The Power of Two

One of the more memorable minor characters on the TV sitcom Seinfeld was Aaron, also known as the Close Talker. One of Elaine’s many boyfriends, Aaron had the discomfiting habit of putting his face just inches from the face of whoever he was talking to, even complete strangers. He was also friendly to a fault, inviting Jerry’s elderly parents along on dates, to museums, My Fair Lady,
even for a romantic dinner. Elaine, confused, finally asks him, “You had fun with Mr. and Mrs. Seinfeld?” He replies: “Yeah. They bought me a Coke.”

It’s hard to process someone like Aaron. He’s not mean, or stupid, or uncultured, or anything else obviously objectionable. He’s just vaguely “off,” and it’s uncomfortable for everyone. It’s not just that he doesn’t know the rules, which he doesn't; he really cannot feel the embarrassment of those around him. He should be squirming, but he's not.

A brain scan would likely reveal that Aaron's "mirror neurons" are out of whack. Mirror neurons are what make us grimace when we see someone else grimace, and by grimacing allow us to actually experience the other's discomfort in intimate connection. Such neurological connection is the foundation of primal empathy, and empathy, according to psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, is one of the fundamental building blocks of social awareness and social intelligence. In his new book, called Social Intelligence to echo his 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence, Goleman inventories the traits that make some people savvy about relationships, and others like Aaron decidedly not. In addition to gut-level empathy, socially intelligent people demonstrate such traits as “attunement.” Attunement is listening—but really listening, with full attention. (Try it. It's hard.) Another trait is “synchrony,” which means interacting effortlessly without words. You often see this in couples who have been together forever. Socially intelligent people also--this is important--demonstrate concern; they care about others’ needs and act in caring ways. Concern is essential to Goleman’s model of social intelligence, because it rules out clever grifters and evil social geniuses.

The notion of social intelligence is not new, as Goleman is quick to concede. Indeed, he credits Edward Thorndike, the Columbia University psychologist who in the 1920s proposed a similar concept in a popular magazine article. Thorndike’s theory never gained traction, however, because it was impossible to prove that social intelligence was anything more that general intelligence, or IQ, applied to relationships. So the idea withered and disappeared.

Goleman believes it’s time to resurrect Thorndike’s basic concept, with important scientific embellishments. Dramatic advances in neuroscience over the last many decades have made it finally possible to locate skills like empathy and synchrony in the brain’s neurons and biochemistry, and to show that social smarts are indeed a unique form of intelligence--unrelated to, say, a talent for trigonometry. One major advance in psychology, for example, is the idea of the brain as a dual processor, with deliberate, logical powers (what Goleman calls the brain’s “high road”) located in one neural region; and rapid, intuitive powers (the “low road”) in another. Where traditional IQ has entirely to do with formal “high road” processing, many of the building blocks of social intelligence are of the intuitive variety, taking place at breakneck speed outside of language and awareness.

Consider just one example of such sizzling brain work: our remarkable ability to detect emotions like fear and anger and kindness in people’s faces almost instantaneously. Goleman describes the massive “spindle cells” that make the brain capable of such snap judgments. Spindle cells are a relatively new discovery, and we appear to be the only mammals who have them. They are rich in neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and vasopressin—chemicals that are crucial to bonding with others, and to moods, pleasure, and love. Mirror neurons are another recent discovery that bolsters the idea of a discrete and potent social intelligence, orchestrated in our axons and synapses. Such advances in “social neuroscience” lie at the core of Goleman’s insightful analysis of social intelligence.

As with IQ, social intelligence forms a bell curve, with most of us clustered in the large, average center, and fewer and fewer at the extremes. At one extreme are people whose low road brain is disabled, and whose lives are purely rational and deliberate. At the other extreme are people who can’t read a roadmap, but who have extraordinary empathy and sensitivity to others’ needs. (In a perfect world these people end up working at the DMV.) In the vast majority of us, though, the brain’s high and low roads are acting in neurological concert, creating a mix of deliberate decisionmaking and automatic, effortless behavior.

Sometime the mix is optimal, but oftentimes it’s not. Our impulsive brain sometimes rules where we should be more thoughtful, or we second-guess our emotional brain’s best snap judgments. The results can range from unhappy marriages to corrosive racism, even genocide. Goleman’s ultimate goal--beyond the scope of this
volume--is to hone the social skills of those of us not in the genius range. Since the publication of Emotional Intelligence, a number of schools have instituted curricula to train students in such skills as empathy, self-awareness and self-management, with demonstrable success in reducing problem behaviors like bullying and harassment. The same kind of training could presumably be designed for social intelligence as well.

I want to call this book revolutionary, but it's more like profoundly obvious. We all know the mystery of real rapport, and body memories, and what it means to be in or out of sync. Such connection goes on all the time. What’s novel here is the accumulating and convincing evidence that our brains have been deep-wired over eons for such "I-you" connections. Even without knowing it, we are making intimate brain-to-brain linkups with another, connections that literally leave two brains altered, anatomically and chemically. But Aaron obviously had it wrong: You can't get close by talking close. Real social intelligence has more to do with listening close.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

The Chemistry of Logic

I am older than Maggie, by a couple years. If you know this, and you also know that Maggie is slightly older than Susie, you probably don’t even need a pencil and paper to figure out that I am older than Susie. It’s about as simple an exercise in logic as you’ll find. Yet it is nevertheless an exercise in logic, and as such requires reasoning from certain given facts to a novel conclusion.

Psychologists are intrigued even by such rudimentary problem solving, because understanding its cognitive underpinnings could conceivably illuminate higher forms of reasoning—the thinking needed to split an atom, for example, or fix a leaky spigot. The ultimate scientific goal is to pinpoint exactly where such fundamental abilities reside in the brain’s complex tangle of neurons.

The prevailing theory about logical thinking is that it takes place in a tiny seahorse-shaped brain structure called the hippocampus. That’s because reams of research studies over decades have pinpointed the hippocampus as the seat of memory, and even the most simplistic problem requires memory. It’s obvious I’m older than Susie—just look at us--but in order to know this logically you must learn, store and recall knowledge of two relationships: mine with Maggie, and Maggie’s with Susie. Since I don’t have a relationship with Susie, there’s no other way around it.

Or is there? What if it’s not that simple? A growing number of psychologists have been thinking, from an evolutionary point of view, that it may not make sense to have only one kind of logic. Isn’t it likely more that, as the brain evolved over eons, it developed some sort of backup problem-solving machinery, just in case memory and logic fail us? University of Arizona psychologist Michael Frank is among those who think so, and he decided to test the idea in the lab. Indeed, he went a step further, suggesting that failed memory might actually enhance a parallel, highly intuitive kind of problem solving located elsewhere in our gray matter.

To explore this possibility, Frank and his colleagues recruited a couple dozen healthy young people, and temporarily but profoundly disabled their memories. They did this with a powerful drug called midazolam, one of a class of sedative drugs that acts on a key chemical in the hippocampus, causing amnesia. This procedure effectively made memorization impossible.

Once Frank had shut down the participants’ working memory, he gave them a series of problems to solve. The quiz is complicated, but it resembles the simple logic exercise above. That is, the participants could solve it the old-fashioned way, by remembering a few facts and splicing them together. Or—this is what Frank speculated—they could perhaps come to the same correct conclusion without memory, using “gut level” emotional loading of the facts. Such intuitive learning of one fact over another actually has to do with surges of the brain chemical dopamine, in a cluster of neurons called the basal ganglia.

And this is precisely what the study showed. As reported recently in the journal Psychological Science, the induced amnesia diminished performance on logic tasks that required explicit memory, but it enhanced performance on tasks that could be accomplished by dopamine-driven gut level learning alone. These results support the idea that the hippocampus and the basal ganglia make distinct contributions to problem solving, and further that failure of the hippocampus—the first responder, if you will—triggers the response of the basal ganglia, which performs admirably in its backup role.

What all this suggests, as a practical matter, is that when explicit memory begins to falter--with aging, for example--it is probably okay to trust your feelings when it comes to everyday decision making. A dull memory equals sharp intuition. This is certainly good news for me, and my gut tells me it’s good news for Maggie and Susie as well.

For further insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.