![Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman](/cover_340306.jpg "Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman")
or more hours of meditation training) were subjected to negative sounds (for example, a woman screaming), they showed lesser activation in the part of the emotional brain called the amygdala compared to novice meditators.14 Furthermore, the more hours of meditation training the expert had, the lower the activation in the amygdala. This is fascinating because the amygdala has a privileged position in the brain—it is our brain’s sentinel, constantly scanning everything we see for threats to our survival.
The amygdala is a hair trigger, which would rather be safe than sorry. When your amygdala detects what looks like a threat to your survival, such as a saber-toothed tiger charging at you or your boss slighting you, it puts you in a fight-flight-freeze mode and impairs your rational thinking. I find it fascinating that, simply with attention training, you can become good at regulating a part of the brain as primitive and important as the amygdala.
Another set of studies comes from the UCLA lab of Matthew Lieberman.15 There is a simple technique for self-regulation called “affect labeling,” which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, “I feel anger”), it somehow helps you manage that emotion. Lieberman suggested the neural mechanisms behind how that process works. The evidence suggests that labeling increases the activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), commonly associated with being the brain’s “brake pedal,” which in turn increases the activation of part of the executive center of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which then down-regulates the amygdala.
Another related study by David Creswell and Matthew Lieberman showed that for people strong in mindfulness, the neural process just described works even better and an additional part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) gets recruited as well. It suggests that mindfulness can help your brain utilize more of its circuitry, thereby making it more effective at managing emotions.16
Train at the Level of Physiology
Once we develop strong, stable, and perceptive attention, what do we do with it? We focus it on our bodies, of course. This again seems a little counterintuitive. What have our bodies got to do with developing emotional intelligence?
There are two very good reasons to work with our bodies: vividness and resolution.
Every emotion has a correlate in the body. Dr. Laura Delizonna, a researcher turned happiness strategist, very nicely defines emotion as “a basic physiological state characterized by identifiable autonomic or bodily changes.”17 Every emotional experience is not just a psychological experience; it is also a physiological experience.
We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.
More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions. High-resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch an emotion the moment it is arising, you can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes, and you can watch it the moment it ceases. This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions, the better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion, we can become so skillful at managing them, it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, dodges bullets after he becomes able to perceive the moments the bullets are fired and see their trajectory in slow motion. Well, maybe we’re not that cool, but you get the point. Unlike Neo, we’re accomplishing our feat not by slowing down time, but by vastly upgrading our ability to perceive the experience of emotion.
The way to develop high-resolution perception of emotion is to apply mindfulness to the body. Using anger as the example, you may be able to train yourself to observe your mind all the time and then to catch anger as it arises in the mind. However, in our experience, it is far easier and more effective to do it in the body. For example, if your bodily correlate to anger is tightness in your chest, shallow breath, and tightness in your forehead, then when you’re in an awkward social situation, the moment your chest tightens, your breath shallows, and your forehead tenses up, you know you are at the moment of arising anger. That knowledge gives you the ability to respond in ways of your own choosing (such as leaving the room before you do something you know you will regret, or choosing to allow the anger to bloom if that’s the right response for the situation).
Essentially, because emotion has such a strong physiological component, we cannot develop emotional intelligence unless we operate at the level of physiology. That is why we direct our mindfulness there.
Last but not least, a useful reason to develop a high-resolution perception of the body is to strengthen our intuition. A lot of our intuition comes from our body, and learning to listen to it can be very fruitful. Here is an illustrative example from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink:
Imagine that I were to ask you to play a very simple gambling game. In front of you are four decks of cards—two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don’t know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. . . . You can win only by taking cards from the blue decks . . . The question is how long will it take you to figure this out?
A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we’ve turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what’s going on. We don’t know why we prefer the blue decks, but we’re pretty sure, at that point, that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured the game out and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a polygraph—a lie detector machine—that measured the activity of the sweat glands that all of us have below the skin in the palms of our hands. Most sweat glands respond to temperature, but those in our palms open up in response to stress—which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks.18
There may be a neurological explanation for why intuition is experienced in the body. Matthew Lieberman’s review of research showed “evidence suggesting that the basal ganglia are the neuroanatomical bases of both implicit learning and intuition.” The story behind basal ganglia is, once again, best told by our friend Daniel Goleman:
The basal ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules. . . . Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings, it has a lot of connectivity to the emotional centers of the brain and to the gut. It tells us this is right or this is wrong as a gut feeling.19
That may be why intuition is experienced in the body and the gut, but it cannot be easily verbalized.
From Mindfulness to Emotional Intelligence
Our approach to cultivating emotional intelligence begins with mindfulness. We use mindfulness to train a quality of attention that is strong both in clarity and stability. We then direct this power-charged attention to the physiological aspects of emotion so we can perceive emotion with high vividness and
