The voice asks them not to say the name of what they hear out loud, but just to themselves. But as they listen to the sounds, they don’t just lie there quietly, like other kids. These hyperactive kids listen with their whole body: when there’s the cry of a bird, they move their arms like a bird. But through it all they manage to calm down and stay focused through the entire six minutes.

The voice on the CD is mine, though the words are those of Linda Lantieri, an old friend and colleague. Linda has pioneered programs in social and emotional learning in the New York City public schools that have been adopted worldwide. Her newest program adds mindfulness for kids to the emotional intelligence tool kit, in one version to enhance focusing and attention, in another to help kids learn to calm themselves better. Linda’s book and CD Cultivating Emotional Intelligence has instructions adapted to kids’ ages – one for five to seven, another eight to eleven, then 12 and up. And she explains how teachers or parents can best introduce these to kids.

Linda’s CD exemplifies the ways we can take advantage of neuroplasticity to help children master the abilities that are crucial for emotional intelligence. As Richard Davidson, founder of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin explained in a conversation we had, the kind of training Linda offers kids strengthens their neural circuitry for self-awareness, self-mastery, and empathy (to hear Davidson’s explanation, listen to the CD Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills).

It was gratifying to hear the reactions of Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn to Linda’s program; Jon has pioneered using mindfulness in health care, and with his wife Myla wrote a pioneering book on parenting, Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. They visited an elementary school in Manhattan that uses Linda’s program and watched kids go through the exercises. They were pleasantly surprised to see hyperactive kids calm down and listen attentively during the calming and focusing instructions.

In Richard Davidson’s view, this kind of instruction takes advantage of a natural neural window of opportunity during childhood. The neural circuitry that allows us to pay attention, calm ourselves, and attune to others’ feelings all takes shape in the first two decades of life. If we leave that shaping to chance, kids can grow up with a range of deficiencies in these key life skills that can trouble them throughout life, in their relationships and at work. But if we offer them a systematic education in these abilities, they can take these skills with them through life.

Perhaps most important for the mission of schools, learning, when kids learn to pay attention and calm down, they learn better. In some of the Manhattan schools teachers play the CDs for the kids right before tests, to help them get in the best brain state for learning and remembering. Linda has created a great assistant for teachers, a way to help kids be better students – not just learning better, but behaving better, too.

Parents and teachers tell kids countless times to “calm down” or “pay attention.” But the natural course of a child’s development means that the brain’s circuitry for calming and focusing is a work in progress – those neural systems are still growing. They will be shaped by the experiences kids have, so the lessons Linda offers are invaluable. We can help by giving children systematic lessons that will strengthen those budding capacities. That’s what Linda has done in her state-of-the-art curriculum – and what any family of classroom can offer kids now.

First, the bad news.  A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of will power, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others.  Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes will power.  In a typical experiment on this effect, people who first had to circle every ‘e’ in a long passage gave up sooner when they then had to watch a video of a fixed, boring, scene. The same loss of persistence has been found when people resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all suggests we have a fixed will power budget, one we should be careful in spending. Some neuroscientists suspect that self-control consumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again, and so the depletion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our will power; like a muscle, over time the more we use it, the more it gradually increases. But doing this takes, of all things, will power.

As the muscle of will grows, the larger our reservoir of self-discipline becomes. So people who are able to stick to a diet or exercise program for a few months, or who complete money-management classes, also reduce their impulse buying, how much junk food they eat and alcohol they drink. They watch less TV and do more housework. And this ability to delay grasping at gratification, much data shows, predicts greater career success.

This round-up of thinking on will power comes courtesy of Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, whose new book Welcome to Your Brain details the evidence about will power.  But, writing in the New York Times, the duo pose a puzzle – while it’s clear that will power has limits, what brain mechanisms let us build it up?

That question brought to mind the conversation I had with Richard Davidson, an old friend and a brilliant neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin (the conversation is available from  www.morethansound.net).  Davidson’s research these days focuses on neuroplasticity: how our experience shapes the brain throughout life. One surprise: though most of us learned that we have a fixed number of brain cells when we are born, and that we lose them steadily until we die, brain science now tells us the brain makes about 10,000 new cells every day, and that they migrate to where they are needed. Once there, each cell makes around 10,000 connections to other brain cells over the successive four months.

One site that helps us build will power, Davidson’s research finds, is located in the left prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center located just behind the forehead. Our plans and goals hatch here, and impulses are executed via this zone. One neural circuit inhibits emotional impulse, and can be strengthened by a range of methods. As Davidson explained to me in our conversation, one kind of training that seems to do this is mindfulness training, a secular form of meditation widely used in settings from businesses to outpatient clinics.

There are ways, it seems, to make it easier to “just say no” when we need to

I was reminded of this again when browsing comments on a journal article that fails to find much of a correlation between teenagers’ level of emotional intelligence and their academic accomplishments (Australian Journal of Psychology, May 2008).  For me, there’s no surprise here. But for those misguided people who think I claim emotional intelligence matters more than IQ for academic achievement, it would be a “Gotcha!” moment.

But I never made that claim – it’s absurd.  My argument is that emotional and social skills give people advantages in realms where such abilities make the most difference, like love and leadership.  EI trumps IQ in “soft” domains, where intellect matters relatively little for success. That said, another such arena where EI matters more than IQ is in performance at work, when comparing people with roughly the same educational backgrounds (like MBAs or accountants) – which is exactly what goes on in human resource departments of companies every day.

As I’ve explained elsewhere on this website:

My belief is that if a longitudinal study were done, IQ would be a much stronger predictor than EI of which jobs or professions people can enter. Because IQ stands as a proxy for the cognitive complexity a person can process, it should predict what technical expertise that person can master. Technical expertise, in turn, represents the major set of threshold competencies that determine whether a person can get and keep a job in a given field. IQ, then, plays a sorting function in determining what jobs people can hold. However, having enough cognitive intelligence to hold a given job does not by itself predict whether one will be a star performer or rise to management or leadership positions in one’s field.

IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will become the strongest leader. In part this is because of the floor effect: everyone at the top echelons of a given profession, or at the top levels of a large organization, has already been sifted for intellect and expertise. At those lofty levels a high IQ becomes a threshold ability, one needed just to get into and stay in the game.

The one place I expect we will be seeing more data showing a relationship between skills in the emotional and social arena and school performance will be in studies of children who have gone through social/emotional learning (SEL) programs. These curricula give students the self-management skills they need to learn better. And so to the extent that advantage boosts learning (as opposed to IQ, which differs from learning), they should do better on academic achievement scores.
A forthcoming study from the University of Illinois finds around a 10 percent boost in achievement test scores among these students. Presumably, the SEL programs would also have meant higher scores on the particular assessment of EI used in the Australian study – and so had they tested such children, there may well have been a positive correlation.

So learning seems to be another domain where EI may matter – whether more than IQ is an empirical question.

The leadership competencies that build on self-mastery include self-confidence, the drive to improve performance, staying calm under pressure, and a positive outlook. All these abilities can be seen at full force, for instance, in workers who are outstanding individual performers. The operative word here is “individual” – and that’s the rub. When it comes to leaders, effectiveness in relationships makes or breaks. Solo stars are often promoted to leadership positions and then flounder for lack of people skills.

When Claudio Fernando-Araoz, head of research for the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International, looked at CEOs who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany and Japan: those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise – but fired for lack of emotional intelligence. They simply could not win over, or sometimes even just get along with, their board of directors, or their direct reports, or others on whom their own success depended.

All this has made intuitive and theoretical sense to me. But I like data. So I’m pleased to see several new studies that confirm how essential social intelligence – as opposed to simple self-mastery – can be for leadership effectiveness. The findings:

• At a transportation company, those leaders strongest in the social intelligence competencies led greater revenue growth, compared to executives with strengths only in the self-mastery competencies.
• The same goes for banking: at a major nationwide bank, high social intelligence (but not self-mastery alone) predicted executive’s yearly performance appraisal, which in turn reflects business success.
• The value of social intelligence even applies to clergy: among Catholic priests,, greater social intelligence predicted more satisfied parishioners.

All these studies were based on the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI), which I helped my colleague Richard Boyatzis design. I’d like to see if other researchers verify this effect using other measures to replicate these findings. Any graduate students out there

In the era of No Child Left Behind, where schools are rated on how well their students score on these tests, that’s a huge advantage for individual students and schools alike. And the gains are biggest in “at risk” kids, the bottom ten percent who are most likely to fail in their education.

That’s what the lead story in Education Week for December 19, 2007, [http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2007/12/19/index.html]
tells us – and what I heard at a recent forum held in New York City by the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning. Roger Weissberg, the outfit’s director, gave a preview of a massive study he’s just completed, based on an analysis of evaluations done on more than 233,000 students across the country. Social/emotional learning (SEL), in short, helps students in every way.

That meta-analysis revealed that students improved on every measure of positive behavior, like classroom discipline, liking school, and attendance – and went down on rates for every anti-social index, from bullying and fights to suspensions and substance abuse. What’s more, there was a drop in numbers of students who were depressed, anxious, and alienated. And all these gains were in as impressive a range as those for academic achievement.

While at the Forum I had the pleasure of once again interviewing George Lucas, whose main philanthropic efforts focus on schools through the George Lucas Educational Foundation. George’s vision for the future of education sees SEL as vital to a world where technology will be so much more pervasive; as computers take over teaching raw knowledge to kids, they will have more time to help students with motivation, cooperation, and other elements of emotional intelligence. George and I (who come from neighboring towns in California’s Central Valley), have explored the ways schooling will morph in the future, and the key role SEL will play in the classroom, in an audio CD.

Teaching students skills like self-awareness, managing distressing emotions and empathy makes them better learners, as Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, explained at the forum. He pointed to data showing that when the brain’s centers for distress are activated, they impair the functioning of the prefrontal areas for memory, attention and learning (a point I made in Chapter 19 of Social Intelligence). Social and emotional learning makes great sense, Davidson argues, because of neuroplasticity – the fact that repeated experiences shape the brain. The more a child practices self-discipline, empathy and cooperation, the stronger the underlying circuits become for these essential life skills.

• Americans spend 2.5 more on health care than do Brits – yet have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, lung disease, and cancer.
• The richest, healthiest Americans are as sick as the poorest Brits.
• Americans work far longer than Brits (and other Europeans), and are more likely to hold two jobs – virtually unheard of in Britain.

In searching for explanations, the focus goes to the fact that Americans seem to value wealth and work over social connections, in the view of a British epidemiology team, led by Sir Michael Marmot at the University College London Medical School. One reason for this, of course, can be seen in the lack of social safety nets Americans face. Compare Britain, which like most European countries, has a far more humane social system: in England, a student might pay about $3,000 a year for a university education (and in other European countries the government pays the whole thing); everyone who retires in Britain gets both a company and a government pension; health care is free. Americans, by contrast, live in fear of losing health care, not having enough money to retire on, or huge education bills.

Even among the well-to-do, contentment remains elusive: No matter how much people earn, their desires grow with their earning power. This insatiable pleasure-seeking has been called by Daniel Kahneman the “hedonic treadmill,” meaning that no matter what you have now, the yearning for more will grow proportionately – keeping you on an endless spending spree. Intriguingly, the country with highest rates of contentment worldwide is Denmark – whose people also have the lowest expectations for material comforts.
Add to America’s cultural malaise the fact that our networks of friends seems to be shrinking. Between 1985 and 2005, the average number of confidantes people reported dropped from three to two. By contrast, British and other European cultures place more importance on social connections than money. In Britain, for instance, every neighborhood has a pub, a place where neighbors go most nights to get together. By contrast, Americans disappear into their homes, doors locked.

This shrinking of personal contact may itself take a health toll. Carnegie Mellon psychologist Sheldon Cohen has found the more personal relationships a person has, the more healthy they are.

One of my most basic assumptions about the relationship between mental effort and brain function has begun to crumble. Here’s why.

My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems.  My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.

My guiding assumptions included the standard premise that the mind-body relationship operates according to orderly, understandable principles.  One such might be called the “dose-response” rule, that the more time put into a given method of training, the greater the result in the targeted biological system.  This is a basic correlate of neuroplasticity, the mechanism through which repeated experience shapes the brain.

For example, a string of research has now established that more experienced meditators recover more quickly from stress-induced physiological arousal than do novices. Nothing remarkable there.  The dose-response rule would predict this is so. Thus brain imaging studies show that the spatial areas of London taxi drivers become enhanced during the first six months they spend driving around that city’s winding streets; likewise, the area for thumb movement in the motor cortex becomes more robust in violinists as they continue to practice over many months.

This relationship has been confirmed in many varieties of mental training. A seminal 2004 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that, compared to novices, highly adept meditators generated far more high-amplitude gamma wave activity  – which reflects finely focused attention – in areas of the prefrontal cortex while meditating.

The seasoned meditators in this study – all Tibetan lamas — had undergone cumulative levels of mental training akin to the amount of lifetime sports practice put in by Olympic athletes: 10,000 to 50,000 hours. Novices tended to increase gamma activity by around 10 to 15 percent in the key brain area, while most experts had increases on the order of 100 percent from baseline. What caught my eye in this data was not this difference between novices and experts (which might be explained in any number of ways, including a self-selection bias), but rather a discrepancy in the data among the group of Olympic-level meditators.

Although the experts’ average boost in gamma was around 100 percent, two lamas were “outliers”: their gamma levels leapt 700 to 800 percent. This might seem to go far beyond an orderly dose-response relationship — these jumps in high-amplitude gamma activity are the highest ever reported in the scientific literature apart from pathological conditions like seizures. Yet the lamas were voluntarily inducing this extraordinarily heightened brain activity for just a few minutes at a time – and by meditating on “pure compassion,” no less.

I have no explanation for this data, but plenty of questions. At the higher reaches of contemplative expertise, do principles apply (as the Dalai Lama has suggested in dialogues with neuroscientists) that we do not yet grasp? If so, what might these be? In truth, I have no idea. But these puzzling data points have pried open my mind a bit as I’ve had to question what had been a rock-solid assumption of my own.

…Or so I thought.  All the above was what I wrote for the annual Edge Question 2008: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?”

A few weeks later I happened to be talking about this answer with Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, and one of the authors of the study with the remarkable meditators.  He pointed out to me that the findings for the two lamas were not statistical outliers, but fit the regression analysis as shown by a scatter plot tucked away among the article’s data tables. These two lamas were the champions among the Olympic-level meditators, having put in the highest number of lifetime retreat hours – about 44,000 and 55,000 hours – and also showing the greatest effect from all that mind training. That’s exactly what the dose-response model predicts.

So now I’ve changed my mind a second time. I not longer see these data points as inexplicable in terms of neuroplasticity. Now I see them as a first scientific report from the upper reaches of neural transformation.  So my change of mind has to do with what might be possible at those upper reaches of human consciousness.

I’m left with a new set of questions.  At the highest reaches of mind training, I wonder, do a novel range of possibilities for self-regulating biological functions emerge? What could be the actual experience of these intense amplifications of neural activity?  And since this remarkable brain activity occurred during the cultivation of compassion, what might the human benefits be of such training?

My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems. My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.

My guiding assumptions included the standard premise that the mind-body relationship operates according to orderly, understandable principles. One such might be called the “dose-response” rule, that the more time put into a given method of training, the greater the result in the targeted biological system. This is a basic correlate of neuroplasticity, the mechanism through which repeated experience shapes the brain.

For example, a string of research has now established that more experienced meditators recover more quickly from stress-induced physiological arousal than do novices. Nothing remarkable there. The dose-response rule would predict this is so. Thus brain imaging studies show that the spatial areas of London taxi drivers become enhanced during the first six months they spend driving around that city’s winding streets; likewise, the area for thumb movement in the motor cortex becomes more robust in violinists as they continue to practice over many months.

This relationship has been confirmed in many varieties of mental training. A seminal 2004 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that, compared to novices, highly adept meditators generated far more high-amplitude gamma wave activity – which reflects finely focused attention – in areas of the prefrontal cortex while meditating.

The seasoned meditators in this study – all Tibetan lamas — had undergone cumulative levels of mental training akin to the amount of lifetime sports practice put in by Olympic athletes: 10,000 to 50,000 hours. Novices tended to increase gamma activity by around 10 to 15 percent in the key brain area, while most experts had increases on the order of 100 percent from baseline. What caught my eye in this data was not this difference between novices and experts (which might be explained in any number of ways, including a self-selection bias), but rather a discrepancy in the data among the group of Olympic-level meditators.

Although the experts’ average boost in gamma was around 100 percent, two lamas were “outliers”: their gamma levels leapt 700 to 800 percent. This goes far beyond an orderly dose-response relationship — these jumps in high-amplitude gamma activity are the highest ever reported in the scientific literature apart from pathological conditions like seizures. Yet the lamas were voluntarily inducing this extraordinarily heightened brain activity for just a few minutes at a time – and by meditating on “pure compassion,” no less.

I have no explanation for this data, but plenty of questions. At the higher reaches of contemplative expertise, do principles apply (as the Dalai Lama has suggested in dialogues with neuroscientists) that we do not yet grasp? If so, what might these be? In truth, I have no idea. But these puzzling data points have pried open my mind a bit as I’ve had to question what had been a rock-solid assumption of my own.