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"Fact-smartness" is mastering what you need to know, which is a left brain skill. 

"Test-smartness" is knowing how to use facts on tests... involves both left brain and right brain thinking skills. 

"Stress-smartness" is learning how to think calmly under test pressures, which calls into play the right brain's emotional / positive visualization skills.

"Whole-brain thinking" goes beyond traditional left brain (verbal, factual, logical) thinking, tapping also into the right brain (creative problem-solving abilities, visual, emotional) thinking. 

To train their whole brains, we look at left brain skills ("fact-smartness" -- which in school receives the most emphasis), combined left/right brain skills ("test-smartness” plus creatively solving abstract questions to provide the correct answers), and right brain skills ("stress-smartness" -- keeping your whole brain working smoothly by relaxing.)

How you react to stress influences how easily you resist or succumb to disease, including viruses like HIV, discovered UCLA AIDS Institute scientists. 

Reported in the Dec.15 edition of Biological Psychiatry, the new findings identify the immune mechanism that makes shy people more susceptible to infection than outgoing people.

She must detach from who she has been, in order to discover who she is meant to be. [amazon.com]

Toxic Childhoods  - By Randy Dotinga

A troubled home life can literally make children sick -- even after they become adults. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have found that children raised in "risky" families -- high on anger and low on love -- were more prone to develop mental and physical illnesses later in life.

The trend held up regardless of whether the families were rich or poor. However, children who grow up in such homes aren't doomed to their fates, says study co-author Rena Repetti, an associate professor of psychology.

"There's a lot of hope," Repetti says. "All of these things can be changed. We're not saying the family environment sets chain reactions in motion that can't be reversed."

Repetti and her colleagues spent six years examining more than 500 studies that looked at how a family's "social environment influences [the children's] physical and mental health." Some of the studies followed groups of people for decades. ...

The researchers uncovered two major types of "risky" families. Some featured "high levels of aggression, overt conflict and expressions of anger," Repetti says, while the other typewas "cold, unsupportive and neglectful."

Repetti and her colleagues speculate that children in "risky" families may not learn how to deal with stress properly.

"If you live in a chronically stressful environment early in life, you become hyper-responsive to stress later in life," she says.

"There's a cumulative effect on the ability to respond to stress and recover from stress."

"People can learn how to cope with stress, how to regulate their emotional states, how to do things to reduce how they react to stress," she says. The results of the research appear in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Bulletin.

 (from HealthScoutNews, April 11 2002)

A third characteristic of eminent individuals is an extraordinary ability to cope with tension and marginality (Gardner, 1994). 

Tensions, both intellectual and personal, result from trying to solve major intellectual problems within a an area and produce novel work. 

Marginality is a result of living and working frequently on the edges of acceptance by the critics and gatekeepers of the talent domain. 

Only individuals who can tolerate high levels of tension can succeed in putting forth novel work. 

Eminent individuals have been found to enjoy the tensions and stresses that accompany their work. They, in fact, thrive on it. ///

As children, eminent individuals have developed coping skills to handle high levels of tension or marginality in their lives. 

Many had stressful childhoods with tense and even traumatizing family situations (Ochse, 1993; Albert, 1994; Simonton, 1992).

> from article: Psychological Factors in the Development of Adulthood Giftedness from Childhood Talent by Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, PhD, director of the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University

Gardner, H. "The fruits of asynchrony: A psychological examination of creativity." Changing the World. A Framework for the Study of Creativity. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, pp. 47-68.

Ochse, R. Before the Gates of Excellence. The Determinants of Creative Genius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

Albert, R. "The contribution of early family history to the achievement of eminence." Talent Development. Proceedings from the 1993 Henry B. and Jocelyn Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development. Eds. N. Colangelo, S.G. Assouline and D.L. Ambroson. Dayton, OH: Ohio Psychology Press, 1994, pp. 311-360.

Simonton, D. K. "The child parents the adult: On getting genius from giftedness." Talent Development: Proceedings from the 1991 Henry B. and Jocelyn Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development, Eds. N. Colangelo, S. G. Assouline, and D. L. Ambroson. New York: Trillium, 1992, pp. 278-297
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> photo: "Thus, rather than becoming a crazed killer or vengeful victimizer of men, Niki de St. Phalle's fury -- some of which stemmed from having been sexually abused by her father -- fostered a fecund creativity, that served her well throughout her prolific career."