9/12/2023 0 Comments Gifted adults characteristics![]() For example, in a group of random 16-year-olds, it might be relatively easy to find the one who is passionate about science. In that case, rather than being a gifted needle in a typically-developing haystack, the whole game has shifted: instead, it’s more like being an extra-pointy needle in a pile of needles. In that sense, then, gifted adults benefit from a birds-of-a-feather circumstance in which they are likely surrounded by people with similar educational attainment and similar skills or interests. These choices necessarily put them in the company of people with either similar interests or skill levels there is no longer a requirement for those who hate math to do math, much less for a prescribed number of minutes per day, just as those who hate writing likely choose a profession that allows them to avoid it. ![]() After all, adults have the benefit of much more agency in their lives, and can make choices about what activities to pursue, including college and jobs thereafter. Socially, gifted adults may be significantly more comfortable than they were as children. Gifted adults have probably had opportunities to connect with other gifted adults, either in their personal lives or at work, because unlike their children, chronological age is less relevant in adulthood - by then, we are wise enough to know that a 35-year-old can work in the same room as a 40-year-old…or even be their boss! It’s still there, but the context around it is often so different that it may be harder to recognize. Giftedness in adulthood doesn’t go anywhere. Also, of course, there is not one “type” of giftedness in adults, just as there is not in children - some are gifted in math, while some have exceptional verbal abilities, others have extraordinary visuospatial skills, and still others have seemingly endless divergent thinking capabilities. Just as we have described gifted preschoolers as being inherently gifted long before schools identify them, gifted adults are simply what those children become when they grow up - sensitive, curious, intense, and often wildly insightful and funny in addition to being intellectually voracious deep thinkers. That’s simply because the variability in intelligence that our teachers and schools attend to in school (ideally) is also stable: kids who were fast learners become adults who are fast learners, generally speaking. Obviously, we have all met people who have tremendous intellectual firepower, and others who do not. They seek challenge, novelty, discovery, and intensity - just like their children.They are likely still different from their peers - though less so than in childhood. ![]() What characterizes a gifted adult?Ī few things we know about gifted adults (also known as “former gifted children”): The answer is both simple and complicated: they become gifted adults, of course. However, the proportion that drops out of school altogether is unclear, as seeking out such a figure is like feeling around to identify a void in a darkened room one commonly-cited figure is 18-25%.) (It is important to note here while we know that gifted children of course do not all go to college. What happens to them after they graduate from high school and from college? Where, then, do all the gifted children go? There are millions of them in programs all over the country and around the world, but just as all successful people are not intellectually gifted, neither are all gifted people eminent and successful. It stands to reason, then, that as we grow up, we generally become… more of who we were to begin with. Outside of traumatic injuries or experiences of tremendous stimulation deprivation, it is just a stubborn thing that doesn’t tend to move very much.Įven if you’re not a huge fan of IQ tests, per se, it seems intuitive to believe that people’s intellectual abilities don’t change significantly - there just aren’t commonly-heard anecdotes about people who struggled in school suddenly becoming college professors, just as there aren’t any of people who were once brilliant but now have only average intelligence (outside of Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon,” which includes both such dynamics). Once we reach the age of eight, IQ is a very stable psychometric measure, remaining remarkably unchanged as people shift from gifted children into gifted adults.
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