2e or not 2e? That is the question

I'm finding it difficult to envisage when, how and why a clinician would diagnose 'giftedness'. They tend to diagnose problems or conditions that are conventionally interpreted as problematic (autism, ADHD, bipolar, dyspraxia etc.). I would have thought that giftedness would not be a problem and that it would be obvious to a layman and not need a clinician to point it out.

Martin said:

I would have thought that giftedness would not be a problem

Mattia Maurée of AuDHD Flourishing did a podcast on the combination of AuDHD+2e and described how their "gifted" brain brings an extra intensity to the AuDHD experience that can be problematic. There was an expectation that they'd be a "high achiever", and when that didn't quite work out, they felt like a disappointment.

Is that the result of having a gifted brain, or the result of having been given a label of 'giftedness'?

It is interesting that neither Charles Darwin nor Albert Einstein would have been labelled as gifted in their schooldays. Personally, I think that the late developers have added far more to the sum of human knowledge than the precocious.

You make strawman extrapolations.

A poster cannot control the rabbit holes that other people's replies take a thread down. It is a conversation after all.

I suspect that, like most things, the interplay of autism and intelligence has positive and negative aspects.

On a personal level my high levels of autism-related anxiety meant that I could never envisage a lecturing post. Giving the occasional seminar or conference presentation would leave me incapable of anything for days afterwards. Therefore, having a regular lecturing schedule would have been impossible. This limited me to purely research roles.

On the positive side, my hyperfixation, eye for detail and an ability to solve problems from unusual directions (thinking out of the box), which I largely ascribe to my autism, gave me many advantages in successfully pursuing research projects.

Martin said:

Einstein had a lack-lustre school career, he did not speak until he was five years old. Hardly a child prodigy.

Not speaking until the age of five can be a sign of Autism. I really don't think you want to make a claim that all non-speaking kids somehow have nothing much else going on between their ears. Maybe he was busy thinking wonderful thoughts.

Martin said:

The average age for a Nobel laureate is 59, the youngest ever in a science field is 31. This alone suggests that precocity is irrelevant in measuring intellectual success at the highest level.

They don't award a Nobel Prize on the day you make your discovery, so age-at-time-of-award is not a fair measure of anything. Also a discovery could itself have been many years in the making.

Lawrence Bragg won the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics at the age of 25 for a discovery (Bragg's law) he first presented at the age of 22.

Anyway, you're moving a lot of goalposts around here. We have gone from "some kids are smarter than the average and have to deal with being ND" to "kids are only properly smart if they go on to win a Nobel Prize". I didn't even start this post to be about precocity, just about the interplay between higher levels of intelligence and Autism/ADHD and how it pans out over a life. Does it make that life easier or harder?

It can take a long time to get a Nobel; it takes time for the value of the research or idea to become apparent and validated. So age at receipt would not be indicative. What you want is age when the work was done, which may also be some time before the paper was written.

Nevertheless I doubt many would be under 25 or 30.

I agree that regurgitating learned information is not the same as creating new ideas.

I have no trouble with standards running to thousands of pages, but I have never invented something completely new. It might be a tweak to something, but no new concepts (yet, if 59 is the target).

Einstein had a lack-lustre school career, he did not speak until he was five years old. Hardly a child prodigy.

I stand by what I said: Absorbing, mastering and displaying concepts and information, which is what 'gifted' children are assessed on, is not the same skill set as is involved in producing radically novel ideas.

In the UK, every few years there will be newspaper accounts of some child prodigy who got into Oxbridge at 11 or 12 years of age. In later decades nothing is heard of them. This does not mean that they did not have reasonably productive academic careers, but it does mean that they did not produce earth-shatteringly novel ideas.

The average age for a Nobel laureate is 59, the youngest ever in a science field is 31. This alone suggests that precocity is irrelevant in measuring intellectual success at the highest level. 

Stuart333 said:

I wonder if the reduced focus on just being a child reduces the space for developing a sense of self, of managing emotions, of just enjoying the world free of excessive pressure.

Yes. Imagine if you were to start overthinking everything from the age of three! It's bad enough at our age.

Stuart333 said:

I wonder if the reduced focus on just being a child reduces the space for developing a sense of self, of managing emotions, of just enjoying the world free of excessive pressure.

Yes. Imagine if you were to start overthinking everything from the age of three! It's bad enough at our age.