Daniel Goleman on Focus: The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment

I'm very pleased to be here and thank you for that introduction tonight this evening I'd like to call your attention to attention and let me begin with a story it's about a classic experiment in social psychology it was done many years ago at the Princeton Theological Seminary with divinity students each student was told that they're going to give a practice sermon they'd receive a topic to prepare and then they go to another building and give the sermon to be evaluated half of the students were given the parable of the Good Samaritan as their topic the

man who stopped to help the stranger in need by the side of the road the other half were given random Bible topics as each divinity student went over to the other building to give their sermon they passed a man who was bent over and moaning in pain the interesting question is did they stop to help the more interesting question is did it matter if they're pondering the parable of the Good Samaritan what do you think didn't matter make no difference at all what mattered was how much time pressure people felt they're under and this is

more or less the story of our lives there's a spectrum that runs from noticing the other person to tuning into the other person to empathizing and understanding what's going on with them and then if they're in need and there's something we can do compassion and maybe helping them but if we never notice in the first place we never go down that road and this is the problem with attention today it's under siege I think the moment I knew we're in trouble was a while back before I started writing the book focus I was on my

way to a meeting I was driving I live out in the country in New England I was late but I was wanting people there to know I was coming so as I was driving I was texting them on my way that's rather horrible because it turns out as I read not very long after that that texting while driving is the same as drinking while driving it's really bad in fact in my state it's outlawed now another thing I've noticed is when I was writing the book I'd be kind of on a riff really in flow

writing well then I'd have to look something up so I go to Google Scholar I love Google Scholar because it gives you access to the academic database so I opened my web browser and my web browser presents me with the news of the day and I'm a news junkie so all of a sudden I start reading news stories and before I know it I've been lot you know fifteen twenty minutes has gone by before I realized that oh I was supposed to be looking that up and today we're all in the same boat and that

the tools that we use our computer our phone and so on are also devised to interrupt us to seduce us to draw our attention from this to that and usually under that is trying to sell us something a pop-up ad or whatever but attention is besieged in a way that has never been true before when I was going around to publishers and telling him I wanted to write about attention one publishers said to me that's wonderful we'd love to have that book but could you keep it short so what happened to us in in 2007

Time magazine a major American publication had a small article it said there's a new word in the English language the word is pizzle it's a combination of puzzled and pissed-off and it refers to the moment when you're with someone who takes out their blackberry and starts talking to someone else and ignoring you in 2007 that was unusual but the word pizzle has died with the blackberry because now that's the new social norm you go out to a dinner very romantic restaurant you see a couple together and they're both looking at their phones instead of into

each other's eyes something has happened to us in 1977 Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon wrote a very prescient he said information consumes attention hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention I think we've entered a time when we're in danger of intentional impoverishment and the the signs of it are more than you know a couple watching they're looking at the phone instead of it into each other's eyes you the other day I saw a mom holding a little toddler and the toddler's trying to get her attention and she's busy texting he's just not

available and you know of course dad's same story I was on a vacation island last summer Martha's Vineyard off the coast of New England and I was taking a taxi from the ferry to my house and I happened to share it with seven sorority sisters college students who were going for a weekend together and we got in the it was a shared taxi a big van and we got in the taxi and within a minute or two every one of the sorority sisters was staring into a screened iphone/ipad but they weren't talking to each other

and I think this is a real long the ingredients of rapport are three the first is full mutual attention from that full attention comes a second ingredient it's a nonverbal synchrony if you look at two people who are really in rapport really connecting if you were to make a video of that and watch it in silence the two bodies look as though they're choreographed this is something that's managed by a category of brain cell called oscillators oscillators govern how we respond to someone else how we respond to physical objects oscillators are very important for the

survival of the human species consider this at the moment of a first kiss they determine the velocity at which two skulls come together and if they get it wrong it would be the end of the species I'm sure the third ingredient after the full attention and the nonverbal synchrony is that it feels good it's a rather pleasant joyous state to connect with someone that well these are the moments in our lives that are the richest that that really matter however recently there was an article in the Harvard Business Review called the human moment it said

if you want to have real connection with someone and if they come into your office or remember this turn away from your screen ignore your phone and on every other device stop your daydream or whatever's on your mind and pay full attention to the person in front of you I find it said that we have to have an article in a Harvard Business Review to tell us something like that but it has come to this because attention is a rarer and rarer commodity but it's a very precious commodity I think the time has come for

us to take an active stand in our lives and fight back against this subtle onslaught I know a couple for example who when they come home have a pact that they'll put their phones in a drawer they won't look at them for the evening there's a new way of getting together I don't know if this has happened here in the UK but in the States for example when people get together for dinner everybody takes their phone out puts it in the middle of the table and the first person that reaches for their phone before the

bill comes has to pay the bill now there's not just one kind of tension attention there's several varieties the most obvious is selective attention when we focus on one thing and ignore others there are two main kinds of distractors two general classes one is sensory distractors so if you're looking at me you're probably not noticing this whiteboard here right that's relatively easy the tough one is the second category it's emotional distractors our emotional distractors are extremely powerful they're thoughts about that conversation that didn't go so well the Tiff's I had with my partner this morning

the mostly relationship concerns things that have upset us so the more focused we are the better we do at anything as a rather obvious but for example a test of concentration among athletes predicts how well they'll do the next season that's rather straightforward and the less our mind wanders or students mind modern rule reading a text the better we comprehend the text however it turns out on average while we're reading a book our mind wanders about twenty to forty percent of the time I think it depends on the book that particular study was done with

Pride and Prejudice if it had been done say with I don't know fifty shades of gray or blink or whatever it might have been different but the the point is that the more disrupted attention is particularly for young people the harder it is for them to grasp to build the cumulative mental models that amount to mastery and in any subject there are basically three modes of attention I want to call your attention to and here's a schematic so this is generally the relationship between performance say this is high this is low and this is the

the horizontal line is brain activity particularly levels of stress hormones like cortisol adrenaline and the relationship is very telling it goes like this it's an upside-down U and the highest performance is when attention is absolutely a hundred percent maybe a hundred and ten percent it's been called flow flow is discovered for those of you who don't know about it by researchers who asked people in in many different domains of expertise basketball players ballerinas neurosurgeons tell us about a time you outdid yourself you were absolutely at your best even you were surprised and no matter what

the domain was people were describing the same phenomena djegal state and one of the characteristics of the state is that attention is utterly absorbed there was a neurosurgeon who said I had to do a surgery an operation that I didn't really know if I could it was so difficult but I did it superbly I was really surprised myself at the end of the surgery I looked around and I saw some rubble in the corner of the operating theatre I said what happened they said while you were operating the roof you didn't over there and you

didn't notice it's that kind of attention it's unbreakable it's also a state where your skills are called upon at the utmost and whatever the demand is you can meet it you're very flexible very adaptable and very tellingly it's a state that feels good it's it's like rapport rapport is mutual flow interpersonal flow so that's when focus is a hundred percent when you have too much to do too little time too little support when you feel overwhelmed you're down here and the stress hormones at their highest you're in a state which was called recently in the

scientific journal action of the journal Science in an article was called the neurobiology of frazzle I don't know if you're familiar with frazzle I've been there many times it's constant stress and here the problem is you can't stop thinking about what's upsetting you what's stressing you you're not focusing here you're not focusing on the task at hand you're focusing on what's upsetting you and that's the power of emotions emotions take over attention they guide attention and if they're too strong then you'll never get up here over here performance is low because people are under motivated

disengage this is a huge problem of disengagement in the workplace people feel in fact there was a survey this is really interesting was done at Harvard 2,500 people are given an iPhone app and the app rings them at random times during the day and they answer two questions what are you doing now and what are you thinking about now and the discrepancy of course is a lot as a measure of mind wandering turns out 50 percent of the time on average our minds are wandering the one activity that had the highest focus no surprise was

making love but who fills out that at a time like that I still haven't been able to figure that out the the lowest three were commuting sitting at a computer and work that's this so if you're not engaged in what you're doing your cortisol levels are too low so I've been talking about focusing as though it were the only valuable kind of attention but actually mind wandering which is the enemy of focusing the term they use in brain sciences they are anti-correlated if your mind is wandering by definition you're not focusing and vice versa mind

wandering is absolutely essential for creative insight the creative process demands that first of all you gather information you focus on the problem you really concentrate and then you let go the annals of science art and mathematics are full of people who came up with incredible solutions when they're just daydreaming in the shower getting on a bus walking your dog and that's because during mind-wandering we're able to make connections between remote elements in a new way that has value that's the definition of a creative act of course if you're going to execute if you're going to

put the idea to use then you have to go back into focus but mind-wandering is extremely extremely valuable there's another level that which attention operates this has to do with leadership but I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus to be really effective the first is an inner focus let me tell you about a case that's actually from the annals of Neurology there was a corporate lawyer who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumor it was discovered early operated successfully after the surgery though he it was very puzzling picture because he was absolutely as

smart as he had been before a very high IQ no problem with the tension or memory but he couldn't do his job anymore he couldn't do any job he in fact he ended up out of work his wife left him he lost his home he's living in his brother's spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio Damacio specializes in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now where we make decisions where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain

particularly the amygdala which is our radar for radar for danger it triggers our strong emotions they had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and demacia at first was puzzled he he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but he something was wrong and then he got a clue he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rationale pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks but he didn't know which is best and Damacio says

when we're making a decision any decision when to have the next appointment should I leave my job for another one what strategy should we follow going into the future who should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows I mean those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain it's very ancient in the brain and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words it has very rich connectivity to the Castro intestinal tract

to the gut so we get a gut feeling feels right doesn't feel right Damacio calls them somatic markers it's a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data - they did a study of California entrepreneurs and asked them how do you make your decisions these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and they more or less said the same strategy I'm a voracious gatherer of information I want to see the numbers but if it doesn't feel

right I won't go ahead with the deal they're tuning into the gut feelings I know someone I grew up in a farm region of California the Central Valley and my high school had a rival High School in the next town and I met him someone who went to that other high school he almost he was not a good student he almost failed it didn't graduate came close to not graduating high school he went to a two-year college at community college that we call them found his way into film which he loved and got into a

film school in film school his student project caught the eye of a director who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that that the director arranged for him to direct his own film someone else's script he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one we will back you and he however hated the way the studio edited the film he felt he was a creative

artist and they had butchered his art he said I'm gonna do the film on my own I'm gonna finance it myself this was everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake you shouldn't do this but he went ahead then he ran out of money had to go to 11 banks before he could get a loan he finished managed to finish the film you may have seen the film it's called Star Wars so George Lucas made a decision on the basis of his gut it didn't feel right to let the

studio mangle his next gnome he read was his integrity and this inner sense is ethical it's an ethical writer you know it answers the question is what I'm about to do in keeping with my sense of meaning values and ethics that's not a question that we answer first in words we answer first and what feels right and doesn't feel right then we put it into words and every leader today needs a strong ethical rudder so I'd say an inner awareness inner focus is essential then there's other focus which is being able to read people being

able to tune into the person there are three kinds of empathy and this is empathy I'm talking about the first is cognitive cognitive empathy means I understand how you think about things your mental models how you see the world what that means is I'm able to communicate with you in terms you really understand you really resonate with managers leaders who are able to talk to other people with good cognitive empathy are able to get better than expected performance out of people because they know how to mobilize them they know what matters then there's emotional empathy

emotional empathy is an immediate felt sense of what's going on in the other person and this is absolutely essential to if you only have cognitive empathy and you don't have emotional empathy you'll be you'll miss the mark the Third Kind of empathy is very important too it's empathic concern not only do I know how you think and how you feel but if there's something I something you need and I can help you with I'm predisposed to help the leaders who have the most loyalty who people love working for have all three kinds of empathy there's

an article in the Harvard Business Review called leadership run amok leadership run amok is about people who may have cognitive empathy but lack the other two these are leaders who are very good at hitting the target for example but don't care about what happens to the people that they manage they have no feeling for them and so they demoralize people our people are ready to leave if Abell the third kind of focus is outer focus this is very important for example in formulating strategy you need to understand the ecosystem within which your organization operates you

need to be able to sense what's going to work what we'll need to do in the future and so on and for that you need a kind of systems view big-picture thinking the sad story here is actually the blackberry there are two kinds of basically two kinds of strategic thinking one is exploitation the other is exploration in exploitation you take a product or a brand that's worked very very well and you fine-tune it you tweak it you keep making it better because it keeps working for you that's what blackberry did the danger is if you

don't also explore exploration means you see you look widely you see what's happening where things are going you do R&D you try to come up with the next new thing and they failed they failed to see for example Samsung they failed to see what the competition was doing if you so if you don't have an inner focus and an other focus and an outer focus the danger is being rudderless clueless or blindsided attention is a mental muscle it's it's like going to the gym if you go to the gym and you lift weights every time

you do a repetition you strengthen the muscle that you're working a tension can be strengthened in the same way in fact I think I'll show you how if you're interested it just take two minutes all you have to do is sit straight up close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath don't try to control your breath just watch your breath to observe it try to sense it coming in and out maybe your nostrils and watch every breath the full in-breath the full out-breath start over again with the next breath and just start again

with the next breath be fully aware of the sensation and if you find that your mind is somewhere else bring it back again and gently restart now you can open your eyes but did anybody notice their mind wandering did anybody bring it back that's the rep actually the exercise is not keeping your mind focus the exercise is when it wanders bringing it back that's what strengthens the connectivity in the attentional circuitry this is a study that was done at Emory University and this is a basic muscle to mind what's interesting to me is that we

don't exercise it typically we depend on externals to grab our attention in fact our economy in a sense is built on the grabbing of attention habituation is what the brain does when it's this sees the same old thing day after day after day save walking the same way to work or whatever it is you don't see it after a while the brain economizes on attention orienting on the other hand is opening up it's whenever the brain encounter is something new novel and surprising it excites the brain and think about it every season there's a new

fashion well what is a new fashion it's actually a minor variation on a basic product every year there's a new car well what's a new car it's just enough difference to excite the orienting response so it's the basis of our economy it's a very radical move to cultivate the ability to manage your own mind so that you can orient at will but that's exactly what's possible with the tension training and I become a big advocate of it one of the reason is the research Richard Davidson who's a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin has expertise

in the brain and emotion and he's found in his research that when were agitated when we're upset and angry and anxious there's a lot of activity in the right prefrontal area just behind the floor also in the amygdala of the brains trigger point for the fight flight freeze response when we're on the other hand in a really positive state I feel great enthusiastic what a wonderful day there's a lot of activity on the left side and no activity on the right each of us has a renter ratio at rest of right-to-left activity that predicts our

mood range day to day he finds there's a bell curve for this like for IQ most of us are in the middle we have bad days we have good days if you're very far to the right you may be clinically depressed a clinically anxious if you're very far to the left you're very resilient you bounce right back from setbacks so Davidson paired up with a fella named Jon kabat-zinn who has made mindfulness as he calls it very popular for example in the in the medical sector as a way to manage chronic conditions and also in

the states of leasing business recently a lot of businesses are bringing it in and it's more or less what we just did Davidson and kabat-zinn went to a biotech startup 24/7 you know high pressure environment and they taught people how to do mindfulness which is more or less the exercise of watching the breath but they did it 30 minutes a day for eight weeks what he found was that before that people's brains were tilted to the right they're pretty hassled and stressed after eight weeks 30 minutes a day they were tilting back toward the left

and what's very interesting is people spontaneously started saying hey you know I'm starting to enjoy my work again I remember what I loved about this job in other words the positive mood was really making a difference there's one reason that businesses are bringing it in I myself feel that it's not we adults who our most in need of paying attention to attention in this way I think it's children because childhood has changed childhood has changed as a side effect of this onslaught of the digital world into our personal universe I was talking to an 8th

grade teacher who was complaining about how kids now are texting in the States I didn't know about here texting has overcome phone calls among teenagers as a preferred way to connect their kids who will send a hundred texts a day to their friends and that's that's not unusual she said you know for 20 years I've been teaching the same book to my 13 year olds it's Edith Hamilton's mythology and she said in the last two three four years my students are starting to say they're having trouble reading this it's a little too hard and she

attributes it to a loss of ability to comprehend because of this constant distraction I saw a kid maybe nine or ten years old riding a bicycle and texting while he was riding can you believe that luckily it was in the country on a country lane the reason I'm worried about children is that the brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature it starts growing from birth and it actually doesn't finish until the mid 20s during that time the principle of neuroplasticity is extremely important neuroplasticity says that repeated experiences shape the brain

use it or lose it as another way of saying it if a child has an experience for example of empathy and another experience of empathy the circuitry for empathy grows if a child has experience of paying full attention and ignoring distractors which is what we just did the connectivity for that circuitry grows and children need this in order for their brains to develop well when we see a child grow and go through different phases of childhood what we're seeing are the external signs of brain growth and I think it's it's incumbent on us to help

children shape their brains in the best way I was in classroom of seven year olds in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan Spanish Harlem is a very impoverished place the children they're living in housing projects and the projects are pretty dire one child came to class the teacher told me and was a little shaken he just seen somebody shot and the teacher said how many how many of you have know someone who's been shot every hand went up it's that kind of childhood it's a very tough place and I happen to be there to watch something called

breathing buddies every day this classroom all the kids have a session where they go to their little cubbies and they get a favorite stuffed animal and they lie it down on a rug on the floor they put the animal on their belly and they watch it go up with the in breath and down when they breathe out and they count one two three on them one two three on the out-breath and they're doing exactly what we just did exactly what they're strengthening the capacity the mental muscle of attention there's something else there's a twofer here

because the same circuitry also calms stormy emotions the ability to manage emotions is inextricably linked with the ability to pay attention and the teacher said you know one day because of a scheduling problem we had to skip this and the class was chaotic the class was chaotic so it makes a huge difference for these kids I've long been an advocate of what's called social emotional learning social emotional learning takes the emotional intelligence component self-awareness managing your inner life empathy handling relationships and makes it part of the curriculum not in a way that takes away from

academics but in a way that enhances children's ability to handle themselves and their relationships and children's relationships if your paradise need to tell you this but from puberty on before puberty the most important relationships in a child's life are family after puberty forget family it's other kids and the melodramas of childhood they didn't invite me to the party whatever it me capture attention those are emotional upsets the more you can manage those upsets the more attentional capacity you have to hear what the teacher is saying one of the things they do in these classes in

these programs I've seen this in New Haven in a neighborhood very similar to Spanish Harlem there's a a poster on the wall of every classroom it's a stop like a traffic light red light yellow light green light it says when you're upset remember the stop light red light stop calm down and think before you act well stop says you have a choice calm down means you can manage your inner turmoil think before you act is a very valuable lesson because it says you can't determine what emotions you're going to have our emotions come unbidden but

once you have them you can stop and think what you're going to do in fact one definition of maturity is lengthening the gap between impulse and action yellow light think of a range of things you could do and what the consequences might be green light pick the best one and try it out this is a lesson in what's called cognitive control some of you may know about the marshmallow test it's another legendary study in psychology four-year-olds at Stanford University or brought into a room one by one sat down as a small table big juicy marshmallow

put in front of them the experimenter says to this for you you can have the marshmallow now if you want but if you don't eat it till I come back from running an errand you can have to then then she leaves the room this is a predicament that tries the soul of any four-year-old I assure you I've seen video on it some of them will go up and sniff it is over dangerous and then jump back and others go off and sing and dance themselves in a corner to stay distracted about a third of the

kids can't stand it they just grab it and gobble it down on the spot and another third or so wait the endless 1012 minutes until the experimenter comes back and they get the two marshmallows the payoff from the study came 14 years later when they're tracked down as they're about to go to university and the two groups are compared the ones who gobbled the ones who waited and it turns out the ones who waited get along much better with their peers they're still able to delay gratification and pursuit of their goals which is exactly what

that's a test of and this was a surprise on the american university entrance exam the SAT which at that time had 1600 total points the kids who waited had a 210 point advantage over the kids who grabbed this is really interesting because these are all children of parents at stanford university these are high IQ high achieving families so what's going on but the difference seems to be that if you're not able to manage your impulse and mind-wandering is kind of a microcosm of that then you're going to be more upset you're going to be more

emotional you're not going to be able to pay attention to what the teacher is saying so you can't learn as well there was a study done just a few years ago in New Zealand every child in a city in New Zealand became part who was born over course of a year became part of the study from ages four to eight they were rigorously tested on cognitive control many different measures including the marshmallow type test and then when they're in their 30s they tracked down again and it turned out the cognitive control the ability keep your

mind here or bring it back when it wanders was a better predictor of financial success and health in the mid-30s than either IQ or the social economic status of the family and it's a completely independent factor in fact the people who did the study argue that we should be teaching this ability to children in order to level the playing field so this is becoming part of social-emotional learning social emotional learning though also means being smart about your relationships so here's something that happened in New Haven among eleven-year-old boys they're going to play what we call

soccer I think you erroneously call it football here is that right so the these kids were three boys going to play slightly the first kid is kind of pudgy not very athletic and the two kids behind them very good at soccer very athletic and they're making sarcastic remarks to this first kid and one of the other kids says to this first kid the big sneer oh so you think you're going to play soccer and the pudgy kid stops takes a deep breath as though to brace himself for the confrontation I had this could easily lead

to a fight in the school turns around and says yeah I'm gonna try to play soccer I'm not very good at it what I'm good at his art show me anything I can draw her really well but you you're fantastic at soccer someday I'd like to be as good as you are and at that the other kid just melts comes up puts his arm around and says oh you're not so bad let me show you a thing or two that was no accident that is called a put-up that Boyd learned it in his sel it's

a way to handle put-downs which is a very big problem in the teenage early teen years and it's just part of a wider curriculum which pays attention to what matters to kids and attention needs to be part of that curriculum and it's not just schools you know parents of the first coach and all of this when you pick up a baby who's crying and soothe her you're actually teaching her how to soothe herself when you point out to a toddler you know when you did that it made your friend feel bad that's a lesson in

empathy so it's you know these the lessons in attention and emotional intelligence start very very early in life but I think we've got to get better at it one reason is the kids are being exposed more and more to influences that aren't so great I don't know if you know anyone any youngster who likes video games and spends hours that then maybe it doesn't happen here in London but it's a big problem worldwide and the data on video games is rather mixed for one thing they actually do enhance some aspects of attention if you're a

kid who likes to play fighting games you know battle games and you have to be constantly on the lookout for the enemy who might pop up and kill you it's very good for enhancing vigilance you could be a very good air traffic controller for example however it also means that if a kid happens to bump you in the hallway your first thought is that he has a grudge against you you get a bias toward hostile attribution so the video games that we have now are rather mixed but there's a new generation coming along which is

using findings from cognitive science there's one called tenacity that I had my four grandchildren play ages 7 to 13 at the time in tenacity you have an iPad every time you breathe out you tap the screen on the fifth out-breath you tap it twice if you do that you get a visual reward you know flowers blooming in the desert as you do it more and more it gets harder and harder so basically what it's doing is training attention but in a way that keeps the attention of kids the same way that all the other video

games do there are there are other things that we could be using you know the media generally and I say this is a reformed journalist the media gives us a very toxic view of the world most of the news we get is about disaster death threats horrible things happening to people it's news for the amygdala the amend oh is a very primitive part of the brain that wants to know what are the dangers however if we were to take on any given day all of the acts of kindness performed around the globe you know a

mom feeding her kid is an act of kindness and we would put it on one scale and then were to take all the atrocious acts and put them on the loser scale the acts of kindness would far outweigh those of meanness but we don't get that sense of the world looking through a media lens but you we can use the media better one example I like is Sesame Street if you have ever if you have a toddler I've had a toddler you may have watched Sesame Street Sesame Street I found when I visited Sesame Workshop

is actually a very sophisticated operation the day I went there the script writers were meeting with two cognitive scientists they're actually meeting about cognitive control because Sesame Street segments turn out to be lessons based in science wrapped in entertainment one of the things that segments that aired this season is the cookie connoisseur Club I know if you're familiar with Cookie Monster Cookie Monster is one of the stars of Sesame Street and he loves to gobble cookies but Alan who runs a store on Sesame Street decided to start a cookie connoisseur Club very much like a

wine connoisseur club and the cookie connoisseur Club you take a cookie and you study it to see if they're imperfections then you sniff it for aroma and then you take a nibble to taste it Cookie Monster of course was dying to get into the club so Alan gives him a cookie and he instantly gobbles it down he can't restrain himself so Alan tells him you know in this club we're going to try all kinds of cookies so if you don't gobble it down I can you into the club and you're going to be able to

eat many many different kinds of cookie that does it for cookie so that's a lesson this is a show that is loved by two to four year olds and two to four year olds learn largely by modeling so what's happening with cookie is that people that the kids are learning a lesson in cognitive control and I think the more of that the better so let me finish with by telling you about a smart use of positive emotion of being able to manage our own internal world of that inner focus there is a remarkable man named

matthieu ricard he's written some books on happiness he's his friend she has a doctorate in cell biology from Pasteur Institute his mentor there actually won a Nobel Prize for the research they're doing but after graduate school he made a startling decision he decided he'd give up science and go to the Himalayas become a monk and meditate for the rest of his life he's been called I think by his publishers publicists the happiest man in the world because he's been studied by scientists and on this right-to-left ratio he's very far to the left there's a scientist

named Paul Ekman who's the world's expert on the facial expression of emotion Paul is the keenest observer of the face as a revealer of what you're feeling is a very dangerous man I once was walking down the street with Paul on the way to a meeting that I was conducting and Paul was telling me about a system for training people to get good at this that he had just developed and as he's telling it we're getting to the meeting hall and I thought this is really interesting but I hope he wraps it up I've got

to think about what I'm gonna do in the meeting at that moment he says to me and if someone had studied the system they'd know you're getting a little angry with me right now this is why pathes so dangerous Paul was interested in emotional contagion he wanted to know what would the effect be someone like Mathieu who was very very upbeat on someone who was quite the opposite so Paul did a quiet phone survey of faculty at the University of where he teaches asking who is the most abrasive difficult confrontational member of our faculty oddly

enough everyone agreed who that was so he calls Professor X aces in the interests of science would you take part in a scientific experiment and the professor's delighted said sure I'd be happy to as the day drew near and error he started making demands which became increasingly outrageous and so they had to dump him and go with the second most difficult professor and the experiment was they're both they're having the Mathieu and the professor have their physiology measured and they're going to have a debate the debate is on the premise that the professor should do

with Mathieu did the professor had a very influential secure well-paid tenured position but the premise of the debate was that he would give it up and become a monk and go to Hermitage for the rest of his life at the beginning of this debate that physiology showed he was really agitated at the thought of that Mathieu was totally calm so as the discussion starts Mathieu stays absolutely calm and the professor gets calmer and calmer and calmer by the end of 15 minutes he's having such a good time he doesn't want to stop the discussion so

our emotions are contagious for better or for worse particularly when we pay full attention to each other I once was waiting for a bus on a very hot humid day in New York City in August it's the kind of day I don't know about London but in New York we have a rather invisible balloon around us we're feeling a little prickly it says don't talk to me don't touch me and my balloon intact and the bus pulls up get on with my balloon and the bus driver did something quite surprising he actually spoke to me

he said how is they Bend I was shocked but I sat down taking most of my bubble with me then I realized this bus drivers carrying on a conversation with everyone on the bus you're looking for suits I you know there's a great sale over here on the right in this department store and did you hear about the Monnet exhibit on the Left that the means wonderful and the Cineplex on were coming to here I know the movie and cinema for got the best reviews but the one in cinema 2 shot the other night fantastic

you should on and on like that and then people would get off the bus and he'd say to them I hope the rest of your day is really wonderful that man was an urban Saint he transformed everyone on the bus he was sending ripples of good feeling through a city that sorely needed it and I think the bottom line is you know you don't have to go to the Himalayas for decades we all can do that in our lives if we pay attention thank you very much so I'm happy to I'm happy to answer any

questions you might have their mics here and there's standing might some tools in the galleries so just raise your hand if you have a question first question over here you mentioned the low cultures in America where there are murders every day Steven Pinker writes very well about some of these cultures and explains that people will be killed over a simple slight a disrespect or something and it's ingrained in the culture it's innate the thing that I can see there's a there seems to be an insidious political correctness in the world today where we're not allowed

to say that a culture is a rubbish culture and in doing that we don't address the problems with these people so every day they continue to have the low expectations the murders the the social Melia that creates and continues to create what you in America called the broken window syndrome and I wondered what your view was on the inability for people to address these problems honestly and openly and even going on to the fact that a lot of our condition is genetically inherited the brain is no different to any other organ in the body that

whole groups of people get a particular kind of genetics sure well I think there's a very young after that it's it's not being addressed at all and we're losing out over that yes well I know of some data which speaks directly to that I think first of all we have to be very careful about stereotypes because in any given neighborhood there's a range of variation who happens to live there there may happen to be some very talented young people who live in a neighborhood which is otherwise rife with problems so for one thing we should

allow for individual differences but generally it's a worldwide problem what to do with children who grow up in dire poverty because from one thing the brain is very fragile so if you're not well nourished in childhood the brain doesn't grow as well and worldwide children who grew up in poverty can have undernourished brains which makes them susceptible to all kinds of behavioral problems particularly when it comes to prefrontal development as I mentioned that the prefrontal area is the one that manages emotions so if you can't handle your rage for instance many people who end up

in murderers row who have killed someone have a damage to the prefrontal areas it's been found so we need to face this as you suggest starkly and see what the problems are and what the possible interventions might be because I would never write off an entire group of children I would say instead these are developing brains let's help them develop as well as they could and in fact I mentioned that the New Zealand study suggested that we have active interventions particularly an early childhood there's a famous study done in the it's called the Perry PE

rry preschool study where children hadn't written children from a neighborhood like this at a very enriched program and they did much much better in life than other kids from the same neighborhood and the question of IQ and class is very important to understand in cultures worldwide where there's a privileged caste or class and an underprivileged caste or class there was always a wide gap in IQ scores between the privileged and the underprivileged and it's taken to be genetic however there's something called the Flynn effect Flynn is a researcher at the University of Otago in New

Zealand and he's shown with vast datasets that every three four five years when IQ tests are revised they have to make questions harder they have to make questions harder because kids become smarter every generation than previous generations in other words it's not fixed the other thing he's found is that when children a group from a caste which is our class which is underprivileged migrates to a country were the bias about that caste class doesn't exist their children do as well as other children so it's not genetic it's largely situational so you're absolutely right we have

to look squarely at those situations and see what we can do to help where is the mic next question hello there thank you for your talk very much enjoyed it my question relates back to the the situation of the marshmallows and you said if you give one child one yes before you all to have one one and if one eats one later then he'll have two and you said when they got to their 30s you know the high achievers were the ones who waited right how much of that is linked to addiction you mean wanting

the two marshmallows right away you could get addicted to marshmallows I think no but is that youth yes yeah exactly the inability to control impulse makes one susceptible to alcoholism addiction Shopaholic gambling addiction and so on because you you want the hit and you you don't restrain yourself and see that there are other ways to go yeah by the way don't try that at home with your child the marshmallow test I know someone who tried it with his four-year-old daughter and he peeked to see what she did he put the marshmallow and left the room

she took the marshmallow she took out the middle of the marshmallow and ate it and then put it back she's probably CEO of a company now I died I have good news good news and bad news if the brain becomes anatomically mature in the mid-20s but doesn't mean it's too late to change habit however habits instantiated in the brain in childhood are very strong so if you end up say addicted or overly anxious or whatever it may be it's still possible to change but you need to make an added effort and the reason is that

you have to practice the new healthy better behavior over and over because you've practiced the bad way 10,000 times you know you've done it over and over in the circuitry is so strong but here cross your arms this is what a habit feels like now cross them the other way with the other arm on top that's what it feels like to change a habit it's a little weird at first little that's strange but if you make the effort and keep making the effort at every naturally occurring opportunity what happens is the neural connectivity for the

new pathway gets stronger and stronger until at some point you pass a developmental landmark a neural landmark where you do the new habit you perform the new habit effortlessly without thinking about it becomes automatic and what that means is that the connectivity for the new habit has now become stronger than the old one it's the brains now the brains default choice but takes work takes more work my question is about the three focuses that you mentioned the inner the other and the answer I won I'm wondering whether they exist in isolation or whether they exist

in a hierarchy and if so is there a method of moving through them well I think they each can be improved I don't think there's a hierarchy because for example in research on leaders we found that some leaders can be very good at any two or one of them and bad any of the others right in other words every combination is possible you can be really emotionally intelligent manage yourself well manage other people well but be absolutely blind to systems and to the larger context in which your organization is operating or you can be very

good at managing yourself and very bad at reading people there are actually a lot of in the workplace there is a whole class of people who are outstanding individual contributors often very good at systems and work very hard computer programmers for example who have zero empathy I was talking to someone here in Europe who was with the company and he said we have a guy who is absolutely brilliant at systems and we can't put him in front of a client because when we do he just starts talking non-stop he never stops to you know meet

the client to find out what's on their mind to understand the problem from their point of view so here's someone who's very good at inner and managing himself and its systems but not people is you mean is attention handled differently within different or value differently absolutely sure oh yeah I mean culture that the culture makes an enormous difference particularly for example in valuing attention attention training most of the attention training methods we use now come from Eastern cultures because because Eastern cultures like Bhutan for example many people in Bhutan and meditators may be to some

extent almost all of them all of the citizens it's part of the culture it's part of the background and so the methodologies they have were quite sophisticated they've been developed over millennia and people like Richard Davidson who I mentioned who do research in this area are using expert advisors from those cultures to help him understand what is what the potential is for us to train attention because in the West we're rather stunted in our view of how to train attention so I think when it comes to to a mental faculty culture makes an enormous difference

the same thing just true by the way of emotions every every culture values and expresses emotions differently everyone universally has the same wiring for emotion our our emotions are contagious yes therefore should we spend more or less time with our angry colleagues should we be the American bus driver or the French monk should we save the world or save ourselves hahahahaha well the French monk is actually good at saving everyone that's his mission but apart from that I think that it's important to understand the dynamic of sending and receiving emotions so there are several factors

that determine in any given interaction who sins and who receives there are studies done for example where two strangers come into a lab they fill out a questionnaire mood questionnaire or how do you feel right now then they sit facing each other in silence for two minutes then they fill out the same genera turns out the person in that diet who's most emotionally expressive transmits his or her emotional state to the other person in two silent minutes so expressivity is very important on the other hand power matters in any human group it's natural to pay

most attention to and put most importance on but the most powerful person in that group says and does so emotions tend to spread from the person who has power outward what this means for example these are experiments done on Keynes if the leader of a team is in a very bad mood people on the team catch the mood and performance goes down if the leader of the team is in a very good mood a positive mood people catch that and performance goes up and this is true for business decisions for creativity for physical coordination like

putting up a tent so that's a second factor is the power relationship the third factor has to do with Mathieu Picard and that is how stable are you if you are going to go and be with your angry colleague are you stable enough in a positive state that like him you can bring or the bus driver you can bring him into that state are you gonna end up angry yourself so those are at least three factors that might determine the answer fascinated by the advocacy of social emotional learning yes and it would appear that there

are many Western parents today who have glommed onto the same focus in prescribing ritalin for many of their kids can you take a minute and talk a little bit about you've described an organic approach to improving focus and I look forward to reading more about those but what are the impact of the over prescription of Ritalin what are the effect in this long-term effects right so ritalin which of course is given to children who have so-called ADHD attentional deficit hyperactivity disorder you know 50 years ago they used to say well he's just a little boy

he'll outgrow it but now it's a become a diagnostic category and there's some kids who have genuine problems paying attention they're not being helped by digital media as they are today they would be very helped by these lessons in cognitive control which are very new and are just now being studied so they're people like Davidson are studying the ways in which we can use attentional training think about it why has this culture had as its default buying a drug and giving it to our children for something which is a skill deficit it's a skill deficit

tension is a skill I think the reason is there are drug companies who are making a lot of money selling us those drugs and convincing us that this is the better alternative this is my personal opinion when in fact what we have not done is basic research on the attentional mechanisms involved in ADHD and what kind of training would help children get better at it and I think within the next five years we're going to see a set of very direct interventions that are non-pharmaceutical in those conditions I just wanted to ask your opinion is

to what extent do you think our emotional reactions are learned or innate well our emotions are innate I think and our particular emotional reactions are largely learned I have to recommend my wife's book here it's called mind whispering her name's Tara Bennett gomen she's a psychotherapist because she talks about the way in which emotional patterns of reactivity are learned in childhood and how you could use mindfulness cognitive therapy a number of interventions to change the habits that are self-defeating the name of the book is mind whispering and her name is Tara Bennett goleman I found

it very useful actually find her even more useful actually there's data on that if you're a pessimist can you learn to be an optimist and there's research done by a fella named Martin Seligman at University of Pennsylvania who developed a field called positive psychology he developed the field because psychology for 80 years only studied pathology so there was a problem we hadn't noticed that there was a positive spectrum of emotion and experience but any rate Seligman took kids who were prone to depression turned out that they tended to be pessimists and to see if they

had something that didn't work out or a setback in life they'd say it's because of me and I'll always be like that and he taught them to think differently well it was the circumstance circumstances can change and I can do something to change them it's a more optimistic outlook and he found that actually after about a year their thinking patterns had changed but it's what I said as with any such behavior we have to keep at it and keep at it at every naturally occurring opportunity and catch ourselves when we go back to the you

know the old pattern so yes optimism can be learned I actually know the the gentleman who invented cognitive therapy cognitive therapy looks at our thinking distorted thinking patterns and helps us see more realistically and it's very effective for depression his name is Aaron Beck he's 93 now he had a terrible accident that put him in a wheelchair and happened to speak to him after that and he was very upbeat he's supposed one of the most optimistic people I know then he lost sight in one eye and I was talking to me said well you know

my right eye works perfectly fine I can still run and then he went blind in his right eye and I said you know I can still listen to books on tape in other words he had the capacity to see what was right instead of what's wrong which is what you're talking about yes hi I just had a question about the performance graph that you have there yeah you mentioned two extremes you have the motivated performance and and then you have the frazzle and yes what can you do if you're one of those types of people

what can I do how can you improve it well we can do with this type of person and with this type of person yeah well let me ask you in this hypothetical question are we this type of person are we managing this type of person or a friend of this who are we are we the person a friend of this type of person today talking I have a friend here that all the days so what the person needs who is under aroused who's disengaged is involvement to get more motivated more passionate more engaged and there's

something there's a literature now on something called good work good work combines three things it combines what we're really good at our excellence with what we're really passionate about what engages us and what we value with our ethics if you align those three things you're naturally going to go up from here to there in fact you'll you'll get into flow much more easily so one question to ask our friend is what would be good work for you and what could you do to make it a larger proportion of the time in your day or your

week or your month or over the course of the next five years of your career so that's a kind of individual strategy for that if you're here if you're frazzle in frazzle what you need is calm so which is very related to cognitive control but there are many ways to calm down however if you can't well there are there two strategies if you're say frazzle because you have a boss that asks you to do too much in too little time and give too little support you might get your boss's CV and send it out to

a headhunter but that's not an immediate solution so instead you might manage your own world better by finding something that works for you that gets you physiologically relaxed it might be meditation it might be yoga might be deep muscle it might be working out at the gym everyone is different do it every day and do it before you go to work or whatever is frazzling you because what happens is that over time your body set point for stress changes and you'll be able to manage better or to be in a more relaxed state in in

the circumstance two general strategies yes I've got two quick questions the first one might be a silly question so I apologize if I've missed this but do you see focus as an extension of emotional intelligence or is it cognitive or is it is it both right so what I think is that attention was embedded within emotional intelligence because the brains circuits for emotions for empathy and for attention intermingle I just never thought about it I didn't realize I had to write a whole new book about it and tonight okay the second question is I've got

a two-year-old son oh when he's four I fully intend to do the marshmallow just wandering between now and then are there things that I could be doing for him that will help him more be more likely to wait you're probably doing them already just being a good enough parent is terrific yeah but pay attention to you know your your child's feelings needs that's very important I wasn't entirely surprised to hear this from my friend a little while ago who works in a psychiatric resident hospital and the difference between the emotions of the sexes is absolutely

enormous if a woman comes in for a session the psychotherapist will say how's it going how are you and I will come exactly how it's going how they feel when a man comes in very little is said so the psychotherapist will say on the sofa over there are a collection of soft toys pick why not hahahahaha so the man will go and pick up the Panda uh-huh and the psychotherapist will say well how is mr. panda today and then it will come the difference of emotions between the sexes however we like to think we are

basically all the same I think we are hugely different so do I thank you well I just wanted to make a response to the gentleman with the two-year-old I have three children and I'm sure that if all three coming out of exactly the same environment probably would react very differently to the marshmallow test so that goes back to my question is it learned or innate and I think often that some people just have a natural emotional intelligence yes I didn't answer question the answer is it's both learned and innate in that each of us is

born with a particular range of set points in the brain chemicals that manage emotion that's our temperament and as you know if you have more than one child kids differ from day one on the other hand epigenetics tells us that it's not the genes you have it's which genes turn on and off that will make the lasting difference and the behavior in a child is very malleable so if a child is very impulsive that child can learn cognitive control if a child is too constricted that child could learn to loosen up there's data on children

for example who are what are called behaviorally inhibited this is work of Jerome Kagan at Harvard he finds that about 15% of children are anxious of new stimuli new playground new friend new food and when they're very young these are the kids who at school-age are identified as shy and it had been thought that this was just genetic but what they he realized wouldn't he followed a group of these kids was that some of them by school-age weren't shy and he looked at the parenting may God and he noted he found that the difference was

this if your parents identify you as she's shy and protect you those are the children who don't change if parents say to a child well you may feel a little timid about it but go ahead and try it anyway that child learns I'll feel little scared at first but if I go ahead I'm gonna have a good time and those are the children who don't end up shy so it's it's a malleable mix of both yeah and I think we've reached the end of our time Daniel I think you've them held our attention brilliantly peace

will you join me in thanking him for a really fascinating stimulating [Applause]