6mo ago

TIL: Being intellectually gifted is a spectrum of neurodivergence and does not automatically mean the person is/will be a genius in anything

Other points:

it's not mutually exclusive with any other neurodivergence, in which case they're "twice exceptional";
In an environment with unprepared people and professionals, they may be wrongly diagnosed as having some other neurodivergence.
It's not just a high IQ score;
Gifted kids can be problem students and have low grades;
Homework feels like torture (this is true to any child, tho);
They're very likely to question authorities and point out perceived hypocrisy (emphasis here on perceived, because pointing something and being right are different things);
As kids, they may have weird quirks for executing tasks, such as wanting to hold pencils the "wrong" way, or wanting to press against a wall to do homework;

If you're Brazilian or can understand Brazilian Portuguese, this is the podcast I listened to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apnuIIePeeA

Aos brasileiros que acabarem encontrando esse post, o podcast que assisti é o que linkei acima

41 comments

This is absolutely true and applies to everything. Becoming good at anything is the result of the combination between predisposition (as in capacity) and favorable conditions for that capacity to manifest. Simple example: a gifted guitar player can only manifest their virtue if they ever have access to the instrument at the right time to spike their interest.

Unless you can give me an exact specific definition of what "intellectually gifted" means in this context then all of this is just meaningless bullshit.
- Came here to say this. I would like to know the definition (and its theory behind) to have a conversation about it, but I won’t watch three hours of a video to get the answer (or not!).
- Exactly. That's all this is. That's all ANYTHING is. Just a series of meaningless bullshit until we can get home from work/school for the day, and be naked for the next 6 hours. Freely letting our farts out without fear of judgement. Letting our man-titties and butt cheeks jiggle in the vibrations of the long fart. Then we can masturbate, and eat dorritos.
  Everything else is just made up bullshit designed to waste our time.
  
  I just meant that the term "intellectually gifted" is meaningless without context, but to each his own I suppose
  
  That was beautiful.
- When we do testing in schools to determine giftedness it is the top 95th percentile of different tests. It wasn’t just reading and math but also nonverbal tasks (like tangram type things). We used state testing and IQ scores as well. We tried to create a whole profile of a child and then determine which ones met the criteria of requiring gifted services (95th percentile and above). I don’t think there’s a federal guideline so each state (or even each district) sets their own parameters. The twice exceptional kids were the ones with ADHD or other diagnoses. But yes, it was possible that these kids were not the “smart, model student” though I’ve had plenty of those as well.
- To me, being an intellectual doesn’t necessarily mean someone is exceptionally smart in the traditional sense. I’ve always taken it to mean a person who can take a few steps back and dispassionately, honestly evaluate things from a distance. It describes how they think, not what they think.
  I listen to a lot of podcasts with guests/hosts I’d consider intellectuals, and I’ve often found that, given the same information, these people tend to land on the same or similar conclusions on unrelated topics. Another common trait of an intellectual is that their ideas don’t map neatly onto a political ideology. They don’t adopt ideas wholesale but instead form opinions on different subjects individually. Maybe I’m talking about intellectual honesty now, which might be slightly different, but that’s my take on it. I remember Sean Carroll defining intellectualism along these lines on an old podcast, and it resonated with me.
  There have been two recent events that, in my view, serve as good tests of a person’s intellectual honesty. First was the Trump assassination attempt. One of the thinkers I admire most is also one of the most anti-Trump people I know, but I was confident they’d still condemn political violence like this, which they did. The second event was just a few days ago: the landing of the Starship 1st stage. If a person is so blinded by their hatred of Musk that they can’t admit how impressive that was, then I don’t consider them an intellectually honest thinker.

- I like how vague some of these are. "ability to notice details", "pattern recognition"
  Not "heightened ability..." or "enhanced..." or any modifier. Does that mean average intelligence, neurotypical people can't notice details or patterns?
  
  I read it as being particularly good at it, since everybody does indeed do pattern matching and can spot details.
  That format of presentation - especially when the choice was clearly made to go for more points rather than more depth per point - is unsuitable for precise, detailed explanations, so expecting otherwise isn't exactly logic.
  As somebody who, judging by everything else in there matches that particular part of the spectrum (though never formally diagnosed) I've always had an eye for details and am big at figuring things out via pattern matching (I.e. notice that certain combinations of things tend to go along with certain other combinations of things or outcomes) which is also what powers the "skip" thinking (you can jump directly to a list of possibly explanations by recognizing that it shares a pattern with something else whose explanation I already have and then work backwards from there to confirm if indeed one of those possible explanations is the correct one).
  I've studied and worked in highly intellectual areas (Science and Technology) and have seldom come across others with a similar style of thinking so to me it makes sense that in that graph those things are there in the sense of more/better than most.

In my gifted class with three other students we were all diagnosed with ADHD later, just saying.
- Here's to our "wasted potential!"
  
  Apparently I could have done well if I applied myself
- If it was 20, maybe even 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child. But I wasn't disruptive and I scored extremely well on tests. In the 80s, that overruled pretty much everything else. And when I had trouble later, it was because I was "lazy." This is why I dislike the narrative that "gifted means everything came easily until it didn't and then they failed because they didn't face hardship." I didn't have trouble because I wasn't challenged. I had trouble because I had undiagnosed ADHD and autism, but got slapped with the lazy label early and often. Nothing I did was ever enough, and I was told my whole life that I just wasn't trying hard enough. All because I learned to read before kindergarten and scored in the 99th percentile on standardized testing.
  Meanwhile, the 5-6 people from my elementary gifted classes that graduated with me all kept excelling through school and into their careers. Which also contradicts the easy narrative that sprang up around "gifted." Not sure how many of them had concurrent neurodivergencies... but I was the weird one even among the weird kids lol.
- Oh that wasn’t the case in mine. Some of us had been diagnosed earlier

Look, I don't want to nitpick much, or make you feel like I'm bashing you, that's not my intent.
The post, however, is pretty far off of reality. "Gifted" is not the same kind of thing as other neurodivergence. It simply doesn't have a well defined criteria. The only criteria that's used in a majority of places that use the term is IQ or other testing scores.
Should it have the same kind of diagnostic criteria as other aspects of neurofunction? Maybe. Maybe not. There's just not enough information on it all to tell if it really is a form of neurodivergence, or just part of neurotypical function with higher "intelligence". I don't speak Portuguese, so I can't tell if that video is accurate in its information or not, but I can tell that "Gifted" as a term is not what you've presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.
If there's newer definitions and criteria, it would be nice if you put them into post instead of relying on a YouTube video at all, but that's whatever.
I'm not saying I disagree. Every "Gifted" or "accelerated" kid I ever knew behaved differently than most people. It may well be a form of neurodivergence that isn't just intelligence (which is a difficult thing to quantify properly in itself).
I'm just saying that the post here doesn't really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There's no meat here.
- but I can tell that “Gifted” as a term is not what you’ve presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.
  I blame the english language, then. The Venn diagram MelodiousFunk posted should hopefully help visualize what I meant somewhat
  I’m just saying that the post here doesn’t really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There’s no meat here.
  Hard to distill almost 3 hours of talk into a lemmy post, but a valid point
  
  Yeah, the diagram does a good job. And, English is a bitch lol. It's hard enough as a native language to navigate all the weird rules and usages.

Imo, it's the human condition. Everyone is good at some things, average at most, bad at others.
Occasionally it happens that sone kids are great at academic achievement and they get labeled as "gifed" because that's what's superficially celebrated in our culture. I say superficially because after school it doesn't matter much

Right, i think that's a pretty common observation. Starting at school. Kids who are considered more intelligent don't necessarily do well in school. On contrary, some really struggle. At least that's what I observed when I was 12 and had some gifted classmates.

Honestly don't know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.
My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I've realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage... which as I have come to understand it isn't ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.
All in all though it's a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it's a "waste" of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it's often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.
To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people's reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to "a different brain". The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn't serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn't particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn't playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.

I was a gifted kid, I'd say most our class was really freaking weird in some way or another. There were definitely those weird ultra good rule followers on one side and the totally weird misfits/defiant troublemakers on the other with very few seeming "normal" kids in the middle. Despite having higher IQs, I don't think that the students were generally more successful than other students in life. In fact, based on those that I am still in touch with, they might be below average in that respect.

"Gifted" is a bullshit word that says more about the state of the Napoleonic educational industry than it does about the poor kid it's leveled at.
Fuck "gifted".
There is no God.
Every bit of knowledge & skill that the phrase steals credit for? That kid in question has busted their ass to attain. But, with a couple syllables, it's all surreptitiously offered at the feet of an ancient comic book character whose modern flock justify war, genocide, rape, genital mutilation, and myriad other human rights atrocities in its "name". Nah.
Fuck "gifted", and fuck your god.
edit: So many "gifted" here, so confidently ignorant. 🤦🏽‍♂️ That tracks so hard. Good job. Your comments are your reward, O' "Gifted".
edit: Yes, perfect. Cling to the moniker they've given you and mentally reconfigure its meaning to make you feel better. That's how change happens. You're doing everyone so proud. Truly. So gifted. We're all so lucky to have you genuises around. Whew. 😭🥰
- I don't like the choice of words either, mostly because of all the expectations associated with it, but the rest of your rant just goes off rails
  
  I like rants that go off the rails. I don't like this safety guardrail world. Give me an unhinged asshole who isn't afraid to fuck shit up. Those are my people!
  Like imagine if french resistance weren't willing go blow up nazi train tracks.
  Use your crazy for good!
  
  The "rest of my rant" is lived experience and factually relevant, friend. You can either recognize that reality or keep lying to yourself (and subsequently perpetuate that shit with inaction). You choose.
  "Gifted" is not "talented", "skilled", etc. It inherently implies a "gift" by some pre-birth entity, and largely assumed to be whatever god is acceptable in the location of the phrase's utterance. Don't play dumb. It's beneath you.
  edit: Your personal lack of etymological roots is no proof. Read a fuckin' book, friends. How typical.
- This is a dumb take. A "gifted" kid is literally one who doesn't have to try as hard as the other kids. Busting your ass comes later once you age out of grade school and have to develop personal discipline and systems and that is where most "gifted" kids fail because excelling in education has been so easy for them so far.
  
  The other issue with Gifted "failing" when they get older is that it's classification based on age.
  That is if a 5 year old has the mental age of a 10 year old, they will be classified as Gifted. But that accelerated aging doesn't necessarily result in someone smater at age 18. Their brain matured early and peaked at average.
- It just means a person who is born with more innate talent than the average. Which some people are. Your rant indeed goes off the rails. It ain't that deep chief.
- I’m a gifted atheist. It has nothing to do with god. It means I didn’t have to work for it - I was born with the genetics for it. Some people are gifted aesthetically. Others with intelligence. Others athletically. Some are gifted musically. Genetics is real. If you are given something at birth, it’s a gift. A gift from your ancestors and parents.
- It sounds like you really care about fairness, in the sense of giving credit to the hard work behind learning. Do you know the phrase “dead metaphor”?
- Laughable that you'd call everyone confidently ignorant while you get downvoted into oblivion. Try some humility. Maybe this rant was misplaced, and you're wrong for going off with it. There was no religious connotation implied with the original post. You misread. Get over it.
  
  Yes, yes, again your lack of understanding is shite proof, but go on with your fantasy meritocracy, kiddo. So gifted. Aww.

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