Assorted Afflatuses

No promotion, at least in the world of online shopping, can make me spend more than a free shipping promotion. Until I signed up for Amazon Prime a few weeks ago I would never have dared to spend less than $25 on Amazon simply because I despise spending extra money for five day shipping. So, when I decided to order a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince from Barnes and Noble (I had a gift card), which was a mere $16, I resolved to find something else to push my total beyond the magic $25 number.

Unfortunately, finding something to meet my demanding standards was next to impossible. For starters, I didn't want to buy anything too expensive, as I could have found the same item on Amazon at half the price. And, because paperback books infuriate me, the book needed to be hard-bound.

I looked for half an hour before I realized that the hardcover criterion needed to go. Eventually, I settled on Daniel H. Pink's A Whole New Mind after reading the mildly intriguing description.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I began reading A Whole New Mind. It blew my expectations out of the water like the HMS Victory bearing down on a French battleship.

The book argues, quite persuasively, that, in a world where computers can crunch numbers billions of times more quickly than any human mind and corporations can so easily ship jobs overseas, the most successful people in our new globalized economy will be able to think logically, with the left side of their brain, and creatively, with the right side.

But more than just that, it offers some really interesting insight into how our brains have been conditioned to think in a very logical, left-brain way. I never realized, for instance, that, because most of the Western world has been reading left to right for the past five millennia — a task that moves the eyes and neck rightward and, thus, involves the left side of the brain — natural selection has conditioned us to be left-brain people.

Like The Lexus and the Olive Tree — and quite unlike Silent Spring — I will be talking about this book for months. For once, the high praise quoted on the back cover actually reflects the pages' content. A Whole New Mind is a must-read for anyone under the age of seventy.