Content Warning: This section refers to mental health conditions, trauma, violence, and emotional distress.

“From the most primitive root, the brainstem, emerged the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or ‘neocortex,’ the great bulb of convoluted tissues that make up the top layers. The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.”

Goleman discusses the evolutionary development of the human brain and its connection to emotions. He starts by highlighting the primitive root, the brainstem, and notes that from these more basic structures, the emotional centers of the brain emerged. The key point Goleman makes is that the emotional brain existed long before the rational brain. This emphasizes the deep-seated roots of emotions in our evolutionary history. By framing the evolution of the brain in this way, Goleman suggests that emotions are foundational to our cognitive processes and challenges the notion that rationality is separate from or superior to emotional experiences. This perspective lays the groundwork for the exploration of emotional intelligence and its crucial role in shaping human behavior and decision-making throughout the book.

“LeDoux turns to the role of the amygdala in childhood to support what has long been a basic tenet of psychoanalytic thought: that the interactions of life’s earliest years lay down a set of emotional lessons based on the attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant and caretakers.”

Goleman underscores the neurological basis for the emotional imprints formed in early life and emphasizes the importance of early experiences in shaping emotional responses and behaviors later in life by connecting LeDoux’s research on the amygdala with psychoanalytic ideas. The reference to “attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant and caretakers” implies that the emotional lessons imprinted in childhood are influenced by the quality of emotional connection or discord between a child and their caregivers.