Think With Full Brain: Power Up Your Brain, #5

Introduction

One of the saddest experiences that can ever happen to a human being is to awaken gray-haired and wrinkled, near the close of a very unproductive career, to the fact that all through the past years, he has been using only a small part of himself.

—Orison Swett Marden

AQuick Story

One day, a professor entered his classroom and asked his students to prepare for a surprise exam. They all waited anxiously at their desks for the exam to begin.

The professor handed out the test papers to students with the text facing down. After he disseminated them all out, he asked the students to turn over the papers.

To everyone’s surprise, there were no questions – just a black dot in the center of the paper. Obviously, the students were confused about how to deal with this surprise test. The professor, seeing the expression on everyone’s faces, told them:

I want you to write about what you see on the test paper.

The students were still confused, but they started on the mysterious task.

At the end of the class, the professor took all the answer sheets and started reading each one of them out loud in front of all the students. All of them, with no exception, defined the black dot – some tried to explain its position in the center of the sheet, while others described its size; a few others talked about the color of the dot. But every answer targeted the black dot.

After all the answers were read, the classroom was silent, waiting for the right answer to the confusing surprise test.  Now the professor started to explain. He expressed:

"I’m not going to grade you on this; I just wanted to give you something to think about. No one wrote about the white part of the paper. Everyone focused on the black dot – and the same thing happens in our lives. We insist on focusing only on the black dot.

The black dot is an allegory; it represents the problems that you face in any area of your life, be they health issues, lack of money, a complicated relationship, or frustration caused by a stressful career. But we get so wrapped up in the black dot (our problems) that we miss out on the bigger context. By focusing too much on a problem, we often limit our thinking and are not able to seek out solutions that are readily available to us.

This is especially interesting when you consider how the black dot is tiny relative to the amount of white space it is surrounded by. If you start looking beyond the black dot and broaden your thinking to reflect on your problem (the black dot) in the context of the surrounding possibilities and solutions (the white space), you might start to get a glimpse of solutions in the form of resourceful people who may be able to assist you, opportunities in nearby areas, or skills that you may be overlooking due to your tunnel vision with regards to your problem.

And what is the moral of the story? The original message was that one should not only look at the dark side but also focus on the white space, i.e. the brighter side of the things.  But as a thought experiment, I wondered what other lessons this story could offer, and, to my mind, this story perfectly addresses the concept of holistic thinking as well.

This anecdote also reminds me of the famous fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Canon Doyle., who often proclaims this insight while investigating any complex case, people see but don’t observe. You see the difference. While seeing is limiting oneself to only looking at the black dot, on the other hand, observing is equivalent to grasping the whole context of the black dot relative to the white space. Observing is analyzing the problem in its context by looking at the surrounding objects and people and examining the interrelation between them.

Now, let’s depart the fictional universe and get into the real world. Our thinking is developed based on our routines and patterns, which are significantly influenced by our family background, our society, and the environment we spend most of our time in. In fact, our pattern of thinking and our perspective change heavily under the influence of the culture and geographies we belong to.

How Culture and Geography Changes the Way We Think

A few research studies have shown that East Asians are culturally more likely to explain any event or problem with reference to its context than Americans, who are focused solely on issues or problems in isolation. Two specific studies compare the context-sensitivity of Japanese and Americans and explain how thinking and behavior changes based on geography and culture.

Psychologists Richard E. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, from the University of Michigan, conducted an experiment,[1] wherein they presented a 20-second animated video of underwater scenes to two different groups comprising Japanese and American participants respectively. Afterward, participants were asked what they had seen.

Here is how both groups responded:

While the Americans mentioned larger, faster-moving, brightly-colored objects in the foreground (such as the big fish), the Japanese described more about what was going on in the background (for example, the small frog at the bottom left). Interestingly, it was also noted that the Japanese also spoke twice as often as the Americans about the interdependencies between the objects in the front and the objects in the background. Japanese were more context-specific and viewed the whole event with a holistic approach.

Similarly, in another experiment, two groups, one American and one Japanese, were asked to take a picture of one individual. The results found that the American people frequently zoomed in on the picture in order to view the intricate facial features in greater detail. On the other hand, the Japanese, when asked to click a picture, frequently took pictures with wider coverage that showed the complete individual from head to toe, as well as objects surrounding that individual such as bookshelves, chairs, floors, etc.

One can readily see the similarities between both studies. The Americans focused on individual items isolated from their backgrounds and contexts, while the Asians gave more attention to the backgrounds and to the interaction or contextual relationship between these backgrounds and the central figures. Why do these two groups approach these situational experiments with such vastly different perspectives?

Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, where she heads the executive education program on leading across borders and cultures, explains the reasoning behind it. She states that a traditional tenet of Western philosophies and religions is that you can remove an item from its environment and analyze it separately. Cultural theorists call this specific thinking. Chinese religions and philosophies, by contrast, have traditionally emphasized interdependencies and interconnectedness. The Ancient Chinese used the holistic thinking approach, believing that action always occurs in a field of forces. You can’t disregard the environmental forces behind any action.

In fact, the Chinese have a concept of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy that describes how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.

Why did I start the book with these two studies?

I did not intend to compare any specific cultures or geographies or leave any positive or adverse comments on any specific set of the population. The idea is to simply communicate that when two people are dealing with or talking to each other in any context, in most cases, they make judgments about other people and label them right or wrong. They wrongly believe that the other person is not perceiving the information correctly. But what they miss out on is that there could be many perspectives or approaches of examining things, depending on their geography, culture, societal values, and upbringing.

What if you could understand all these perspectives while interacting with people? What if you could hear what they are saying in some particular context? What if you could also see what they are seeing?

Imagine, if you could, how different and exciting your life would be. It would be a journey full of exploration and adventure because every other person will show you their own perception or view about something that is different from what you think and believe. Every day, every meeting, and every interaction with another person will offer you diverse approaches of looking at things.

If that happens, you’ll start making clear distinctions in your mind about why different people think differently and alter your perspective about things, places, situations, and people. You’ll view things in a more holistic manner and offer better solutions.

Does that sound interesting?

That’s what we will cover here: how to start thinking with your full brain.

Why Think with Your Full Brain?

Neuroscience has progressed enough, and there are many non-invasive brain-testing technologies these days like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that can see inside of the human brain and have already figured out the inner constituents of our brain.

Robert Sperry’s split-brain research that won him the Nobel Prize in medicine proved that the human brain has two hemispheres, right and left.  Each side of the brain thinks in a different pattern.  While the left side of the brain deals with rational and logical thought processes, the right side of the brain is inclined towards imagination, intuition, and interpersonal human aspects of thinking.

We are talking about thinking with our whole brains, so obviously, we will not get into a debate about which hemisphere is better or worse.  The objective here is to use the full potential of your brain to make holistic and better decisions in most life situations.

In fact, people tend to use one side of their brains dominantly, just like people use one hand as their dominant hand while performing their regular tasks.

But you can’t and shouldn’t be solely relying on one particular segment of the brain to do all of your mental work. Let’s set the research and proof aside for a moment and consider this statement with a logical perspective only. Why is a human being created with two brain hemispheres if they are not both useful and essential to one’s life? Can you look at your outer body and say that any part of your body is inessential? Or can you just feel the sensations or vibrations inside your body and conclude that few organs of our inner system are inessential?

No body part or organ of your body is inessential. Every outside part or internal organ of the body has some role to play. So why would you prefer to use only one part or to restrict the usage of the other part of your most precious treasure – your brain? You should be using all the areas of the brain to their fullest potential...

Both hemispheres of our brain have specific roles to play, and we will examine these roles later in much greater detail. There is nothing bad about having a specific preference for one hemisphere or the other, but that