A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

Daniel Pink describes society as always having valued “a certain kind of mind” more than any other (1). This mind belongs to the lawyers, programmers, and MBAs of the world—those whose careers earn them more money than others. Now, the world is shifting; creators, “pattern recognizers, and meaning makers” are on the rise and are taking back control (1). Pink attributes this change to society’s transition away from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age.

The Introduction then shifts to map out the goals of the book: to demonstrate how and why the world has been dominated by a way of thinking that is reductively analytical—and that we are now moving into an age that values creativity, empathy, and narrative. These two divergent ways of thinking are essentially derived from the concept of being left- or right-brained. Our brains are split; the left hemisphere is “sequential, logical, and analytical” while the right hemisphere is “nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic” (3). Although humans engage both sides of their brains for even the smallest tasks, we’ve come to understand the hemispheres as indicative of separate identities. Pink endeavors to prove that this is no longer the case throughout the length of this book, beginning with contextualizing the differences through examples, defining the origin of the thinking hierarchy, and using left-brained analytics to evince that right-brained thinking is now the leading force in the world.