Today I Learned

Honestly don't know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.

My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I've realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage... which as I have come to understand it isn't ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.

All in all though it's a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it's a "waste" of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it's often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.

To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people's reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to "a different brain". The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn't serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn't particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn't playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.

I was a gifted kid, I'd say most our class was really freaking weird in some way or another. There were definitely those weird ultra good rule followers on one side and the totally weird misfits/defiant troublemakers on the other with very few seeming "normal" kids in the middle. Despite having higher IQs, I don't think that the students were generally more successful than other students in life. In fact, based on those that I am still in touch with, they might be below average in that respect.

Right, i think that's a pretty common observation. Starting at school. Kids who are considered more intelligent don't necessarily do well in school. On contrary, some really struggle. At least that's what I observed when I was 12 and had some gifted classmates.

Imo, it's the human condition. Everyone is good at some things, average at most, bad at others.

Occasionally it happens that sone kids are great at academic achievement and they get labeled as "gifed" because that's what's superficially celebrated in our culture. I say superficially because after school it doesn't matter much

In my gifted class with three other students we were all diagnosed with ADHD later, just saying.

Look, I don't want to nitpick much, or make you feel like I'm bashing you, that's not my intent.

The post, however, is pretty far off of reality. "Gifted" is not the same kind of thing as other neurodivergence. It simply doesn't have a well defined criteria. The only criteria that's used in a majority of places that use the term is IQ or other testing scores.

Should it have the same kind of diagnostic criteria as other aspects of neurofunction? Maybe. Maybe not. There's just not enough information on it all to tell if it really is a form of neurodivergence, or just part of neurotypical function with higher "intelligence". I don't speak Portuguese, so I can't tell if that video is accurate in its information or not, but I can tell that "Gifted" as a term is not what you've presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.

If there's newer definitions and criteria, it would be nice if you put them into post instead of relying on a YouTube video at all, but that's whatever.

I'm not saying I disagree. Every "Gifted" or "accelerated" kid I ever knew behaved differently than most people. It may well be a form of neurodivergence that isn't just intelligence (which is a difficult thing to quantify properly in itself).

I'm just saying that the post here doesn't really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There's no meat here.

Unless you can give me an exact specific definition of what "intellectually gifted" means in this context then all of this is just meaningless bullshit.