Many people think there is only one characteristic associated with being a gifted adult: high intelligence as defined by an IQ score. Despite this common misconception, being gifted is not an IQ score but how a gifted adult thinks, feels and perceives the world.
Defining Characteristics of Gifted Adults
1) Differentiated Thinking
Differentiated thinking is defined by academics/educators/psychologists in a number of ways: divergent, complex, an IQ score, ability to assimilate significant amounts of information rapidly (though this ability may be subject specific), the need to understand information at a deeper level/to understand why. Regardless of how differentiated thinking is defined, being gifted means thinking differently than most people and, generally speaking, in a way that can be measured.
Some common markers of gifted thinking include: unconventional perspective, disregard for status quo, the need to ‘figure it out for yourself’, wide variety of interests, the tendency to think about thinking (metacognition), extensive vocabulary, inclination to analyze, curiousity, and the desire to ’solve’ problems. The differentiated thinking of gifted adults is characterized by the tendency to regularly come to conclusions that are at odds with the accepted thinking and to come to that conclusion quickly.
2) Intensity
It has been suggested that the physiology and differentiated thinking of gifted adults are linked. In essence, a gifted adult’s nervous system fires faster than the average person creating a heightened internal experience. For example, a gifted adult will start by thinking about an experience differently than most, simultaneously linking it to and synthesizing it with many other thoughts simultaneously, and then tend to play the thought over in their mind. This phemonema of the heightened interplay of differentiated thinking and emotion is particular to gifted adults and, while it can take many forms, its core defines what it is to be a gifted adult.
These two characteristics define what it is to be a gifted adult but other factors interact with a gifted adult’s differentiated thinking and intensity; the environment, other personal traits and experience also affect determine who someone is. As a result, gifted adults are a diverse group and cannot be defined beyond differentiated thinking and intensity. Nevertheless, there are additional characteristics that do not define gifted adults, they are more common in gifted adults than the general population.
Also, it should be pointed out, the presence or absence of the characteristics below does not determine if one is a gifted adult; however, having these characteristics, particularly in combination, is a good indicator one is a gifted adult. Deidre V. Lovecky pointed out that in order to explain characteristics associated with being gifted, it’s necessary to describe them separately but of course, they do not exist stand alone but interact and reinforce each other.
Common Characteristics of Gifted Adults
Overexcitabilities are a way of explaining the intensity found in gifted adults. Overexcitability is a translation of a Polish word that is meant to convey ‘the capacity to be superstimulated’. Based on the theories of Dabrowski and Piechowski, it is suggested that gifted adults have stronger sensory experiences and these sensory experiences are quantitatively different than most. Overexcitabilities are broken down into these categories:
- Psychomotor
- Sensual
- Intellectual
- Imaginational
- Emotional
Perception – ability to read emotional situations beyond the surface/dislike of superficiality; related to differentiated thinking is the ability to predict outcomes and consequences
Asynchronicity – feeling of being out of step emotionally either with the external environment or internally due to the disconnection between one’s intellectual and emotional states
Entelechy - the need and drive to be all that one is capable of being.
Perfectionism – high standards for one’s self and other people; may be accompanied by guilt and frustration when one is not living up to their expectations
Idealism/Heightened Sense of Morality – the tendency to see things in black and white; ability to be outraged at injustice
Isolation - lack of intellectual peers and different world view often result in sense of being alone and disconnected
Introversion – this can mean needing time alone to think but it also can mean that being be one’s self is necessary to re-charge versus extraverts who become energized as a result of being around other people. Introversion does not necessarily mean avoiding or not enjoying the company of other people.
This article contains reference to the theories and work of: Kazimierz Dabrowski, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, Deidre V. Lovecky, Michael Piechowski, Linda Kreger Silverman, and Stephanie Tolan
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True enough… the gifted tends to have more processing elements (gray matter) on the surface of the brain, necessitating more folds to accomodate the greater surface area and less connective tissue (white matter) inside. (This is why Eistein’s brain actually weighed less than expected; all the additional crinkleage inside the same sized skull as a person of normal intelligence only need shorter connective tissue and took up dead space itself.) More processing power and shorter connections for it to the rest of the nervous system mean fatser thought and reaction times. If you get the joke someone made five seconds ahead of everyone else, you’re proably a gifted adult. And, not just that; it’s an amplication of everything… the gifted (if you’ll forgive the allusion to Claude Raines’ character in Casablanca) are just like anyone else only more so.
P.S. (And, sorry about the typos above.) Also, having said the above, as the gifted can differ even more between each other than they do from non-gifted people, there may be a heightened idealism/ sense of morality… but it’s not necessarily good. Intelligence and morality aren’t related; it depends upon the character of the individual. Sure you’ll get greater extremes with greater development, but good and bad are still equally distributed with giftedness. For every Mother Theresa or Albert Schweizer there’s, unfortunately, a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.
No question that not all people who are intelligent have a heightened sense of morality. It is regularly pointed out to me that high intelligence and psychopathy are correlated.
My intention with this article (possibly unsucessful
) is to separate what gifted adults share in common, what defines them: cognition and intensity. And characteristics gifted adults frequently but don’t necessarily always possess. I totally agree with you that gifted people differ so widely from each other – I think it’s one of the many reasons gifted people are unaware that they are gifted – because it doesn’t really look like any one thing….but there are things that we share in common and recognize in each other…even when it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what….
Actually, only sucessful psychopathy and high intelligence are correlated; unintelligent ones don’t get very far. And, no, your intent of parsing all of the above out with the article did work… it just sort misses the point; none of that is dissected for the gifted person from their point of view as they go about their life. It’s just sort of a whole condition or state of being… one that varies from person to person, of course, and by degree of giftedness involved. (Being a visual-spatial thinker whose thought is naturally synthetic, analytically parsing stuff out makes me stumble too.)
I hear you that a gifted person does not live their life in the defined categories in the article. But let me ask you this: when and how did you learn you were a gifted adult? How did you find out that some of the things you are…not just that you think fast – were part of your being gifted?
Formally identified in Kindergarten (grudgingly) by a liberal school system more into “all children are gifted in some way” in 1975, educated by conservative school systems that’d kept their Sputnik-era achievement focus and curricula for the gifted through high school graduation thereafter. Hated the “person-centered” college environment (took adult responsibility to think and get results out of my hands) for its term, ran into the “social-affective needs” approach to giftedness (whose ideas left-off before my prior education had just expected us to start) for the first time there. A personal crash-course in giftedness, combined with my own experience, in trying to get something educationally better to do was very informative… mostly, aside from learning my developed brand of giftedness to be passé, it was finding that mundane things I didn’t have a fancy name for or any problem with (hey, live and let live) had to be explained to people who wanted expected answers that fit some stereotype or they’d get upset.