Read A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future for Free Online

and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.) 1
    High concept and high touch are on the rise throughout the world economy and society. But for the most persuasive evidence, it helps to look in the most unlikely places. Take medical schools, long a bastion for those with the best grades, highest test scores, and the keenest powers of analytical thinking. Today, the curriculum at American medical schools is undergoing its greatest change in a generation. Students at Columbia University Medical School and elsewhere are being trained in “narrative medicine,” because research has revealed that despite the power of computer diagnostics, an important part of a diagnosis is contained in a patient’s story. At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient’s condition. Meantime, more than fifty medical schools across the United States have incorporated spirituality into their coursework. UCLA Medical School has established a Hospital Overnight Program, in which second-year students are admitted to the hospital overnight with fictitious ailments. The purpose of this playacting? “To develop medical students’ empathy for patients,” says the school. Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia has even developed a new measure of physician effectiveness—an empathy index. 2
    Or leave American teaching hospitals and head for the world’s second largest economy. Japan, which rose from the ashes of World War II thanks to its intense emphasis on L-Directed Thinking, is now reconsidering the source of its national strength. Although Japanese students lead the world in math and science scores, many in Japan suspect that the nation’s unrelenting focus on schoolbook academics might be an outdated approach. So the country is remaking its vaunted education system to foster greater creativity, artistry, and play. Little wonder. Japan’s most lucrative export these days isn’t autos or electronics. It’s pop culture. 3 Meanwhile, in response to the mind-melting academic pressures on Japanese youth, the Education Ministry has been pushing students to reflect on the meaning and mission of their lives, encouraging what it calls “education of the heart.”
    Then, when you’ve returned from Japan, check out a third unlikely setting—the mammoth multinational General Motors. A few years ago, GM hired a man named Robert Lutz to help turn around the ailing automaker. Bob Lutz is not exactly a touchy-feely, artsyfartsy kind of guy. He’s a craggy, white-haired white man in his seventies. During his career, he’s been an executive at each of the big three American automakers. He looks and acts like a marine, which he once was. He smokes cigars. He flies his own plane. He believes global warming is a myth peddled by the environmental movement. But when Lutz took over his post at beleaguered GM, and The New York Times asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here’s how he responded: “It’s more right brain. . . . I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” 4
    Let that comment settle in for a moment. General Motors—an exemplar not even of the Information Age but of the Industrial Age—says it’s in the art business. The art business. And the person leading GM into this right-brain world isn’t some beret-topped artiste but a seventy-something piss-and-vinegar former marine. To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there’s something happening here—and what it is is