Develop Emotional Intelligence

This article is written based on the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller that redefines what it means to be smart. The book title is “Emotional Intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman. Let me write down page 17 to 22, add in my own reflection and hope you can buy the original book to get the most of it. The paragraph begins with a subtitle “the seat of all passion”.
In humans the amygdala (from the Greek word for “almond”) is an almond-shaped cluster of interconnected structures perched above the brainstem, near the bottom ot the limbic ring. The hippocampus and the amygdala were two key parts that give rise to the cortex and the neocortex. To this day these limbic structures do much or most of the brain’s learning and remembering; the amygdala is the specialist for emotional matters.

One young man whose amygdala had been surgically removed became completely uninterested in people, preferring to sit in isolation with no human contact. While he was perfectly capable of conversation, he no longer recognized closed friends, relatives, or even his mother, and remained impassive in the face of their anguish at his indifference. Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings. The amygdala acts as a storehouse of emotional memory, and thus; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of personal meanings.

More than affection is tied to the amygdala; all passion depends on it. Animals that have their amygdala removed, lack fear and rage, lose the urge to compete or cooperate, and no longer have any sense of their place in their kind’s social order; emotion is absent. Tears, an emotional signal unique to humans. It triggered by amygdala and a nearby structure. Without amygdala, there are no tears of sorrow to soothe.

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, was the first to discover the key role of the amygdala in the emotional brain. His findings on the circuitry of the emotional brain overthrow a long-standing notion about the limbic system, putting the amygdala at the center of the action and placing other limbic structures in very different roles. LeDoux’s research explains how the amygdala can take control over what we do even as the thinking brain, the neocortex, is still coming to a decision.

In the brain structure, a visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional centers. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centers have fully understood what is happening.

Hippocampus, which has long been considered the key structure of the limbic system, is more involved in registering and making sense of perceptual patterns than with emotional reactions. The hippocampus’s main input is providing a memory of context, vital for emotional meaning; it is the hippocampus that recognizes the differing significance of, say, a bear in the zoo versus one in your backyard. “The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don’t really like her”.