Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults (2009) [pdf]

hoagiesgifted.org

204 pointssillysaurus3128 comments

> As one child described it, they feel "like abandoned aliens waiting for the mother ship to come and take them home"

This is exactly how I felt. I can remember thinking those exact words when I was very young - although I didn't really start questioning the nature of reality until my early teens.

At some point, I realised that these thoughts were only causing depression, so I decided to simply stop thinking about them. I also became apathetic, and detached from my own emotions.

Ultimately, my own existential depression led to self-destructive behavior - perhaps this was related to the coping strategy of "Seeking novelty and adrenaline rushes".

Edit: I would like to add that I do not consider myself gifted. I simply have a rather narrow set of interests which I have become good at. I think it is particularly common for "technical" people to be told they are gifted, because to the untrained observer their skills can seem like wizardry.

I know where you are coming from.

I felt that I was a member of a different species, to the point where that idea quite literally manifested itself as a concrete possibility in my head.

You're right man, it's all thought based...it's all brain weirdness. It's a conflict between biosocial and intellectual factors.

The only way to push past it is to change your mindset. I can't speak for others, obviously, but for me that's been a long and arduous process.

There are ways to question the nature of life and the world and to remain calm and serene about it. To remain level.

I found too that little things are a big help...I lived a long time not bothering myself with "minor" and "vain" concerns... i.e. fancy clothing, delicious meals etc... but truly taking care and investing in these little things, concerning yourself with the quality of the little practices you partake in everyday really does begin to help.

Caring about yourself in little ways slowly but surely leads to a more positive overall conception of your own self and your movement through the world.

I had a sudden "wake up call" about a year ago, and since then things have been getting much better. Partly because I have become more independent, but also because I have perfected the art of simply not thinking about things that I want to ignore. I'm not sure if that's healthy or not, but it seems to work.

I think it's healthy, especially if those things are truly and deeply beyond your influence or control.

Do you have any advise on how you accomplished that? Meditation?

I'm not sure really, it seemed to come naturally. Perhaps even as a symptom of depression.

It might have helped that I stopped carrying a smartphone. I guess things like sitting on a train without any entertainment counts as meditation, although I never really think of it as such.

Disclaimer: I've had an anxiety disorder most of my life and I already have had some professional CBT training to help with difficult times. I think if anyone reading this is really down / troubled, then seeing a professional would be wise. There are really good caring people out there that can help.

I've recently experienced something very similar, I would like to share with you my story on getting (mostly) through it in hope that it may help others.

First step for me, just getting out in the wilderness helped me immensely, even just a nice park and some sun/rain helps. It sounds really alternate but getting out and touching trees, just sitting under them has been a kind of medicine, watching animals in as wild of a setting as possible is nice too.

Walking, or "wandering" for a long period of time has also been a great way to settle the mind, you could call it the most primitive form of meditation, but if you get the chance to walk for 1-2 hours along a quiet beach, consider yourself blessed. Just not having a set place to walk but just exploring is what I mean.

More formal meditation practice is very, very good for me; however, it has to be taught / practiced properly. Getting the wrong idea about something like Buddhism can be quite destructive, especially for those in a vulnerable place.

I found socializing to be critical, if you can talk to someone about the problems specifically it's even better. We are social beings.

My episode I now consider a little bit of a gift, it has made me realize the value of our natural surroundings and how important their conservation, protection and our return to them is for us humans. Maybe more than some of us ever realize.

I read the ancient Greeks would treat people with mental distress by giving them a nice quiet place to stay near the sea, maybe they were onto something?

Meditation has been a weird journey for me. Took a few tries to find something I'd stick with, and so far, it has made it easier to stop thinking about some things. Basically, meditation for me is a time to detach from my thoughts. Give myself something to concentrate on (drums for me), and do that for 20 minutes daily, and when the mind wanders, just go back to the sounds. And after a while, it is like your mind gets more used to doing that - I don't dwell nearly as much. It isn't perfect, but better.

Some folks find mediation makes them feel worse, depending on the technique and what is going on inside the person's head. Some of the repeated thoughts can happen in depression and anxiety. Meditation combined with either illness can be weird - some folks get a lot out of it, especially if they have comparatively mild symptoms, and some find it makes it go awry, for lack of a better description. Also, for females, hormones can cause sticky thoughts sometimes. This sort of thing might make medication a better first helping choice than meditation.

I accomplished it by squelching the conversations in my head about random shit - most of which was speculating future scenarios. These conversations of the past or future events are primary for me because I don't visualize - i.e. I don't have spontaneous visual memories or willful recall of visual detail of a memory. The conversations begin slowing when I began working on solving dissonant thoughts that lead to additional future telling of events. Now my mind is quiet, although full of questions about reality. It's a double edged sword!

Stop reading the news.

Wow.

Maybe about a year ago I wrote a comment on reddit it read almost exactly like that abandoned aliens sentence.

I think I said something like "waiting for the mother ship to take me to my people.".

I know the feeling. There's the existential depression, and than there's that special kind of loneliness of being isolated by having a different set of knowledge to that of your peers. I try not to mix the two...

I just latched on to an intense fear of death, and struggle with sleep. It's hard to deal with existential crises when you're nine, and it tends to leave a mark.

Being called gifted only made it worse. I was not. None of them were. I'm still not. It was a lie. Why couldn't people just give me credit for working hard? That was the truth. Why was my success some magical unexplainable innate attribute?

At any rate, psychologists will tell you how harmful it can be to tell a child how smart they "are", rather than letting them know they've simply "done" a good job.

The distinction seems to be between being and doing, with the former being static and the latter dynamic.

Well, probably to not feel bad about themselves. If your skills were obtained through hard work, they could have done that themselves. Whereas if it was handed to you by magic then there's nothing to be done, right?

Cognitive ability is an innate attribute. This is observationally true. We can't pretend that everyone has the same capabilities, even with applied effort. That's false. However, I still think that showering someone with praise and sectioning them off into separate classes throughout childhood is not necessarily the best strategy for dealing with highly intelligent children, either. My own experience was that socially, I was years behind my peers in high school due to the isolation of gifted classes. I think it would be best to have gifted students advance in grades but still have them integrated with the general student body along with some social interaction with peers of their age group.

At some level, everybody works hard, but some are incredibly more talented than others.

But I agree that it's misleading to call someone gifted. Intelligence is such a diverse thing. Some people can be gifted for one thing and totally deficient for some other things. I'm not even sure that a very high IQ is predictive of success in science for instance.

I also very highly doubt a very high IQ is predictive of science success - those are simply the folks we hear about because it is more popular than bragging that a philosopher or a musician is such. All three can be brilliant, but their minds simply work in different ways from each other.

Very high iq is certainly correlated with science success and predictive of it to a degree. That degree is not 100%, it's probably less than 50%

IQ is quite heritable, something about h = 0.7 for adults is a good average I've seen from a couple reviews. That's quite strong, though interestingly it's lower for children.

Now, you can argue about interpreting IQ all you like, but it's really a moot point because the metric captures some of the variation humans have in cognitive ability. It doesn't mean that there's a neat linear scale (a simplification like IQ metrics leads some to falsely conclude this), but there is variation nonetheless, and it's mostly due to your genes, not your upbringing.

Does that mean you were gifted? Not necessarily; advantages in some aspects of cognition likely come with a trade-off for others. Those we consider gifted likely just have a good match of abilities with the challenges they face.

However, I would caution against the other extreme; you did not simply pull yourself up by your bootstraps in some sort of meritocratic Riefenstahl-ian fantasy. You most certainly had some advantages and fortune.

I became so much happier when I realized how much my education-minded parents and my environment gave me a leg up (even in the economically declining Eastern Europe of the time). Helped me chill out a lot and feel less pressure (and hence have much more actual productivity).

Starting advantage does not mean you are not working hard now. Just means that you should do good things with that advantage. Make it shine!

You can certainly say that for yourself, but ascribing it merely to "hard work" for everyone is facetious.

I didn't work hard at all. I've never had a class which seriously taxed me mentally and until college at least I could get As without even trying at all.

Even more directly, on my first time taking the SAT (with 0 prep) I scored better than anyone else in my class, including people who had studied like crazy and gone through extensive prep courses.

Thinking that I'm anything but incredibly lucky would be arrogant of me. That being said, I do dislike the "gifted" terminology, primarily due to its theological and duty connotations.

I was a gifted kid, I got D's all through school because fuck doing that busywork, and then slept through college and did the bare minimum to graduate with honors, which means only studying for the exams in the car on the way to school... Meanwhile other people worked really really hard to graduate with a 3.0

Please tell me how my success is due to my hard work and not the luck to have been born to my smart-but-relatively-poor parents.

I know other people can spend their life working hard and not get to where I am, and people can work less hard than me and get a lot further. This isn't a game with very structured rules. Life is chaos, and you're doing yourself and society at large a disservice by ascribing your success solely to "hard work", because applying that dogma to people with an IQ of 90 isn't going to work out well on a large scale.

Or, a different interpretation: what's the benchmark for gifted? Who's picking these people out of the crowd, and how? The programs I saw didn't test objectively, were absurdly vulnerable to parental arm-twisting, and in some cases were drawing from a student body that was, on average, performing well below grade-level.

(N.B. Amount of hard work still dwarfed by blind luck.)

Highly selective colleges are the mother ship. When the handful of isolated gifted students are plucked out of their widely dispersed high schools and collected in one institution, one dorm, it's incredible. People feel home for the first time.

That was not my experience. I found that as I worked my way into elite institutions people were just playing more sophisticated, elaborate forms of the monkey-see-monkey-do game they were playing everywhere else.

It was mine.

To be fair, I think there is a tier of elite institutions which primarily attract the prestige/wealth crowd (Ivy League, etc), and a tier just below them in rankings which attract the nerds who want to do hard intellectual work.

This is entirely my experience. A lot of people at highly selective colleges are hyper focused on one area of study to the exclusion of others, for example a lot of my friends who are brilliant engineers hate the arts. I think intelligence is broader than IQ, because I think there's something to be said for the intelligence that allows you to recognize the value of many different intellectual pursuits at the same time. You can learn so much more if you get along with intellectuals of all kinds.

Some people take their specialization too far, in my opinion.

I suspect the cognitive effects of depression may serve this purpose well. An endeavor (specialization) is a good way to battle depression. My inclination is to agree with you. Then I realize this "intelligence" you've described is essentially an adaption to the sluggish nature of dissonant reasoning. The more axes involved in mediating dissonance the more the set of thoughts becomes partially ordered vs fully ordered. This partial ordering demands active mediation. This is the domain for which this intelligence is just another specialization. I realize it's good but it isn't wholly superior to avoiding it outright. For instance, in noticing this I'm only more ambivalent and ultimately... depressed. I can see how I would be able to execute faster if I defaulted to the other heuristic.

This is so true. I was on one of the mother ships. The bests of our class won a coupe of gold and silver medals on the Internationale Mathematik Olympiad.

After leaving school I "realized" that the universe is filled with happy morons and I have always wished to be one of them. But some day I realized that this wish makes me a moron because it's like to wish the sky were green. So actually a became one of them.

> People feel home for the first time.

I tend to believe that people that have relational issues continue to have them even when changing environment. Moreover, elite institutions can be competitive and it can be hard to deal with too.

I went to Oxford and even though everyone else there seemed pretty smart too I still didn't really make friends or develop meaningful relationships. It took me many years of basically just being isolated from others before I learned about the concept of "attachment styles" and started working on "Earned Secure Attachment" which basically means you build your own sense of attachment as an adult to correct the problematic aspects of your attachment style from childhood. It's unfortunate that kids who don't really "fit in" and end up being fairly isolated socially even though they are intelligent don't have a way of finding out how to solve that problem and that people just go around encouraging kids to be more socially active and suchlike. Even if you are socially active, you are probably not going to be able to form successful adult relationships without help if you already fall into the category that the OP is referencing.

I've met swathes of extremely accomplished people who clearly give very little thought to things existential (their studies or other passions are often a distraction from such thinking).

Highly accomplished people also often engage in "just world fallacy" thinking and consider their success as rightfully deserved due to their inherent virtue. This again is used to avoid thinking about things like the randomness, injustice, and suffering involved in existence.

So I don't think inserting yourself into a bubble of overachievers is a solution by any means.

my home called to me pre-college at 10 years old in a nationally administered gifted program. i only realised a few years later that everyone there was just like me and totally different from everyone else at the same time.

university, even the most selective ones, are just ever so slightly different to not be the home I belonged to for 7 years.

I remember being very convinced that everyone else was a robot for a couple of years in my teens. Really freaked me out.

Mostly it was just that I was an only child in a stable household so everything around me was very routine and predictable.

That makes me wonder if an overly stable household is actually a bad thing.

If nothing particularly unusual happens to you as a child, overcoming adversity in the future is probably more difficult.

To clarify, I was interested in a lot of things. The routine of everybody else around me was just so consistent.

Dad got up and ready and out the door for work at the same time every day. Mom stuck perfectly to her routine. Birthdays, holidays, football season, school, church, etc. There just wasn't any really drama or family crisis that disrupted things.

Unless you are a robot...

About kids thinking they are aliens or, as another commenter, that everyone is a robot but them — or the reverse: I thought I was a robot like Daryl :) — it's really quite common, like kids thinking their parents are not their parents, etc.

There is a nice comics that start from this common thought in kids, and, well… you'll see! It's called "the astronauts of the future"[1], and it's about a boy and a girl who believe there's alien everywhere or that everyone is a robot, respectively, and try to prove each other who is right.

[1] http://www.eurocomics.info/astronauts_of_the_future.html

> I would like to add that I do not consider myself gifted. I simply have a rather narrow set of interests which I have become good at.

Are you Bryan Mills by any chance?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22998852

BACKGROUND:

Happiness and higher intelligent quotient (IQ) are independently related to positive health outcomes. However, there are inconsistent reports about the relationship between IQ and happiness. The aim was to examine the association between IQ and happiness and whether it is mediated by social and clinical factors. Method The authors analysed data from the 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey in England. The participants were adults aged 16 years or over, living in private households in 2007. Data from 6870 participants were included in the study. Happiness was measured using a validated question on a three-point scale. Verbal IQ was estimated using the National Adult Reading Test and both categorical and continuous IQ was analysed.

RESULTS:

Happiness is significantly associated with IQ. Those in the lowest IQ range (70-99) reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with the highest IQ group (120-129). Mediation analysis using the continuous IQ variable found dependency in activities of daily living, income, health and neurotic symptoms were strong mediators of the relationship, as they reduced the association between happiness and IQ by 50%.

CONCLUSIONS:

Those with lower IQ are less happy than those with higher IQ. Interventions that target modifiable variables such as income (e.g. through enhancing education and employment opportunities) and neurotic symptoms (e.g. through better detection of mental health problems) may improve levels of happiness in the lower IQ groups.

I think the woes of intelligent people are the mental version of first world problems. Unintelligent people are sad and lonely too - and if the research is true - even more so than clever ones.

The myth that despair companions intelligence is properly due to confirmation bias. You don't have many stupid people talking or writing about the hurt they feel from being. Or its just a nice thing to believe to find exaltation in one's own suffering.

This bit from the "Strengths and Limitations" section gave me an inappropriate chuckle:

> ... The use of a single question to measure happiness is easier for people with lower IQ to understand ...

In seriousness, though, this paper is interesting, as it goes against conventional wisdom.

I struggled quite a bit with an existential crisis a little over a year ago. The sense of despair I felt over the lack of innate purpose and meaning in life made it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I recovered from this aspect of it by reminding myself that evolution happened to shape me with a mind which craves purpose; so just as I fulfill my need for food, sex and companionship, I can create a sense of meaning for myself to meet this need.

The sense of meaning came from being, as Neil degrasse Tyson says, "A good, strong link in the chain of life". I decided to simply be a good human who attempts to be present and care for my fellow humans, to honor and respect life, and to try to leave society more healthy and stable. This is enough for me. Unfortunately, the existential risks which plague us (nuclear war, catastrophic climate change) not only frighten me because of the horrors I would experience, but also because they would erase my purpose. Grappling with the idea that humans could be wiped out due to our apathy, greed and proclivity towards violence is so thoroughly depressing that my only recourse is distracting myself. I meditate, get lost in friends, work and video games, enjoy travel, and try not to think about it. If civilization or our species will be destroyed within my lifetime, I want to at least have enjoyed the time I had.

I don't know about "gifted," but I certainly suffer from this. I suspect most people have at some point.

I don't think of myself as "gifted." Some people have said I am, but I doubt it: I work hard, I read, I acquire knowledge. Anyone can do that.

Besides, even if I am gifted, It's not a healthy attitude to have. You start to get presumptuous, and arrogant, which means that you'll learn less. And I'm arrogant enough: I don't need a swelled head.

In short, statistically, I'm probably not gifted, and it's unhealthy to believe you're gifted anyways, so even if I am, I'm better off not knowing.

This might be totally insane, but it seems reasonable to me...

As far as societal measures go I was identified as "gifted" at a young age. I was shipped off to special schools and classes, offered grade skipping, started taking college courses while in high school, "identified" by Mensa and Who's Who.

In the shorter term, while I was younger, it did make me arrogant. As I got older that went away.

It certainly didn't result in me learning less. I have always felt lonely, for a long time depressed, then eventually just detached and separate from the world.

I'm almost 40 now and learning is still a way for me to tune out a world that I feel set aside from.

If you don't mind me asking, how did you cope with loneliness?

I suspect learning. Loneliness is ultimately not the signal we think it is. It's conditioned from other more fundamental signals. One such signal is the desire to learn. To become a better version of yourself. Sustained loneliness is eventually disintegrated and mediated more fundamentally. Empathizing with the intellectual giants of history can yield wonderful quasi-imaginary friends. Notably many such people lived very similarly and have wonderful things to say about it; Almost as if they intended to be your temporally long-distance friend. If you love them as they were then you will come to see that they loved you too. Truly to the depth that they could know you. It both humbles and inspires.

Some of the most arrogant people I know reject the notion that they are gifted (as in, born lucky) in favor of the idea that they just work hard and anybody else could do the same but everyone else is too lazy. I think there are some definite positives in recognising the advantages you were born with.

You can always be arrogant if you try hard enough. But not being arrogant is far harder.

Personally, I believe that I might have had a bit of an advantage in some fields. Not because I'm necessarily better, but because my approach functions better in that area. But most people can do the same thing if they wanted to. It's merely that everybody has a limited amount of focus, and most people choose to spend it differently. Looking down on them is unproductive, and also incorrect: they're probably experts in something you don't know anything about.

Gifted children are very likely to suffer from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome (the opposite of Dunning-Kruger). Because they're gifted, they tend to hold themselves to a much higher standard, and don't even realize it. Maybe that's also unhealthy, but it's pretty much the opposite of arrogance.

> I don't think of myself as "gifted." Some people have said I am, but I doubt it: I work hard, I read, I acquire knowledge. Anyone can do that.

This is a common perception that needs to die. You might as well say that anyone can dunk a basketball. Some people really just can't. Innate ability does exist, even mentally.

I agree with the rest!

Innate ability does exist, yes, but it's not as uncommon as you might think. IIRC, the people who have trouble learning to program, for example, are those that have difficulty forming a coherent mental model of assignment, and other similarly basic ideas. How many people like that do you know?

Sure, innate ability can sometimes make things a bit easier, but a lack of it rarely makes things impossible, AFAICT.

I may be wrong...

> This kind of sensitive awareness and idealism makes them more likely to ask themselves difficult questions about the nature and purpose of their lives and the lives of those around them. They become keenly aware of their smallness in the larger picture of existence, and they feel helpless to fix the many problems that trouble them. As a result, they become depressed.

Psilocybin mushrooms have a similar effect, however ironically I have used those experiences as a way of dealing with existential depression. Rather than coming away feeling "helpless to fix the many problems" I feel more like I've shed the weight of those problems.

I agree. There is no cure for existential depression, but the temporary changes in perception that occur during a mushroom/acid trip can be a huge boon. The sense of self is diminished as you are chemically forced to stare into the void. This death of the ego is a powerful kick in the brain and makes mortality more palatable.

"As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs." - Lisa Simpson

https://flowingdata.com/2008/06/20/lisa-simpson-on-happiness...

Somehow I believe that the upper brain is here to deal with problems, and so is naturally correlated to suffering.

Reminded me of a post recently that suggested liberal arts majors are typically better coders. I felt pretty good about myself reading that one too until I got to the part where it was written by somebody with a liberal arts degree, and like this paper didn't really give any evidence to support the claim except for some clearly self-serving unfalsifiable opinions.

There's some interesting stuff in here if you like to visit this realm of thought but you could remove any reference to 'gifted' and you wouldn't lose any of it.

> Reminded me of a post recently that suggested liberal arts majors are typically better coders.

Better coders compared to what? Here's some anecdotal data: I've interviewed computer scientists and computer/electrical engineers for software work terms for almost 10 years now. I administer a pretty simple technical test just measuring the ability to read and understand a small function in C#.

Over the past ~8 years I've interviewed, less than half of computer science students complete the test without any errors, or trivial errors due to simple misunderstanding of the comments documenting the code. Probably ~80% of the engineering students complete the test successfully.

Take from that what you will. Perhaps I'm looking at a biased sample because the job descriptions I post simply don't attract the better CS students, but do attract good engineering students for some reason. No idea.

I'm not going to touch on whether the 'gifted' only feel this sort of constancy of existential fear and depression. I don't think that matters. I think moving past it does.

It's a question of framing.

I have battled this sort of perspective, the existentialist depression, for a long time.

I am finally beginning to realize the radical openness of life can be viewed in another way. You can see this existential predicament we all share not as something ultimately harrowing , but rather a gift.

The future truly is open. Radically so. Existence does precede essence--rather there's no essence at all.

See what occurs as a gift, when you can.

The works of Samuel Beckett, though perhaps on a surface interpretation nihilistic and perhaps depressing, are actually a point of positivity for me. I find they really capture the open nature of life and its inherent lack of structure, or apparent (key word) purpose, and the human propensity, which is really quite admirable, to go on, in spite of all that.

The following are all quotes from Beckett I like to keep in mind when I am viewing life in a grim manner and want to improve my mood:

but who cares how things pass, provided they pass.

the end is the beginning, and yet you go on.

A story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

----

The important thing, I think, is to live. You can't control how things pass, but you can rest easier, perhaps, if you lay down your head knowing you at least tried.

I had a professor whom I will always cherish that said "what if, could have, should have, would have, if only" are the words of tragedy. I've finally taken that lesson to heart.

An importnat step for me was deciding and forcing myself to go out and do things I normally didn't do. I'm not an inherently social person, and I forced myself to modify that. I'm still not a butterfly by any means, but getting out there, meeting people, learning about them and how they lived their lives, genuinely starting to care about them, that all helps. Solitude, while it can be a sweet companion, I think is probably the worst possible thing to have when facing this sort of condition of existential worry.

A story is not compulsory. It is written, if you write it.

Sorry for personal ramblings, but I've been through what I'd call existential dread and its not fun, not fun at all. We only have one shot at this life thing. At the end of the day, spending it in a state of perpetual negativity is sorrowful. It's my hope, I guess, that maybe venting my own process of change and moving on from this incessant feeling of damnation will help someone else too, even just a little.

Keep on living guys.

Much appreciated. Thanks for the post

Thanks for this fam

Did I miss it, or was there no mention of the worst, most depressing problem of gifted children (or, most likely, adults): learning, and intuitively understanding, that they are not the smartest person in the room.

They become keenly aware of their small ness in the larger pic ture of exis tence, and they feel help less to fix the many prob lems that trou ble them. As a result, they become depressed

I have heard it's the opposite: that smarter people are happier. I think the problem is these studies on happiness and psychology are so imprecise. maybe also anecdotal evidence and cherry picking.

Other char ac ter is tics of gifted chil dren and adults also pre dis pose them to exis ten tial dis tress. Because brighter people are able to envi sion the pos si bil i ties of how things might be, they tend to be ide al ists. How ever, they are simul ta neously able to see that the world falls short of their ideals. Unfor tu nately, these vision ar ies also rec og nize that their abil ity to make changes in the world is very lim ited. Because they are intense, these gifted indi vid u als—both chil dren and adults—keenly feel the dis ap point ment and frus tra tion that occurs when their ideals are not reached. They notice duplic ity, pre tense, arbi trari ness, insin cer i ties, and absur di ties in soci ety and in the behav iors of those around them. They may ques tion or chal lenge tra di tions, partic u larly those that seem mean ing less or unfair. They may ask, for exam ple, “Why are there such inflex i ble sex or age-role restric tions on people? Is there any jus ti fi able reason why men and women ‘should’ act a cer tain way? Why do people engage in hyp o crit i cal behav iors in which they say one thing but then do the opposite? People say they are con cerned with the envi ron ment, but their behav iors show oth erwise. Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? They greet you with, ‘How are you?’ when they really don’t want you to tell them the details of how you are. Why are so many people so unthinking and uncar ing in their deal ings with others? And with our planet? Are others really con cerned with improv - ing the world, or is it simply all about self ish ness? Why do people settle for medi oc rity? People seem fun da men tally self ish and tribal. How much dif - ference can one person make? It all seems hope less. The world is too far gone. Things get worse each day. As one person, I’ll never be able to make a difference.” These thoughts are common in gifted children and adults

I think these concerns are common to most people...not just the smart

I suspect your notion of intelligence includes more than the quality itself. Humans are complex systems and exist inside much more complex systems. If intelligence were purely adaptive then there would be a lot more of it than there is. If the adaptation of an organism didn't dominate the expression of it's qualities then they would always be manifest; They are not. When they are not, happiness is also often not. It is true that a more fully manifest human is happier. Also that as their happiness and observable intelligence are correlated. But what would result from intelligence that hadn't been able to fully manifest? I suspect the expression of many of these concerns. Your final statement equalizes on this point. In fact, the expression of these concerns is absolutely not equal among humans. I can appreciate the hesitation to accept their indication of higher intelligence. They're not remarkable thoughts. They're absolutely not thoughts we want to reward. They are only occasionally the product of excessive intelligence becoming maladaptive. A person that is failing to cope takes a fairly regular form. This form is ultimately not an expression of their intelligence.

You seem to be talking about "adaptive" intelligence. I suspect this is in fact the nearness to an optimal quantity and not merely more of the quality itself. Also, that this fluctuates over time. Adaptation to it is a continuous process of the meta-mind. Ignorance can be recognized as a form of unconscious intelligence possessed by any finite thinking thing. The calculations of this intelligence precede the existence of any particular mind and needn't be known by it. Our capacity to know this form of intelligence is unlikely. Hence your perception of imprecision. The thing you wish were precise never will be. Psychology simply cannot talk about it. As a science it wouldn't intend to. It can only theorize about definable qualities. To understand and properly measure "adaptive" intelligence we would have to subvert the entirety of it's effects. We would have to know what it deemed unworthy of being within the finite knower; Merely to confirm that it was in fact unworthy of being known. We can only pontificate about what "adaptive" intelligence is. Perhaps we can assert it's the correlates of observable intelligence. This demands that it doesn't fluctuate over time. Anything we can know to properly define it is too finite. Knowing it would imply a more "real" intelligence we have yet to define. We cannot "know" the meta-mind.

I wanted to share a couple of thoughts, because after reading the comments here, there seems to be some kind of discomfort with the word "gifted". I too, felt like the paper described what I've been through, but completely rejected the idea of being gifted, as it should be, because it furthers marginalizes the self from society. I believe that with some effort through introspection, reading and practicing everybody could have similar opinions or knowledge as the people described in those pages. But I had to look into what gifted meant to the author first before assuring my discomfort and luckily, I found a couple of definitions on the website, which are different at what everybody here is thinking he meant.

"Gifted and talented children are those identified by professionally qualified persons who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of high performance." I want to note the word "capable". A lot of you, I'm sure, have come to realize that you learn fast, and faster than most people around you, and that you have different interests: sports, music, intellectually, leadership etc. That means that you don't have to be as Mozart or Einstein to enter that definition of gifted.

The second thing I wanted to say was a little bit of my experience. Yes, I'm an idealist and have strong emotions. After realizing the joke that society is I became conflicted. First, because I came to realize that we all are at fault of "this way of life" by playing along with it. Second, because I can't do anything about it to accomplish the ideal world that I sought. And lastly, because nobody that I knew thought or felt like I did, and that, made me different and felt alone. I read some books that further threw me into the abyss, because I hadn't experience enough or wasn't mature enough intellectually to understand the good in them. Especially Camus' "The stranger", a novel that talks about the absurdity of life.

To make my comment shorter so that you don't get bored. I read Sartre, and found in paragraph what life represents for me, and that set me "free", as I'm an atheist, that knew there was no meaning to life, and thus, felt my existence and everything I did irrelevant:

“Man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

For me, that was how I started to feel ok. I was free to do everything I wanted, but I too, was responsible of everything, "good" and "wrong" of the consequences. That meant "I was" what "I did", not what I thought me to be; Seneca gave a great example when he said: "A coward, makes himself a coward", and I didn't want to be a coward anymore. It was time to live what I thought life should be. And then, I read Seneca's letters to Lucilius, and found in them, agreeable and useful ways in living a more content life. And it has led me to a better path (individually speaking), "the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference".

At a very young age, I remember stairing at myself in the mirror and realizing I am I, and asking but what am I?!

Another name for "common sense" which isn't that common for some reason.

"Gifted children" is just a special buzzword to make parents feel good about their high-functioning-autism offspring. That's how it worked here in Canada.

My first encounter with such "gifted" students was in elementary school, they had a class right next to ours. At the time, I never knew about the concept of "gifted students" but what I remember clearly is this: They were constantly bullied for their appearance and mannerisms (ie. very bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities, poor motor skills) fast forward to today, none of these past gifted-students are doing anything special or noteworthy in academia and or the workforce (from my research)

This is just my experience, but perhaps I'm being too harsh.

I'm not sure how your program worked, but my experience in the States was very different. Gifted was determined based on a high general or specific intelligence score. In elementary school, the gifted kids were given special acceleration in math and reading, and were commonly accelerated a grade or two in specific classes or every class.

And general intelligence is heavily correlated to success. http://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligenc...

I don't know if your program was different, but your anecdote isn't very convincing. Did you compare the percentage of noteworthy outcomes for students inside and outside the program? What do you consider noteworthy? Has your opinion of them from elementary school colored your views?

In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them went to private high schools.

Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of people with less social skills or motor skills.

This is not actually true. Intelligence correlates with social skills https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf. It's just that math departments select for people who want a job where they have high degree of control over their environment and work on things they chose and want to spend lots of time on, and this makes it a good choice for high IQ people with autistic traits.

I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details are in the individual studies. The study does say

Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success, number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11).

I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career success, education level etc.

As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often than if these traits were uncorrelated.

I'm Canadian and in grade 2, we took some kind of test that gave me the gifted label. Woo. I suspect it was just a simple IQ test of some sort. They eventually skipped me a grade as a result.

Not even remotely autistic though.

Not autistic and was in gifted classes throughout elementary and middle school. Also played sports and did not have poor motor skills. As for bad dress sense, well, if you were worried about dress sense in elementary school I feel bad for your childhood.

I grew up in Toronto and was in the gifted program from grades four through twelve. Admission was based on an IQ test administered by a psychologist in third grade. You had to score in the 99th percentile and you were in.

It had nothing to do with how 'autistic' you were. We had more strange people than the other classes but there were plenty of normal people too. Nobody famous, but lots of lawyers, doctors, and engineers now. Nobody's dead, locked up, unemployed, pregnant, or working retail so we seem to have done much better than average.

I'm confused by your inclusion of pregnancy in that list.

They likely meant pregnant before the end of high school, as pregnancy in adulthood is actually an indication of success!

I'm only 25. It's practically unheard of for people to get pregnant this young on purpose (at least in Toronto).

Is that true across different ethnic, religious, and economic groups? I don't think it would be in the U.S.!

There's a worldwide trend that richer (in absolute terms), more educated, and more urban people tend to have fewer children and have them later, but that trend isn't affecting everybody at the same rate.

(Probably a distraction from the observation you were making, though -- including pregnancy in your list makes sense to me.)

I've seen some highly intelligent kids with no lack of hygiene and average motor skills. They weren't suffering a disease that needed them to be filtered out of mainstream society. Actually, I'd be happy if society gave them just a little more peace (I did make fun of some... teens being teens).

There are way too many 'I's in this article for comfort.

It is a great ego-stroke to hear that you are depressed because you are a gifted snowflake. Odds are, you are depressed because you are not doing the right things (regardless of how gifted you may be).

I hope folks don't interpret their depression as evidence that they are one of the 'gifted' ones—an error of affirming the consequent.

No-one on this forum is just average, right? Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average (!) .

Yep. I think most of us have this, gifted or no.

And plenty of people on this forum are average. Including me.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the average high school student doesn't browse HN, so maybe I'm not average in that respect...

Also, that joke was terrible. And it made me sad.

The quote/joke comes from the intro of Garrison Keillor's radio show "Lake Wobegon", about life in a fictional city in Minnesota. So, hopefully that makes it a little less depressing. :-)

---Alex

No, nonononono. I got the joke. That's why I'm sad.

Keilor's finally retiring this year :-(.

>No-one on this forum is just average, right?

Every time one of these posts come up, the comments are filled with "me too". Everyone here is a tortured genius.

Memes, memes everywhere..

Existential depression, my ass! Gifted adults, and even children, would surely read things like Stepenwolf, On The Road, Cuckoos Nest, Nausea, Age Of Reason and the likes and cure themselves.

Depression is nothing but a set of acquired habits. Change in behavior, caused by traveling and excessive reading, will produce a different perspective upon so called reality and an altered set of habits which will change ones personality. For better or worse.

This kind of CBT goes back to the seers and sages of the East and the first great philosophers of the West somewhere about 600 B.C. It still works.

Maybe we're discussing different definitions of the word "depression" here, but depression isn't simply "walked off" or fixed with a change of perspective. To suggest so both ignores the reality of depression as a mental illness and repeats the same myth that people who are depressed are just confusing themselves.

Some people just did it. Some even wrote books based on such experience.

> Depression is nothing but a set of acquired habits.

Nope.

No one has been born depressed.

Humans develop and change both mentally and physically over time.

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