"A view of human-nature that ignores the power of emotion is sadly shortsighted."
The phrase "emotional intelligence" is so commonly used it is hard to believe it was only popularized two decades ago.
In Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman (born on March 7, 1946) gives us the biological and psychological implications of our cognitive circuitry and expands the model for what it means to be intelligent.
In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. These two fundamentally different ways of knowing interact to construct our mental life.
One is the rational mind, the mode of comprehension we are typically conscious of: more prominent in awareness, thoughtful, able to ponder and reflect. But alongside that there is another system of knowing, the impulsive, powerful, if sometimes illogical emotional mind.
Goleman has spent a career writing about practical applications of neurological and psychological scientific discovery. His work sought to harness the meaning of mindfulness, empathy, kindness, and even "destructive emotions" like anger and fear.
Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, establishes his reoccurring premise: balancing and discerning insights from our rational and emotional systems is the key to enhancing our knowledge and awareness. Especially our empathy towards others, what the Thai call kreng jai.
Goleman continues:
People's emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expressions and the like.
Not only do we need to process our emotions, but we also need to communicate them (a task often thwarted by their complexity).
Our ability to create language, wrote novelist Marilynne Robinson, is one of humankind's most outstanding achievements. (Of course, what we cannot fit between the bounds of words we try to put into art, suggested sculptor Barbara Hepworth).
One thing I appreciate about Emotional Intelligence is that Goleman never sentimentalizes the emotional element and steers far from suggesting any superficial "X" factor. Like Goleman, economist and author E.F. Schumacher devoted his life to finding the connectedness between humans. But the two men differed on their resolutions. For Goleman, this connectedness was carried in empathy and understanding, while Schumacher wrote about a more abstract and almost mystic "x" factor. Their works make excellent companions.
Emotions, like our rational minds, are a factor of brain circuitry. Our brains, these tireless gadgets, figure out most of the nuances of emotional and rational responses for our conscious selves. We only need to listen and interpret.
The connections between the amygdala […] and the neocortex are the hub of the battles or cooperative treaties struck between head and heart, thought and feeling. This circuitry explains why emotion is so crucial to effective thought, both in making wise decisions and in simply allowing us to think clearly.
This dance between the hippocampus and the amygdala ("the former remembers the dry facts; the latter retains the emotional flavor that goes with those facts") is but one of many complicated processes that our body undergoes to ascertain intelligence.
And yet, in Emotional Intelligence, Goleman argues that we often ignore the output, training, testing, and improving intelligence solely on intellectual aptitude. Our unfeasible focus on this sole source of intelligence delivers us a "sadly short-sighted" understanding of human nature.
"What's the greatest thing you've ever said?" asked the boy. "Help," said the horse. Goleman's passion in Emotional Intelligence and in his later writings is to guide us to understand how to recognize and use emotional intelligence in everyday life. I'd like to recommend a few reads that abound with emotional intelligence and subsequent compassion for others. The most surprising is the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant—military leader, President, heavy drinker, and, as one discovers in this book, a man with astute understanding and care for others, even his foes.
Additionally, one finds similar intelligence in poems of Wilfred Owen, one of the first poets to capture the humanity of war rather than its glory, in Andy Warhol's art as a mirror to the world, and certainly in the eye-opening memoirs of nurse Christie Watson.
And, of course, Maya Angelou. A person whose heart and soul and shining gifts to others were so firmly rooted in her deep empathy. That Angelou happened to be an extremely talented singer, dancer, poet, and leader is one of the 20th century's greatest blessings. Read more from her in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Letter to My Daughter, and my favorite Mom & Me & Mom.