Daniel Goleman || Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence

for The New York Times for many years. His nineteen ninety five book Emotional Intelligence was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half, with more than five million copies in print worldwide and forty languages, and has been a bestseller in many countries. Apart from his books and Emotional Intelligence, Goldman has written books on topics including self deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social emotional learning, ecoliteracy,

and the ecological Crisis. Daniel, what it honored is to chat with you today. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. So this is a bit surreal for me, and I'll tell you why. Uh, when I was in ninth grade in high school, your book Emotional Intelligence came out and when I just even read the first chapter, I thought to myself, this is what I'm going to do with my life someday. Wow, you know, like like you're that was the book that you know

I wanted. First of all, When I said that's what I would do with my life someday, there was a bunch of things tied up with that. I thought, well, I want to be a science writer. It wasn't just I want to be a psychologist, it was I want to be a public science communicator. I want to do outreach. I want to I just love the style and the

way that you was very captivating. I remember I think in chapter one or something, you talk about the amigdala and h and how it can be you know, we can go go berserk, and I thought, well, and it just made such an impact on me. So I just want to start off saying thank you for influencing me going into this field. I'm so kind of you. I'm glad you met him, all of the all that bath. Yeah, you're a psychologist and a communicator. That's great. Yeah, that's wonderful.

I'm doing what I definitely dreamed of as a kid. So yeah, the note, we're going to talk about your work on mindfulness, maybe a little bit of social learning. I want to also know what eco literacy means. But just real quick about emotional intelligence. Is this still a topic that are you researching these days? Where's your mind at with emotional intelligence these days? You know, I'm doing

several things right now. One is I'm still I'm writing an article for Harvard Business Review on the emotionally intelligent organization because for twenty five years I've been a co director of a consortium of researchers and practitioners around emotional intelligence in organizations, and there's so much data now that shows that this is a big factor in outstanding leaders in high performance teams, and we're making the argument at

the organizational level for the first time. So that's something I'm still thinking about. Recently, I had a really vicious personal attack on me and the concept of emotional intelligence kind of out of the blue right in the New Yorker, which got me thinking about it, and now I'm kind of rethinking emotional intelligence in terms of what's missing and what could be added. Maybe we can get back to that.

I'm also writing a book with a Tibetan lama on meditation, and that's been an interest of mine since, you know, my undergraduate days. So you know, I have many, many streams of interest, and those are many of several of them. Wonderful. Yeah, let's talk a little about what might be missing from the idea of motion intelligence, what sort of the central core things are still very most valuable. I'll start with I can start with some of my own sort of

reading of the of the psychology literature. One thing I noticed was that when your book came out, you couldn't control the headlines. I'm sure, I think you know. There was like a Time article headline was like, emotional intelligence is like fifty thousand times more important than IQ or something like that. Now, when I actually look into the literature, I don't The literature shows I mean, IQ and in

a lot of cases still out predicts emotional intelligence. You do a regression model, you know, but it's certainly important. Have your views kind of changed at all, or you know, what are you thinking in terms of like comparing IQ verse seeking. First of all, I never made the claim that emotional intelligence always outperforms IQ. It's not true, absolutely not true. But people, you know, you don't write the headlines, That's what I said. Yeah, it's like the Time, the

Time magazine cover. Yeah, Time, so editors hype hype ideas. They pushed them as far a little further than you want. I didn't even know that they're going to ask what's your EQUE. That was like the cover of time. I had no idea. I don't even use EQ, I like EI for emotional intelligence. But anyway, when it comes to academics, to how will you do in school, to whether you'll be an outstanding professor, I think IQ is where it's at. I think emotional intelligence counts are very little there, except

in terms of maybe of how you handle yourself. My model of emotional intelligence has two big parts. One is being aware of your feelings, then using that to manage your disruptive emotions and to marshal your better motivations and so on. And then empathy tuning into people around you and using that to have effective relationships. So that's how I see it. So I would say that when it comes to the relationship sector or part of life, I

would suspect that emotional intelligence probably outweighs IQ. I don't know that there are good studies yet that show that. One of the things you have to remember is IQ has been around for more than one hundred years, and there's huge bodies of evidence around IQ. There have been several models proposed of IQ over the decades, and several measures that go with each of those models, and the

same for emotional intelligence. You know, there are many models emotional intelligence, many measures, So I would say the evidence is not yet in on many of the questions you raise. So if you were to do you know, statistical analysis, particularly if you use the first model of emotional intelligence, which was put forward by a friend of mine who's now the president of Yale, Peter Salive. He was a junior professor at Yale at the time and his graduate

student then Jack May or John Mayer formerly. Their model is more like a personality model, was based on intelligence, and if you use their measure solely, then you get one set of findings. If you use a model that I just explained to you the four parts self awareness, of management, empathy, social skill, and you use a measure I co developed your Richard Boyosis, who's a case Western,

you actually get a different picture. And it turns out if you're trying to predict performance in the workplace, our model is much better than the other model. But so what I'm getting at is that it depends on what your outcome measure is as to whether IQ or emotional

intelligence matters more. Thank you. Yeah. This different models point is really interesting because I edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence to the Robert Sternberg and we had a chapter in there on the latest research on emotional intelligence, and one of the biggest controversies in that chapter was this differentiation between emotional intelligence as an ability a set of

ability skills versus personality traits. I was surprised to hear you describe Salvey's model as personality because I always saw that as more ability based, and your model is more personality beast, am I am? I thinking? Am I not thinking about that? I misspoke? I think is explicitly an ability based model. What year was Sternberg writing that chapter? Oh? No,

Stirnberg didn't write chapter. Stenberg and I co edited the entire book the Camber You can tell me, I think, actually yeah, I was co editor me and yeah, yeah, yeah, was the twenty eleven. Twenty eleven I think the person who wrote or one of the co authors was Salve I believe, or Caruso or Meyer one of them, one of those guys. Yeah, mesqique. So that was ten years ago. A lot has happened in the last ten years. So if you were to look at emotional intelligence since twenty eleven,

you'd find that there are many news studies. So when I told you about the data point that my model with boyos predicts performance in the workplace leadership better than the mayor model, that's new finding. It wouldn't be in the book you edited. Cool. I'd love to read that study very much. So, you know, the field is it keeps moving, keeps developing totally. And also a really interesting nerdy question is like what are their right proper boundary

conditions for emotional intelligence? You know you include If one includes too many you know, positive personality traits under that umbrella, then it starts to lose its specificity. Where do you

draw the line? There's no answer. Yeah, our model actually came from the work of our pro bestor at Harvard, David McClelland, who was one of the people who developed the field called competency modeling, which you would not know about unless you're an io psychologist and organization and psychologist, because organizations want to know who are the most outstanding people in a given role in our organization, who's best at sales, who's best at software, what differentiates the stars

the top ten percent performer by whatever metric makes sense for that role from people are only average. That gives you a competence model. And so we based our work on competence models, and we looked at which competencies seem to be nested in which of those four domains. That's how we came so the boundary conditions were defined by that work. We excluded purely cognitive abilities. And people who are not familiar with competence models can easily complain that

it seems to include too much. But if you realize that we see four domains self awareness, of management, empathy, and relationships. That's a lot of domains and there's a lot of competencies that nest within them. And it makes sense from the point of organizational point of view to look at what are lucked together as soft skills as opposed to hard skills. And we're looking at soft skills in a an orderly way, systematic way, and we also

looked at the behavioral level of those skills, something that's observable. Yeah, oh no, absolutely, it's really cool research they're doing. What's always fascinating to me about is this bloody G factor, the general factor of intelligence. All these abilities if you try to measure them, they are all pusively correlated with each other to a certain extent. And not just saying that that there's no demean specificity, because there certainly is,

but there is kind of an overarching G factor. There is that, and Boyance has just did an interesting study about that. He looked at engineers at a global manufacturing firm and he asked them to rate other engineers on who's the most effective as an engineer, and he used the raven as a measure of IQ, and he found that there was basically no correlation to effectiveness as an engineer with IQ as rated by other engineers, and there was a rather high correlations I can't remember now with

emotional intelligence as measured by our model. So that's a little counterintuitive, but I think it's because there's a floor effect for IQ. In any profession, you've got to be pretty smart. I have a granddaughter who's studying engineering at Cornell right now. She's really smart. You've got to be really smart to get an engineering degree IQ wise. However, to be the leader of a team of engineers, you're

really managing people and that doesn't depend on IQ. In fact, you need a minimal amount and you understand what it is they know, so you can put the right person in the right place, for example. But you know it has to do with people skills, not with your IQ. So I would say that IQ get you in the game, but it doesn't determine whether you'll be outstanding in that game.

Oh that's very interesting. Yeah, and it depends what game you're playing, As you already mentioned exactly, if you're going to stay in academics, you're going to need every bit of IQ you can get. Yeah, does that count even in the humanities. And I'm joking, I'm joking. Everybody calm down, everybody calm down. You need your verbal fluency. You need your verbal fluency. That's part of IQ. We can we should break down, you know, verbal versus non verbal reasoning

skills as well. Yeah, okay, uh And and just the only other thing I wanted to bring up on most toldience before we move on was this idea that some people might think that you're if if if you if you if someone who's suffering or someone has emotional operas and you and and one says, oh, that person just needs more emotional intelligence. That might ignore a lot of societal factors and lack of support, and maybe that person's poor, Maybe that person went through a lot of economic or

environmental conditions. So I just want to say that trust that. I would say that that understanding is true, but ignores another factor, which is called cognitive control. Kindive control is an aspect the developmental psychologists are very familiar with. It means that you can you can widen the gap between impulse and reactivity, and the wider the gap, the more mature you can be because you can consider other alternatives.

So the person who, because of trauma and childhood, a disadvantaged childhood, or simply poor impulse control, does the first thing that comes to them, I'm not sure that that excuses what they do. Let's say it's a cock who shoots someone while yelling taser. That happened like a week or two ago. This woman who was a police officer meant to subdue a non cooperative suspect with her taser, grabbed a gun and shot him death on the spot. Yeah, if she had had better cognitive control, she might have

been able to use a less lethal intervention. So I would say that one of the factors, of course is social but there are other factors that have to do with how well you can manage you're a middim. I guess the point there is that some people's might have a more uphill battle and manage their migdala, maybe through

mental illness or maybe through yes, I think so. One of the reasons I'm a big advocate of what's called social emotional learning, which are basically emotional intelligence for school kids from the garden to twelfth grade, is that no matter where you grew up, no matter your zip code of origin, it teaches kids this same ability. And they did a study in New Zealand, very important study where they measured kind of control and kids four to eight

and then track them down in their thirties. They found that childhood kind of control predicted income and health in your thirties better than childhood I care, actually better than the wealth of the family you grew up in. And I went to a school in Spanish Harlem, very poor area of New York where the kids are doing mindfulness, which we should get to, which it turns out enhances

the circuitry for card of control, it seems to. And I was glad to see that because those kids are more calm and clear while they're in school, which means that they're going to learn more, which means that it may help them overcome the disadvantage of growing up in a housing project. In Spanish, Harmon, that's super important work. My friend Josh Aronson runs the Mindful NYU Lab, the Mindful Education Lab. I don't know if I'm wonderful earned that lab, but I hope maybe put you guys in

touch with each other. So how did you become interested in studying mindfulness? And can you tell me a little bit about your work with Richard Davidson. I got into meditation when I was an undergraduate because I was anxious

and it helped me stay calm, calm me down. And then as a graduate student, I got a traveling fellowship to India or I got much more serious about studying meditation because as I met people who were you would say, advanced meditators, yogis and mamas and swamis, I noticed that they seemed to share certain traits or characteristics I found very interesting. They're pretty calm, they're joyful, they seem to be loving. They all seem to be positive human attribute. So,

you know, I went back to Harvard. After the fellowship, I said, you know, I want to do my dissertation on meditation and stress and they said that's the stupidest idea we've ever heard. Really, yeah, this was way too early. In fact, they're kicking themselves now. They may not be alive now actually, But anyway, so another graduate student at the time, Richard Davidson, also wanted to do research on meditation. He was told that that would be a career ending move,

but we went in did anyway. And Ritchie as everybody calls him, and I are very old friends. He now heads a neuroscience lab at University of Wisconsin. And we circled around and looked at the more than six thousand peer review articles on meditation and mindfulness. Mindfulness is one

kind of meditation. There are many kinds, and most research these days is on mindfulness because of another friend of ours from those days in Cambridge, a guy named John cabot Zin, who developed mindfulness based stress reduction when he was at U Mass Medical Center. And that is manualized, which means that people can replicate the methodology that they use to teach it, and it makes it very researchable.

So it's been lots of research on that, and basically the research shows that pretty much from the beginning, people do become more calm as measured by all kinds of things including physiology. They become more focused, their ability to focus, attention improves, working memory seems to improve, as indicated by

better test scores and students. And if you do an aspect of mindfulness, which is called loving kindness practice which enhances warm heartedness, you actually become more generous, more kind as measured by kinds of measures you use in a peer review article. So the benefits seem to show up from the beginning. We did three tranches. One is, we looked at beginning meditators one to one hundred hours lifetime

hours of meditation. We looked at long term practitioners which is one thousand to ten thousand hours lifetime, and then we looked at Olympic level twelve thousand and sixty two thousand hours that those were Tibetan yogis or yogis from Europe were flown over to his lab one by one for brain measures, and at that level he found that their brains are functionally different. Mhm. You see, I have my yoga and my meditation, so you know, you're Yeah,

whatever it's called. I couldn't even remember what I could think called my cushion. That's the word I was looking for in my cushion. No I. Meditation has has helped me many times in my life when I've had when I keep thinking about going on s SR I I keep I keep meditating, and then realize I don't necessarily need to at that moment. You know, they might be

good together. Who knows. Yeah, yeah, for some people it can work, sure, And then there are some studies that seem to show that people can many people can get off med's like for depression or anxiety if they introduce regular meditation practice. But I think it's quite individual, quite individual. Yeah yeah, well, okay, this actually makes me think of some questions. The individual part is there. Do you think there's a certain kind of personality that's attracted to mindfulness

to begin with? Like I know that mindful look, I know mindfluess can change your personality. But do you think, like if you do a pretest, there's like a certain kind of person that finds the whole meditation business more interesting anyway than a different type of personality. You know, that's the kind of question that calls for a graduate student to do the studies this topic. YEA, because it's a wonderful question, and I don't think it's been answered,

at least I haven't seen the answer myself. Would you have a hunch. I do have a hunch. I do because just because I've noticed that that there's a certain like phenotype among mindfulness researchers that but I don't. But the point here is that I don't know if it's because it's an outcome of their longtime meditation, or if or what was there existing beforehand? There's a certain you

need to randomize. You need a randomize control trial. Yeah, where people who are equally interested go are randomly assigned to meditate or this is very important to an active control group, something that the teachers are equally enthusiastic about and positive about. When Davidson did that with MBSR, do you put together HEP health Enhancement program and the teachers of help were as positive that it would help you as were the teachers of mindfulness. And this is interesting.

All subjective outcome measures fell away. There was no difference. It was in the physiological that you found the difference. Wow, that's so interesting? What what? What? What? What is that paper? If I wanted to look it up, not to put you on the spot, I don't know, but it must be on Davidson's home page. Okay, I'm sure I can find publications and maybe co o with Cabins in if they publish the findings. I didn't even know if they did. Yeah,

maybe not. What does the data show about the relationship between neuroplasticity and mindfulness? Seems what I'm familiar with, and there may be much more. Is that the consistent mind training that you get if you practice mindfulness of the breath, for example, where there are four basic moves, you put your mind on your breath, it wanders off, you notice it wandered, and you bring it back to the breath.

I suspect that the payoff is in bringing it back to the breath, and that that strengthens connectivity for neurocircuitry involved in focus and ignoring distraction. Yeah, that would be my hypothesis quite possibly. Yeah, yeah, you know, there's there's all sorts of different meditations that exist, returning of the breath being one of them. I'm really into open monitoring meditation.

I was wondering if what your thoughts are on different forms of meditation are any they're more conducive to creativity in your in your view than others. Where do you see creativity fitting to this picture? Well, you know, the classic model of creativity has three stages. One is curiosity. You know, you absorb as much information on the subjects you can, you struggle to solve the problem, you can't solve it, and you forget about it. That's the second stage.

So it's kind of uh, you know, it's the default mode network damn, which is the part of the brain, the circuitry that comes online when you're not focused on a task for example, And during that mode, I think that people make connections much more effectively and widely than they do when they're potask focused, because when you're task focus, you see mind wandering as a distraction. So it's during that second stage when you would get more creative insight.

And then third is you execute you have to go back to your focused So I think that a meditation that left you wide open would be very good, particularly if thoughts keep coming up but then you drop them. Every once in a while you get a really good one. You'll probably write that one down. That's your creative I like, I really like what you're saying, and I really like that level of nuance. As creativity knows, involve lots of different stages. It's cyclical, you know, you have to go

back and forth between different modes of thought. The mindful state might not be uniformly be the best state for creativity twenty seven, you know, like, would you want to be in the mindful state twenty four to seven? Daniel Goleman. It depends what you mean by mindful? Yeah, fair enough in the controlled return to breath the kind of mental state O FA. So yeah, I told you I'm writing a book with a Tibetan mama. So they have a

different model of mindfulness. So one of the ways they use mindfulness is to just what you said, to notice when your mind wanders and bring it back. That's called mindfulness with support. Then there's mindfulness without support. Where you go and what did you say you do? Open open monitoring,

open monitoring. That might be the second where you let whatever comes up come up, but you don't follow it right, And the mindfulness is to be sure you don't follow it, you don't get sucked into some thought or some sensation

or some perception like come you let it go. The third level in the Tibetan model is way beyond anything that we call mindfulness in the West, because they see any thought or perception that traps you in any way as a distraction, and they use mindfulness to see that that doesn't happen, and in fact their goal is to be in that state twenty four to seven. That's so interesting. Can you give me an example of, like, when I'm trapped in a thought like is it? Is it sort

of like when I'm when it's repetitive or ruminative? Is that the end? Oh? No, it's it's simply when one thought leads to another and another when there's a train of thought that started with that one innocent thought, Oh yeah, I didn't pay my rent, and then I start thinking about the balance in my checkbook, and then I think about the other bills I have, on and on and on. And you're not meditating, you're lost in and you may not notice it, but then if you notice it, think, oh,

I better go back to my brain. That's the moment of mindfulness. I'm reminded of this phrase. Not all minds that wander are lost. Is it isn't it Like creativity sometimes requires going down some alleys and then letting an insight emerge, and then being aware of the insight. I suppose it's no good if you're not aware of all the goodies you know in gold. That's cut me out

of your consciousness. That's not good. But you know, there's another thing going on here which I'd like to call out, which is that the cultural context from which mindfulness is derived didn't care in the least about you being creative or you're getting higher performance. Those are like side benefits. The West, however, seized on those. So we want to be mindful who we could be calm. We want to be mindful, who you can be clear in our thinking. You want to be mindful so we can perform better.

That's a Western point of view. The Eastern point of view had a far different goal in mind, and as it happened, these were side effects of that process. Yeah, yeah, it's so true. I wrote an article for Scientific American on spiritual narcissism, this idea that some people who meditate more than others start to think they're superior to others. The I'm enlightened and you're not effect but that really does miss the point of meditation big time, which is

becoming very aware. There's another urinary or paradox there too. I don't know if you're aware of if you are in an Asian culture like see Tibet. Yeah, someone who actually is enlightened would never say they were enlightened, because humility is part of what'll catch you there. And if you say you know, hey, you know I'm pretty special like a narcissist, would it means you know, you're not really special at all for sure. And well, here's the thing.

The more I meditate, the more I realized just how not special I am. Oh. And not only that, but I realize just how crazy I am in the sense of my consciousness. I mean, I sit there, I you know, just become a witness to my consciousness in such a way that I don't identify with my thoughts that I'm like, wow, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on there. You can think anything, and from you know, in the Asian model, it doesn't matter what you think. It's really the process,

not the content. It's interesting and from western point of you, you know, I don't know if you've noticed this, but people who start to meditate sometimes say oh man, I could never do this. My mind is going nuts. It's just one thought after another, which actually is a good sign because it means you're starting to notice how things are in there. Yeah, I think that's that's quite right. That's quite right. Well, what do you think about these apps,

you know, like Headspace and Calm Waking Up? Do you think there is effective as long term meditation training and retreats that are not apt East Davidson and I made a distinction between going wide with meditation and going deep,

and I think apps allow going wide. It means more people can get the benefits, particularly the beginning level of benefits from meditation than otherwise would Whether an app is as effective as an in person teacher, I suspect not, But there's I don't know of a study that's showsen. I suspect not, because a teacher can answer your questions and help you stay on track, and an app may not be as good as that. I don't know. I've never used it. That the deep, however, doesn't happen with

an app. Means you follow a path to a traditional path to its traditional end, and that takes a lot of practice. As I said twelve thousand and sixty two thousand hours is the group that Davidson looked at. If you do a traditional Tibetan retreat, which is three years, three months, three days, you get credit for ten thousand hours. So sixty two thousand hours is a heck of a lot of practice that'll really get your prefrontal cortex tuned up.

When they did a study with the guy at sixty two thousand hours, they asked him to do a meditation on compassion, and there's certain neuro circuitry that activates is activated instantly about seven or eight hundred times more than it had been, which has actually never been seen before, and voluntarily make a change like that in the brain, so the brains are functionally different. They actually scanned his brain like day one fMRI efor so they actually had

that comparison. Wow, that's a cool study. That's yeah, Well it's interesting you about compassion because one of you know, there's a lot of talented benefits of mindfulness and some of them are not have not borne out, you know, like some people that like sell meditation programs will claim all sorts of things better sex better. You know, it'll make you won't you won't lose your hair. You know,

it's gooddle American marketing, of course, exactly, exactly so. But one of the benefits that I sometimes see talented, which I actually haven't seen good evidence for, is that mindfulness will improve your like emotional intelligence, your social intelligence. And I haven't seen that evidence that that is the case with compassion, yes, but not in terms of social skills. So I was worrying, like, what you think the relationship

is between mindfulness and emotional and social intelligence. Let's back up a minute, because I said in passing the mindfulness is one of many, many varieties of meditation. So I think that you want to see what is the intervention and then what's the outcome measure you're looking for with that intervention. So there may be a meditation or set of meditations which does make you more interpersonal. I ran into a fellow who's a Sufi. Sufi's have their own

set of practice. This guy was so loving. I was just blown away. Whether it's his personality or due to practice, I don't know, but I suspect practice was a large part of it. But they don't do what we think of his mindfulness of the breath. They do other kinds of ritual practice, and it has a different kind of payoff. And I think the fact that he was so loving

probably made him more effective in relationship. Probably we don't know, but all I'm saying is that I think a more sophisticated way of asking the question is does intervention X a certain kind of meditation have outcome why? And I wouldn't expect that any one intervention would improve all four

domains of emotional intelligence. It may be set, but but you know, but you know, one could make the hypothesis that sitting there, you know, isolated meditation, you know in your own thoughts, can actually make you disconnected from from people when when you get out of it, you know, in the sense it makes it more awkward, like talking to people because you've been so focused on your own thoughts for so long. And the one could make me

say that. The counter hypothesis would be that tuning into the full range of your own emotion might help you be more empathic in tuning into the emotions of other people. So one of the findings I remember on empathy, and I don't remember the source, is that if you're tuned out of a range of your own inner experience, you will have trouble picking that up in other people, so

you could make a counter hypothesis just as easily. So since you're an impure the oriented guy, I would say, we have to wait and see until we get Is that a graduate student? Is that? Yeah? Is that a nice way of saying since you're a uber nerd Scott, I think it's because I think it's the way of saying, you want to see what the data says. And just as with emotional intelligence, meditation actually is a very young

field for research, very well there when we agree. When Davidson and I looked at the studies, I think I mentioned there were three peer review studies, maybe two, and they're both anecdotal when we did our dissertations, and now there are more than six thousand in peer review journals, not many of them. Not that good. By the way. It's a new field. It's new, many questions, and there is some data. I mean, I had David Vogo on my podcast. I don't know if you've been following his

research on mindfulness. Va g O, Uh what do you say? You know? No? David? Oh, good, good, He's such a good guy. I really like him. He wrote, you know, a critical review of my It was called mind the High the mind the mindfulness hype, I think was the title, And when I talked to him on his podcast on my podcast, he made clear that there is no data showing that it doesn't prove your like social skills or your even ability to listen to two people. So uh,

just so much. We still need to know and to see what and and separate the hype from the myth. You know, I think if I wanted to improve someone's ability to listen, I would train them in a listening method. Yeah, you know, I mean, yeah, come on, I feel that mindfulness probably is overhyped and the infectations may be too high that they think it this may be the answer to everything, because perhaps it's sold that way. I don't think it is. It might be an answer to some things,

but not everything. Yeah, no, that's a great answer. And also just like I can practice mindfulness without an app just by living my life. For instance, right now, there is this NonStop noise of a of a jackhammer construction that I couldn't control and I am trying so hard to right, aren't I practicing my mindfulness muscles right now? Like doesn't that count? Does it count? There's certainly practicing your behavioral innovation muscles. Okay, control, congratulations, you're doing great.

I mean I'm trying to stay mindful to the conversation despite all its mindful there you mean focused? Focused? Yeah, attentive, Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you've talked to Mishi Jaw. She's an attention researcher. No I recommend her. I just did an interview with her. She is at you roused in Miami, okay, and she looks at the various modalities of attention in terms of mindfulness training. You might find it interesting. Now she's a talk coming out. Oh you're not talking about

pre T Shaw, are you? No? Achin Jaw Mischi jall? I actually I like pre T Shaw as well, who studies difference. I'm not and I'm not even joking. Pre T Shaw fraction eats executive functioning to different components as well. So I thought maybe you were talking about her work. But interesting, But I'll check out this this person you're referring to for sure. What's her what's her new book called? Do you know the name of it? Mind Peak of Mind. It will be out until fall. Very nice, very nice.

So what do you think the future of mindfulness training methods should be? Like what's on the horizon in terms of a new and exciting methods to help people train their mind to be more mindful. I would broaden the question. I would say what mind training methods might be coming down the pike that would be a benefit. Mindfulness is one variety of training. The mind visualization is another traditional one.

So I think that what we have learned at a higher level is that trainings like mindfulness seem to make neuroplasticity more systematic so that we can drive the brain change the brain in desirable ways. And I suspect that with time, people will develop more and more methods, mindfulness being one of many, and maybe mindless being a part of many, to help people develop mental capacity. These just the way you go to a gym and a trainer takes you through, Oh, you want to develop your ABS

or your PEX or something. Do this? Do that? I suspect that mind training will follow those lines and become more specific to the desired outcome. Is that a development that I think is good in a relative way. I think it's good In another way, I think it kind of sucks because it distracts people from the traditional inner goals or spiritual goals of the traditions that mindfulness and

other meditation mind trainings have come from. And I feel that in the future those goals, things like caring more about the greater good than your own self interest, will become more and more important for the survival of the species. So in a way it's good, and in a way it's not enough. Oh that was a very sophisticated reframing of my question and a very sophisticated answer, So thank you,

Thank you for doing that. I think this relates as well to what you mean by and correct me if I'm wrong, But you often you make the distinction between practicing smart versus just practicing ten thousand hours, right, yes, So one of the advantages that people who are in that top category have is that they have a trainer, They have a coach, a teacher who monitors how they're doing and gives them correctives, which helps them practice smart.

And this has comes from a work of Ericson at Florida, who the silly ten thousand hour rule came from his research. He's miffed about that because he's a dose response relationship between training and outcome, and that it varies from skill to skill. So if you're doing memory, for example, it's a matter of hundreds of hours, not ten thousand hours. It's okay, I see you have his book right behind you. Peak, I see you ran your bookshelf right there, yeah, right there. Yeah, yeah,

he's he's he was a friend of mine. You know he passed away recently, right, No, I didn't know that. I'm so sorry to hear. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it was. It was a really big lost fun mastery in any domain. He was real wonderful person. Yeah. Yeah, he was a friend and a sparring partner because I thought he underhead he neglected the role of talent and anyway, he was such always such a delight in in even just discussing these things. Like he didn't have that big

of an ego. Yeah, So how did you get into doing what you're doing? You don't need to put this in the part. I'm just interested. Where did you go to undergrad and all of that? Well? I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University. Oh you're dead, But I did my pH d at Yale with the Robert Sternberg and uh, and show you that happened to edit that book with him. Yeah, we worked on a bunch of other things as well. But uh, but yeah, I remember Solve was there as well. That's you know that he was.

He wasn't head of the of Yale yet, he was still working in the psychology department. And but even when I was in grad school, I thought to myself, I really want to do uh, popular writing. So I started a blog for Psychology Today, which ended up doing really well and and and realized I had I had a knack for popular science writing and it was in my in my bones. So I've been doing a lot more of that now. I write regularly for Scientific American, and

I write books. I'd love to send you my most recent book on transcendence, The Science of transcendence, really the science of transcendence that sunds intriguing. Yeah I should. Can you put my podcast in your show notes? Oh? Yeah, I just started a podcast called First Person Plural, okay, And it's emotional intelligence and beyond. It's all kinds of

things that I'm interested in, Okay. In this new book or podcasts or in this new podcast, do you talk about ecoliteracy and ecological crisis, because I'm so curious to

your thoughts on that. Yes, I just did a podcast on that, because one of the things that troubles me is that at the systems level, in the economics system, we have complete transparency about value of stocks, for example, our companies, we have zero transparency about the environmental impacts of things we buy and use, things that are sold

to us. And my argument is that since there is now a methodology to assess a range of environmental impacts it's called life cycle assessment, that consumers and businesses in B to B should be given a third party evaluation of a product or processes impact on the environment. Is it good for the environment, bad for the environment, or terrible for the environment, so that we could create a market force that would move things in a better direction.

And this is already happening in the investment community. By the way, my next door neighbor is just becoming head of a two billion dollar fund for sustainable investing at a very large financial firm. And there's a whole movement in the investment world to put their money, particularly investors who are interested in long term return, like pension funds and so on, put their money in companies that already

are paying attention to this. So that's already started. But in my writing, I did a book called Ecological Intelligence, and I make argument I just summarized for you, and it's something that I continue to worry about. So I did a podcast in first person plural, talking to someone who is developing a platform where companies can share this data on their impacts, and someone who's doing regenerative farming, which is a way of doing agriculture that doesn't destroy

the soil. And so I'm a little passionate about this. I have grandchildren. Yeah, you know that wasn't in gar Howard Gardner's you know he did, he didn't have ecological intelligence. That's when that's you. You added that one? Was that you Yeah, they wanted that title for the book. I wanted to call it radical transparency. But it doesn't matter. Oh, radical transparency. I think ecological intelligence probably is better from a marketing perspective. That's what my editor thought. But I mean,

my gosh, you look at your whole career. You know that word intelligence is played such a prominent, you know, sort of presence as a thread in all of your stuff. A lot of your stuff what do you think, like, like, how do you even define the word intelligence? It's funny because I'm asking that as the last question. I should have asked that probably is the first question. But you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna use the word intelligence at the end of a lot of these things, what

makes them all intelligence? You know what I mean? Is that a fair question? I don't know. Let me see, Let's see what I come up with. Yeah, So I guess intelligence is a way of referring to a person's capacity or ability two solve problems in a given domain. So in the verbal and spatial and mathematical domain we have IQ. In the personal and interpersonal domain we have emotional intelligence, and why not in the environmental domain ecological intelligence?

And I'm sure there are others. What's the difference between, sorry, what's the difference between emotional and social intelligence? People differ in their opinions on this. Social intelligence. Some say refers to your relationship skills and empathy. Some say emotional intelligence refers to your intra personal abilities and your self awareness and your self management skills. I happen to lump them both together under emotional intelligence. My colleague Richard biotsis separates

them the two skill sets. There's a long tradition of research on social intelligence and a nascent body of work, and emotional intelligence has defined narrowly. But you wrote a whole book on social intelligence which I really enjoyed, which was separate from from emotional So yeah, right, so do you see, you know, a thread running through all of your work, Like, what would you what would you say

it is? I was trying to put words in your mouth by saying intelligence, but but but what would you say it is if you if you had to reflect on the tie that binds all of it? Yeah, uh, probably what interests me right now? Mm hmm. And that's a moving target? Oh right, right, yeah, what interests you

at that at that time? Yeah? Okay. So so for example, Social Intelligence is a book that was monitoring the emergence of social neuroscience, and I thought, hey, there's a critical mass of findings about the basis for a relationship and interactions. There's enough to write a book about. I wrote a book about it. Interested me? So right now, May eleventh, twenty twenty one, what are you most excited about and what are you kind of looking forward to working on?

What projects oh, so I'm rethinking emotional intelligence and really so much good. It's not so good? What's missing? What other abilities might turbo charge it? I'm interested ongoing, interested in meditation mostly those. Yeah. Hey, that's good enough, Daniel. Hey, I want to thank you so much for I know it's hard for us to hear each other. We're kind of sign languaging over here, you know, like, but we made it through, and I'm really I'm really happy that

we got a chance to finally talk. Thank you so much, Daniel, yea for being honest. To send me your book on transcendence. I'm really interested in that. I sure will. I'll reach out an email. You can give me your address, that'd be great. Great, Thanks Daniel, This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Likewise, thanks for listening to this

episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, I would like early access to new episodes, you can join us at Patreon dot com Slash psych Podcast. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain behavior and creativity.