Social innovation converstations

This collection of innovation conversations includes an entertaining and broad scoped talk by David Brooks emphasizing the importance of non-cognitive skills and emotional, automatic and mirroring processes in understanding behaviour, decision-making and human capital formation. Producing a language that facilitates consideration of emotional and relational processing at the political level is a focus of his discussion on the transition from a physical to a human-capital economy. Brooks covers findings from neuroscience, psychology, sociology, genetics, and behavioural economics and is fairly on the ball when it comes to the importance and trajectory of this stuff.

One thing that came up in the discussion on this talk is the value of an emotional connection to education and the importance of forming relational interconnections between life-domains. There is a lot of work on student satisfaction and other aspects such as self-discipline and emotional management, however, in terms of reducing achievement gaps in a 'meritocracy' boosting emotional engagement with education and social confidence is likely to be an essential complement to self-regulation.