Most of the work I do as an executive coach (particularly at Stanford) involves asking clients and students to keep a journal. In some cases this is a structured (and graded!) class assignment, and several times a year my academic duties include reading and commenting on students’ journals while they’re taking our experiential "Interpersonal Dynamics" class. But even if someone’s journal is just a series of informal, private notes, the purpose is to insure that the learning doesn’t stop at the end of the coaching session or the class exercise.
My empirical experience as a journal-reader, as a coach working with journal-writers, and as an occasional journal-keeper myself has convinced me of the value of this practice, and this fits with my conceptual understanding of . But I’m still left wondering why it actually works: What are the underlying processes that make journal writing a meaningful activity?
The work of neuroscientist suggests some answers. Ledoux’s work has focused on memory, emotions and cognition, and he with the Edge "World Question Center":
But Ledoux’s work on emotion and cognition suggests an even more powerful reason for the value of journaling. A key theme for Ledoux is the distinction between emotional memories, which he in an Edge interview with John Brockman as "implicit, or procedural memories that are in the brain’s systems, but not reflected in consciousness" and cognitive, or explicit, memories, which he defined as "the kind of memory we usually have in mind when we use the word memory in everyday speech."
[T]he brain can produce emotional responses in us that have very little
to do with what we think we’re dealing with or talking about or
thinking about at the time. In other words, emotional reactions can be
elicited independent of our conscious thought processes. For example,
we’ve found pathways that take information into the amygdala without
first going through the neocortex, which is where you need to process
it in order to figure out exactly what it is and be conscious of it.
So, emotions can be and, in fact, probably are mostly processed at an
unconscious level. We become conscious and aware of all this after the
fact.But, of course, many otherwise valuable coaching sessions and experiential learning activities don’t evoke strong emotions; is it helpful to journal in these cases as well? Again, Ledoux’s work suggests that it is. From conducted by the Dana Foundation:
There is both an upside and
a downside to the fact that emotional states make memories stronger.
The upside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater
extent than non-emotional ones. The downside is that we remember our
emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones.So journaling after non-emotional experiences bolsters our memories of these experiences and helps to insure that they’re not lost among our more powerful and long-lasting emotional memories.
One final thought–Ledoux also discussed with Brockman the potent and even destructive power of emotional memories:
Many people have problems with their emotional memories; psychologists’
offices are filled with people who are basically trying to take care of
and alter emotional memories, get rid of them, hold them in check.(Perhaps surprisingly, given my general fondness for technology, I’m a big fan of journaling with pen and paper. The downsides are manifest–not searchable, not archivable, and the stuff does tend to pile up. But the upside is that it’s a lot less tempting to edit and re-write, and I just get my thoughts out and move on. A sentence today is worth a page tomorrow. I’m not picky about pens–I prefer cheap blue Bics–but I truly love Moleskine notebooks.)
Thanks to for refererring me to Ledoux in the first place. Photos by Del Far and culture.culte. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
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