Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What does the "gifted" label mean to you?

I know a fair number of you tested as gifted when you were younger. What does the gifted label mean to you, now, as an adult?

I've been thinking a bit about this and it is actually bothering me a bit, because according to my mom, I missed the cut off for the gifted program by 2 points. So, I guess I'm not gifted?

I've been throwing around the idea of taking the test for Mensa, and DH thinks I'm silly and wants no part of it. I feel like I don't want to join unless DH wants to join and can qualify.

I'm embarrassed to say I actually took their official online home test and got a score back saying I would likely qualify. I don't know if the home test is accurate. DH definitely has some gifted traits, but he does not share my love of analyzing everything.

Anyway, I had a truly horrible school experience. There are whole sections of my life that I seem to have blocked out. Old friends of mine and my family sometimes mention certain things and I vaguely recognize what they are talking about, but most of the time I have no recollection. My sister is convinced I've just repressed half of it. I had cancer as a teenager, so I know why that part is blocked out.

A few years ago, I started reading some of the gifted literature, and it was an "Aha!" moment for me. Everything they talked about was how I was as a child and how I felt most of the time. I finally had an explanation for why I never fit in, why my peers didn't like me and could never put their finger on exactly why, and why my friends regularly told me I was "too much", and made me feel bad about it.

(I use to attribute half of it to getting "INTP" on a personality test, but those tests aren't supposed to be accurate, anyway. lol)

Anyway, I feel lonely sometimes, but DH doesn't understand and I feel silly bringing it up. I need to have "deep" discussions once in awhile, but I have no one to talk to except people in online forums. There was one guy my DH was friends with when he was in the military. He didn't fit in, either, and people thought he was "odd" and "antisocial."

I completely understood him, and when I had to go to drinking parties (beer pong does not excite me), he and I would sit in a corner somewhere and end up having amazing meaning of life type conversations. I even called him on the phone, once, when I had to go to a party that he wasn't at.

But... I'm not gifted. I'm also obviously not outside of some sort of "optimal range" for fitting in. So I don't have a "reason" for all the years of agonizing over not fitting in, or having issues at school, or even for my inability now to choose just one interest to focus on.

I have no "excuse" for my intensity. I'm just "too much" and have a hard time finding friends. I only have a handful, and they are scattered around the country because I moved a lot after high school.

DH (my ENFP lol) gets along with most people and even though he never had a best friend growing up, he moved a lot and never experienced the bullying or things that I did. He doesn't really understand why I keep reading about giftedness or why I care. I don't even know why I care.

DD is definitely more advanced than other babies her age right now and that might also be dragging it up for me. And... I keep coming back to this forum.

We need some more smilies here! I'm looking for a hug one and it is not to be found.

My initial thought is two fold:

1) what test did you take that says you're not gifted? My mother, a few years back, gave me my old school records and I came across two pieces of paper with various test scores on them but which didn't indicate the test name or anything else specific. They were old dot matrix print outs from some school computer presumably. One, at the top above the achievement test scores, had one line that said "cognitive ability" or something like that and put me in the mid 80s. Another, a few years later looked like basically the same thing and had my "cognitive ability" in the 99th. I've taken an IQ test twice in my life and both times it was close to the second assessment not the first. Point being, if it was one of those group tests that many of us bemoan, who knows how accurate it was for you and;

2) scores are not set in stone. As has often been said here, it is a picture of one day. Can we really distinguish btwn two points difference? It's splitting hairs at that point. If you were very young, those scores are also not supremely stable.

Another thing to consider is were you in the 94th rather than the 95th or the 98th rather than the 99th? That also might make a difference. How high was the bar?

In re to the "optimal range," I'm not sure that it can be quantified by sheer #s. I'm someone, if I go off of the greater bunch of the data not that one group test from my early elementary years, who is right at the 99th point but really not above it. I've got a few tests that put me a hair higher and a few that put me a bit lower, but I'm not a DYS kid type of person. My dd12 is also probably right around the same spot. We're avg Mensa eligible material which doesn't seem that far out honestly.

None the less, other things come into play in terms of alienation in life. What does your community look like? If you've lived in places that mirror the avg of the nation, you're still trying to find that one person in 50 or 100 who is like you. That is harder than it is for most people. Personality matters too (I'm not suggesting that you have a bad one .) I suspect that my dd12 finds herself fitting better with the further out there people b/c of her personal drive and direction in life. It makes her appear even more gifted than she probably is.

I, like you, find that my # of friends is limited. On my end, we moved a lot too but I'm sure that isn't all of it. Lonely is a hard place to be, though. FWIW, I have really enjoyed the people I've met through my local Mensa group but I'm sure that it varies from place to place.

SAT tests are IQ proxy tests, too.

And in any event, "gifted" to me is just a section of the human population with a certain level of "intensity" or "amplitude".

I only started looking at IQ again when I had to figure out what extremely low IQs meant for my job.

From what I hear, Mensa is hit or miss. I've never bothered trying to find out much about them.

Mensa doesn't accept SAT tests anymore. I think SAT tests are more of an aptitude test and IQ tests are supposed to measure intelligence, although obviously the two concepts are closely linked.
"Not fitting in" doesn't necessarily mean you are or aren't gifted. I know lots of of gifted people/kids who fit in, and some who didn't. Taking the mensa IQ test won't necessarily answer questions that you have about yourself- what if you bomb it? You can still be gifted.

The Triple Nine Society still accepts SAT tests through February 2005.

In any event, the SAT's probably good enough for government work, so to speak.

Giftedness is a continum, just like ingelligence, generally.

I don't think there are fixed "gifted / non-gifted" points.

But you know it when you see it. And personality comes into play.

Here's my thought: Let's say right now you were presented with a piece of paper that says IslandOfApples: you are gifted. What would that change for you? It sounds like you are saying in your head you would have a valid reason for your feelings of difference.

From my perspective that sense of validity of your feelings doesn't come from a piece of paper with an IQ score on it. Because of course there are a range of feelings that people x number IQ can have. Many will feel nothing like you feel. Some who have a totally different IQ will. Having that IQ doesn't take away the experience you had of feeling alone as a child and it won't make you less along right now.

If you feel discontent or loneliness in your life now that's what I'd focus on. A little bit of therapy to come to terms with your feelings might help. Putting energy into finding people you can connect with would also help. Most adults don't join clubs based on IQ - they meet around shared interests. What are your interests? It is very likely if you focus on your interests you will find ways to connect with people. Think about activities like: volunteering, book club, chess club, etc. Putting the same energy you put into online activities into real life activities is the road to building those in real life friendships that offer the possibility of real support.

I think it's safe to define "gifted" as a certain level of thinking power above the average. On a good day a current IQ test would mark that power at 130 or higher. People are complicated, however, so when you take that measurable thinking power and blend it into everything else that makes us human, especially our social and emotional needs, you get an infinite variety which explains the diversity of the gifted population. Throw in variables like motor skills, working memory, and processing speed, and it's obvious that each gifted person is totally unique and there are no manuals.

I like to imagine we are like those graphic audio equalizers on your PC, but replace the frequencies with different areas of thinking and feeling and personality. An average person has most of these on a similar level across the board. But as you enter the gifted range, the levels almost never go up together; things become asynchronous, so one person has a high working memory, but lower verbal, and vice versa. And just how in audio this brings unique, often distorted sound, so with people it brings unique gifts and talents but often at a cost of emotional and social problems during development. You can imagine what some of the so-called "idiot savants" might look like on such a graphic equalizer, with one or two levels at the top and then others at rock bottom.

In my opinion, working and long term memory are vastly underrated in measuring intelligence. Raw thinking power is like having a muscle car with no roads. If you're constantly having to rebuild the roads, look up the facts, then your muscle car isn't all that useful or fun.

I think that explains why the only people I've ever met who seemed impressively and universally intelligent to me all had a superior memory. I worked with one IT guy who had 40 certifications and remembered everything. He was a mellow guy, not intense or "giftie", but he just could remember everything. For all I know his thinking power could have been average but what does it matter? His brain was finely mapped with smooth roads and excellent signs, so even if he was driving a Honda Civic, the guy next to him with the muscle car brain was constantly popping his tires and having to repair the roads and squint at the signs his poor memory obscured.

OK, my analogy is breaking down at this point but that's because according to the IQ test I took when I was 17, my 8-yo daughter is smarter by 25 IQ points!

I grew up with a guy like this. He memorized the dictonary and won the national spelling bee one year.

He was intense and quite different.

I have a pet theory that I like to carry around with me (and I bookmarked on my computer before the hard drive crashed). If you think of a brain cell as being like a computer that is connected to other brain cells by ethernet cables, the insulation on the cables is called myelin. There's been some research that suggests that the the greatest impact genetics or your physical body has on intelligence is through the quality of this insulation. For some reason, I find this thought rather comforting.

I'm a teacher with little experience in gifted education, but I have run more meetings to determine eligibility for Special Education than I can count. I do tend to think of giftedness being similar to mental retardation, because both represent remote corners of a normal distribution, whose difficulties come about because they are so far from the norm.

I also think of cutoff scores as being a line arbitrarily drawn on a bell curve. There isn't a gap on that line that makes the people on one side noticeably different from the folks on the other. There are plenty of people who happen to be very close to it. The line doesn't have much meaning in the real world, in other words.

If a public school looked at a IQ 2 points higher than mentally retarded in this day and age and declared that student was not eligible because they didn't meet the cutoff, it would be in a world of trouble with state and federal law. For one thing, 2 points on a standard scale is a very small difference that might disappear if you happened to take the test on a different day. For another thing, they'd need to do another test whose name eludes me at the moment. I think it's called a Functional Assessment--the Vineland is one example.

Now, the laws for SpEd have always been stronger than the laws regarding gifted education, but having a single, hard-and fast cutoff score is just bad practice. Data from a variety of sources should be considered.

My older sister also missed the cutoff for the gifted class. She's a now a medical doctor in charge of training medical residents at her hospital. In the past, she's been chief of staff at a different hospital. If she was tested in this day and age, other factors besides a cognitive score--like her superior task commitment--would probably be considered, and she would probably qualify.

I'm going to suggest you google "3 Ring" and "Renzulli", and that you try to get your hands on a book called _Living with Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults_ Daniels & Piechowski, ed.s

I can only monetize I.Q.'s of 70 or under. And trust me, that's a hard cutoff under Social Security's disability regulations:

"12.05 Mental retardation: Mental retardation refers to significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning with deficits in adaptive functioning initially manifested during the developmental period; i.e., the evidence demonstrates or supports onset of the impairment before age 22.

The required level of severity for this disorder is met when the requirements in A, B, C, or D are satisfied.

A. Mental incapacity evidenced by dependence upon others for personal needs (e.g., toileting, eating, dressing, or bathing) and inability to follow directions, such that the use of standardized measures of intellectual functioning is precluded;

OR

B. A valid verbal, performance, or full scale IQ of 59 or less;

OR

C. A valid verbal, performance, or full scale IQ of 60 through 70 and a physical or other mental impairment imposing an additional and significant work-related limitation of function;"