Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  Oscillators echo the neural equivalent of the ditty from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?” When we are with another person, these timekeepers put us in synch unconsciously, like the flowing ease with which lovers approach for an embrace, or take each other’s hands at just the right instant as they walk down the street. (On the other hand, a friend tells me that when she was dating, if she kept falling out of step with the guy she was walking with, she was alerted that there might be trouble ahead.)

  Any conversation demands that the brain make extraordinarily complex calculations, with oscillators guiding the continuous cascade of adjustments that keep us in synch. From this micro-synchrony flows an affinity, as we participate in a slice of our conversational partner’s very experience. We so readily slide into a brain-to-brain link in part because we’ve been practicing this silent rhumba all our life, since we first learned the basic moves.

  THE PROTOCONVERSATION

  Picture a mother holding her baby. The mother makes an affectionate “kissy-face,” pursing her lips. At that her baby draws his lips inward, in a somewhat sober-looking expression.

  The mother widens her mouth into a slight smile, and her baby relaxes his lips, hinting at widening his mouth into a grin, and mother and baby join in a slight smile.

  Then the baby breaks into a full-blown beam, moving his head to the side and up, almost flirtatiously.

  The entire interaction takes less than three seconds. Not much happened, yet there was a definite communication. Such rudimentary engagements are called “protoconversation,” the prototype of all human interaction, communication at its most basic.

  Oscillators are at work in the protoconversation. Microanalysis reveals that babies and mothers precisely time the start, end, and pauses in their baby talk, creating a coupling of rhythm. Each captures and coordinates what they do with the timing of the other.20

  These “conversations” are nonverbal, resorting to words only as sound effects.21 We engage in protoconversation with a baby through our gaze, touch, and tone of voice. Messages go via smiles and coos and most especially “Motherese”—the adult complement to baby talk.

  More like a song than a sentence, Motherese deploys prosody, melodic overtones of speech that transcend culture, and that are much the same whether the mother speaks Mandarin Chinese, Urdu, or English. Motherese always sounds friendly and playful, with a high pitch (around 300 hertz, to be technical) and short, spiked, undulating or gliding pitch contours.

  Often a mother will synchronize Motherese with patting or stroking her baby in a repeated, periodic rhythm. Her face and head movements are in synch with her hands and voice, and the baby in turn responds with smiles, cooing, and movements of jaws, lips, and tongue in synch with his hand motions. Such mother-baby pirouettes are short, a matter of just seconds or even milliseconds—and they end when both partners match states, typically happy ones. Mother and infant fall into what seems much like a duet of synchronized or alternating parts, paced by a steady adagio pulse at about 90 beats per minute.

  Such scientific observations are made painstakingly, through the tedious examination of endless hours of videotaped mother-infant interactions, by developmental psychologists like Colwyn Trevarthen at the University of Edinburgh. Trevarthen’s studies have made him the world expert on protoconversation, a duet where both performers, as he describes it, “seek harmony and counterpoint on one beat to create a melody.”22

  But more than marking out a kind of melody, the two are having a discussion of sorts that centers on one central theme: emotions. The frequency of the mother’s touch and the sound of her voice give the baby the reassuring message of her love—resulting, as Trevarthen puts it, in an “immediate, unverbalized, conceptless, rapport.”

  The exchange of these signals forges a link with a baby through which we can make her happy and excited, calm and quiet—or upset and in tears. During a happy protoconversation, mother and baby feel upbeat and attuned to each other. But when either the mother or the infant fails to hold up their part of the conversation, the outcomes are quite different. If the mother, for instance, pays too little attention or responds without enthusiasm, the baby reacts by withdrawing. If the mother’s responses are poorly timed, the baby will look puzzled, then distressed. And if it’s the baby who fails to respond, the mother in turn will get upset.

  These sessions are a kind of tutorial: the protoconversation marks a baby’s first lesson in how to interact. We learn how to synchronize emotionally long before we have words for those feelings. Protoconversations remain our most basic template for interacting, a tacit awareness that quietly gets us in step as we link with someone else. The ability to get into synch as we did when we were babies serves us through life, guiding us in every social interaction.

  And just as feelings were the main topic of protoconversation for us as infants, they remain the bedrock of communication in adulthood. This silent dialogue on feelings is the substrate on which all other encounters build and the hidden agenda in every interaction.

  3

  Neural WiFi

  As I settled into a seat on a New York City subway, one of those ambiguous, possibly ominous moments of urban life occurred: I heard a shriek far behind me, from the opposite end of the car.

  My back was to the source of the scream. But I faced a gentleman whose face suddenly took on a slightly anxious look.

  My mind raced to comprehend what was going on and what—if anything—I should do. Was it a fight? Was someone running amok on the subway? Was danger headed my way?

  Or was it merely a shriek of delight, maybe a group of teenagers having a whooping good time?

  My answer came swiftly, from the face of the man who could see what was happening: his worried features settled into calm, and he went back to reading his newspaper. Whatever was going on back there, I knew all was well.

  My initial apprehension was calmed by seeing his face relax. In moments like my sudden wariness on the subway, we instinctively become more attentive to the faces of the people around us, searching for smiles or frowns that give us a better sense of how to interpret signs of danger or that might signal someone’s intentions.1

  In human prehistory a primal band with its numerous eyes and ears could be ever more vigilant for danger than could an isolated individual. And in the tooth-and-claw world of early humans, that ability to multiply sentinels—and a brain mechanism attuned to pick up signs of danger automatically and mobilize fear—no doubt had great survival value.

  Although at the extremes of anxiety we may become too swallowed up in our own fear to attune at all, in most of its range anxiety heightens emotional transactions, so that people who feel threatened and anxious are especially prone to catching other people’s emotions. In one of those early human groups, no doubt the terrorized face of someone who had sighted a prowling tiger was enough to set off the same panic in whoever saw that expression—and set them running to safety.

  Gaze for a moment at this face:

  The amygdala instantly reacts to such a photograph, and the stronger the emotion displayed, the more intense the amygdala’s reaction.2 When people looked at such pictures while undergoing an fMRI, their own brain looked like they were the frightened ones, though in a more muted range.3

  When two people interact face to face, contagion spreads via multiple neural circuits operating in parallel within each person’s brain. These systems for emotional contagion traffic in the entire range of feeling, from sadness and anxiety to joy.

  Moments of contagion represent a remarkable neural event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies. In systems terms, during this linkup brains “couple,” with the output of one becoming input to drive the workings of the other, for the time being forming what amounts to an interbrain circuit. When two entities are connected in a feedback loop, as the first changes, so does the secon
d.

  As people loop together, their brains send and receive an ongoing stream of signals that allow them to create a tacit harmony—and, if the flow goes the right way, amplify their resonance. Looping lets feelings, thoughts, and actions synchronize. We send and receive internal states for better or for worse—whether laughter and tenderness, or tension and rancor.

  In physics, the defining property of resonance is sympathetic vibration, the tendency of one part to amplify its vibratory rate by matching the pace at which another part vibrates. Such resonance produces the largest and most prolonged possible response between the two interacting parts—an afterglow.

  Brains loop outside our awareness, with no special attention or intention demanded. While we can intentionally try to mimic someone in order to foster closeness, such attempts tend to come off as awkward. Synchrony works best when it is spontaneous, not constructed from ulterior motives such as ingratiation or any other conscious intention.4

  The low road’s automaticity allows its rapidity. For instance, the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than two-hundredths of a second).5 This quick read attests to the hyperspeed of the low road, so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception (though we might sense the resulting vague stirring of uneasiness).

  We may not consciously realize how we are synchronizing, yet we mesh with remarkable ease. This spontaneous social duet is the work of a special class of neurons.

  NEURAL MIRRORS

  I must have been just two or three years old, but the memory remains vivid in my mind. As I wandered down the aisle of the local grocery store at my mother’s side, a lady spotted me—a cute little toddler—and gave me a warm smile.

  My own mouth, I still recall, startled me by involuntarily moving into a smile in return. It felt as though somehow my face had become puppetlike, drawn by mysterious strings that widened the muscles around my mouth and puffed out my cheeks.

  I distinctly felt that my smile had come unbidden—directed not from within but from outside myself.

  That unbidden reaction no doubt signaled the activity of what are called “mirror neurons” in my young brain. “Mirror” neurons do just that: they reflect back an action we observe in someone else, making us mimic that action or have the impulse to do so. These do-as-she-does neurons offer a brain mechanism that explains the old lyric, “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”

  Major lanes of the low road surely run through this kind of neuron. We have multiple systems of mirror neurons, with more being discovered as time goes on. There seems to be a multitude of such neural systems that remain as yet unmapped. And they explain a huge swath of life, from emotional contagion and social synchrony to how infants learn.

  Neuroscientists stumbled on this neural WiFi by accident in 1992. They were mapping the sensorimotor area of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be implanted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement.6 The neurons in this area were proving to be remarkably precise; for instance, some neurons lit up only when the monkey was grasping something in its hand, others only when it was tearing it apart.

  But the truly unexpected discovery came one hot afternoon when a research assistant came back from a break eating an ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey—or one of the experimenters—making a given movement.

  Since that first sighting of mirror neurons in monkeys, the same systems have been discovered in the human brain. In a remarkable study where a laser-thin electrode monitored a single neuron in an awake person, the neuron fired both when the person anticipated pain—a pinprick—and when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick—a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action.7

  Many mirror neurons operate in the premotor cortex, which governs activities ranging from speaking and movement to simply intending to act. Because they are adjacent to motor neurons, their location means that the areas of the brain that initiate a movement can readily begin to activate even as we watch someone else make that same movement.8 When we mentally rehearse an action—making a dry run of a talk we have to give, or envisioning the fine points of our golf swing—the same neurons activate in the premotor cortex as if we had uttered those words or made that swing. Simulating an act is, in the brain, the same as performing it, except that the actual execution is somehow blocked.9

  Our mirror neurons fire as we watch someone else, for example, scratch their head or wipe away a tear, so that a portion of the pattern of neuronal firing in our brain mimics theirs. This maps the identical information from what we are seeing onto our own motor neurons, letting us participate in the other person’s actions as if we were executing that action.

  The human brain harbors multiple mirror neuron systems, not just for mimicking actions but also for reading intentions, for extracting the social implications from what someone does, and for reading emotions.10 For instance, when volunteers lay in an fMRI watching a video showing someone smile or scowl, most brain areas that activated in the observers were the same as those active in the person displaying the emotion, though not as extreme.11

  Mirror neurons make emotions contagious, letting the feelings we witness flow through us, helping us get in synch and follow what’s going on. We “feel” the other in the broadest sense of the word: sensing their sentiments, their movements, their sensations, their emotions as they act inside us.

  Social skill depends on mirror neurons. For one thing, echoing what we observe in another person prepares us to make a speedy and fitting response. For another, the neurons respond to the mere hint of an intention to move, and they help us track what motivation may be in play.12 Sensing what other people intend—and why—offers invaluable social information, letting us keep a step ahead of whatever will happen next, like social chameleons.

  Mirror neurons appear to be essential to the way children learn. Imitative learning has long been recognized as a major avenue of childhood development. But findings about mirror neurons explain how children can gain mastery simply from watching. As they watch, they are etching in their own brains a repertoire for emotion, for behavior, and for how the world works.

  Human mirror neurons are far more flexible and diverse than those in monkeys, reflecting our sophisticated social abilities. By mimicking what another person does or feels, mirror neurons create a shared sensibility, bringing the outside inside us: to understand another, we become like the other—at least a bit.13 That virtual sense of what someone else experiences fits with an emerging notion in the philosophy of mind: that we understand others by translating their actions into the neural language that prepares us for the same actions and lets us experience alike.14

  I understand your action by creating a template for it in my own brain. As Giacomo Rizzolatti, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons, explains, these systems “allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking.”15

  This triggering of parallel circuitry in two brains lets us instantly achieve a shared sense of what counts in a given moment. This creates an immediacy, a sense of sharing the moment. Neuroscientists call that mutually reverberating state “empathic resonance,” a brain-to-brain linkage that forms a two-person circuitry via the low road.

  The external signs of such inner links have been detailed by an American psychiatrist working at the University of Geneva, Daniel Stern, who has for decades made systematic observations of mothers and infants. A developmental scientist in the tradition of Jean Piaget, Stern also explores adult interactions, such as between psychotherapists and their clients, or between lovers. />
  Stern concludes that our nervous systems “are constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin.”16 At such moments we resonate with their experience, and they with ours.

  We can no longer, Stern adds, “see our minds as so independent, separate and isolated,” but instead we must view them as “permeable,” continually interacting as though joined by an invisible link. At an unconscious level, we are in constant dialogue with anyone we interact with, our every feeling and very way of moving attuned to theirs. At least for the moment our mental life is cocreated, in an interconnected two-person matrix.

  Mirror neurons ensure that the moment someone sees an emotion expressed on your face, they will at once sense that same feeling within themselves. And so our emotions are experienced not merely by ourselves in isolation but also by those around us—both covertly and openly.

  Stern suggests that the neurons for mimicry are at play whenever we sense another person’s state of mind and resonate with their feelings. This interbrain linkage makes bodies move in tandem, thoughts go down the same roads, and emotions run along the same lines. As mirror neurons bridge brains, they create a tacit duet that opens the way for subtle but powerful transactions.

  THE HAPPY FACE ADVANTAGE

  When I first met Paul Ekman, in the 1980s, he had just spent a year gazing into a mirror while learning to voluntarily control each one of the close to two hundred muscles of the face. This entailed some heroic scientific research: he had to apply a mild electrical shock to locate some hard-to-detect facial muscles. Once he had mastered his feat of self-control, he was able to map precisely how different sets of these muscles move to exhibit each of the major emotions and their variations.

  Ekman has identified eighteen kinds of smiles, all various permutations of the fifteen facial muscles involved. To name but a few: A miserable smile pastes over an unhappy expression, like a grin-and-bear-it comment on feeling dismal. A cruel smile shows that the person relishes being angry and mean. And then there’s the supercilious smile that was Charlie Chaplin’s hallmark, which draws on a muscle most people can’t move deliberately—a smile, as Ekman puts it, that “smiles at smiling.”17