Daniel Goleman reminded me of the Yerkes-Dodson Law in a recent NYT article. I had long since forgotten its name; when I mention it to clients, I call it “the inverted U.”

The Yerkes-Dodson Law demonstrates an empirical relationship between arousal and performance. It dictates that performance increases with cognitive arousal but only to a certain point: when levels of arousal become too high, performance will decrease. A corollary is that there is an optimal level of arousal for a given task.

At the left of the curve, picture complete boredom – no arousal, no learning. As you go over the top, and on to the right side, imagine arousal going to agitation, stress, and anxiety; again, there’s no learning taking place. Best performance is at that top point, which Goleman calls the brain’s sweet spot.

Goleman is interested in the sweet spot (or, shall we say, the sour spots) in relation to high-stakes testing. His argument is yet another caution about the poor use we make of group achievement tests; you know I’m always happy to see another nail in that coffin of the should-be-dead.

But I’m more intrigued by a general implication that lurks in the Y-D Law. Let me pose it as two questions:

• Kids have a sweet spot for learning, a just-enough level of arousal that avoids the Scylla of boredom and the Charybdis of anxiety / stress / pressure. Shouldn’t it be a primary goal of education to ease every child into the sweet spot as many minutes of each day as is possible?
• Would kids, under “the right” educational circumstances, tend to hold themselves in the sweet spot?