- cognitive net: a tool to help us not to forget to do something e.g. a checklist (Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, p
- pause point: an aviation term referring to a point in an operation where the operator “must stop to run through a series of checks before proceding.” We could build lots of “pause points” int our daily routine e.g. just before sending an email, just before buying some new clothes, just before wntering a party, etc. (Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, p 111)
- cognitive leap: a flash of insight
- brain-child: our own intellectual creation (Viktor Frankl’s In Search of Meaning, p ?)
- mindsight:the ability to peer “into the mind of a person to sense their feelings and deduce their thoughts.” (Daniel Goleman, social intelligence, p 135)
- mind-blind:our poor ability to read the thoughts and feelings of others; mind-blind people are empathically inaccurate. (Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, p 139)
- system-blind: poor ability to systematize things and to understand systems such as the stock market, software, quantum physics (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence. , 139)
- ego orgasm: “When a couple mingles in emotional usion along with physical intimacy, both lose their sense of separateness… in a meeting of not just bodies but of their very being” (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence. , 210)
- two-way empathy: where each person is empathically in-tune with the other (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence. , 210)
- teachable moment: an incident that presents a golden opportunity for “teaching” the other an important lesson they need to know.
- social allergy: “a strong aversion towards a partner’s habits that , like a physical allergen, at first contact causes no reaction–and would not in most other people–but becomes increasingly sensitized with each exposure.” (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence. , 217)
- compassion fatigue: “where the helper becomes overwhelmed by the anguish of those she tries to help.” She eventually runs dry and cannot give any more. (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 260)
- emotionally barren:A boss would be emotionally barren if /she only spoke to staff in factual terms and never asked how they felt about things or gave encouragement or showed admiration or gratitude for their good efforts. (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 258)
- socially intelligent leadership: where a leader calls on the full set of social intelligence skills to get his/her team working as close to optimal performance as possible and feeling very positive about themselves. (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 280)
- nourishing relationships: warm, resonant connections with others that supply us with “emotional vitamins”; nourishing relationships are “the single most universally agreed-upon feature of the good life. (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 312)
- emotional vitamins: see above
- resonant relationships: see above
- a relationship’s nutritional value: the emotional goodness–the quantity and range of “emotional vitamins”–provided by a relationship
- I-It relationship:A Martin Buber term where “one person in the relationship has no attunement to the other person’s subjective reality, feels no real empathy for the other person [unlike in healthy I-You relationships]. The lack of connectedness may be all too obvious from the recipient’s perspective.” (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 105)
- The thingification of people: A Martin Buber term referring to “the depersonalization of relationships that corrodes our quality of life and the human spirit itself.” (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 313)
- compassionate capitalism: an Alvin Weinberg term referring to an improved capitalism that assigns a high priority to spending money on “good works”. (Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, p 317)
- social depression:
- feeling felt
- being fully present
- tone deaf to emotion
- emotional afterglow
- amae
- empathic accuracy
- elevation
- emotions are contagious:
- social autism
- Fear Central: Joseph LeDoux’s term for the amygdala
- cortical real-estate:the amount of brain matter – neurons and their multi-headed connections that are available for connecting with each other; there is a ‘use it or lose it” aspect to these neurons and connections; people who use their brains to learn lots of stuff end up with a dense and rich cortical real-estate, due to the rich number of connections happening between neurons; if we stop using those neurons in the original way, they those neurons can get assigned to “other duties” or they sit there idle, doing nothing. (Norman Doight, The Brain that Changes Itself, p 52)
- brain plasticity:the brain is not hard-wired, as originally thought, but remains plastic from cradle to grave. The brain changes itself with new experiences –from the synapse level up to brain map level. Neurons re-wire themselves by “strengthening and increasing or weakening and decreasing the number of connections between the neurons.” (Norman Doight, The Brain that Changes Itself, p 54)
- competitive plasticity: If we stop using the neural pathways we’ve created, those pathways will weaken and be vulnerable to the brain turning over their brain maps to skills we are practising. In effect, the brain is saying, “Use it or lose it.” If we don’t want to lose skills, we have to keep practising them every now and then to keep the pathways strong and not under threat of invasion. Competitive plasticity explains why old bad habits are so difficult to break (unlearn). The brain map attached to these bad habits are well-formed; their strength makes it hard to create space for new “good” habits. That presents a compelling argument for taking the time to teach children good habits in the beginning. (Norman Doight, The Brain that Changes Itself, p 60)
clever word pictures
April 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment
About Anne AustinI have created this website to show you simple, proven ways to improve all aspects of your life.
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