standard of living there will surely rise and catch up with the standard of living in the West, and so are the salaries expected to rise, but such global processes take place over a long period of time. Meanwhile, the fact on the ground is that Asia is "stealing" employment from the West.
my daughter,
It is true that it has always existed, but recently the trend is increasing and accelerating.
Yair,
not always.
In numerical analysis there are such elegant, short and simple methods - if it were not for the creative genius of these methods, we would be stuck without being able to solve these problems, because they are not solvable (unless you have infinite time to wait for the software to run). You are right that it may be less in the use of programming, but more in the field of algorithmics.
Ami:
I can choose the direction in which I will see the dancer spin.
If I don't make an effort, it turns clockwise for me, but if I want I can reverse the direction.
It's not entirely simple and sometimes I have to stop looking at her for a moment so I can change the direction of rotation, but it's possible.
I would like to clarify some things that seem to me not to be clear from the article and that it is also clear that some of the respondents to the article do not understand.
Success in high-tech has always required great creativity and thinking outside the box. So is the pursuit of science.
The fact that Google tests their candidates using puzzles that require creativity is no accident.
I can also tell those who don't know that this examination method has been accepted in high-tech companies for many years.
Those who want to see evidence of this fact can find it in this response https://www.hayadan.org.il/glast-in-orbit-1306088/#comment-59976 written in 2008.
The practice of testing candidates using puzzles to diagnose creativity also predates this date - and by many years.
The location of creativity in only one hemisphere is also not accurate.
In this whole issue of the division of brain functionality between the two hemispheres there are a lot of urban legends.
It is recommended to read a little more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
Asia's influence on the types of specialization needed is temporary.
Today, manpower in China is still very cheap, but it simply cannot stay that way.
Many there are employed under slave conditions and they see what is happening in the West.
The standard of living in China will rise and the possibility to arbitrage on labor costs will disappear.
Automation does not happen by itself.
There will always be people who will make it possible.
True - these will be creative people - just as they have always been.
Yael Peter,
So what has changed?
You write yourself that even in the past those who succeeded were "right-brained people", and many more are known for example, such as: Fedrich Kekula, whose story about the dream of carbon atoms is published almost everywhere or, in contrast, Sigel the mobster who dreamed of a gambling city in the desert. Do you really know someone who got rich just from the operation of the "left brain"? In my opinion, such a person - died in his lifetime.
In short: what was will be!
Indeed, a balance of the two parts would be better.
Since today the inclination is clearly left (in the brain), a right correction must be made (again in the brain...) urgently 🙂
In the end there will be a balance…
As a programmer, it is true that two lines of recursion code are better than 20 lines in a loop, and this is despite the fact that it is usually slower, due to the fact that it is more readable. (and sorry for taking care of the example...)
Asaf,
The intention is not creativity of design.
but for the creativity that differentiates Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg from an ordinary programmer.
This is what sets Soros apart from any other market analyst.
And this is what distinguishes Stephen Hawking and Einstein from other scientists.
All these people who entered the pages of history, used the right side of the brain as much as the left side. They used creativity and emotional intelligence to understand the world around them, identify the next trends, and make millions out of it.
And if I take for example the excellent example you presented, then in the matter of programming it is possible to identify people who use the right side of the brain - these are the people who will bring the elegant and efficient solution to the software. Instead of a loop of 20 lines, they may solve it with 2 lines of recursion code - such a thing cannot be quantified in money at all, these elegant solutions optimize the computer programs by dozens of counters.
If for anyone the link in the article does not work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CEr2GfGilw
Correction: clockwise.
I heard about a simple test that should determine whether you are "right-brained" or left-brained, I don't know how reliable this test is:
http://www.news1.co.il/Archive/001-D-147539-00.html?tag=03-50-44
For me it always rotates counterclockwise.
Don't mistake yourself for the "other me". The demand for a developed right brain comes after passing criteria of displaying left brain abilities.
Only right brain is nice but not suitable in high tech in my opinion.
Creativity is important, but you need it in small quantities. When designing computer software, for example, you only need one designer for every programmer, so it's hard to see how right-brained people will be able to make money from this, the amount of roles they can fill is simply too small.
the other me
And a combination of the two is the most ideal
big!! It is time for the people of the right hemisphere to rise to prominence. This has far greater implications than product presentation creativity.
Empathy will lead to fraternity and equality, thinking outside the box will help solve problems and barriers that today are impossible in the normal thinking models (including the way the financiers think).
This, in my opinion, finally heralds the decline of the ego from its greatness...
Isn't the end of the world?!