Some thoughts from Steve about his second TEDx Talk:
I gave a TEDx talk a while back to the Davidson Academy: a high school for the extremely gifted and talented. These are kids who have IQs in the 99.9th percentile and above; 1 in a 1,000, at a minimum.
At that level of intellectual achievement you’d think these kids have world by the tail — and in some ways they do. But they still suffer, with rejection, identity issues, and all of the normal issues flesh is heir to — and they tend to over-rely on their intellectual problem solving abilities to deal with these issues.
In a way their lives are the story of the human condition, on steroids. I decided to give the talk on human language and cognition, and why we need to learn to slow to slow our minds down at times, not just speed them up. Everyone faces this same issue — even those who are developmentally disabled — but ironically, better educated people face it in spades. The human mind did not evolve to make us happy — it evolved to solve problems. You need to know how to put on the mental brakes when we are dealing with issues that are not the kinds of things problem solving is good for. We all do.
I’m pretty happy with the resulting talk. It explains relational frame theory with a single 4 line ditty and walks though a whole variety of “cognitive defusion” methods to slow the mind down when that is the healthy thing to do.
Enjoy the video!
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