After eighteen months of humiliation, just a few hours before it was set to end, she had to cope with the biggest setback of her career. She may have had the right sort of brain to handle these things—it might be as simple as that. But when I asked her about this ability, she didn’t see it as a sign of her exceptional biology. Emotional control, she told me, was just another form of discipline. “You have to regulate emotion,” she said. “You can bring it back at some later stage, but when you know you’ve got something to do, you can remove it from your thoughts, put it in a vault, and get on
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