David Brooks in his book, The Social Animal, writes a fascinating account of the importance that noncognitive skills play for successfully navigating life. According to Brooks noncognitive skills “is the catchall category for hidden qualities that can’t be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfillment.” (ix)

Most books that are written about success focus on “outer definition of success, having to do with IQ, wealth, prestige, and worldly accomplishments.” (x) However, Brooks is keen to tell the story that takes place on the lower level. He writes, “And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.” (x) Moreover, he notes that “the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind – where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishment.” (x)

According to Brooks, modern society has focused primarily on cultivating the hard skills. Usually the cultivating and valuing of the soft skills (the moral and emotional faculties) has been ignored and deemed as unimportant (since it is not easily measured). Brooks writes, “Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own. We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions. We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say.” (xiv) Thus Brooks has set out and written a narrative account of two fictional characters Harold and Erica through which he shows the significance of the noncognitive plays out in real life. With his fictional account of Harold and Erica he illustrates the most recent scientific findings and brings them together in one coherent narrative.

According to Brooks, “Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state.” (12) Thus a key to successful navigating life is to be able to read and apply nonverbal emotional communication. The loss of emotional capabilities is demonstrated through an account of Damasio who treated a patient “who had also lost his emotional functions through a brain injury, was finishing an interview session in Damasio’s office, and Damasio suggested two alternative dates for their next meeting. The man pulled out his datebook and began listing the pros and cons of each option. For the better part of half an hour, he went on and on, listing possible conflicts, potential weather conditions on the two days in question, the proximity of other appointments. [….] Finally Damasio interrupted the man’s musings and just assigned him a date to return. Without a pause, the man said, “That’s fine” and went away.” (18-19) The loss of emotional ability, “leads to self-destructive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths, untroubled by barbarism and unable to feel other people’s pain.” (19) Out of his observation with patients, Damasio formulated a theory which is known as the “somatic marker hypothesis.” The theory deals with the “role of emotion in human cognition. Parts of the theory are disputed – scientists differ about how much the brain and the body interact – but his key point is that emotions measure the value of something, and help unconsciously guide us as we navigate through life – away from things that are likely to lead to pain and toward things that are likely to lead to fulfillment.” (19) This does not mean that somatic marker deliberate for us. Rather, “They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration. You may think of it as a system for automated qualification of prediction, which acts, whether you want it or not, to evaluate the extremely diverse scenarios of the anticipated future before you. Think of it as a biasing device.” (19) Brooks refers to this as the Emotional Positioning System (EPS) that helps us to navigate each day through all the stimuli that comes our way. Brooks writes that “amidst all this pyrotechnic chaos, different parts of the brain and body interact to form an Emotional Positioning System.” (19) He further explains, “Like the Global Positioning System that might be in your car, the EPS senses your current situation and compares it to the vast body of data it has stored in its memory. It reaches certain judgments about whether the course you are on will produce good or bad outcomes, and then it coats each person, place, or circumstance with an emotion (fear or excitement, admiration or repugnance) and an implied reaction (“Smile” or “Don’t smile”); “Approach” or “Get Away”) that helps us navigate our days.” (20) Thus according to Brooks, reason and emotion are intricately connected with each other. Moreover, “Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.” (21)

For a long time I have been thinking about spiritual discernment. I wonder how many times Christians have elevated reason so much to the expense of intuition and discernment. Do we ignore our EPS in our theology and Christian leadership?