Recent articles
The author of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. notes that about 15 to 20 percent of the population have this trait.
“It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations,” she says. “It also means you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been out in a highly stimulating environment for too long.”
See her short video about this on the Highly Sensitive site.
A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.
Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience — what psychologists call fluid intelligence — is innate and cannot be taught. . .
But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works.
Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower,
By Nicholas Bakalar, NY Times.
“I have never been a fan of learning in a classroom. Inside a laboratory or a garage, I always wanted to know more, but never inside a classroom.”
That quote is from Caltech physicist Caolionn O’Connell, PhD, from the site for PBS program Einstein’s Big Idea. Speaking of Einstein: he was expelled from school (in 1894) for “undermining the authority of his teachers and being a disruptive influence.”
Our self concept, recognition of our talents, appreciation for divergent thinking, respect for high sensitivity or other aspects of being exceptional — all of these can be guided and nurtured, or corroded and corrupted, by our school experiences.
Continued on Teen / Young Adult Talent
As she noted at the start of her blog (in 2005), writer Liz Spikol “struggles with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder and OCD. I was also diagnosed with dissociative disorder N.O.S. — which means I suffer from intermittent depersonalization and derealization.”
Here is part of a New York Times article that includes Spikol and others who speak openly of “madness”:
‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma, By GABRIELLE GLASER
IN the YouTube video, Liz Spikol is smiling and animated, the light glinting off her large hoop earrings. Deadpan, she holds up a diaper. It is not, she explains, a hygienic item for a giantess, but rather a prop to illustrate how much control people lose when they undergo electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, as she did 12 years ago.
In other videos and blog postings, Ms. Spikol, a 39-year-old writer in Philadelphia who has bipolar disorder, describes a period of psychosis so severe she jumped out of her mother’s car and ran away like a scared dog.
Heather Thomas based her new novel “Trophies” on Hollywood trophy wives - women who, she says “get a bad rap, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about them. But really, there isn’t a hospital wing or a library in this city that wasn’t the result of some trophy wife’s efforts.”
Continued on Women and Talent
In her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want she explains, “50 percent of individual differences in happiness are governed by genes, 10 percent by life circumstances, and the remaining 40 percent by what we do and how we think - that is, our intentional activities and strategies.
“The secret of course lies in that 40 percent. If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings.
“As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.” - Kim Basinger
Many of us were shy as children, and continue to be. In more extreme versions, it may be labeled social phobia or social anxiety disorder, but maybe it is usually a personality trait, related to introversion and high sensitivity. A number of psychologists and others argue that shyness can be viewed as an ordinary variation in personality, and should not be pathologized or treated as a medical condition to be overcome.
Actor Sigourney Weaver has commented, “Sometimes because I am very shy, when I meet a director and they are shy too, we just sort of sit there.”
Many other actors describe themselves as shy. Nicole Kidman has said she is “very shy - really shy - I even had a stutter as a kid, which I slowly got over, but I still regress into that shyness. So I don’t like walking into a crowded restaurant by myself; I don’t like going to a party by myself.”
Many of us avoid crowds or social contacts that are too anxiety producing, and it works. But if this kind of anxiety and protective behavior gets to be overly self-limiting, holding us back from expressing our talents, there are ways to deal with it.
Continued on Highly Sensitive
Maggie Gyllenhaal: [about her film SherryBaby] Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished shooting.
And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.
Continued on The Inner Actor
In her article How Much Do You Need to Know Before You’re an Expert?, career counselor Valerie Young of Changing Course describes a number of self-limiting beliefs about qualification and competence. Here are some quotes:
You’re especially prone to the Expert Trap if you mistakenly believe that competence and expertise are one and the same. The belief that, “If I were really competent, intelligent, qualified . . . I would know more” keeps far too many people from striking out on their own.
A lot of men fall victim to this same self-limiting thinking.
Yet my early research, coupled with twenty-plus years of anecdotal evidence, suggests women are more prone to equate competence with knowing it all.
[Image from Rethinking Expertise, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans.
A recent Associated Press article talks about actress, singer and songwriter Miley Cyrus and her “controversial photo” at age 15 in Vanity Fair as presenting “a great opportunity for parents to discuss how seemingly innocuous photos posted to a blog or social networking site can be misinterpreted.”
But acclaimed author Germaine Greer says, “No matter how much energy Disney - which makes the TV show Hannah Montana, in which Cyrus stars - might put into denying the obvious, 15-year-olds are sexually aware.”
Continued on Teen / Young Adult Talent
