In 1981 while I was a
sophomore in high school and as an aftereffect of some road trips with my
family, I became a fan of the 70’s rock group ABBA. In 2010, ABBA’s music experienced a revival through
the musical “Mama Mia.” The musical
showcased some of their most popular songs in a story of young love, feminine
mid-life crisis and reunited love. After
enjoying the movie with my wife, we bought “The Best of Abba” CD, which I
promptly started listening to in my car.
I heartily began to enjoy singing along in the relative privacy of my
car as wary passers-by rolled their eyes and laughed at my disco-driving
moves. But something was out of
order. As one song would end, my
internal IPod would start to play the next song of the previously-released
album from the late 70’s. This was due
to the many hours of previous programming in my brain. Some thirty years later, without conscious
thought, I was amazed that I knew what song should be next. The order of songs had become hardwired in my
brain. Such is the case with the brain’s
limbic system and how it affects much more than music memory.
Recent advances in
brain mapping have produced some remarkable discoveries that support the notion
that Emotional Intelligence is not a red-headed stepchild of neuroscience, but
a full-blooded sibling. The
scientifically observed interplay of base and sophisticated communication
within the brain can help to explain why we have strong and irrational
reactions like the one I had with the appliance salesman in the opening
story. As we will come to learn, these
reactions are, in fact, irrational, originating from a part of the brain that
is not rational, but more instinctual.
The way data enters the brain and how the data is processed is a matter
of stimulus travelling from base parts of the brain (the hippocampus and the
amygdala at the bottom-center of the brain) to the frontal lobe of the brain
where the reasoning centers reside. The signals that travel along these
neuronic pathways are constructed early in the life of the individual. They are, in turn, well-travelled through the
lifetime of the individual. These
neuronic pathways become the proverbial “path of least resistance” and the
first travelled down, regardless of the manner in which the data enters the
brain.
Subsequently, along the
way the data can be intercepted or the reaction can be trained. This is, perhaps, one of the most exciting
and promising notions of Emotional Intelligence; it is trainable. Emotional Intelligence can be increased. A person’s regular intelligence quotient (IQ)
is predetermined and constant. It is not
remedial. It is not improvable. Emotional Intelligence can be! To learn more or to get
an Emotional Intelligence Assessment, click here.
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