Leaders know, and science has discovered, emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another.
Mirror neurons (the cells of nerve tissue) are connected to the brain's emotion region, the limbic system, and re-create the experience of others' intentions and feelings within ourselves. Your limbic brain (the emotional brain) works in concert and sometimes at odds with the neocortical brain (that directs the abstract mind--the cognitive functions of language, problem-solving, physics, mathematics).
"To function well with other people, we need to understand where they're coming from so as not to misread their intentions," says Regina Pally, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles and a clinical professor at UCLA. "Mirror neurons are what let us understand others' emotions." The same cortical neurons that process the sense of touch also fire when you see someone else touched. Mirror neurons also let us feel another person's pain. We feel the sensations of others in our own emotional brain as if we would be having those same sensations.
Within the effulgence of their limbic brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance--a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multilayered experience.
Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain, our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.
Exercise the power of your limbic brain by looking deeply into someone's eyes today.
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