What does "smart" mean, anyway?

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When I was in my 20s, I took the test for Mensa. It was actually two standardized IQ tests, given on the same day. To qualify for membership, you have to score at or above the 98th percentile on one of the tests. I scored above the 98th percentile on both -- and on one (don't ask me which one -- it was 40 years ago), I scored above the 99th percentile, which also qualified me for membership in Intertel. In short, I am what used to be called "smart". When my kids were in school, it was called "gifted and talented", or just "gifted". 

Please miss me with your comments about how IQ tests are biased bullshit. There has been a culture-fair alternative IQ test available since 1949, although not everybody agrees that it's actually culturally fair. I suspect that complete fairness will require each culture to create its own IQ test -- a herculean task. 

But to be honest, I think some in the sniffy crowd are just mad that they're White but didn't make the cut. That's a culture-based response, guys. Americans are so obsessed with the idea that Everybody's! Equal! that they're suspicious of anyone who has superior abilities (unless those abilities can be monetized by some promoter, but I digress). And they're sure as hell not inclined to help anybody who thinks faster than they do.

But here is the thing: Differences in cognitive ability are real, and they don't exist only on the low end of the scale. 

Which brings me to the new concept -- or new to me, anyway -- that giftedness is better defined as a form of neurodivergence. Like, say, autism or ADHD. Here's a Venn diagram developed by a therapist that attempts to show how the traits of giftedness, autism, and ADHD overlap. 

A free, more readable PDF version is available here.

I have mixed emotions about this concept. On one hand, the traits that the author associates with giftedness mostly seem to tally with my experience (she says right on the diagram that it's not meant to be a diagnostic tool, and she emphasizes elsewhere on her blog that not everybody in these categories has every trait). For instance: I do "skip thinking", aka logical leaps; I developed the concept of fairness very young; I prefer precision in expression; I make connections across domains (the Pipe Woman Chronicles being one example); I need time alone; and so on. Plus psychology has always interested me -- it's one of my many wide-ranging interests, to use another trait from the diagram.

On the other hand, giftedness-as-neurodivergence feels like a way to lump smart people together with the weird kids. Remember what I said earlier about how Americans view anyone of above-average intelligence with suspicion? Labeling gifted people as neurodivergent could give "normal" people an excuse to hand us a ticket for the short bus.

Do you think that's an exaggeration? Take a look at this blog post, in which the author attempts to argue that labeling someone "gifted" is a way to whitewash ADHD and/or autism: "'Gifted' is autism/ADHD/neurodivergence with the crusts cut off to make it more palatable to neurotypicals, slicing away anything that makes things hard and leaving only the child's strengths to praise and enjoy." She also blames the "gifted kid" label for the "social isolation" that some gifted adults experience. 

Did I feel socially isolated as a gifted adult? Well, yes. Why do you think I joined Mensa? For the dubious prestige of it? Nope, it was to meet other people with whom I could have a conversation on my level. And if you believe that statement makes me some kind of superior asshole, I refer you to that culture-based bias against intelligence that I mentioned in the third paragraph.

Anyway, the point this blogger misses is that not every gifted person is ADHD and/or autistic. Some of us are just ... smart.

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Not for nothing, "neurotypicals" can exhibit traits on that Venn diagram, too. 

The definition of "neurotypical" tickles me. According to Oxford Languages, it's "not displaying or characterized by ... neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior." In other words, you can't define it with precision without knowing every possible neurodivergence -- which we seem to be busy labeling. At the rate we're going, I can envision a time (there I go again with the giftedness traits: forseeing problems!) when the pool of neurotypical people will become vanishingly small. And then what Margaret Mead once said will really be true: "Always remember that you're absolutely unique -- just like everyone else."

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This post was prompted by a recent conversation with a friend I'd met in Mensa. As we talked, I remembered that I'd hated geometry in high school because doing proofs seemed pointless to me -- and then I realized why: My brain moved so fast through the steps that it was stupid and annoying to have to write them out. In short, I was bored. Giftedness or ADHD? You decide.

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These moments of possibly neurodivergent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!

On reframing.

I've said it before and it's true again this week: Some weeks provide an array of topics to blog about. This week, for example, I could talk about the shape of the stage at this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference and why it's so troubling to Pagans (and muse about why the media don't cover any conventions sponsored by liberal and progressive groups  as avidly as they do CPAC). Or I could talk about an interview in this week's Politico Magazine with a liberal Christian theologian named the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, which is framed on the somewhat ludicrous premise that the "religious left" hasn't been taken seriously in the past (really? So the name Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., means nothing to you?) and misses a trick when Dr. Jones uses the phrase "love your neighbor" without defining who constitutes neighbor more cogently. As a Pagan and an animist, my definition is likely to be a lot broader than hers.

Maybe I'll do that one next week. Today, though, I'd like to talk about a dream I had last night.

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I've been known to indulge in dream analysis. I have a book written by Michael Sheridan, an Irish fellow who has made a career out of this sort of thing. The book has a pretty good dream symbol dictionary in the back -- although like a lot of these sorts of dictionaries, his definitions sometimes say more about him than about the dreamer. (For one thing, he seems to be fixated on yeast infections.) But I didn't bother to analyze the dream I had last night. It was enough to experience the feelings the dream brought up for me.

In this dream, I was playing a game I'd never played before. The people who invited me to play gave me a stack of chips -- two blues and several whites. I noticed the chips in their stack were different colors -- a red one and I forget what else -- but they said it didn't matter. Anyway, we played the game, and I did pretty well, and eventually I found out I wasn't supposed to do as well as I had because my starting stack of chips was actually worth less than theirs.

The scene shifted a bit, as dreams do, and it turned out this was all being staged for a reality TV show. And I overheard a couple of the guys on the crew say that they had been sure I would fail -- not just because the organizers had given me a lesser stack of chips, but because I was fat. This was TV, remember, where appearance is everything; the camera puts ten pounds on you, and all that. Because of the way I looked, they didn't expect me to win. I'd surprised them by being smart.

Upon hearing this, I was embarrassed. Humiliated, even. And those feelings were what stuck with me when I woke up. Because this has been a recurring theme my whole life: being judged lesser-than at first glance because of the size of my body, even though my IQ is in the 99th percentile* (which tends to be apparent as soon as I open my mouth).

So okay. If this were a real-world experience and if I were working through it with a therapist, one of the techniques the therapist would suggest is reframing, or looking at the issue from a different perspective. And I could do that in this scenario. In fact, the thought occurred to me after I woke up. After all, with the chips literally stacked against me, I did really well. I overcame the bias in this situation by using my natural giftedness.

But that isn't what my feelings were telling me. Dream Me was hurt. Dream Me would have appreciated some validation of that hurt, you bastards, and an apology wouldn't have gone amiss.

Reframing certainly works for lots of folks. Plenty of successful people have used humiliation as a springboard to their success -- the old "I'll show them" mentality. But for me, it seems like a mind trick. It might work in the moment, but it's not sustainable. It shifts the focus from what actually happened at the cost of burying your true feelings. And those true feelings will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe even in a dream, decades later.

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* You're thinking of Mensa. That's for people who score in the 98th percentile on a standardized IQ test. There's a different organization for those in the 99th percentile called Intertel; I've been a member of both at one time or another. 

There's an even loftier organization called the Triple Nine Society for those whose IQs are in the 99.9th percentile. I have never been that smart.

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These moments of dreamy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell -- who is once again reminding you to mask up, social distance, and hang in there, baby, the vaccine's coming.