When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine - but not when she looks elsewhere.

In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.

The task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life's perils by anticipating dangers before they arise. If we are preoccupied by worries, we have that must less attention to expend on figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies, propelling us toward the very disaster they predict.

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.

All the classical meditation traditions, in one way or another, stress nonattachment to the self as a goal of practice. Oddly, this dimension is largely ignored in scientific research, which tends to focus on health and other such benefits. I suppose the difference has to do with the contrast in views of the self from the spiritual and scientific perspectives. Scientists value the self; spiritual traditions have another perspective.

The more time you put into practicing, then, the greater the payoff.