Video: You think you’re so smart.

A number of movies include gifted and talented characters, and depict a variety of characteristics that are positive and relate to exceptional abilities, but also can generate not so positive reactions – such as “You think you’re so smart,” or, “You’re too verbal… too bossy… too nerdy… too sensitive.”

And, of course, we may still experience some of those reactions as adults.

Movie clips in this video include Matilda (1996, with Mara Wilson, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman); Phoebe in Wonderland (2008, Elle Fanning, Patricia Clarkson); Little Man Tate (1991, directed by and starring Jodie Foster, with Dianne Wiest, Adam Hann-Byrd);  Akeelah and the Bee (2006, Keke Palmer, Laurence Fishburne); Bridge to Terabithia (2007, Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel).

Photo: Elle Fanning in Phoebe in Wonderland, from post: Our high sensitivity personality: normalcy, wholeness, acceptance. [She is also outstanding in the newer movie Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola.]

Short list of gifted characteristics in video from article What is giftedness all about? – by Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., Gifted Development Center.

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Video: Gifted adults are different from an early age

One clip here is from the movie Nancy Drew, based on the books about the talented girl detective.

Gifted children like Nancy are different and divergent in their thinking, interests, values and behavior.

And many gifted adults still feel wrong or anxious about not fitting in even though being different can be a strength.

In Nancy Drew, the heroine (played with style and grace by Emma Roberts) uses and celebrates her intuitive and intellectual abilities as a teen sleuth, and accepts the fact she is exceptional, and does not fit in with her high school peers mainly concerned with cliques, clothes and boys.

Many gifted children and gifted adults are considered “eccentric.”

[Another clip: Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch (in glasses) in Ghost World” (2001). The director Terry Zwigoff commented that when he met Johansson, he thought, “OK, she’s 15, but she could easily pass for 30. She’s a very attractive girl, but she’s sort of a weirdo. I like that about her.”

In her article Counseling Gifted Adults A Case Study, counselor Paula Prober writes about Susan, who had known that she was different since she was seven. Her thoughts and feelings had never fit into the box that was comfortable and reassuring for most children.

Her appetite for learning was insatiable. Reading was more nourishing than food. Thinking, analyzing, and synthesizing were better than Barbie. And she worried about everything: poverty, world peace, the loss of the rain forests. It kept her awake at night. To her classmates, she just seemed weird certainly not birthday party material.

The article continues, All of these reactions confused and saddened Susan but no one was explaining to her that she was different because she was gifted: She had a mind running deeper and faster than most.

Like many gifted adults, she rediscovered herself as gifted later in life, but also felt a strong need for emotional help, as Prober writes: “At age 52, Susan came to therapy. Raising her teenaged son, John, had forced her to confront herself. John had been identified as gifted in preschool. Susan started reading about gifted children and was quite surprised to find that she was reading about herself.”

The image (in video) is from the book Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential, which can help people understand some of the emotional and social aspects of being gifted.

Short list of gifted characteristics from video: Dr. Linda Karges-Bone about gifted children.

Also see Self-tests : giftedness / high ability

List of other films: Hoagies’ Gifted: Movies Featuring Gifted Kids (and Adults!)

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By Lisa Erickson, MS, LMHC

Lisbeth Salander is the fictional heroine of Steig Larsson’s trilogy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

As the heroine, Lisbeth Salander embodies certain characteristics of giftedness, and these characteristics help her survive terrible, long-term physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

What helps Lisbeth Salander survive her ordeals?

Good problem solving skills mediate trauma.

Lisbeth Salander survives traumas that might lead to addiction or the suicide of a less resilient character. Giftedness contributes to her resiliency by aiding her problem solving, which increases her ability to cope.

> Continued: 3 Things To Learn From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – A Gifted Trauma Survivor

Her presence and depth in acting at age 13 in “The Professional” were amazing, and Natalie Portman continues to grow stronger and more compelling as an outstanding actor.

But beyond that, it is intriguing to read about how exceptional she is in other ways.

Here are excerpts from several publications about her educational and other achievements:

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Fox News [various dates]

Natalie Portman is fluent in Hebrew, French and Japanese…she told the New York Post that she’s considered leaving show biz to become a vet or a clinical psychologist.

Before graduating from Harvard with a psychology degree in June 2003, Portman was credited — under her given name, Natalie Hershlag — as a research assistant to Alan Dershowitz’s “Case for Israel” and had a study on memory called “Frontal Lobe Activation During Object Permanence” published in a scientific journal.

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The Harvard Crimson

Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz considered Portman an exceptional student.

“She was in my seminar called Neuropsychology and the Law, and I didn’t know who she was because her name was Natalie Hershlag,” he said, referring to Portman’s birth name. “It was a few weeks into the semester that I learned she was an actress—but she was a terrific student.”

Portman’s paper on new methods of lie detection earned her an A+ from Dershowitz—the highest grade in the class. After that, Dershowitz hired Portman as a research assistant for a book he was writing.

“We talked a lot about her career,” he says. “She said she wanted to do acting, and she wanted at some point to be a psychologist.”

But Dershowitz in no way considers Portman’s divergence from psychology to be disappointing. “It’s all about choice,” he said.  “And she has choices and options. She would be a great psychologist, and she’s a great actor. She probably influences more people in her acting.”

Dershowitz also said that he does not consider the two fields mutually exclusive. “Her psychology background helped her in formulating the role for [Black Swan] … She’s an actor who uses her academic background,” he said.

From “Professors Reflect on Natalie Portman” by Abigail F. Schoenberg, The Harvard Crimson, March 1 2011.

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Wikipedia page

Portman won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award, and the BAFTA Award for her lead performance in Black Swan.

She has studied French, Japanese, German, and Arabic.

Due to her scientific publications, Portman is among a very small number of professional actors with a finite Erdős–Bacon number, a concept that reflects the “small world phenomenon” in academia and entertainment by measuring the “collaborative distance” between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon.

At the age of 10, a Revlon agent asked her to become a child model, but she turned down the offer to focus on acting. In a magazine interview, Portman said that she was “different from the other kids. I was more ambitious, I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked very hard. I was a very serious kid.”

In 2003, Portman graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. degree in psychology. “I don’t care if [college] ruins my career,” she told the New York Post, according to a Fox News article. “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Portman

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New York Times

The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition…

As a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials — awards, degrees, patents and theorems in their name.

[The article continues with mentions of Hedy Lamarr; Danica McKellar; Mayim Bialik; Leonard Nimoy.]

Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist, By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/science/01angier.html

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One of my Talent Development Resources posts:

Personal Growth: Getting Beyond Too Deferential

Writer Amy Kaufman comments, “It wasn’t until she attended Harvard University that she says she was able to find her own voice, abandoning the ‘yes, ma’am’ attitude she’d adopted during adolescence.”

“When you’re a child, and a director is telling you what to do, you’re just like, ‘OK.’ It’s like it’s your parents,” Portman recalled.

“There are certain people that have personalities, even as kids, where they’re like, ‘No! I won’t do that!’ But that’s just not me at all.”

Having to tap into that side of herself while playing the deferential Nina [in her movie Black Swan], she said, was more challenging than nearly all of the physical work.

In the TV series “House,” Amber Tamblyn portrays Martha M. Masters – a “genius third-year med student who, after graduating from high school at age 15, spent her down time getting PhDs in applied math and art history.”

“She’s like the Internet, with breasts,” House observes before correcting himself. “Oh wait, the Internet already has breasts.”

[From LA Times post 'House' recap: Enter the Tamblyn, November 8, 2010.]

Amber Tamblyn said her character “is a bit of an homage to a friend, whose name also is Martha Masters and is currently a medical student. I’m not saying anything out of turn or mean about her, but she’s incredibly brilliant and sometimes she can be very socially awkward.”

She comments about Martha:

“I think you’re going to see someone who has been so much in the world of academia and knowledge that she really never progressed or matured in a social sense,” she said. “You’re going to see someone who has a hard time communicating on the most-basic levels.

“I think House probably sees a little bit of himself in her, except the opposite – he’s usually mean and she’s usually overly nice,” she said. “The two characters both annoy and fascinate each other.”

Tamblyn “has published two poetry books and is planning on a third. Writing poetry helped her deal with the entertainment industry’s capriciousness.”

“Suddenly you’re not this cute thing anymore. You’re supposed to look a certain way, and you’re supposed to play these certain parts, and I had a really hard time adjusting to that when I was 17 years old.

“So writing helped me a lot to make fun of that and be angry about it and just get all my frustrations out without doing it in a real public way.”

[Amber Tamblyn Finally Relishing Role on "House", ThirdAge.com]

[Photo from Fox TV / House site.]

Also see Amber Tamblyn on Facebook and her Official Blog.

A couple of other gifted / high ability characters on current TV series:

Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) in Bones, and Amy (Mayim Bialik) in The Big Bang Theory.

These characters are extreme in ways, but also engaging and entertaining.

Are they mostly fun and do they portray “real” gifted women, and giftedness characteristics at least somewhat accurately?

Or in negative ways? What do you think?

By Joe Smydo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Though he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his work in paleontology, Christopher Beard doesn’t consider himself a wunderkind or believe he was genetically predestined for success.

Not entirely, anyway.

Dr. Beard said he had his parents’ guidance, along with their genes. He’s worked industriously to make a mark in his profession. And he believes that serendipity has been on his side.

“Some people would call it luck,” said Dr. Beard, curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who received the $500,000 MacArthur research grant in 2000.

The question of whether high-performers are born or made long has captivated the scholarly community, whose search for answers has led to studies of chess players, musicians and leaders in various fields.

In the 1980s, Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a ground-breaking work proposing multiple kinds of intelligence. Dr. Gardner, a 1981 MacArthur grant recipient, also proposed multiple kinds of creativity.

In Dr. Gardner’s view, “Picasso probably could not have been Mozart and Mozart probably could not have been Picasso because they had different kinds of intelligence,” said Kenneth Kiewra, professor of educational psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In recent years, the mystique of high-performers has been grist for popular books, such as Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How,” Geoff Colvin’s “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success.”

The books downplay the notion of genetically predetermined greatness and suggest that other factors, including many hours of strategic practice, differentiate high performers.

“Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected,” Mr. Colvin wrote.

Some believe that talent and work both are part of the mix.

“Neither one is sufficient; both are necessary,” said Yong Zhao, professor of education at Michigan State University and author of “Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization.” The book, published by the education group ASCD, says schools should do more to help students nurture individual abilities.

With determination and practice, a person can attain proficiency, if not greatness, in many fields, Dr. Zhao said. “I would say everybody can learn to swim, but not everybody can become Michael Phelps.”

Time constraints are one factor limiting a person’s improvement in a given field; developmental factors also may play a role. For example, Dr. Zhao noted that research has suggested that mastery of a foreign language becomes more difficult after early adolescence.

Schools recognize innate abilities by offering special programs to “gifted” students.

However, giftedness is no all-or-nothing proposition.

Some students classified as gifted struggle with an advanced curriculum; other gifted students show a knack for one discipline but struggle in another, said J. Kaye Cupples, associate professor of education at Point Park University and retired executive director of support services for the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

Dr. Kiewra said a variety of environmental factors could influence a person’s performance.

They include early exposure to a discipline or hobby, perhaps through one’s parents; sustained family support of a child’s interest; and the right kinds of mentors or instructors at various points in life. He said there’s also what researchers call “accumulated advantages.”

For example, a young soccer player with an elder sibling to practice with outperforms teammates lacking the same opportunity. The young player gets more touches than his teammates, which translates into a still-higher skill level, which leads him to a more-advanced team with better coaches.

“That kind of thing happens all the time,” Dr. Kiewra said.

Personal qualities are important, too, including the drive Dr. Kiewra called a “rage to learn.”

The nature-or-nurture question often leads to a discussion of golfing great Tiger Woods. Mr. Colvin and Dr. Kiewra are among those who cited two interrelated factors — a rigorous practice regimen and the influence of Mr. Woods’ father — as key factors in Mr. Woods’ development as a golfer.

Practice is so powerful that it changes the brain. For example, Dr. Kiewra said the brains of taxi drivers “grow” in the areas governing spatial skills.

But how circumscribed is greatness? How successful would Mr. Woods be in another line of work, even another sport?

Dr. Kiewra noted that Michael Jordan, a basketball superstar, has proven less adept at baseball and golf.

Each year, the MacArthur Foundation awards no-strings-attached grants to a select number of people in various disciplines, recognizing their “creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future.”

They’re commonly called “genius grants,” though the foundation doesn’t use that term. The foundation won’t say whether it considers its recipients to be prodigies.

Dr. Beard and Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and 2006 recipient of a MacArthur grant, said many factors influenced their success.

Dr. Beard said he received good guidance from parents who encouraged him to take schoolwork seriously. He had an early interest in animals, which grew when his father, a biology teacher, began relating stories about extinct animals and fossils.

After receiving his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he had an opportunity to teach and conduct research at a medical school or to take the paleontology position at the Carnegie.

Dr. Beard said he had the good fortune, or luck, to choose the latter. The Carnegie position led to cutting-edge research in China, which, in turn, attracted the attention of the MacArthur Foundation.

As for talent, Dr. Beard didn’t cite technical ability but a knack for helping others to understand a project and buy into its importance — a gift he said some scientists lack.

Dr. von Ahn said he got his first computer when he was 8 and soon was doing things with it that his peers could not.

“There may have been talent, but more than talent, I think, there was curiosity,” he said.

And a work ethic, too. “I know the following: You can’t do it without hard work, at least in my case,” Dr. von Ahn said.

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Related article: Genius: The Modern View, By David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times

Related posts :

It takes more than talent.

Grit and perseverance mean more than talent.

Outliers and developing exceptional abilities

gifted adults, gifted adult information, gifted adult personality, psychology of giftedness, high ability, high aptitude, advanced development

The image is food critic Anton Ego from the movie Ratatouille [video clip].

I was reminded of the stuffy and dour character while reading Laura Berman Fortgang’s The Little Book on Meaning , and her reference below to “high analytical ability.. often black-and-white thinkers.. Quick to decide what is good and what is bad..”

I know I sometimes limit my appreciation of nuances and grays on account of that tendency.

Here is the excerpt by Fortgang :

We are all faced with choices… Do we allow ourselves to be fear-minded, anxiety driven, scarcity-minded? Do we allow anger, hurt, and resentment to rule our minds? Do we dig ourselves deep into a trench and fight all the time causing ourselves great stress, even for a “good” cause like a paycheck?

Do we linger in the glory of our discontent? Any of these mental states involve a choice on our part. It’s not simple to make the choice, unfortunately – there may be work needed in therapy to unravel the root beliefs – but it is absolutely possible to free ourselves from fearful and angry thoughts to embrace thoughts that nurture love and connection.

What’s interesting is that some of the smartest people with the most developed minds suffer the most at the hand of their own high analytical ability when it comes to having happiness and meaning in their life.

These often black-and-white thinkers, who see very little that is gray or colorful, are highly and quickly decisive but who can also easily miss joy in the way they process.

Quick to decide what is good and what is bad, little room is left for mystery and discovery and some of the other elements that slow us down long enough to feel meaning.

barriers to personal growth and development, emotional intelligence, intellect and ego

[Description from Youtube:] “One of the most talented singers the world has seen – Nora Foss Al-Jabri (13) from Norway singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”

Nora’s management: aktomter@online.no www.anjazz.no

> See more videos at Oprah’s Search for the World’s Smartest and Most Talented Kids.
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Nora Foss Al-Jabri, gifted children identification, gifted teens

Daniel Tammet is able to recite 22,514 digits of pi from memory. An author with autistic savant syndrome, he thinks such astounding abilities are not due to some cerebral or genetic fluke, but based on an associative form of thinking and imagination.

He thinks differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated, to the detriment of how most of us value our own abilities and develop our talents.

In his new book, Tammet explains that people may consider his kind of extraordinary ability as just that – extraordinary, out of the realm of possibility for non-savant people, but he thinks that is a wrong presumption.

He says it is a “surprisingly common conclusion: that individuals with very different minds must use them in some fundamentally different, almost magical way.

“As one of the world’s few well-known autistic savants, I have received all manner of strange requests: from being asked to predict the following week’s winning lottery numbers, to requests for advice on building a perpetual motion machine. Little wonder then that conditions such as autism and savant syndrome remain poorly understood by most people, including many experts.

Not supernaturally gifted

“It is not only savant minds that are considered somehow supernaturally gifted and therefore set apart from those of most other people: the success of outstanding individuals in numerous fields, from Mozart and Einstein to Garry Kasparov and Bill Gates, has been attributed by many to minds they regard as unearthly and inexplicable.”

Tammet thinks “this view is not only erroneous but harmful, too, because it separates the achievements of talented individuals from their humanity; an injustice both to them and to everyone else.

“Every brain is amazing. Researchers know this after many years of studying the minds of highly gifted people, as well as those of housewives, cab drivers, and many others from all walks of life.

“As a result, today, we have a far richer, more sophisticated understanding of human ability and potential than ever before. Anyone with the passion and dedication necessary to master a field or subject can succeed in it.

“Genius, in all its forms, is not due to any mere quirk of the brain; it is the result of far more chaotic, dynamic, and essentially human qualities such as perseverance, imagination, intuition, and even love.

“Such an understanding of the human mind enriches, rather than detracts from, the popular appreciation of the accomplishments of highly successful individuals.”

From Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, by Daniel Tammet.

Rain Man ability probably in all of us

In his article Is There A Little Rain Man In Each Of Us?, Darold Treffert, MD declares that “some Rain Man ability — savant-like skill and capacity — probably exists in each of us.”

He explains, “There is evidence that some savants, because of prenatal, perinatal or postnatal central nervous system damage, from a variety of genetic, injury or disease processes have substituted right brain capacity in a compensatory manner for left brain dysfunction and limitation.

“Simultaneously, because of those same injurious factors, these savants have come to rely on more primitive cortico-striatal (procedural or habit) memory rather than higher level cortico-limbic (semantic or declarative) memory.

“This combination of right brain skills coupled with procedural memory produces the constellation of abilities and traits that is savant syndrome.

“But that more primitive memory circuitry, and right brain capacity, both still exist in each of us.”

The image is from his book Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.

Also see more Learning differences articles, and quotes, books etc on the Learning differences page.

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savant book, , learning differences, psychology of savants, high aptitude personality, Daniel Tammet, autistic savant

To avoid being seen as too weird or different, and to fit in better with others, gifted children often learn to stifle or cover up their unusual cognitive and other abilities. As adults, many still follow a pattern of hiding.

When she began directing in the forties, Ida Lupino sometimes claimed not to know the best way to line up a shot or specify a line reading, explaining “Men hate bossy women. Sometimes I pretend to know less than I do.” [From my article Gifted Women: Identity and Expression.]

She was working in a more restrictive and even misogynistic era (the photo is Lupino directing a scene in her movie “Mother of a Champion,” 1951), but some research on contemporary gifted girls and women indicates they often suppress their advanced abilities.

But covering up, not acknowledging, or discounting our talents and abilities is not just something done by girls and women.

“Unfortunately most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them,” Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton declare in their book Now, Discover Your Strengths.

“Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.”

Discounting or disparaging

We may even discount or disparage our exceptional perceptions, sensory processing and other aspects of giftedness as “flaws” – especially in the face of negative social reactions and ignorance on the part of medical professionals.

Sally M. Reis, Ph.D. “found that gifted girls do not want to be considered different from their friends and same-age peers. Indeed, a tendency exists for many females, regardless of age, to try to minimize their differences.

“For many gifted girls, however, the problem becomes more difficult as they become women and their talents and gifts set them apart from their peers and friends.”

But there is also a more insidious problem: “In addition to hiding abilities, some gifted and talented women begin to doubt that they really have abilities.”

From her article Internal barriers, personal issues, and decisions faced by gifted and talented females.

In some talent domains or fields, being different and exceptional is much more supported – such as entertainment. The photo is Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar at age 11 for The Piano. [From my post Anna Paquin and others on realizing multiple talents.]

Hiding is not limited to U.S. culture.

A recent article in the Gifted / talented news feed says “It is estimated that five per cent of the population below 14 years, or about 445,000 Malaysian children from all socio-economic strata and ethnicities, are likely to be gifted and talented.

“Raising a gifted child is not easy. ‘They do everything at the wrong time,’ says one parent. A gifted child told me that he likes doing things that others cannot do. But he does not like it when others tease him, call him names and won’t play chess with him any more.

“He is excited about astrophysics, but he is lonely in learning about it because other children are not as enthusiastic. Hence, he finds it hard to sustain social interactions. Afraid of being ridiculed, teased, resented or ostracised, he goes to great lengths to hide his giftedness.”

From Nurturing the gifted and talented, by SHARIFAH HAPSAH SHAHABUDIN, New Straits Times Mar 16 2009.

Back to the idea of gifted adults and hiding giftedness.

In her article Giftedness in the Workplace: Can the Bright Mind Thrive in Organizations?, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen (author of The Gifted Adult) points out, “Exceptional intellectual and creative abilities can lead to highly successful careers, sometimes in multiple fields… From time to time relatively unfettered bright minds alter the direction of their domain as a whole. Stories of eminent figures fascinate and inspire us.

[Photo: Barack Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School.]

“At the same time glorified images of illustriousness can imply that early in life those who are truly gifted know exactly what they are to do with their lives and pursue their rightful lifework unimpeded — all the way to the full realization of their potential and the rewards of eminence.”

She cautions, “However, the transition from full-time learner to full-time worker can be a bumpy road indeed, and can easily engender deep disappointment instead of the anticipated coming-of-age gratification.”

In her article Discovering the Gifted Ex-Child, Stephanie S. Tolan notes, “The experience of the gifted adult is the experience of an unusual consciousness, an extraordinary mind whose perceptions and judgments may be different enough to require an extraordinary courage.

“Large numbers of gifted adults, aware not only of their mental capacities but of the degree to which those capacities set them apart, understand this… Thinking independently may seem foolhardy or antisocial.”

Feeling frustrated, tied down

She adds, “But for the adult whose life circumstances do not readily provide an arena for the positive use of these abilities the result may be a feeling of frustration, lack of fulfillment, a nagging sense of being tied down, imprisoned, thwarted (Roeper, 1991; Smith, 1992).

“The middle management employee who has the ability to see and devise solutions to various company problems may be seriously frustrated in his job because a boss who lacks that ability does not allow the expression, much less the implementation of those solutions.”

She adds, “The suburban housewife, who has raised several children and worked as a volunteer for innumerable civic associations, may find herself restless, bored and frustrated when the children have left home. Social activities do not fill the void, nor does the sort of routine job she may be tempted to pursue to get herself out of the house.”

Another issue she brings up in her article Self-Knowledge, Self-Esteem and the Gifted Adult is self-identification: “Many gifted adults seem to know very little about their minds and how they differ from more ‘ordinary’ minds.  The result of this lack of self-knowledge is often low, sometimes cripplingly low self esteem.”

Tolan and others point out that it may require great courage, fortitude, and assertiveness to craft a life that allows and encourages the expression of exceptional abilities. But it is worth it.

As Barbara Sher puts it so poetically, “Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do – can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do.”

See Barbara Sher articles.

Also see the pages Self-limiting and Hiding / silencing abilities & talents.
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gifted adult books, gifted adult information, gifted adult personality, psychology of giftedness

..

Photo: Clarence So of Diamond Ranch High in Pomona cheers on classmates at a regional decathlon at USC. Another decathlon was held at UCLA.

From article: In L.A. County, a battle of the brains, by Esmeralda Bermudez and Ruben Vives, Los Angeles Times February 8, 2009. “A day of decathlons, spelling bees and science bowls put the brightest students to the test. More than 100 high schools faced off in two regional decathlons at USC and UCLA, while 25 more competed in a science bowl at Caltech.”

Academic competitions and other social situations can bring together gifted teens in ways that enhance not only their intellectual growth, but their exploration and development of meaningful relationships.

High Intelligence Specialist Deborah L. Ruf, Ph.D. notes “The level of giftedness has a profound effect on how comfortable in different situations the young person will be…

“If the youth is part of a group, as in an advanced placement class, finding pals and receiving positive social feedback from classmates is more likely than if the young person is forced to sit through general education classes with students who are on a completely different intellectual, and interest, plane than he is.

“Intellectual level, per se, does not contribute to poor social skills.  Too much time with people who are nothing like us can warp how we solve the intricate problems of learning how to get along with others.”

From her article Independence and Relationship Issues in Intellectually Gifted Adolescents.
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raising gifted kids, parenting gifted kids, gifted adolescent relationships, gifted teens