Intellectual Giftedness

Intellectual giftedness, often referred to as high IQ, is usually given short shrift when it comes to considerations of the special needs of exceptional people. Because giftedness appears on the surface to be nothing but an advantage, the challenges it presents are often ignored and unknown.

Giftedness is not about being better, it's about being *different*. A gifted person's life experience is significantly different from the norm. Along with it's blessings, it brings it's own set of challenges. Feelings of extreme isolation are fairly common, while introversion and emotional intensity conspire to keep others at bay. In school, while everyone assumes we should excel, we often *suffer*, because most school systems aren't equipped for the gifted. These are the reasons why high IQ societies such as Mensa exist; the gifted need a place where they can find peers and feel that they fit in.

I'm of the opinion that, despite our desire for simple quantification of intelligence, noting characteristics of giftedness is perhaps a more useful, or at least complementary, method of detecting the intelligent. Taken from the book Gifted Grownups by Marylou Streznewski, some indicators of giftedness are:

Energy
Curiousity
Speed
Concentration
Sensitivity, empathy, insight and intuition
Sophistication of thinking, highly developed moral sense
Nonconformist/Independent
Persistence
Humour
Uses up jobs

Almost all those characteristics, while pretty general, are present in every really smart person I know. I might add introversion to the list. I read somewhere that among gifted people, the introversion rate is about 70%, compared to only 30% in the general population. In terms of Myers-Briggs personality types, many of us are of the NT variety. I'm an INTJ.