How Whole Brain Thinking Can Save the Future
Why Left Hemisphere Dominance Has Brought Humanity to the Brink of Disaster and How We Can Think Our Way to Peace and Healing
When facing a tough dilemma, the wise person tackles the whole problem. They don’t just focus on one part and ignore the rest. That’s a matter of common sense, but such holistic thinking rarely occurs in our most consequential organizations. Although women are catching up in the corridors of power, most people in charge today are highly specialized males whose perception is too often myopic. For example, while they may focus well on the immediate symptoms of a problem, they often miss deeper causes, wider effects, and longer-term consequences. Such people, some of whom are also women, are “left-brain dominant” thinkers who tend to miss the forest for the trees. Sadly, these left-brain dominants fail to use all the mental faculties available to them—in particular the holistic and intuitive perceptions provided by their right brain. And this is why our future is now in great peril.
In this multiple award-winning book, James Olson carefully explores these issues and shows us how to minimize conflict by gaining creative control over our two modes of perception. He goes on to describe the left-brain bias in our civilization, revealing it to be the root cause for centuries of war, racism, sexism, exploitation, and hyper-polarization. Left-brain dominance also explains eons of misunderstanding between the sexes and our inability to understand LGBTQ variants—of which there are as many as 32 fluid variations, as Olson shows. While most of our technological and scientific progress is driven by left-brain thinking, the great advances to come, especially in ethics, politics, the arts, and religion, will require that we consciously harness both sides of our brain to greatly improve our thinking so we can more often reach agreement. Independent scholar Olson concludes by explaining how we can achieve greater internal coordination between these two “operating systems,” thus showing us how and why thinking with our whole brains will lead us to peace, justice, prosperity, and to the ultimate healing of our relationships and our world.
James Olson is an integral philosopher whose studies have included business, engineering, art, Eastern and Western religion, language, psychology, and brain perspective. Olson has traveled extensively throughout Europe; lived in Austria, France, and Germany; and attended Oklahoma State University, the University of Vienna, Oklahoma University, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the Kansas City Art Institute. As a practicing philosopher, Olson has worked most of his life to unify his understanding of material things, ideas, and spiritual energies by embracing concepts that are in harmony with one another. A former church deacon and farmer, as well as a state and national winner in 4-H, Olson starts with a core of conservative farm and Christian values, and into that integrates the complementary perspective of Eastern religion, the liberal perspective of Europe, the wisdom of ancient Egypt, the facts of science, the discipline of business, and the unique spiritual insights offered by modern revelation. Following the unifying guidelines of philosophy and drawing on his broad education, Olson has made it his mission to help bring the planet's masculine and feminine energies into greater harmony and a more peaceful state, through his advocacy of whole-brain thinking.
