Outsourcing

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

A change of pace this week as I continue thinking about Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and relate it to my own experiences in India this past winter.

Daniel Pink believes that left brain tasks requiring logic, analysis and speedy thinking will be either outsourced to smart and inexpensive labor in India or performed by tireless computers. He advises everyone who wants to get or keep their job to start pumping up their right brain processes – the creative, nonlinear stuff – in order to make themselves indispensable. I have no doubt that he’s right, but when I was over in India I saw little evidence of its linear left brain.

In Rishikesh, India’s yoga center, I was expecting a serene place filled with people whose feet only rarely touched the ground. What I found instead was a narrow bridge called Lakshman Jula alive with humanity and aggressive monkeys. The sacred Ganges was like Times Square, so packed it was with bathers, boats and garbage.

It wasn’t long before the chaotic nature of the place started to close in on me. After my wife got sick (suspicious masala chai we think) I was craving left-brain linearity. I wanted to get some of that in an American hotel near the airport. I’d like to pause for a moment to remark that I work in television for a living, so I have an intimate understanding of chaos and even outright insanity. What made me crack in India?

On the way to the airport in our air-conditioned car we saw motorcycles carrying more passengers than you’d think gravity would permit, and all manner of cargo – wood, entire trees, cooking oil, chairs, more people. I was expecting India to give me something of a balance between spirituality and left-brain IT computer geeks. Instead I got wood smoke, rickshaws and cows. I got noise, loud music, suspicious food and drink and people just trying to survive who hoped I would finance them.

I found little calm on the trip until we got to Mumbai, a jumpy, jangly city of 13 million people. In a temple dedicated to Ganesha, the Hindu god of success, and also in another dedicated to the goddess of prosperity Lakshmi, something happened. I felt that I grasped the spiritual world I had been seeking.

There are seeker/spiritual right-brained friends of mine who tell me that since I was expecting chaos and bad food in India, that’s what I got. Therefore, I created that universe. But I found that in Mumbai, the place that was closest to the cities I know, Los Angeles and New York, I was able to connect with both left and right brain. Too far to the logical side of things and there’s no access to intuition. Too far to the right, too much chaos. I found the balance in Mumbai, if only for a day.

If you’d like to see a slightly different video slideshow version of this story, you’ll find it on Lonely Planet’s website. Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

Of Two Minds

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

Disclosure: I like doing yoga. I don’t go for the workout. (I have running for that.) I don’t go for the women. (Though I met a woman in yoga whom I have married.) I go to explore the mindscape and the soulscape. That said, I have a request for all yoga teachers: Can you stop telling us to throw away the mind? You might know the type, the teacher who cranks up the volume on their shallow pop music and shouts over it, “You don’t need your brain – just listen to your feelings!” This instruction makes me want to puke, but I would have to use my brain to do that, so I guess it’s not allowed.

I’m thinking about this because I just saw a new documentary called “Enlighten Up!” It’s the story of a skeptic who tries to find out if yoga can change him. I experienced the story very much through the skeptic’s eyes because he wanted tangible proof of how yoga was working. I like that, because it speaks to the existential engineer in me. Seeking such proof involves the brain in the process of healing the body and the spirit. That’s good. Here’s why: You might already know that there are two parts of the brain and they work together. The left brain takes care of the sequential, analytical, logical stuff like doing your taxes and complaining about it. The right brain is non-linear, intuitive and big picture. It’s what we use to connect to the soul, interpret people’s facial expressions, dance with abandon and heal ourselves.

“The brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”
-Woody Allen

As Daniel H. Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, the left brain is bossy and tends to bully the right brain. This is why in meditation we’re asked to “quiet the mind.” It’s an oversimplified instruction – you really want to quiet the left brain — it’s analyzing how annoying it is to sit still — and try to listen to the right brain as it tells its subtle story. One great technique for this is to sit and hum loudly. It gets everything vibrating, clears the mind of extra thoughts and if you don’t go insane first or get evicted, you might discover something new.

I was amazed to learn from Daniel Pink’s book that for years scientists believed it was the left brain alone that “made us human” – our logical, analytical selves vaulted us above dumb animals who have never even attempted to write a novel. The mute, mysterious right brain was thought to be a vestige of a more primitive form of human. But as Pink points out, “We need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies.”

Works for me. Even when I gaze into my own past I see that my father is a lawyer whose default mode is analytical left brain rationality while my mother, who was an artist, was a devotedly holistic right brain person. Genetically, that’s my recipe. Whatever I am pursuing or pursued by these days is orchestrated by biology, biography and those two halves of the brain playing their symphony together.