Daniel Goleman requires no introduction. Personally, of all his books I have read, the one I found most stimulating was Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue With the Dalai Lama, a superb overview of what emotions are and how we can put them to good use. He is now conducting a great series of audio interviews including one with George Lucas on Educating Hearts and Minds: Rethinking Education.

We are honored to bring you a guest post by Daniel Goleman, thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine, a UC-Berkeley-based quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism. Enjoy!

- Alvaro

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The Power of Mindsight

How can we free ourselves from prisons of the past?

– By Daniel Goleman

When you were young, which of these did you feel more often?

a) No matter what I do, my parents love me;

b) I can’t seem to please my parents, no matter what I do;

c) My parents don’t really notice me.

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I was sent these links to a free online crossword puzzle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excellent computer-based brain fitness programs available, puzzles can still be good mental exercise … they are just not a complete workout for your whole brain.

Word games like crossword puzzles and SCRABBLE® exercise your lexical recall (memory for words that name things), attention, memory, and pattern recognition. They can help maintain your vocabulary and avoid the frustrating tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon that all of us experience from time to time. Sudoko is not a mathematics game in that you don’t actually manipulate the numbers as mathematical entities, but it is a pattern recognition game using symbols (numbers). A very legitimate reason to play casual games is that they can be social and fun – which is good for reducing stress.

The drawbacks to puzzles and games is that they are hard to calibrate to ensure increasing challenge, and they generally only exercise a limited number of brain functions.

So by all means, do puzzles if you enjoy them! But be sure to push yourself to keep finding harder ones that fall just short of frustrating you. Also, just as you cross train your voluntary muscles, be sure to cross train your mental muscles by balancing your workout with other types of mental work (motor coordination, auditory, working memory, planning, etc.). The computerized programs make it easier for you in the sense that they are individually calibrated for you to employ novelty, variety, challenge, and practice to exercise your brain more thoroughly in each session.

Further reading on language production, comprehension, and goofs:

• Language Production and Perception
• Wernicke’s Area: an area of the brain where the temporal and parietal lobes meet that is used in understanding and comprehending spoken language
• Broca’s Area: an area in the frontal lobe of the brain that is involved in language processing, speech production and comprehension
• The Language Production Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics