A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink Page B

listens empathically to her patient’s story but forgets to take his blood pressure or prescribes the wrong drug is not long for the profession. But Charon’s approach can help young physicians imbue their work with greater empathy. (I’ll discuss empathy in greater detail in Chapter 7.) For example, Charon’s students all keep two charts on each patient. On one chart, they include the quantitative information and medical lingo of a typical hospital chart. But on the other—what she calls the “parallel chart”—students write narratives about their patients and chronicle their own emotions. According to the first study to test this method’s effectiveness, students who kept a parallel chart had better relationships with patients—and better interviewing and technical skills—than their counterparts who did not. 12 Stories alone won’t cure the sick. But combined with modern technology, they have an undeniable healing power. This may be the future of medicine: physicians who can both think rigorously and feel empathically, physicians who can both analyze a test and appreciate a story—physicians with a whole new mind.
“If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
—BARRY LOPEZ,
author of Arctic Dreams
    W E ARE OUR STORIES. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.
    More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, Story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain. We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places—in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.
    What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide—context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters. The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely been acted upon—that we must listen to each other’s stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives.
*The answers: Question 1—$136 billion. Question 2—Chess grand master Garry Kasparov.



Write a Mini-Saga.
    Writing anything is hard work. Writing a short story is really hard work. And writing a novel, a play, or a screenplay can take years. So go easy on yourself by writing a mini-saga. Mini-sagas are extremely short stories—just fifty words long . . . no more, no less. Yet, like all stories, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. London’s Telegraph newspaper once sponsored an annual mini-saga contest—and the results showed how much creativity a person can pack into exactly fifty words. Try writing a mini-saga yourself. It’s addicting.Here are two excellent examples to hook you:
    A Life
    BY JANE ROSENBERG, BRIGHTON, UNITED KINGDOM
    Joey, third of five, left home at sixteen, travelled the country and wound up in Nottingham with a wife and kids. They do shifts, the kids play out and ends never meet. Sometimes he’d give anything to walk away but he knows she’s only got a year and she doesn’t.
    A Dream So Real
    BY PATRICK FORSYTH, MALDON, UNITED KINGDOM
    Staying overnight with friends, his sleep was disturbed by a vivid dream: a thief broke in, stole everything in the flat—then carefully replaced every single item with an exact replica.
    “It felt so real,” he told his friends in the morning.
    Horrified,