Is Giftedness a form of Neurodivergence?
You’re smart, but you don’t always feel like it. You feel things deeply and sometimes you really struggle with impostor syndrome. Above all, you clicked on this post because, quite frankly, the title is incredibly interesting and you’re ready to do some deep thinking. Did I get you? Let me know in the comments below.
I’m actually diagnosed as gifted, in as much as you can be diagnosed as gifted, my ADHD report diagnoses me as 2e “Twice Exceptional” which basically means gifted and ADHD, and I’m still trying to come to terms with accepting that as part of my identity because every time I force myself to say it on this channel I feel icky. Like I’m being arrogant while at the same time feeling impostor syndrome pushing back. But we’re going to deep dive into this a little more later.
Because one of the things I want to talk about today is whether giftedness is a form of neurodivergence in its own right. Because many of us that are gifted are diagnosed with something else, not all of us but all of us that I’ve crossed paths with anyway, the line can sometimes be a bit blurred. So today I’m going to try and distill down the gifted experience on its own and see how it all fits into this.
In order to answer the question though, we need to start out by talking about what neurodivergence means and that question isn’t really as easy to answer as I had initially hoped.
Because neurodivergence itself isn’t actually something that’s defined in the DSM-5 or whatever bible you use to explain concepts of brain functioning. The Cleveland clinic describes it as “a nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason.”. Very Well Mind refers to it as “Neurodivergence is the term for when someone's brain processes, learns, and/or behaves differently from what is considered "typical."” and the BBC recently called it “a term used for lots of different people who have different thinking or communicating styles.”
The language around that is very vague. What does “different” mean in this context? And what do we consider “typical”? I’ve already pontificated on this conversation in a few of my previous videos, linked above, so I’m not going to dive too deep into this question any further but as discussed in the paper “Neurodiversity studies: mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm” neurodivergent is a social term and somewhat of a moving target, meaning that overtime the definition of neurodivergence is going to change as our understanding of the human brain, social constructs and the way the world works continues to grow.
So with that level of complexity, how on earth am I going to answer the question about whether giftedness is a form of neurodivergence? Well, if we take the definition that neurodivergence is thinking differently and acknowledge that gifted brains think differently then I guess that’s it. Case closed, we’ve solved the problem, thank you for watching!
I’m joking, let’s get into the meat!
Part 1: What is giftedness?
So in order to look into this question, we do have to isolate what giftedness is because the fact it often comes with friends in the form of other neurodivergence means it can be hard to pin down exactly what it is that we’re talking about.
This added complexity can also be frustrating. When I had my ADHD diagnosis, my diagnoser actually took a bit of time to step away and review my diagnosis because my giftedness was masking so many of my ADHD symptoms, particularly in my younger years, that it meant that he needed to evaluate my symptoms with greater nuance to be able to spot how the two were interplaying in my brain. Fortunately for me, I did get the ADHD diagnosis, albeit one that is considered “not severe enough for medication” because of the gifted compensations, but many more aren’t able to get the diagnosis at all because the nuances of the giftedness just aren’t taken into account.
So in order to get into these nuances around giftedness, I’ve been nose deep in a book called Your Rainforest Mind by Paula Prober to gain an understanding of giftedness from her years of experience working with people who have, what she calls a “Rainforest Mind”.
Also, as a side note, I think there’s a bit of nominative determinism going on here - a therapist with the surname of Prober is just so well fitting!
So as I just alluded to, Prober is a therapist who spent her early career in the education of gifted children before pivoting to expand her work to teens and adults in her gifted therapy practise. The book is chock full of resources with each chapter containing amazing tools, strategies and further reading suggestions so this video in no way compensates for the wealth of knowledge that is the whole book, but I’m going to talk about some of the key points from the book to contextualise our discussion.
So if I were to summarise what giftedness means, I would refer to it as having extra layers of complexity. Prober is keen to emphasize that this doesn’t just mean cognitive ability or high achievement, and we’ll discuss why this often isn’t the case, or doesn’t appear to be the case, but it also refers to complexity in emotions, in sensitivity, empathy and also a bit of perfectionism thrown in there.
What is a shame is that the word almost comes with a sense of stigma attached to it. I mentioned that I still struggle with talking about it for fear of appearing arrogant so Prober is keen to stress that these conceptions of the cocky smart kid who seem themselves above everyone else isn’t actually what giftedness looks like.
Instead she opens with a series of questions to help you tell if you have a Rainforest Mind. And it’s very clever. Because some of the questions I didn’t relate to at all, such as “Do you see ecru, beige and sand where others see only white?”, some of them were talking to me on a much more personal level, rudely prodding my own fear of failure.
Most of them, however, I wasn’t so sure about. She writes that if you score at least 12 out of 23 then you’re likely to have a Rainforest Mind. Then she said this:
“If you ruminated about the answers to many of these questions and often thought “it depends”, you, too fit the profile”. Check mate Prober. You got me good there. So I guess she knows what she’s talking about!
Part 2: Aren’t you just smart?
One of the hallmarks of being gifted is that we learn quickly, incredibly quickly. We pick up basic concepts with ease and that is praised when we’re younger, and to be honest I still am very motivated by praise for it as an adult too.
And if we take a simplistic approach and stop there, that sounds amazing, wouldn’t everyone love to be gifted? But in reality, this comes as a double edged sword. When we’re praised for how fast we learn, we internalise that into our identity. We’re smart, so things should be easy for us. When they’re not then uh oh, we’ve got a problem.
This can set up impostor syndrome, making us feel like we’re not as smart as we thought we were. A fixed mindset is really not our friend here. It can cause us to give up on things the moment they start feeling hard because we’ve never really learned how to struggle at things. It can mean we procrastinate, because back when things were easy we could leave them to the last minute and still do a good job. And boring tasks are just unbearable really.
This ease of learning also means we have incredibly high standards for ourselves and we are often self-critical, feeling like we never get close to measuring up to those standards. When we do achieve something and it does feel easy, it doesn’t feel like a real achievement because, well it felt too easy, so therefore it was an easy thing to do and not something we should be proud of.
One particularly frustrating thing is that sometimes we have the ability to intellectually grasp a concept, but that doesn’t mean we have the ability to physically implement that concept. Such is the never ending frustration of being a musician. The amount of times I’ve told my fingers off.
This can also go a different way, where we see appearing smart as a bad thing, so instead of trying to live up to high expectations, we squash ourselves, to try and appear not smart, brushing by our achievements as not important because being smarter than other people is a Bad Thing and trying to be too smart is too much pressure anyway.
Because being gifted can get us in trouble too. In the workplace, if we finish all our work quicker and too a higher standard, what do we get as a well done? More work, often coming without recognition. In this situation we’re being taken advantage of for our giftedness, so best not to show your intelligence at all.
But actually, I’m missing half the picture here. Because like I often talk about how there are ADHDers who do well at school despite much of the diagnostic criteria and societal expectations implying we should be unable to cope with it, there are also amazing gifted brains who struggle to do well at school at all, and it’s got nothing to do with them not being intelligent enough.
Instead they struggle because of the lack of intelligent stimulation at school. Forced into a system where everyone goes at the same pace, these children are driven up the wall by how slow things are moving, leading to misbehaving out of sheer boredom or disengaging completely with learning.
We know from neurodivergent kids that school systems are set up with a one size fits all approach that doesn’t work for the majority of neurodivergent brains. Giftedness is no exception.
Something else that can make the education setting hard is how often when we’re gifted we don’t really fit in, something that is also very common to the neurodivergent experience. In fact, Prober calls loneliness the number one challenge to the Rainforest Minds. It can be hard to relate to others when your brain is spinning on existential questions or deeply complex topics when others just want to talk about something a lot more every day.
I know this is something I’ve struggled with. When I joined my orchestra I really thought everyone would be as deeply passionate about music and the complexities of it as I was, and while plenty of people were passionate and I’ve had some wonderful conversations about it, it was a wake up call that my deep pull to music was the exception, rather than the norm.
Giftedness can also make it hard learning and working in a group because it can be confusing for the gifted person to internalise that other people don’t work at the same speed or look at things the same way.
This can also make it really hard for us to get the support that we need. If being smart is part of our identity then it can make asking for help incredibly hard because we might worry that it makes us not seem smart.
We’re also idealistic and highly resilient, so even if we do ask for help people might not be able to see that we are actually struggling and often we get a response akin to “you’re smart, you’ll figure it out” and we often will figure it out but that’s because we have to, not because we didn’t need the support to begin with.
Prober also points out that sometimes the support just isn’t adequate enough, too low level or unable to keep up with the complexity. It’s as I reflect on this that I realise I may have been too harsh on things in the past. Things like courses I’ve taken that I’ve dismissed as useless when maybe I just needed a higher level of support than they were offering.
Part 3: Everything feels too much
So being intelligent and the double edged sword that is is one form of complexity, but actually we experience many other levels of complexity as well and one of which is emotional complexity, both from a positive and negative point of view.
Prober mentions the concept of OverExcitabilities, part of the theory of positive disintegration which basically involve a particular strong reaction to the five OverExcitabilities and has been linked in the research to giftedness ((Lysy and Piechowski 1983; Piechowski 1986; Piechowski and Miller 1995)). These five overexcitabilities are:
Psychomotor with an intense zest for life, full of enthusiasm and energy, either mental or physical.
Emotional, where you form deep intense bonds with not only people and animals but also it can be things like places and things. You have complex emotions and a sense of justice and purpose.
Intellectual, where you have an intense desire for learning and understanding.
Imaginational, thinking different with a quirky sense of humor and a love of fiction and creative daydreaming
Sensory where you experience strong reactions to what goes through your five senses.
You will probably not be surprised to hear that I score very highly on the first four of those but middling for sensory overexcitability - I know I have sensory sensitivities but they’re not that bad for someone who is also probably autistic!
These overexcitabilities are great in many ways - I don’t know about you but I LOVE being excited - but they also can cause challenges of their own. Emotional overexcitabilities can lead to us being deeply empathetic. Prober tells the story of a client being moved to tears by seeing a tree cut down. I haven’t had as strong a reaction as that but I do have memories of being a child and feeling deeply saddened by seeing a toy, lost by their owner, abandoned on the street.
I knew as a child that this wasn’t a “normal” reaction to have so would distract myself and temper my emotion but even retelling this story I actually feel it welling up. I feel for the child losing their toy but also the toy that is lost by its owner as well. And I know how this sounds, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how it sounds, but it’s definitely something I experience.
This can also lead to an empathy for the state of the world and cause us to become particularly upset at environmental and social injustices, something that can also lead to existential depression and guilt at our privilege and the part we play in this all. I remember my own existential awakening as a child, baffling one of my poor teachers when I started talking to her about the meaning of life at the end of class. We pick up a sense of responsibility for these things from a young age and as a result carry a lot of weight on our shoulders.
Our sensitivities can also lead to anxiety and overthinking, which, when I put all this into context means that being gifted can be incredibly difficult at times.
Part 4: Jack of All Trades
Another hallmark of giftedness is having an interest and enthusiasm for so many different things, and Prober suggests that many gifted people are also multipotentialites. That means we struggle to do just one job, wanting to do multiple things or change career on a regular basis.
This is actually a topic that I discuss a lot on this channel and I’m not going to go into a huge detail on it here because I’ve done a whole video on it already which you can find up above, but I wanted to emphasize that changing careers, that doing multiple things, that being a generalist rather than a specialist in just one thing is not a bad thing and in fact is significantly more valuable than you give it credit for. Seriously, go and watch that video after this one because I think you’ll find it super validating.
Part 5: Something bigger than me
There was one chapter in the book that I found difficult to get through, and I actually find it a little difficult to get my head around because this chapter was about a connection to something spiritual. Prober states that while many gifted people struggled with a standard religion, finding the answers to complex questions insufficient for their understanding, many of them were still incredibly spiritual.
She states that many gifted people were spiritually connected with nature and links that to the earlier mention of having a strong drive to protect the planet and the environment.
The reason why I struggle with this chapter is because I am just lacking that. I mean it’s not that I’m indifferent to the environment or urging on oil companies. I do care and I’ve gone mostly vegetarian in order to save the planet. I also love walking through nature and enjoying gorgeous nature. I just don’t think I feel a spiritual connection to it and I don’t think I really understand what that means.
However, when I take a step back and contextualise it within the rest of the book, I think it all fundamentally comes down to a need for greater meaning, for something bigger than us. And that’s something I can get behind. Because I feel a drive for purpose, wanting to do something that means something. And I’d like to think I’m doing something right now in being open about my neurodivergence and giftedness. I’d like to make a difference in what I’m doing.
Prober describes this as being amazed and deeply connected to beauty in the world and as I’m not a very visual person I’d like to reframe this slightly for me because while I appreciate things that are beautiful, I think actually the feeling that I appreciate more, and that I think is also common to those enraptured by beauty, is actually a feeling of awe.
And I relate strongly to this feeling of awe. I am awed by hearing a piece of music that so greatly conveys emotion that I feel it squeezing my stomach. I am awed by seeing my friends and clients achieving things that they never thought they could achieve. I’m also in awe of things that others might not find awe in. When I see someone do an amazingly cool move in jiu jitsu that I’d love to learn. And when I see someone break a speedrunning world record that they’ve grafted for years at. Because being gifted doesn’t just mean finding awe at the big stuff, it’s finding awe at the smaller stuff as well.
Part 6: Putting it all together
So I think through this analysis I’ve done a good job of laying out the ways in which we, the gifted, think differently. And if we take the definition of neurodivergent as thinking differently, then I guess my earlier conclusion was right: Giftedness is a form of neurodivergence, case closed.
But actually I wanted to go a little deeper because I see things in giftedness that overlap with other forms of neurodivergence. We’ve explored the concept of an interest based attention and how that makes easy things difficult when there’s insufficient challenge but can cause deep focus on things that are interesting. Doesn’t that sound like a huge overlap with ADHD? Isn’t finding easy things difficult and harder things easy a symptom of Dyslexia as well?
We’ve also touched upon sensory sensitivities. I didn’t go deep into this topic but Prober talks more about how sensitivities to sound, touch and visual stimulus can be significant to someone who is gifted. Doesn’t that overlap with autism too?
We’ve spoken of difficulties with emotions that could overlap with emotional dysregulation, difficulties with fitting in with peers and a strong sense of justice, all of these things known to be traits of various forms of neurodivergence.
So what makes all of these traits diagnosable but giftedness not?
I’m actually not here to draw the line as to what’s diagnosable and what’s not and I don’t really want to get into a debate over the social vs medical model of disability because I’ve actually had that conversation already here on YouTube, yet another link above, but the conclusion I have reached in my own mind is that giftedness is complex, it’s multi faceted, it has parts that are extremely difficult to contrast the parts of it that are good and those difficulties can end up completely derailing a gifted person’s life.
So is giftedness a form of neurodivergence? I think so. But that’s just my opinion as I navigate my own identity through this messy experience we call life. Yours might be different. Let me know in the comments below.
Thank you for your attention today and I’ll see you in the next one!
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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