It’s too bad that people tend to look at such diagrams with the false left-brain/right-brain dilemma in mind. They totally ignore the function of the corpus callosum, the spaghetti-like mass that links both sides of the brain together so that all these brain functions can WORK TOGETHER. As a result, they tend to view human behavior as an “either/or”, rather than as a “both”. Either smart OR emotional, either rational OR creative, and so forth. What they should be looking for instead is a way to be ALL of these things together, without any of them being compromised or shut off.
Just working with what ALREADY exists in our own brains, we could be so much more than we are. And the really GREAT news is that very little of it has anything to do with having a high IQ. IQ measures the EFFICIENCY of the algorithmic mind; not the CAPACITY of it. Even if I walk slower than my son, I can still get there; it’s a matter of CARING to get there—and we can ALL do that. No old person fails to go to the bathroom simply because he’s slow getting there. No, to him, it’s IMPORTANT, so he makes it happen.
It’s the “reflective mind” that cares about things and that weighs the importance of things. The healthy reflective mind tells the “algorithmic mind” whether to keep doing the math or not, and it reflects on and deliberately trains the unconscious activities of the “autonomous mind”–the things we have memorized and the things we can do without actively thinking about them. Having the IQ functions of the algorithmic mind and the automatic functions of the autonomous mind up and running without a healthy reflective mind is like having an engine without an engineer.
How ironic that the human mind is what most sets us apart from the other species, and yet we make so little use of its higher functions. I fear that we tend to live much more like animals than like the sovereign minds that our design can facilitate. If each were but aspiring to be better than he is and to correct himself accordingly, imagine what a different society ours would be. Yet so many are caught up in false paradigms about the human mind, just as they are in false paradigms about politics and religion. We tend to get our low value of our potential from those who see us only as a means to profit. But we can be much more than any boss might ever want or need from us; we can be sovereign individuals who are authentic representatives of the paradigms we value—people of true worth who can help each other immensely and who can work together to solve just about anything that ails us.
