One day in class, the teacher held up an apple, stood in front of the class and said, “Please smell the smell in the air!”

One student raised his hand and answered, “I can smell it. It is the smell of an apple.”

The teacher stepped off the platform, passed by each of the students and said, “Smell again to see if (是否) the smell of the apple is still in the air.”

Half of the students raised their hands to show that they could smell it. The teacher returned to the front of the classroom and asked again if the students could smell the apple. Everyone raised their hand except one student. The teacher came to the student and asked, “You really can’t smell the apple?”

The student answered, “No, I can’t smell it. I don’t think it’s a real apple.”

The teacher smiled at the student and said to the class, “He is right! This is not a real apple.”

All of the other students had been tricked. They may have thought that maybe the apple was not real, but they didn’t have the courage to speak up. They just “followed the leader” and went along with the first student.

Emotional Intelligence

Goleman is the writer of Emotional Intelligence, a great book about emotional intelligence (情商) or EQ is more important than IQ in one’s success in life. One of the highlights of the book is a test that Goleman calls “The Marshmallow (棉花糖) Challenge.”

In this experiment, four-year-old children were separately called into a room. A kind man gave a marshmallow to each of them and said they could eat the marshmallow right away, or wait for him to come back to get two marshmallows.

Some of the children covered their eyes or played games to keep their thoughts off the single marshmallow and waited for the promised double prize. Others-about a third of the group-simply watched the man leave and grabbed (抓) the marshmallow and ate it right away.

Twelve years later, the same children were teenagers and they were tested again. “The emotional and social difference between the grab-the-marshmallow kids and the satisfaction-delaying kids was interesting,” Goleman says.

The ones who had resisted eating the marshmallow right away were clearly more socially capable than the others. “They were less likely to become nervous and disorganized when stressed; they welcomed challenges and followed them instead of giving up; they were independent and confident.”

The third or so who grabbed the marshmallow were more likely to be seen as shying away from social contacts, to be easily upset by stress, to think of themselves as unworthy, or to overreact to certain situations.

And all because of a single marshmallow? In fact, Goleman explains, it’s all because of a lone neuron (孤神经元) in the brain, that bypasses the neocortex-the area of the brain where reasonable decisions are made-and goes straight to the amygdala (大脑杏仁核), the emotional center of the brain. Here, the more that emotional memories involving disappointment, worry, and fear are stored in early teenage time, the more the amygdala can “control the rest of the brain,” Goleman says, “by flooding it with strong and improper emotions.’”

But if the emotions stored in the brain are those of self-managing, self-motivation and hope, then we are given a gift of an “emotional intelligence” that serves instead of controlling us for the rest of our lives.

However, amygdala takes a long time to grow, around fifteen or sixteen years, which means to Goleman that “emotional intelligence can be taught, not only in the home but perhaps, more importantly, in school.”