It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the Earth is turning and you just can't quite believe it 'cause everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour and I can feel it. That's who I am.
Those of you with impeccable taste in television will recognize this as a quote from Doctor Who. You may wonder what it has to do with anything, considering the character speaking in this quote is a nine hundred-year-old time-travelling alien. Well, I'm not suggesting that gifted individuals can feel the Earth's rotation, obviously. But this particular quote occurred to me today when I was thinking about how gifted people experience the world. They see and feel and understand things others don't, often provoking the same emotion with which the Doctor delivers this line: wonder tinged with loneliness - the loneliness of experience. It's a bittersweet feeling - probably (though sadly I will likely never be able to test this comparison) the same as that of seeing the Earth from space for the first time and knowing that nobody you talk to when you get home will be able to understand what you saw and felt, even if you were to talk about nothing else until the day you died.
Being gifted is about being different, and giftedness brings a different experience of the world. One of my two "favorite" myths about giftedness is that gifted children are "ahead" of their peers. "Ahead" makes it sound like all kids are in a race and the gifted ones got a jump-start somehow. It also implies that gifted and non-gifted children have the same experiences, just at different points in their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here's a new metaphor for you: imagine there are two trains crossing a mountain range. One is the "gifted" train and one is the "non-gifted" train. The "non-gifted" train heads through the mountains in a perfectly straight line, through tunnels and over bridges. It never detours. It arrives everywhere it's expected to be at pretty much the right time. And it gets to the other side exactly when it's expected, to the cheers of those waiting on the platform.
The "gifted" train, on the other hand, is a very special train: it decides it doesn't need to follow the track. Instead, it crosses the mountain range in a dizzying maze-like path, looping around mountains, going over peaks, running through valleys, exploring rivers and waterfalls, stopping at a few villages along the way, and by the time it reaches the far side of the mountains, its route map looks like a knot the very thought of which would be enough to give an Eagle Scout a coronary. And with all the extra things it's seen and done, it still arrives before it's expected - and before the non-gifted train.
My other favorite giftedness myth is that the word "gifted" is actually a prefix that must be attached to the word "children". People ask, "Were you gifted as a child?" How is one supposed to answer that question? Perhaps, "Yes, I was, but a large spike was accidentally driven into my head when I was eighteen, so I'm now a perfectly normal adult."
Gifted children grow up to be - surprise! - gifted adults, and thus progress from a group whose discussion causes general discomfort into one whose existence is essentially denied by all factions of society apart from the writers of The Big Bang Theory. People seem to think the "problem" of giftedness simply goes away somewhere between the SATs and the first day of college. But it doesn't. Gifted adults face many of the same issues gifted children do - issues such as a lack of mental challenge and intellectual stimulation in everyday life, difficulty finding friends who are intellectual peers, a tendency to "dabble", inability to follow unfounded rules, and proneness to overexcitabilities. Of course, gifted adults are also blessed with the same abilities they had when they were gifted children: creativity, flashes of insight, impeccable memory, etcetera. From both the positive and the negative impacts of giftedness on a person's life, there comes an experience of the world which is unique, and which does not suddenly revert to normal upon reaching adulthood. The gifted train never returns to the track.
So how does it feel to be a person who experiences the world in such a special way for his whole life?
The nineteen in twenty gifted individuals who fall in the mildly to moderately gifted range may not see the world so uniquely that they feel the loneliness of experience, though they will almost certainly feel a regular stream of "Why can't everyone else see this?" moments for the whole of their lives. They may sometimes be frustrated by the world's general "slowness". They are capable of a great deal of self-teaching, have huge reserves of mental and sometimes physical energy, and think things through much more deeply than non-gifted people. They may find that post-school life provides the intellectual stimulation they have missed as children, if they choose a profession that requires deep, creative thought. In school and in later life, they are likely to be seen as exceptional and labelled "geniuses" or "geeks", but generally speaking, they can function as part of a "normal" group and have meaningful friendships with non-gifted individuals.
Those who are highly gifted (approximately 0.1% of the human race) or exceptionally gifted (0.01%) - I myself sit right around the dividing line between these groups - have a more unique experience. We see connections others don't and have frequent moments of creative, philosophical, or intellectual insight. We experience emotions in unique ways, and sometimes react to things with a staggering intensity. We tend to find that the world at large is simply not "set up" for us, nor we for it. Life is an ongoing search for intellectual stimulation. Peers are difficult to find and it is hard to maintain more than casual friendships with non-gifted individuals. Boredom sets in easily, necessitating job, lifestyle, and even life-course changes that occur with unusual frequency. Our perception of society at large is often that it is overly rigid, mistaken in some of its values or priorities, or generally lacking in creativity and individuality; to highly and exceptionally gifted children and adults, the world can seem a grey canvas begging for color.
Those who are profoundly gifted (approximately one in a million people, but often impossible to properly identify) are, quite simply, the greatest minds of their age. Da Vinci and Mozart numbered among these individuals; Einstein did not. These people may never encounter a concept they cannot comprehend, and the intuitive leaps of which they are capable can escape the understanding of others for years (or centuries). They are extremely sensitive to detail and complexity. They often have extremely intense emotional and moral reactions. They face all the problems associated with giftedness tenfold: they are so unique that even high-IQ societies offer little opportunity to meet intellectual peers (of whom there may be only a few thousand in the world), no occupation exists which can provide them with a consistent mental challenge, and the workings of "normal" society may be completely alien and indecipherable to them (imagine trying to work out the social norms of an ant colony and then insinuate yourself into it). Even highly gifted individuals cannot begin to guess what it means to be profoundly gifted. The loneliness of experience for these people must be overpowering.
So maybe gifted children and adults don't feel the turn of the Earth - but just like the Doctor, they have an experience of the world others don't. And while that experience is often wondrous, it brings with it a loneliness that touches every facet of life.
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