I started watching this 1-hour lecture with low expectations, but was blown away by Dan’s info-packed, beautifully-articulated talk on the importance of focus and empathy and the psychology and science behind them.
I generally avoid the nonfiction bestseller lists these days, but I just downloaded samples of Emotional Intelligence and Focus. My Kindle queue hates me…
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” – Herbert Simon
My notes:
- two groups of people were asked to give speeches; one group on the Good Samaritan parable; on their way to the lecture hall, people in each group “accidentally” bump into a stranger that needs their help; it didn’t matter whether the good samaritan parable was their speech topic (and thus on their minds) or another unrelated, control topic; what mattered was
how much time pressure they were under (boy can I relate to this) - your intuition, your gut instinct is what one scientist calls “somatic markers”
- there are 3 types of empathy:
- cognitive empathy – knowing what another person knows
- emotional empathy – immediately feeling what another person feels; reading and processing their emotions
- empathic concern – “I know how you think and how you feel, and I’m pre-disposed to help” (Goleman believes this is a defining quality of leaders)
- what matters in meditation is not focus, it’s
bringing your mind back when it wanders ; the “bringing it back” strengthens connectivity in your attention circuitry - before puberty, parents are primary in a kid’s life; after, it’s all about friends and peers
- First-Person Shooter games strengthen a kid’s vigilance (ability to detect threats, process stimuli quickly) but also their hostile attribution bias (if another kid bumps into them, they will think it’s on purpose)
- a study in the UK showed attention control (how focused you can be on the task in front of you) was more correlated with career success than family background or education level
- in that famous study of whether kids could resist eating one marshmellow to be rewarded for their patience with two marshmellows, there was a 200 point difference in SAT scores when tracked over time; the crazy part? the kids all attended Bing Nursery School at Stanford, so I presume most were children of Stanford parents or faculty and admin — which means they had access to, on average, plenty of academic resources and parental attention
- emotions are contagious and spread by:
- expressivity of person
- power and hierarchy
stability of emotions (which is why a monk can calm an angry person)
- Goleman asks, why is it that a culture defaults to giving a pill to solve what is essentially a skill deficit? (attention, for example, is a skill that can be taught and practiced and improved)
- behavioral inhibition, aka being “shy”; researchers thought it was genetic, but found a strong tie to parenting style: there are parents who publicly say things like “oh, she’s shy” and inhibit their kid from taking risks, and then they wonder why their kids don’t like public speaking and aren’t so outgoing; the parents that tell their child to “go ahead and try it anyway” raise more outgoing, more extroverted children