Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  On such days young Milton would rush to get ready for school, to be sure that he was the first one to make a path through the snow to the schoolhouse. Then he would intentionally take a circuitous, zigzag route, his boots the first to plow a path through the new-fallen snow.

  No matter how many twists and turns he made in the path, inevitably the next kid would follow this route of least resistance—and the next, and the next after that. By the end of the day, it would have become a fixed route, the invariable track everyone followed.

  Erickson used the tale as a metaphor for how habits are formed. But his story of that first track through the snow, and the repeated traversing that followed, also offers an apt model for how neural pathways are laid down in the brain. The first connections made in a neural circuit become strengthened each time the same sequence gets followed, until the pathways become so strong that they are the automatic route—and a new circuit has been put in place.

  Because the human brain packs so much circuitry in so little space, it creates continuous pressure to extinguish connections the brain no longer needs, to make space for those it must have. The adage “use it or lose it” refers to this ruthless neural Darwinism, where brain circuits vie with one another to survive. Those neurons we lose are “pruned,” disappearing like twigs cut from a tree.

  Like the mound of clay a sculptor starts with, the brain generates more material than it needs to take its final shape. Over the course of childhood and the teen years, the brain will selectively lose half those overabundant neurons, keeping the ones that are used and dropping those that are neglected, as the child’s life experiences—including relationships—sculpt its brain.

  In addition to determining what connections are preserved, our relationships help shape our brain by guiding the connections made by new neurons. Here too old assumptions in neuroscience crumble. Even today some students are taught that once we are born, the brain cannot manufacture new cells. This theory has now been soundly disproven.15 In fact, we know that the brain and spinal cord contain stem cells that turn into new neurons at the rate of thousands a day. The pace of neuron creation peaks during childhood but continues into old age.

  Once a new neuron has come into being, it migrates to its position in the brain and, over the course of a month, develops to the point where it makes about ten thousand connections to other neurons dispersed throughout the brain. Over the next four months or so, the neuron refines its connections; once these pathways are linked, they are locked in. As neuroscientists like to say, cells that fire together wire together.

  During this five-or-six-month period, personal experience dictates which neurons the newborn cell will connect with.16 The more often an experience repeats, the stronger the habit becomes, and the denser the resulting neural connectivity. Meaney has found that in mice repetitive learning speeds the rate at which new neurons integrate into circuits with other neurons. In this way the brain continues to be redesigned, as new neurons and their connections are put in place.

  Well and good for mice—but what about for us humans? The same dynamics seem to apply, with profound implications for the shaping of the social brain.

  Each brain system has an optimal period during which experience maximally shapes its circuitry. Sensory systems, for instance, are largely shaped during early childhood, and language systems mature next.17 Some systems, like the hippocampus—in humans as in rats, the seat for learning and memory—continue to be strongly shaped by experience throughout life. Studies with monkeys reveal that specific cells in the hippocampus that take up their positions only during infancy may fail to migrate to their designated position if the infant undergoes extreme stress during that critical period.18 Conversely, loving parental care can enhance their migration.

  In humans, the longest window for shaping occurs with the prefrontal cortex, which continues to be molded anatomically into early adulthood. Thus the people in a child’s life have a decades-long opportunity to leave an imprint on that child’s executive neural circuitry.

  The more a particular interaction occurs during childhood, the more deeply imprinted it becomes in the brain’s circuitry—and the more “stickiness” it will have as that child moves through life as an adult. Those repeated moments from childhood will become automatic paths in the brain, like Milton Erickson’s tracks in the snow.19

  Take as an example spindle cells—those superrapid connectors of the social brain. Researchers find that in humans these cells migrate to their proper placement—largely in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex—at around four months, at which point they extend their connections to thousands of other cells. These neuroscientists propose that just where and how richly spindle cells connect depends on influences like family stress (for the worse) or a warm and loving atmosphere (for the better).20

  Spindle cells, remember, bond the high and low roads, helping us orchestrate our emotions with our responses. That neural connectivity undergirds a crucial set of social intelligence skills. As Richard Davidson (the neuroscientist we met in Chapter 6) explained, “After our brain registers emotional information, the prefrontal cortex helps us manage our response to it skillfully. The shaping of these circuits by genes interacting with the experiences in our life determines our affective style: how quickly and strongly we respond to an emotional trigger, and how long it takes us to recover.”

  When it comes to learning the self-regulatory skills so vital for smooth social interactions, Davidson comments, “There is a lot more plasticity early in life than later. The animal evidence indicates that some of the effects of early experience can be irreversible so that once a circuit is shaped by the environment in childhood, it then becomes quite stable.”21

  Picture a mother and baby as they play an innocent game of peekaboo. As his mother repeatedly covers and uncovers her face, the baby grows increasingly excited; at the peak point of intensity, the baby abruptly turns away from her and sucks his thumb, dully staring into space.

  That stare signals a time-out period the baby needs to calm himself down. The mother gives him the time he needs, waiting until he’s ready to resume their game. A few seconds later he turns back to her and they beam at each other, smiling.

  Contrast that game of peekaboo with this one: again the game reaches its crescendo of excitement, the point at which the baby needs to turn away, suck his thumb, and calm down before reengaging his mother. Except this time she doesn’t wait for him to turn back to her. Instead she leans over into his line of vision, clicking her tongue to demand that his attention return to her.

  Her baby just keeps looking away, ignoring his mother. Undaunted, she moves her head still closer, setting him off fussing and grimacing, pushing her face away. Finally, he turns even farther away from the mother, sucking feverishly on his thumb.

  Does it matter that one mother attunes to the signal her baby sends, while the other ignores his message?

  Nothing can be proven by a single game of peekaboo. But repeated, multiple failures by a caretaker to attune, much research suggests, can have lasting effects. When reprised throughout childhood, these patterns shape the social brain in ways that make one child grow up delighted with the world, affectionate, and comfortable with people, while others grow up sad and withdrawn, or angry and confrontational. Once such differences might have been attributed to the child’s “temperament,” a stand-in for genes. Now the scientific action centers on how a child’s genes may be set by the thousands of routine interactions a child experiences growing up.

  HOPE FOR A CHANGE

  I can remember Jerome Kagan talking in the 1980s about the research he had under way in Boston and in faraway China that used a baby’s reactions to novelty to identify children who would grow up to be timid and shy. Kagan, by now semiretired, still continues this line of investigation, following some of the “Kagan babies” into their early adult years.22 I drop in on him every few years in his old office on the top floor of William James Hall, the tallest tower on the Harv
ard campus.

  On my most recent visit he told me about his latest finding, from fMRI studies of Kagan kids. Kagan, always up to the minute in his research methods, had joined the fMRI crowd. As he told me, a study of twenty-two Kagan babies, who as children had been identified as inhibited and were now in their twenties, had just found that their amygdalas still overreacted to anything out of the ordinary just as they had done before.23

  One neurological indicator of this timidity profile appears to be higher activity in the colliculus, a part of the sensory cortex that is activated when the amygdala detects something anomalous and possibly threatening. This neural circuitry triggers whenever we perceive a discrepancy, like a picture of a baby’s head on a giraffe body. The images that elicit this activation need not be outright threats—anything strange-looking or “crazy” will do the trick.

  Kids who have low reactivity in these circuits tend to be outgoing and sociable. But youngsters who have high reactivity shy away from anything unusual; the novel frightens them. Such predispositions in a young child tend to be self-reinforcing, as protective parents shield their timid toddlers from the very encounters that might help them learn an alternative reaction.

  In earlier studies Kagan discovered that when parents encourage these timid kids to spend time with peers whom they might otherwise avoid (and sometimes parents have to be forceful), the children can often overcome the genetic predisposition to shyness. After decades of research Kagan has found that among children identified shortly after birth as “inhibited,” only one-third still showed timid behavior as they entered early adulthood.

  Now he realizes that what seems to change is not so much the underlying neural hyperreactivity—the amygdala and colliculus still overreact—but rather what the brain does with the impulse. Over time children who learn to resist the urge to withdraw become able to engage more fully, showing no outward signs of their inhibition.

  Neuroscientists use the term “neural scaffolding” to describe how once a brain circuit has been laid out, its connections become strengthened with repeated use—like a scaffold being erected at a building site. Neural scaffolding explains why a behavioral pattern, once it is established, requires effort to change. But with new opportunities—or perhaps just with effort and awareness—we can lay down and strengthen a new track.

  As Kagan told me about the inhibited children, “Seventy percent grow toward health. Temperament may constrain what can be, but it does not determine it. These kids are no longer frightened or hyperreactive.”

  Take as an example one boy, identified as inhibited in infancy, who had learned by his teen years to feel his fear and act anyway. Now no one, he said, realized that he still felt shy. But it took some help and effort—and a series of small victories, seemingly using the high road to tame the low.

  One triumph he remembers was overcoming his fear of shots, which in childhood was so severe that he refused to go to the dentist—until he finally found a dentist who won his trust. Seeing his sister jump into a pool gave him the courage to overcome his own fear of getting water on his face, and so he learned to swim. While at first it took talking to his parents to get over a bad dream, eventually he learned to calm down on his own.

  “I was able to get over my fears,” the formerly worry-bound boy wrote in a school essay. “Because I now understand my predisposition towards anxiety, I can talk myself out of simple fears.”24

  And so with a bit of help, a positive change can occur naturally for many of these inhibited children. The right urging from family or others can help, as can understanding how to manage their own reticence. So does using naturally occurring “threats” to challenge their inhibited tendencies.

  Kagan tells of his own granddaughter, who was very shy at six, saying to him: “Make believe I don’t know you—I have to practice not being shy.”

  He adds, “Parents don’t realize that though biology constrains certain outcomes, it does not determine what can happen.”

  Parenting cannot change every gene, nor modify every neural tic—and yet what children experience day after day sculpts their neural circuitry. Neuroscience has begun to pinpoint with surprising specificity how some of that sculpting operates.

  11

  A Secure Base

  At twenty-three, he had just graduated from a well-known university—in those days in Britain, a ticket to a successful career. Yet here he was severely depressed, planning suicide.

  As he revealed to his psychotherapist, his childhood had been one ongoing misery.

  His parents’ frequent quarrels often ended in violence. The eldest of a large family, he already had two younger siblings by the time he reached his third birthday. His father spent much time away from the family for work, and his mother—overwhelmed by the squabbles of her tribe of youngsters—would sometimes lock herself in her bedroom for hours, even days, at a time.

  As a young child, he was left alone to cry for long periods—his parents believed that a child’s crying was just an attempt “to be spoilt” by their attention. He felt that his most basic feelings and needs were ignored.

  His signature memory from childhood was the night he developed appendicitis and lay awake until dawn, moaning and alone. He also remembers hearing his younger brothers and sisters as they cried themselves to exhaustion, his parents indifferent. And he remembers hating them for it.

  His first day of school was the most miserable of his life. Being deposited there seemed like the final rejection by his mother. Desperate, he cried the whole day.

  As his childhood went on, he came to hide all his yearning for love, refusing to ask his parents for anything. During therapy he was terrified that if he let his feelings into the open and cried, his therapist would see him as an attention-seeking nuisance and—he fantasized—lock himself away in another room until he left.1

  That clinical account was offered up by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, whose writings on the emotional bonds between parent and child have made him the most influential thinker in child development to emerge from the followers of Freud. Bowlby tackled grand themes in human life like abandonment and loss—and the emotional attachments that make those so powerful.

  Though trained in the classic patient-on-the-couch mode of psychoanalysis, Bowlby did something revolutionary for his time, roughly from the 1950s on: He observed mothers and infants directly rather than depending solely on the unverifiable memories of patients in psychoanalysis. And he followed up with those children to see how their early interactions shaped their interpersonal habits.

  Bowlby identified a healthy attachment to parents as the crucial ingredient in a child’s well-being. When parents act with empathy and are responsive to a child’s needs, they build a basic sense of security. Such consistent empathy and sensitivity was precisely what that suicidal patient had lacked. And he continued to suffer because he saw his current relationships through the lens of his tragically troubled childhood.

  Every child, Bowlby argues, needs a preponderance of I-You connections in childhood to thrive throughout life. Well-attuned parents offer a child a “secure base,” people they can count on when they are upset and need attention, love, and comfort.

  The notion of attachment and a secure base was elaborated by Bowlby’s chief American disciple, the equally influential development theorist Mary Ainsworth.2 Scores of researchers, following her lead, have by now accumulated mounds of data and have detected in the subtleties of early parent-infant interactions powerful impacts for whether a child will be secure for life.

  Virtually from birth, babies are not mere passive lumps but active communicators seeking their own intensely urgent goals. The two-way emotional message system between a baby and her caretaker represents her lifeline, the route through which passes all the traffic to get her basic needs fulfilled. Babies need be tiny masters at managing their caretakers through an elaborate, built-in system of eyes contacted and avoided, smiles, and cries; lacking that social intercom, babies can remain miserable o
r even die from neglect.

  Watch a protoconversation between any mother and her infant, and you will see a finely orchestrated emotional dance, one in which the partners switch taking the lead. As the baby smiles or cries, the mother reacts accordingly: in a very real sense, the emotions of the infant direct what the mother does as much as the mother directs the infant. Their exquisite responsiveness to each other indicates that their loop operates in both directions, a primal emotional highway.

  This parent-child loop offers the central passageway for parents to help their children learn the ground rules for relationships—how to attend to another person, how to pace an interaction, how to engage in conversation, how to tune in to the other person’s feelings, and how to manage your own feelings while you are engaged with someone else. These essential lessons lay the foundations for a competent social life.

  Surprisingly, they also seem to shape intellectual development: the intuitive emotional lessons from the wordless protoconversation of the first year of life build the mental scaffolding for actual conversations at age two. And as a child masters the habit of talking, it primes that private inner conversation we call thinking.3

  Research has also found that a secure base does more than provide an emotional cocoon: it seems to nudge the brain to secrete neurotransmitters that add a small bolt of pleasure to that feeling of being well loved—and it does the same for whomever provides that love. Decades after Bowlby and Ainsworth proposed their theories, neuroscientists identified two pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters, oxytocin and endorphins, that are activated by looping.4

  Oxytocin generates a sense of satisfying relaxation; endorphins mimic the addictive pleasure of heroin in the brain (though not nearly so intensely). For a toddler, parents and family offer this savory security; playmates and, later in life, friendships and romantic intimacy activate the same circuits. The systems that secrete these chemicals of nurturing love include familiar parts of the social brain.