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We’re called SDM. Sonic Death Monkey.” “‘Sonic Death Monkey.’” “What do you think? Dick likes it.” “Barry, you’re over thirty years old. You owe it to yourself and to your friends and to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.” “I owe it to myself to go out on the edge, Rob, and this group really does go out on the edge. Over it, in fact.” “You’ll be going fucking right over it if you come anywhere near me next Friday night.” “That’s what we want. Reaction. And if Laura’s bourgeois lawyer friends can’t take it, then fuck ’em. Let ’em riot, we can handle it. We’ll be ready.” He gives what he fondly imagines to be a demonic, drug-crazed chuckle.
You can see the bad-apple problem in a study of NBA basketball teams—a setting where players who lack prosocial skills stand out as self-centered and narcissistic. Psychologists coded players’ narcissism from their Twitter profiles. Yes, I’m flexing, and no, I couldn’t find a shirt. When I look in the mirror, all I see staring back is greatness. My biggest regret is that I’ll never be able to watch myself play live. If teams had many narcissists or even one extreme narcissist, they completed fewer assists and won fewer games. They also failed to improve over the season—especially if their point guard (the primary passer and play caller) scored high on narcissism. Narcissists are ball hogs, and the most undervalued players are the ones who help their teammates score.
Hidden Potential
Adam Grant
HOLD YOUR BREATH Several months after experimenting with carbon dioxide therapy, I was at home reading the Sunday paper, flipping through the obituaries, and saw that Dr. Donald Klein had died. Klein was the psychiatrist who spent years studying the links between chemoreceptor flexibility, carbon dioxide, and anxieties. He was 90. It was Klein’s research that inspired Justin Feinstein to pursue the NIH-funded experiments in Tulsa. I wrote Feinstein with the news. He was crushed. He told me he’d been planning on reaching out to Klein in the coming weeks regarding what could be a “game-changing discovery.” It turns out that the amygdalae, those gooey nodes on the sides of our head that help govern perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects of our breathing. Patients with epilepsy who have had these brain areas stimulated with electrodes immediately cease breathing. The patients were totally unaware of it and didn’t seem to feel their carbon dioxide levels rising long after their breathing ceased. Communication between the chemoreceptors and amygdalae works both ways: these structures are constantly exchanging information and adjusting breathing every second of every minute of the day. If communication breaks down, havoc ensues. Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suffer from connection problems between these areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath throughout the day. Only when the body becomes overwhelmed by carbon dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an emergency signal to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would reflexively start fighting to breathe. They’d panic. Eventually their bodies adapt to avoid such unexpected attacks by staying in a state of alert, by constantly overbreathing in an effort to keep their carbon dioxide as low as possible. “What anxious patients could be experiencing is a…
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