The dark side of being the ‘gifted kid’ Those who think exceptional students have it made don’t understand that being brilliant can have dark implications, writes Swerve’s Marcello Di Cintio.
Reed Ball started playing Monopoly with his family at age three—and beat them. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first kids to have a “portable” computer, a 10-kilogram Amstrad PPC512. Reed brought it to class until one of the school’s bullies knocked it out of his hands and down a stairwell. Reed was a math whiz, and used to correct his teachers’ science errors. When they warned him he would get lead poisoning if he kept stabbing at his own arm with a pencil, Reed replied, “actually, it is graphite.” Just before he graduated from high school in 1991, Reed developed software for a major oil company that converted old blueprints into working documents.
He began his studies for a degree in mathematics that September, but flunked out a year later. Porn Star James Deen GQ Profile - July 2012: Celebrities. It is a clement spring day in greater Los Angeles, and James Deen is driving through the soft green tumescences of the Calabasas hills on his way to a pornographic-movie shoot.
If Deen betrays not a trace of anticipation, aversion, or excitement at the prospect of having sex on-camera today, it is because having sex on-camera is something the 26-year-old does more frequently than most of us use dental floss: "About 360 days a year" is Deen's offhand tally. Deen's professional relentlessness has yielded a host of accolades. In 2009, when he was 23, the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, pornography's Oscars, named Deen "Male Performer of the Year. " (Deen was one of the youngest actors ever to be so decorated.) This on the heels of a similar distinction from the X-Rated Critics Organization, which in 2007 noted the arrival of a major talent with an "Unsung Swordsman" award. A visit to the comments section of Deen's website appears to confirm Nightline's claims: I have many questions: And cut. Psychologists discover oxytocin receptor gene's link to optimism, self-esteem.
UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and "mastery," the belief that one has control over one's own life -- three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression.
Basics - A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task. Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit) What are the causes of success?
At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else. That’s a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How did that person get so good at hitting a baseball or trading stocks? For a long time, talent seemed to be about inheritance, about the blessed set of genes that gave rise to some particular skill.
In recent years, however, the pendulum has shifted. That’s interesting, right? The ability to ask these questions, to peel away layers of explanation, is one of the reasons I’m drawn to the psychological sciences. The first thing Duckworth, et. al. discovered is that deliberate practice works. But that still begs the question: Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? There are two interesting takeaways from this study. The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation. I.
The Poverty of Attention I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard (“iguana hold yr hand LOL get it like Beatles”); refresh your work e-mail, your home e-mail, your school e-mail; upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so (I know that seems drastic: Tell them you’re having an appendectomy or something and are about to lose consciousness).
Good. Now: Count your breaths. Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. The Memory Doctor 2010 - The future of false memories. Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal. Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11. How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD - Media. It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint.
That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, "I'm not completely nuuuuts! " Upon further consideration, a more explanative response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there. "There" would be Haiti, where I'd just spent two weeks covering the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that shook the country into ugly chaos.