Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

by Daniel Goleman

"cognitive unconscious"

presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.

in registering and making sense of perceptual patterns than with emotional reactions.

While the hippocampus remembers the dry facts, the amygdala retains the emotional flavor that goes with those facts.

"The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don't really like her."

Under stress (or anxiety, or presumably even the intense excitement of joy) a nerve running from the brain to the adrenal glands atop the kidneys triggers a secretion of the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, which surge through the body priming it for an emergency.

This amygdala arousal seems to imprint in memory most moments of emotional arousal with an added degree of strength—that's why we are more likely, for example, to remember where we went on a first date, or what we were doing when we heard the news that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.

The more intense the amygdala arousal, the stronger the imprint; the experiences that scare or thrill us the most in life are among our most indelible memories.

So it is important to have positive emotions refularly so imprints of emotions on amygdyala is intense , thats positive emotions produce postive thoughts.

But emotional memories can be faulty guides to the present.

One drawback of such neural alarms is that the urgent message the amygdala sends is sometimes, if not often, out-of-date—especially in the fluid social world we humans inhabit.

Its method of comparison is associative: when one key element of a present situation is similar to the past, it can call it a "match"—which is why this circuit is sloppy:

it acts before there is full confirmation.

It frantically commands that we react to the present in ways that were imprinted long ago, with thoughts, emotions, reactions learned in response to events perhaps only dimly simi...

The emotional brain's imprecision in such moments is added to by the fact that many potent emotional memories date from the first few years of life, in the relationship between an infant and its caretakers. This is especially true for traumatic events, like beatings or outright neglect.

During this early period of life other brain structures, particularly the hippocampus, which is crucial for narrative memories, and the neocortex, seat of rational thought, have yet to become fully developed.

Since these earliest emotional memories are established at a time before infants have words for their experience, when these emotional memories are triggered in later life there is no matching set of articulated thoughts about the response that takes us over.

"You don't need to know exactly what something is to know that it may be dangerous."10

Such inchoate emotional mistakes are based on feeling prior to thought.

"precognitive emotion," a reaction based on neural bits and pieces of sensory information that have not been fully sorted out and integrated into a recognizable object.

If the amygdala senses a sensory pattern of import emerging, it jumps to a conclusion, triggering its reactions before there is full confirming evidence—or any confirmation at all.

THE EMOTIONAL MANAGER

The left pre frontal lobe acts as an off switch for amygdyala surge. The right pre forntal lobe is for worry ,fear and rage.

The prefrontal cortex seems to be at work when someone is fearful or enraged, but stifles or controls the feeling in order to deal more effectively with the situation at hand, or when a reappraisal calls for a completely different response, as with the worried mother on the phone. This neocortical area of the brain brings a more analytic or appropriate response to our emotional impulses, modulating the amygdala and other limbic areas.

If in the process an emotional response is called for, the prefrontal lobes dictate it, working hand-in-hand with the amygdala and other circuits in the emotional brain.

And for we humans . . . when to attack, when to run—and also, when to placate, persuade, seek sympathy, stonewall, provoke guilt, whine, put on a facade of bravado, be contemptuous—and so on, through the whole repertoire of emotional wiles.

The neocortical response is slower in brain time than the hijack mechanism because it involves more circuitry.

When we register a loss and become sad, or feel happy after a triumph, or mull over something someone has said or done and then get hu...

Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynamics: triggering of the amygdala and a failure to activate the neocortical processes that usually keep emotional response in balance—or a recruitment of the neocortical zones to the emotional urgency.

One way the prefrontal cortex acts as an efficient

manager of emotion—weighing reactions before acting—is by dampening the signals for activation sent out by the amygdala and other limbic centers—something

something like a parent who stops an impulsive child from grabbing and tells the child to ask properly (or wa...

left frontal lobe is to act as a neural thermostat, regulating unpleasant emotions. The right prefrontal lobes are a seat of negative feelings like fear and aggression, while the left lobes keep those raw emotions in check, probably by inhibiting the right lobe.

If the amygdala often acts as an emergency trigger, the left prefrontal lobe appears to be part of the brain's “off switch” for disturbing emotion: the amygdala proposes, the prefrontal lobe disposes.

This circuitry explains why emotion is so crucial to effective thought, both in making wise decisions and in simply allowing us to think clearly.

But circuits from the limbic brain to the prefrontal lobes mean that the signals of strong emotion—anxiety, anger, and the like—can create neural static, sabotaging the ability of the prefrontal lobe to maintain working memory.

The emotional brain, quite separate from those cortical areas tapped by IQ tests, controls rage and compassion alike.

Consider, too, the role of emotions in even the most "rational" decision-making.

impaired in patients with damage to the prefrontal-amygdala circuit.19 Their decision-making is terribly flawed—and yet they show no deterioration at all in

IQ or any cognitive ability.

As the meeting point between thought and emotion, the prefrontal-amygdala circuit is a crucial doorway to the repository for the likes and dislikes we acquire over the course of a lifetime.

A stimulus, be it a favorite pet or a detested acquaintance, no longer triggers either attraction or aversion; these patients have "forgotten" all such emotional lessons because they no longer have access to where they are stored in the amygdala.

(How should you invest your retirement savings? Whom should you marry?), the emotional learning that life has given us (such as the memory of a disastrous investment or a painful breakup) sends signals that streamline the decision by eliminating some options and highlighting others at the outset. In this way, Dr. Damasio argues, the emotional brain is as involved in reasoning as is the thinking brain.

The emotions, then, matter for rationality. In the dance of feeling and thought the emotional faculty guides our moment-to-moment decisions, working hand-in-hand with the rational mind, enabling—or disabling—thought itself.

Likewise, the thinking brain plays an executive role in our emotions—except in those moments when emotions surge out of control a...

Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence.

reason and feeling on its head: it is not that we want to do away with emotion and put reason in its place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent balance of the two.

emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.

But childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference.5

Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits—some might call it character—that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.

Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept—who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings—are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.

people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.