Sometimes I
envy them, as it’s much easier for them to make decisions. While me, not
trusting analyses, I don’t have a
fool-proof tool to make them. The decisions. Which doesn’t mean I’m always
hesitant. No, sometimes I’m as sure as one can be, only I can’t put a digital
finger on the exact reasons why. Just a gut feeling. A very strong one (there’s
nothing weak about my guts).
I recently
read about a very tempting book by Daniel Pink on that topic. His proposition appealed
to me as truly irresistible. It’s irresistible as it says that right is right and
it’s right to be so! The right brain is just as, or even more, important than the left one. I’m right! I’m
right!
I’m my
right brain, that’s what I wanted to say by this seemingly arrogant
exclamation. It is the one that makes me.
The rest is just details.
Contrarily
to what people who are in love with technology will say, the analogue will rule
the future. The analogue as the opposite of the digital. For me, the analogue
stands for: the right brain, the intuitive, the big picture, the creative (it
doesn’t really directly stand for
that for the general public, but there are analogies: I’ve just learned from my private engineer
that analogue means mechanical, or
using changing physical quantities such as voltage to store data. Oh, yes, the
changing physical quantities. They travel through my brain when it delivers the
feeling to my guts, resulting in a gut feeling. Analogue is therefore my
private little protest against the digital. And by the way, a metaphor is
analogous, too: it’s translating one domain using the terms of another one).
Old
fashioned analogue is the future. Not in technology, but in people.
The book
I’m talking about is “A Whole Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future”.
The book is “about the two forces that
are making our left-brain capabilities increasingly obsolete in business. The
first is outsourcing. The fact that someone abroad can do a job equally well
but for less money than you can means
that these days companies are not looking so much for left-brain
workers. (…) But what they can’t outsource is your creativity, your empathy
with customers, your playfulness, your big-picture thinking and all the other
habits this book is about. (…) The
second force is computers ” (quoted after S. Hashemi “Switched On”). Aha! The digital machine will make the
digital man obsolete. I need to learn
more about it, to warn some fellow-digitals that they need to go analogue.
Daniel Pink is about to be added to my shopping basket.
Just as,
one day, another incredible book ended up there “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill
Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. A brain scientist herself, Ms. Bolte experienced a left-brain
stroke in her thirties. The hemisphere where language and logic centres are
located, went off. What she was left with was the right brain, and, while she
was struggling to recall the proper course of action in such a case (calling an
ambulance wasn’t something that directly came to her ailing mind) she
experienced feelings of “tranquillity, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and
omniscience.” She describes this experience further like this: “deep within the
absence of earthly temporality, the boundaries of my earthly body dissolved and
I melted into the universe.” She put the phone in front of her trying in vain to
recall a number to dial – the neurons coding numbers were now swimming in a
pool of blood. The digits were gone. What she was offered instead was nirvana.
Fortunately,
she both survived the stroke and fully recovered from it, after a surgery and
eight years of revalidation. I was delighted to read about her journey and
realise that somewhere in the right side of our brains there resides a
possibility of experiencing a oneness with the universe. In Jill Bolte Taylor’s
words: “Wow, what a strange and amazing thing I am. What a bizarre living being
I am. Life! I am life! “
I dream of
a true digit-free relationship, with no touch screens between us.
There’s no 1 or 0, and nothing is for sure but one thing: that we are life.
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