New Hampshire: The Unlikely Birthplace of Two Big Ideas.

Good Saturday morning, everyone! I like to drop in some fun and/or interesting tidbits into the blog on the weekend. This week, let's take a look at an unlikely source of two fascinating, world-shaping concepts, both of which emerged from my home state. When people think of intellectual epicenters, New Hampshire rarely tops the list. But this small New England state has a surprisingly strong claim to being the birthplace of two enormously influential ideas: artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Where "Artificial Intelligence" Got Its Name

The Dartmouth Conference, 1956

In the summer of 1956, a small group of researchers gathered at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, for what became known as the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Organized by John McCarthy, along with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, the workshop is widely credited as the moment the term "artificial intelligence" was coined and formalized as a field of study.

The proposal for the conference boldly stated that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." That single sentence launched decades of research, funding, hype cycles, and eventually the technology reshaping our world today. Attendees at Dartmouth that summer went on to found some of the most important AI labs in the country, and the "Dartmouth Conference" is still treated as AI's founding myth — the Big Bang of machine intelligence.

Where "Emotional Intelligence" Was Born

Thompson Hall at my alma mater, UNH...What we used to call "The Poor Man's Dartmouth"!

Nearly 250 miles and 34 years later, another idea with "intelligence" in its name took root in New Hampshire — this time at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. In 1990, psychology professor John D. Mayer, working with Yale's Peter Salovey, published the papers that coined the term "emotional intelligence" and laid out its first formal academic model: the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, discriminate among them, and use that information to guide thinking and behavior.

Their work stayed largely within academic psychology circles until 1995, when journalist Daniel Goleman came across Mayer and Salovey's research. Goleman reached out to the pair, and with their permission, used "Emotional Intelligence" as the title of his bestselling book — the one that introduced the concept to millions of readers and boardrooms worldwide. Mayer has said the title itself was actually his editor's idea to make the book more attention-grabbing; Goleman's book expanded well beyond Mayer and Salovey's original, narrower academic model, and the two camps have had a friendly but pointed rivalry about the term's scope ever since. Still, without Mayer's foundational research at UNH, the phrase "emotional intelligence" as we know it wouldn't exist.

A Small State, Two Big Legacies

It's a strange bit of intellectual geography: within such a small state, separated by a few decades, researchers coined the terms for both the coldest, most computational branch of science and one of psychology's warmest, most human-centered concepts. Dartmouth gave the world a machine's capacity to reason. UNH gave the world a name for humanity's capacity to feel — and to understand emotions in others.

Next time someone brings up ChatGPT or emotional intelligence assessments at work, it's worth remembering: both ideas trace back to New Hampshire. Not Silicon Valley, not an Ivy League media empire — just two university campuses a couple hours apart, decades before either concept became a household term.

Performance Transformation is positioned at the confluence of AI and EI. Since 2009, more than 500 combat veterans have experienced our "Warriors in Transition" workshops, which lean heavily into Emotional Intelligence and evolved to incorporate Dr. Rich Davidson's discoveries into the Six Dimensions of Emotional Style. Our neuroscience-based approach to coaching and leadership development seeks to harness "The Human Continuum", striking a balance between the growing cognitive abilities of AI and the infinite capacity of the human mind, heart and spirit to connect, engage and inspire.

For more information, please reach out to terry@performtransform.com

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