Hemispheres and Mini Sagas

Hemispheres and Mini Sagas

My husband has an addiction. A perfectly worthy one mind you. He expands his mind through compulsive book buying from Amazon. He is a consultant and tries to keep on top of what is going on in the world of business boffin book writers. Fortunately for me, the truly dry and esoteric tomes he reads are borrowed from dry and esoteric people (Competing on Analytics never really took off in our household), and get pushed out the door soon enough. The volumes that adorn our bookshelf tend to be quite interesting 'flavour of the month' material, and I have found many of them adequate for end of the day reading. But I do have some quibbles with 'business lite' writing. Some books seem to be one idea stretched out a couple of hundred pages more than was necessary by having small pages, lots of pictures, and plenty of repetition (Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, an engaging and insightful book, could have got its point across on the back of the napkin, perhaps two). And some books probably could have benefited from a bit more rigour.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink falls into the latter category. To be fair, I am only halfway through. The book is about moving away from analytical left brain dominated thinking to more creative right brain dominated thinking. With that in mind, perhaps it is appropriate that his approach is not particularly academic. And I must 'fess up to finding this book, like others of its type, eminently readable and persuasive. As I said, it was just a quibble.

For his narrative, Pink relies on the hemispheres of the brain as a metaphorical device to explain where the economies of the developed world are heading. Pink argues we are moving away from what he terms the L-Directed Thinking of the Information Age, that is, thinking characteristic of the left brain "sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic." Our destination is R-Directed Thinking, which is, you guessed it, characteristic of the right brain "simultaneous, metaphorical aesthetic, contextual and synthetic (in the 'synthesis' sense of the word, not the 'artificial' sense)." He is not, however, arguing that one hemisphere is becoming redundant as the other becomes ascendant, after all he is envisaging a whole new mind.

Key to Pink's argument are the effects in the developed world of Abundance, Automation and Asia. Abundance has satisfied our material needs, "boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating the individual's search for meaning" - steering us towards right hemisphere satisfactions. Concurrently, as happened with manual labour last century, automation and outsourcing to Asia have relieved white collar drones of logic and analysis work - reducing the economic value of those left hemisphere skills. (If you are interested in this topic, you should also read Rolf Jensen's Dream Society. Jensen is a futurist who wrote his book a few years prior to Pink. He comes at it from a different angle but his vision for the future is similar).

Pink provides tips on developing your skills for this future economy. I have just read the part of the book where he provides advice on how to enhance your story telling ability (a skill hitherto under appreciated in the modern economy). Being lazy by nature, I was particularly taken by his suggestion of writing mini-sagas. A mini-saga is a particularly short piece of flash fiction told in 50 words or less. (I prefer this to the very difficult challenge of writing a story in 6 words - who could top Hemingway's poignant "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

I thought I would give a fifty worder a bash:

As the moon's reflection shimmered on the glassy surface of the sea, and the water gently lapped at her milky white shoulders, Harriet came to the realisation that the incoming tide had stolen away her chance of retaining any semblance of modesty when she walked back to Christian camp.

It is a bit rubbish really - all one sentence. Send me your better offerings. It will give me a thrill. I will post them too.