On the Gifted Adult

The overwhelming bulk of the literature on giftedness is about gifted children — raising them, helping them, being one. What sets Jacobsen’s book apart is its emphasis on what happens to gifted children once they become gifted adults, and if other former gifted children read it, I hope they’ll recognize the crashing and burning I feel I’ve been doing in adulthood. For Jacobsen, giftedness comes down to three traits — intensity, complexity, and drive — and what marks the “gifted” isn’t having them, since everyone does to some degree, but the degree to which they’re expressed. She rightly pushes back on IQ as the measure of giftedness; it can be a component but it’s far from the whole story (for what it’s worth, I think IQ is a useful measure of the ability to abstract, and not much else). She also leans on the theory of multiple intelligences — spatial, kinetic, verbal, auditory, and so on — arguing that the gifted tend to do well across a range of them, and that recognizing this matters.

She lost me, though, in her discussion of “evolutionary intelligence,” a quotient that combines the multiple intelligences with the three traits and a measure of “advanced development.” It’s an interesting thought, but it reads as pastiche — things pasted together to look like a numerical signifier without actually meaning anything. The rest of the book is about how gifted people get constrained, or over-expanded, in environments that don’t recognize this kind of neurodivergence (I’m not sure it qualifies as neurodivergence, and to her credit she doesn’t use the term — that’s mine). It’s interesting and has practical suggestions, but those sections have more in common with other self-help than with anything new: of course it’s important to be a team player, of course these qualities have their benefits — most readers will already know that. Knowing it is interesting, but it still doesn’t help in many situations; sometimes the only way out is to find a new environment, which is a shame. It’s the same trouble that plagues so much self-help: we read, we learn, we practice, we build new habits, and then what? It can help you see an old problem differently, but not much more.