The Hypomanic American and Organizing
Link: Hypomanic American, The - New York Times.
This article in the NY times is fascinating. It doesn't say it, but there may also be a link to ADD and even to the difficulty many creative people have organizing themselves.
Creative, risk taking people are very eccentric in the way they organize themselves. Being a "creative" (ENTP) personality myself, and the grandaughter of immigrants from Spain, Portugal, England and Montreal, organizing was a skill I really had to work at.
I suppose that's why I'm always seeking out new approaches to organizing. I don't believe one size fits all and love helping other people find non-traditional organizing systems that work for their personal style.
All the best,
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Here's the article in case the link stops working.....
The Hypomanic American
For centuries, scholars have tried to explain the American
character: is it the product of the frontier experience, or of the
heritage of dissenting Protestantism, or of the absence of feudalism?
This year, two professors of psychiatry each published books
attributing American exceptionalism to a new and hitherto unsuspected
source: American DNA. They argue that the United States is full of
energetic risk-takers because it's full of immigrants, who as a group
may carry a genetic marker that expresses itself as restless curiosity,
exuberance and competitive self-promotion - a combination known as
hypomania.
Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. and John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins
University Medical School make their cases for an immigrant-specific
genotype in their respective books, "American Mania" and "The Hypomanic
Edge." Even when times are hard, Whybrow points out, most people don't
leave their homelands. The 2 percent or so who do are a self-selecting
group. What distinguishes them, he suggests, might be the genetic
makeup of their dopamine-receptor system - the pathway in the brain
that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.
The genetic variation that gets neurons firing along the dopamine
circuits seems to have been disproportionately prevalent in the kinship
groups that over generations walked the farthest 10,000 to 20,000 years
ago, from Asia across the Bering Strait into the Americas. This genetic
makeup, Whybrow argues, may also be present to a high degree among the
98 percent of Americans who were either born in another country or into
families that came to this country in the last three centuries. If the
genetic marker cuts across immigrants of all origins, it's not about
where you come from, it's that you came at all.
Why aren't Canada and Australia, where many immigrants and their
descendants also live, as hypomanic as the United States? Whybrow
answers that behavior is always a function of genetics and environment
- nature with an overlay of nurture. "Here you have the genes and the
completely unrestricted marketplace," he says - with the anything-goes
rules of American capitalism also reflecting immigrant genetics.
"That's what gives us our peculiar edge."
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