One day I was googling “African Americans with Tourette’s” and I came upon this joke:
If you know someone is already a genius, then their affectations and quirks don’t detract from their intelligence.
But if you’re a lowly schmoe riding a city bus or standing at an intersection and you start tugging at your clothes or jerking your head erratically or shouting gibberish, no one is going to think “Ah, they must be a genius!” ESPECIALLY if you are a black woman. People think “crackhead”, “nutjob”, or “mental defective” when they see someone behaving in a weird way.
How do I know this? Because this is what I think when I see a stranger behaving in an erratic fashion.
If you suspect I’m a little “ticked off” at your remark, you are 100% correct. Frankly, I’m curious where YOU have picked up your idea from. No one would ever volunteer to have Tourette’s Syndrome, because there is nothing about it that enhances anyone’s appearance or appeal. That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. Get outta here with that kind of bullshit nonsense.
Well, the critiques are by somebody who knows what she’s about. Unlike here.
But, I did do a study that showed that using being on Jeopardy as a metric for intelligence, Dopers are 2 orders of magnitude smarter than the population at large.
So, maybe. (But it’s really selection bias.)
Sorry about ticking you off. It wasn’t intentional, nor did I intend to suggest that tics weren’t mostly a downside. I was just responding to the “mental defective” aspect.
Now that I think about it, it must have been the Simpsons that normalized it for me. Professor Frink was a little weird, but undoubtedly a genius. And then John Carmack provided a real-world example.
You make a fair point that you were mostly talking about the perceptions of strangers. But you never meet anyone totally out of context; a person behaving otherwise normally in a supermarket is different from someone in urine-soaked clothing pushing a shopping cart full of cans.
Anyway, sorry that people have treated you badly. People suck.
I don’t know what you mean by “meeting someone out of context”. I meet people all the time who don’t know a single thing about me other than how I present to them. I might be wearing the cleanest, sharpest clothes, but if I’m jerking around looking crazy, I just look like a well-dressed crazy person. The fact that I might open my mouth and reveal myself to be quite intelligent doesn’t remove the poor first impression I made.
At any rate, I almost never presume that my intelligence will be assessed accurately at first blush. This goes even when I’m well-behaved.
No one has treated me badly for having Tourette’s. I consider myself fortunate that my tics didn’t show up until I was an adult.
Not to me. If you’re dressed semi-normally and doing some activity like grocery shopping or buying a coffee, then I assume you’re not actually crazy. And if you’re a fellow student in graduate school, then I’m probably going with “quirky sign of intelligence.”
Not that I’m the best judge, really. I did run into a well-dressed guy at a bus stop having a conversation on his Bluetooth headset. But the half of the conversation I could hear got kinda weird, and when I glimpsed the other half of his head, I discovered there was no headset. He was just a crazy guy talking to himself.
Well, I don’t know what else to say besides that I’m glad you’ve accepted your nature. Not caring too much about what other people think is really the way to go.
I’ve been thinking about this, and honestly the one thing I’ve done that pushed me the furthest was getting a set of relatively ambitious friends. Just being in the general vicinity of achievement has opened my mind to opportunities I didn’t know where there and previously wouldn’t have known what to do with.
Deep breathing exercises 1-2x a day. It actually works. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and has a ton of benefits.
I only did it because I thought it would help with anxiety, but it also helped with my insomnia, I don’t automatically fall into a downward mental spiral when things go bad, my problems don’t feel as insurmountable. It is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
FWIW, I don’t ‘think’ about anything in particular. I don’t try to meditate or focus on my breathing, I just do deep rhythmic breathing (I also am hooked up to a biofeedback device to measure my progress and using binaural beats meditation cds). I usually do it while watching TV or my mind wanders. It’d probably work better if I focused on something good but meh.
I would say practicing self control in all areas of my life. Not allowing people places or things the power to control my thoughts or feelings for any period of time.
One single activity that I feel has contributed greatly to my mental strength is my archery hobby. My specific discipline deals with building the bows . My challenge is to maximize the energy they store and minimize the energy losses during the power stroke. Every one percent of energy gain is fought for tooth and nail. One could easily spend a good part of his life doing this as I have. Requires persistence and patience and constant analyzing.
