tosh prior to its introduction, and asked people to describe the
ideal personal computer, they would have come up with some-
thing entirely different. But when we show people the Macin-
tosh and say, ‘Is this what you want?’ they say, ‘Yes.’ You have
to be able to make the abstract recognizable, because only then
can people accept or reject it.”
As an academic administrator, Alfred Gottschalk looked for
right-brain characteristics when he hired. “I first look for char-
acter, whether the individual can inspire trust. Then I look for
imagination and perseverance, steadfastness of purpose. If, for
example, I am engaging somebody who is going to be the chief
controller of the institution, and I see that as an undergraduate
he had difficulty with intermediate algebra or calculus, and he
nevertheless manages to go into accounting, I wonder what
kind of a financial imagination he has. I try to find out as much
as I can about the individual, and then a largely intuitive deci-
sion is made. I have to feel right about the person.”
Right-brain characteristics come in handy even when you’re
dealing with things, not people. Mathilde Krim talked about
the importance of instinct in her early work: “I always had a
good instinct for biological problems. I don’t remember ever
having worked at something that fizzled into nothing.... I
could recognize a chromosome. One time a colleague said that
he had isolated a new cell line from a dog. And I looked at it
and saw immediately that it wasn’t a dog cell. I could tell that
it was a rat cell just by looking at the chromosomes, and I was
right, because we did cellulogical tests afterwards. In the case
of prenatal diagnosis, it was obvious to me from the begin-
ning, the first time I looked at the lymphatic cells, that there
was a difference between male and female cells, so then we
studied it systematically. At the time it made quite a splash in
the press, but it was a very simple kind of work to do.”
Operating on Instinct