The Brain and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Author:Daniel Goleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Nonfiction
Publisher: More Than Sound
Published: 2011-04-14T20:00:00+00:00

The Social Brain

“Mindsight” is the term Dr. Daniel Siegel, director of the MindSight Institute at UCLA, uses for the mind’s ability to see itself. His remarkable work makes a strong case that the brain circuitry we use for self-mastery and to know ourselves is largely identical with that for knowing another person22. In other words, our awareness of another person’s inner reality and of our own, are in a sense both acts of empathy. Siegel, a good friend and scientific trailblazer, is a founder of a new field, interpersonal neurobiology, which has emerged only in recent years as science discovered the social brain.

The social brain includes a multitude of circuitry, all designed to attune to and interact with another person’s brain. The social brain is a relatively new discovery in neuroscience because from its start, brain research studied one brain in one body of one person. Only in the last five to ten years have they started to study two brains in two bodies in two people while they interacted – and it’s opened up a vast panoply of discoveries.

One key discovery was “mirror neurons,” which act something like a neural Wifi to connect with another brain. There are several stories about how they were discovered. The one I like has to do with a lab in Italy where they were mapping the motor cortex in monkeys, the part of the brain that moves the body. They were measuring single neurons, one at a time, and they were watching neurons that only did one thing and never fired when the monkey was doing something else. One day they were watching a cell in the monkey’s brain that only fired when that monkey raised its arm, and they were surprised that the brain cell was firing but the monkey hadn't moved.

Then they realized what was going on: it was a hot day, and a lab assistant had gone out to get a gelato. He was standing in front of that cage and every time he raised his arm for a lick the monkey’s neuron for doing the same thing fired. Now we realize that the human brain is peppered with mirror neurons and they activate in us exactly what we see in the other person: Their emotions, their movements, and even their intentions23.

This discovery may explain why emotions are contagious. We had known about this contagion in psychology for decades because of experiments in which you have two strangers come into a lab, and fill out a mood checklist. Then they sit in silence, looking at each other for two minutes. Afterward, they fill out the same checklist. The person in that pair who’s most expressive emotionally will transmit his or her emotions to the other person in two silent minutes.

But exactly how this could happen was a puzzle. Psychologists wondered what the mechanism for contagion might be. Now we know: it’s done with mirror neurons (and other areas like the insula, which maps sensations throughout the body), via what amounts to a brain-to-brain connection.

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