In 1996 Antonio Damasio published Descartes Error, in part a detailed study of neural pathways required by good decision-making and follow-up action. It is particularly valuable because it describes areas of the right brain whose malfunction causes the kind of indecision and inactivity typical of progress traps. It is not difficult to see how overuse of Geschwind's left-side parietal area, coupled with failure of Damasio's `decision circuit' on the other side, could lead to the kind of high-tech, industrial stalemate we are studying.

Damasio focused on damage to the frontal cortex, and the awareness and decision-making deficiencies of affected patients, reporting that a right-brain area—the somatosensory circuit— was, in addition to the frontal areas, essential in decisions and their execution. His descriptions of this right brain activity are valuable in defining what is lacking in individuals and societies where activity of the left brain (logical, verbal, sequential) predominates:

At roughly the same time as environmental soul-searching emerged, there began an era of intense clinical studies of the brain, especially the role of the left and right cortical hemispheres. One book that popularized this research was art teacher Betty Edwards' Drawing on the right side of the Brain. Edwards' view was that one could improve one's drawing skill by stimulating the right side. Medical research held that rational function, language, calculation, logic and sequence were based in the left side of the brain while feelings, intuition and spatial processing took place on the right. In addition, receiving and analyzing information from the outside world is the job of the right hemisphere. The experiments included work by Nobel laureate Sperry, LeDoux, Gazzaniga, and many more.