(Editor’s note: Daniel Goleman is now conducting a great series of audio interviews including one with Richard Davidson on Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills. We are honored to bring you this guest post by Daniel Goleman, thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine.) 

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Resources to help students build emotional intelligence

By Daniel Goleman

The scene: a first-grade classroom in a Manhattan school. Not just any classroom—this one has lots of Special Ed students, who are very hyperactive. So the room is a whirlpool of frenzied activity. The teacher tells the kids that they’re going to listen to a CD. The kids quiet down a bit.

Then they get pretty still as the CD starts, and a man’s voice asks the kids to lie down on their backs, arms at their sides, and get a “breathing buddy,” like a stuffed animal, who will sit on their stomachs and help them be aware of their breathing. The voice takes the children through a series of breathing and body awareness exercises, and the kids manage to calm down and stay focused through the entire six minutes, which ends with them wiggling their toes.

“You’ve just learned how to make your body feel calm and relaxed,” says the voice. “And you can do this again any time you want.”

The voice on the CD is mine, though I’m reading the words of Linda Lantieri, who has pioneered public school programs in social and emotional learning that have been adopted worldwide.

Her newest program adds an important tool to the emotional intelligence kit: mindfulness, a moment-by-moment awareness of one’s internal state and external environment. In a new book, Building Emotional Intelligence, which comes with the CD, Lantieri uses mindfulness training to enhance concentration and attention among kids, and to help them learn to better calm themselves. Building Emotional Intelligence comes with instructions that explain how teachers and parents can adapt Latieri’s exercises to kids at different age levels (five to seven, eight to 11, or 12 and up) and provides detailed explanations of each exercise.

Lantieri’s project exemplifies the ways we can build on scientific insights to help children master the skills of emotional intelligence. As Richard Davidson, founder of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, explained to me in Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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