Is Too!

In an article titled High Intelligence is not Neurodivergence, the author (whom I will not name as I hope to focus on the topic) argues that high intelligence and neurodivergence are categorically distinct. Intelligence describes level of cognitive capacity. Neurotype describes how perception, attention, and processing are organized. The article acknowledges that highly intelligent people pay a real social cost for their ability — they often mask or downplay their thinking to avoid alienating others. But it argues this adaptation is fundamentally different from what neurodivergent people navigate, and that each group needs different support as a result. It closes by warning that stretching "neurodivergent" to cover any uncommon trait dilutes the term's precision. Highly intelligent people, it argues, deserve language of their own rather than borrowing a category built for something else.

The author specifically writes: “High intelligence does not need to be called neurodivergence in order to be understood. It needs to be recognized as a real human variation with real social consequences. It needs language spacious enough to describe both its gifts and its costs without collapsing it into another category.”

Isn’t that what the neurodiversity movement perpetuates though: “real human variation”? Is neurodivergence not exactly that?

On Facebook, the Gifted Development Center shared this article writing: “Is high intelligence a form of neurodivergence, or are we confusing two distinct traits?” They shared how the author “takes a look at why high intelligence and neurodivergence are distinct concepts, and why conflating them can obscure the lived experiences of both groups.”

Aw man. Son of a… ok. So… this article can be dangerous and misleading. Yes, as a trait, “high intelligence” (which is not effectively or measurably operationalized in this post) is not necessarily neurodivergence, however, giftedness is. There is neurobiology behind this reality, and no real science in this article. And please know, the disagreement over classification isn’t the problem. What’s dangerous is what the disagreement does once it’s out in the world carrying an institution’s name.

The article never actually settles whether it’s talking about high intelligence or giftedness, and treats the two as interchangeable throughout, when they’re not the same construct. High intelligence is a score on a cognitive measure. Giftedness, per the Columbus Group’s definition, is a developmental and experiential profile inclusive of asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive ability and heightened intensity combine to produce qualitatively different inner experience, not simply a higher score on the same processing everyone else runs. That intensity shows up across sensual, psychomotor, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional domains (what Dabrowski described as overexcitability).

Collapsing giftedness into high intelligence while the piece gets shared by the Gifted Development Center is no small thing since it reframes giftedness as a marker of raw cognitive superiority rather than a neurodifference with its own regulatory costs. That repositions gifted people as an intellectual elite who happen to struggle socially, instead of people whose nervous systems are organized differently and who need support structured around that difference.

There’s a second harm running alongside this, too... the article’s own framing treats being called neurodivergent as something gifted children need to be protected from, as if the label itself were a diagnosis to avoid. That’s backwards relative to what the neurodiversity movement maintains. Neurodivergent was never meant to mark pathology. Quite the opposite, it was meant to remove pathology from the conversation, treating divergence as difference rather than defect. Writing as though “neurodivergent” carries a stigma that “gifted” doesn’t is itself a quiet act of pathologizing, dressed up as protecting gifted kids from a bad label that is not bad at all (regardless of whether you like/appreciate labels or not).

As for the discussion concerning self-diagnosis or self-identification that keeps coming up, this is important as not all people have access to diagnosis for so many reasons.

There were several meaningful responses to this post. A couple people said they appreciated it. I asked them why. The answers were ill-informed and erroneous, unfortunately.

Most people pushed back though, including several renowned experts in the field.

My favorite post however, came from a new-to-the-scene individual, Gifted Curious educator and consultant Youssef Sleiman.

I’ve worked with Youssef and explored the neurology of giftedness with him. He’s read Insight Into a Bright Mind: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Stories of Unique Thinking by Nicole Tetreault PhD cover to cover. He edited Intersection of Intensity: Exploring Giftedness and Trauma, which explicitly discusses neurological differences in the gifted brain. Most importantly though, as a relatively tall man, he commented with this in response to a quote from the article:

“A very tall person is not in a different category of motor development because height creates social inconvenience.” ... Well, actually ...

Individuals with giantism do follow a fundamentally different motor development than non-giantistic folk.

Likewise, gifted individuals (who *may* be identified with an IQ test) follow different neurological development:

- delays in synaptic pruning

- thickening of the cortex in various regions

- increased dendritic thickness

(As in the very neurons of high IQ folk are developmentally different from non-high IQ folk.) Patty L Gently and Austina De Bonte have the research citations covered.)

In a different gifted group, I joked about how giftedness could be described as “existential giantism”.

I didn’t imagine anyone who works with gifted or high IQ individuals might confuse those who are in the 98th percentile of IQ as analogous to someone who’s just kinda tall.

And there we have it. Need we say more?

Share

Leave a comment