Westward Dhammo! The Future of Buddhism in the West
Fall 1995 Vol. 12 #1
Fall 1995 Vol. 12 #1
Daniel Goleman is familiar to many Americans as the brain and behavioral sciences editor of The New York Times. Goleman has also been practicing Buddhist meditation for over twenty-five years, and many people in the sangha are familiar with his ability to explain the cross-fertilization of science and dharma. His books include The Meditative Mind, an excellent guide through different states of consciousness. He is co-author of Mind-Body Medicine, perhaps the best compendium of knowledge on the subject thus far. Goleman’s new book Emotional Intelligence is out this fall, published by Bantam.
Inquiring Mind: In your new book, Emotional Intelligence, you explain and interpret some of the latest discoveries in brain research, specifically the workings of human emotions. What led you to investigate and write about this subject?
Daniel Goleman: For the past decade or so, as the behavioral science writer for The New York Times, I’ve been covering breakthroughs in human brain research, learning how the emotional centers work and how our emotions unfold and develop. At the same time, as a concerned citizen, I’ve been witnessing a catastrophic breakdown of emotional self-control in our society: beatings in families, abuse, people killing each other. I’ve come to realize that the emerging scientific understanding of emotions offers a fresh way of viewing these social problems and finding potential solutions for them.
IM: According to your book, the latest research suggests that evolution has provided us with an emotional center in the brain that is crucial for our survival. It contains a kind of trip-wiring that allows us to by-pass our cognitive powers and moral intelligence so we can respond instantaneously. The downside is that we can be ruled by this emotional center.
DG: That’s the dilemma. Evolution has designed the human brain so that during the most pressing crises of our lives—the moments when we are faced with real threats—the decision about what to do gets made in the most primitive part of the brain, because that part can act most quickly. This design is a winning survival tool since through most of our evolution, the big question has always been, do I eat it, or does it eat me? That’s a question that you can’t sit around and ponder. You need a response before you even have time to ask the question.
So the emotional centers are where the answer gets made. The design of the brain is such that an emotional center can, in a moment, hijack the rest of the brain. Through most of evolution that design has paid off. The problem is that in civilization we confront dilemmas that require a more reasoned and temperate approach, and yet we find ourselves, time after time, “losing it” to the emotional brain. All too often, a strong dysfunctional emotion like anger or anxiety triggers an outburst. The dust settles and we think, “Oh my God, why did I do that?”
There are several things we can do to gain some modicum of control over such emotions. This is not to say that we can decide which emotion to have at any given moment. Our emotional triggering is not voluntary. However, we do have the power to determine how long those emotions will last, and that is the fulcrum of our self-control.
The first step is to recognize that an emotion is being triggered, instead of being caught in a state in which all you are thinking is, “I hate you, you son of a bitch.” You need to recognize that anger is arising in you: “Oh, I’m angry.” In Buddhist meditation the term for this kind of self-reflection is “mindfulness.”
IM: Even though the Buddha was working with mindfulness 2,500 years ago, on an evolutionary time-scale this ability to reflect on our own behavior is a relatively new skill.
DG: The very capacity for self-reflexive awareness is rather new and still somewhat tentative in human evolution, which is reckoned in millions of years. And that self-reflexive awareness is exactly what it takes to begin to tame the emotional brain. When emotions are aroused, the ability to be self-reflexive is weakened. The irony is that in the moments when we need this particular tool the most, it is the weakest. When we practice meditation, it becomes more powerful and accessible.
Neurological science is now showing us how the circuitry works. The parts of the brain that are activated when you have self-reflexive awareness—when you are being mindful—are also those parts which are involved in channeling and regulating emotional response. They are located largely in the prefrontal cortex. When you become mindful, you activate those higher centers. The more you step into those centers, the easier it is to step out of the reactive emotional centers of the limbic brain. That shift is critical to all impulse control and emotional self-regulation.
IM: Of course, Buddhadharma explained all of this long ago and even mapped out ways for short circuiting the emotional brain. It’s amazing how well the Buddha understood the workings of the mind and even how to fix the wiring.
DG: And it’s amazing how many of these recent scientific findings seem to corroborate the traditional Buddhist understanding. Furthermore, I think you can read the great laws of ancient civilizations, from the Code of Hammurabi to the Edicts of Emperor Ashoka, as early realizations that the animal heritage of the brain is not sufficient for the complexities of the lives that we lead as humans in civilization. What the Buddha saw as a way to tame the mind is, I think, part of the same insight that came elsewhere, in one form or another, as the ancient world began to develop civilization. Now we are coming to that realization again through scientific understanding of how the brain works.
IM: Beyond simple impulse control, what else is involved in emotional intelligence?
DG: I describe five major domains of emotional intelligence. All of them flow from the first domain, which is this self-reflexive consciousness, or mindfulness. That is the basis for the second domain of controlling emotions—managing anger, handling your anxiety, soothing yourself, resisting impulse. It is also the basis for the third domain of emotional intelligence which is the ability to motivate yourself, to persist and stay hopeful in the face of obstacles and setbacks. Self-reflective awareness is also the basis of the fourth domain, empathy. If you don’t know what you are feeling, you are incapable of picking up on what someone else is feeling.
The fifth and last domain of emotional intelligence is the art of relationships, which, in a sense, means managing emotions in other people. It’s the social skill of being able to have an interaction in which people feel good in the end or are glad they were with you. If you don’t have your own emotional life under control, you won’t do well at that.
Again, the keystone, the necessary basis for all domains of emotional intelligence is a mindful awareness.
IM: How is mindfulness a basis for empathy?
DG: Recent research shows that in a moment of empathy a person tunes into the subliminal reflection in her own body of the physiological pattern experienced by the person with whom she is empathizing. A study was done on couples in conversation with each other about some conflict. During these conversations both partners were measured for physiological responses—heart rate and so on—and their faces were video-taped, tracking exactly what they were feeling from second to second. Each person then looked at the tape and reported how he or she was feeling at each moment. After this the researchers monitored each partner watching the tape while trying to experience the conversation from his or her partner’s perspective. The researchers found those who were able to do guess most accurately what their partners were feeling were actually mimicking in their own bodies the precise physiologies of the partners they were watching. Their heart rates jumped when their partners’ did, and so on. Through sensing their own physiological readouts they were able to report what their partners were feeling.
If you are out of touch with your own emotions, if you don’t have that self-reflexive awareness, then literally you can’t empathize. Sociopathic criminals, such as child molesters, rapists, or people who are sadistically violent, commonly don’t have this capacity for empathy. It is a horrible deficiency.
IM: Why don’t you talk about meditation in your book? The word is not even mentioned.
DG: It’s not a book about meditation—it’s about living life. These are insights that are helpful to everybody, whether or not you are a meditator. If there were one effect of this book that I would like to see, it would be that schools would routinely add to their curriculum a track of emotional literacy from kindergarten through high school. It is sorely needed. A national survey of tens of thousands of American kids over a fifteen-year period, from the mid seventies to the late eighties, shows a sharp, steady decline in emotional capacities. Across the board, successive generations of American kids have become more impulsive, more meanspirited, more prone to tantrums, to whining, to anger, to disobedience, to being easily frustrated. They have gone down on forty-two measures. These ratings were done by both parents and teachers, people who really know the kids. This is happening in the wealthy suburbs as well as in the inner city.
I’ve visited schools that teach kids a basic set of emotional skills, the first of which is knowing what you are feeling. Basic self-awareness is the key, the foundation skill. At the beginning of the day these second graders get in a circle and say what they are feeling that morning and explain why they think they are feeling it. These are critical skills that most kids are never taught. Often no one talks to them about what they are feeling. Lacking this basic self-awareness can make a child prey to a whole range of problems.
For instance, if you look at ten-year-old girls, you will find individuals in a certain subset who can’t tell the difference between feelings of anxiety, anger or boredom, and just plain hunger. Those are the girls who have an increased risk of developing eating disorders by the time they are twelve and thirteen. What they lack is insight, a kind of mindful sensibility about what they are actually feeling, what to call it, and what to do about it. The problem is that they begin to treat all of their feelings as hunger, they gain weight and then they go on crazy dieting regimes.
There is a whole range of other problems that kids start to exhibit in adolescence due to a lack of emotional self-awareness or self-control. By beginning at an early age to systematically teach the most rudimentary mindfulness skills, we create a prevention program—lowering rates of crime and violence, teen pregnancy, depression, eating disorders.
In one New Haven school I visited, they have placed a poster in every classroom. It reads, “Whenever you have a problem first remember the red light: stop, calm down, and think about it. Then remember the yellow light: think of a lot of different alternative things you can do and what their consequences are, and then pick the best choice. Then advance to the green light: go ahead, try it out, and evaluate.” That is fantastic moral instruction, a good basis for sila (morality). It should be flashed on every television screen every thirty minutes.
As a result of the New Haven emotional literacy program, disruptive behavior is on the decline after being on the rise there for a long, long time. The principal told me that last year 144 kids were sent to him for fighting. This year it was only ninety-nine.
IM: Are there any studies on how the emotional training effects these kids in later life?
DG: Not yet. However, research is showing that the emotional centers in the brain continue to develop into mid to late adolescence. These centers are the last parts of the brain to fully mature. The consistently repeated experiences in our early emotional life literally shape the circuitry of those parts of the brain. We’ve been leaving this development to chance until now, but society can’t afford to ignore the implications of this research.
Teaching our children the basic skills of self-awareness would be much more efficient than their going into psychotherapy in later life. Psychotherapy is really a remedial tutorial in emotional literacy. Most therapy tries to retrain those same circuits that were shaped by the emotional experiences of childhood. If we learned to go dead to a certain range of feelings, or always responded to frustration by lashing out and yelling, then that pattern became imprinted in our brain as the way to respond. So later in life when something comes up that is symbolically similar—and for the primitive brain, often symbol is reality—we will react according to the early pattern. We will be emotionally hijacked based on our childhood experience. If your spouse does something that frustrates you and you lash out in anger, you do that because that is what you learned to do when you were a child. Instead, you could have learned the skills of emotional intelligence.
IM: Finally, a more personal question. How has your understanding of the science and physiology of the brain affected your own meditation practice?
DG: I think it has given me more patience with my emotional life because it has disabused me of the idea that I shouldn’t have certain emotions. There is a sort of goody-goody school of thought in meditation practice. The Abhidhamma implicitly supports it by saying that there are wholesome states and unwholesome states; if a person is evolved, only wholesome states will arise. There will be no experience of anger, hatred, lust, anxiety, torpor, agitation and so forth. This, of course, is the ideal state exemplified by arhats. It is probably closer to the truth to say that we all experience these states, but a more evolved person will have more control over their intensity, duration and overall effect. Those are really the only options we have when it comes to the emotions. Meditation can help us strengthen the tools that allow us to make the right choices sooner and more powerfully. So my scientific understanding allows me to be more forgiving of myself, on the one hand, and on the other, it inspires me to really use my practice to let go.
∞
From the Fall 1995 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 12, No. 1)
Text © 1995-2020 by Barbara Gates & Wes Nisker
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