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

This principal theme of the text is the purpose of Pink’s undertaking and permeates every chapter. As Pink argues for the importance of the right hemisphere, he is constantly working to undo generations of stigma assigned to emotionally driven aptitudes. These skills, generally, are involved with empathy, artistic ability, and “soft” sciences. They have been assigned to right-brained dominant individuals and most often reduced to overgeneralizations and misunderstandings. Pink’s book demonstrates that society has come to value one way of thinking over the other, resulting in a decline in necessary right-brained skills. The text implies that society’s favoring of left-brained individuals—those who become lawyers, doctors, and accountants—originated from the demand for knowledge and skilled workers necessitated by the Information Age. During this economic period, creatives and empaths were marginalized and undervalued because their skills did not conform to standardized production and an apathetic work environment. 

Emotionally driven skills are about intuition, vision, and feeling. They are essentially high concept and high touch. Within the business world, empathy has “often [been] considered a softhearted nicety in a world that demanded hardheaded detachment” (160). To dismiss a person and their thoughts, one only need to utter that their sentiment is “touchy-feely.