Theoretical background
Many writers, including Nils Holm, Michael Ferguson, Chris Wayan, and Leta Hollingworth, have discussed the communication difficulties of people whose intelligence varies drastically from the norm. Although the observations themselves are valid and resonate with my own personal experiences as a neurodivergently intelligent1 (NI) person, I think they could benefit from more nuance. I am especially uncomfortable with the interchangeability of “highly intelligent/gifted” and “high-IQ” that many of these people use.
Neurodivergently intelligent doesn’t always mean high IQ
Most people who test well are necessarily NI. It’s unlikely that you’ll show skills you lack on one of these tests, unless you’re a savant specialised in verbal expression or spatial recognition, but who struggles to understand the work you produce. But many people’s IQ scores do not reflect their innate intelligence because of the ways in which these tests are constructed. Modern IQ tests include tasks that measure skills other than the general ability to learn, think abstractly and recognise patterns, and many of them exhibit cultural bias. This caveat is important. Otherwise, the analyses unnecessarily exclude a population of people who may be very intelligent and express all or most of the qualitative signs of extreme intelligence, but test comparatively poorly.
Fixating on IQ misses the forest for the trees: it’s about the experience of developing asynchronously and being neurodivergent in a way that lets you learn more quickly than the majority of the population and see patterns they may not see—and people don’t understand you well because of it. This article applies to all NI people who feel their experiences match qualitative descriptions.
Theory of mind and neurodivergent intelligence
Though I’ll be talking about specific social difficulties that NI people encounter, the issue is ultimately more complex than that. The deeper issue is less about intelligence, really, as it is about people having a hard time understanding perspectives that are drastically different from theirs: problems with “theory of mind.” It’s about neurodivergence. A similar phenomenon occurs with autistic people who interact with nonautistic people and vice versa, regardless of where they fall on the cognitive-ability spectrum. Some people stereotype autistic people as lacking “theory of mind.” But it’s actually a bidirectional problem for many people. Because autistic people appear less frequently in the population at large, we are accused of lacking a theory of mind. Neurodivergent people tend to have difficulties socialising with neurotypical people because we experience things that most people don’t. It’s therefore unfair to claim that autistic people or other neurodivergent people lack social imagination when the problem exists on both ends.
The wall and the asymptote
I’ve noticed two related communication difficulties related to one’s learning abilities: the wall and the asymptote.
The wall
People hit the wall when the person they’re talking to doesn’t understand them at all. This can happen when an NI person talks to an average person or someone who has an intellectual disability (ID) about a relatively complex or abstract topic. The person who feels confused may admit they don’t understand, shut down and go silent, or become hostile towards the person who’s confused them. While it’s possible for NI people to simplify their language and discuss only topics that other people can understand, it can still be a laborious task that prevents them from expressing their true selves.
Constantly encountering the wall when talking to people during childhood and adolescence may make an NI person feel alone with their observations and interpretations of the world. It’s difficult to hold a conversation that other people can’t reciprocate. NI people may may feel crazy when others deny what they’ve seen and heard. I frequently clashed with my (slightly above-average) parents because of this problem. I thought that since they were my parents they should understand what I was saying, but they often didn’t, especially when I tried to give complex explanations for my behaviour. They would ridicule me, become hostile, dismiss me or act as though what I was perceiving was completely imaginary. They didn’t see that I could recognise patterns and tendencies that they couldn’t, and didn’t know how to respond to those differences. Conversely, I didn’t know how to translate my thought processes into a way they could understand and accept.
It’s your job to make yourself understood
My work involves translating complex ideas like the thorny details of public policy, systemic discrimination, critical theory, and cultural studies into more digestible information that laypeople and beginning professionals can understand. I’ll often translate academic journal articles into plain-language summaries that people with ID or reading difficulties can digest more easily. Even if you can’t fully explain everything you want, there are ways that you can learn how to communicate certain ideas in a more accessible way.
The onus is on the NI person to translate what they’re saying if they want to communicate a particular idea to the general public. NIs make up a far smaller portion of the population than typically developing people. Most people are not being obstinate. They simply don’t understand. Of course, if people are being hostile towards you for not understanding, that’s their own responsibility, but there’s a difference between the hostility and the misunderstanding itself. As a disability advocate, professional, and activist, I believe passionately in making things accessible. I’m not saying that NIs should spend every minute of every day trying to dial themselves down and communicate only with people who don’t understand them, but it is an important skill to have.
The asymptote
The asymptote occurs when someone comes very close to understanding a communication but never quite reaches the point of full understanding. This often happens when an NI person is talking to someone who’s reasonably intelligent, but whose learning abilities and developmental trajectory aren’t to the degree that they make them feel isolated from others. In mathematics, an asymptote is a line that lists towards a point on a graph, reaching out infinitely, but never fully reaches the point it approaches. (Similar concepts include limits and infinitesimals, numbers that become infinitely close to zero, but never actually become zero.)
In the same way, an NI person may discuss a topic that someone else mostly understands, but the other person may not get the nuances or wants to drop the subject when the NI person feels like they’ve just gotten started. They keep reaching and reaching, but never quite get there. It can be an unsatisfying experience, though it’s still less exhausting than encountering the wall.
In my current social circles it’s rare for me to hit the wall except in highly specific circumstances, but the asymptote problem is infuriatingly frequent. I’ll have a conversation that I find mostly fulfilling, but find that the other person has missed the subtlety of what I was saying, or can’t quite relate to what I’m talking about and will be inadvertently dismissive. I feel a twinge of dissatisfaction and wonder, yet again, whether I’ve just made things up or am overreacting or am making completely arbitrary connections that make no sense. Like the wall, this isn’t a deliberate behaviour designed to infuriate NI people; it’s simply a matter of our brains functioning differently and our communications reflecting those differences. Sometimes breaking things down further or using tangible metaphors can help with this problem.
Finding like-minded people
I agree with Nils Holm that it’s important for NI people to find a community of people who understand them so they’re not always running into the wall or having asymptotic conversations, whether that’s online via in-person groups. You can find fellow NIs in niche online groups dedicated to discussing specific topics (including neurodivergent intelligence itself!), meet-ups around a shared interest, or just by hanging around awesomely geeky people with a wide variety of interests.
High-IQ societies not required
Unlike him, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend high-IQ societies like Mensa or Triple Nine, though; the requirements may exclude NIs who have spiky profiles that disqualify them or don’t particularly care to be tested anyway. Also, I’ve seen a worrying number of people who make a big deal about being “high-IQ” (as opposed to being NI, or even gifted) espousing ableist beliefs about people with intellectual disabilities, supporting eugenics, making misogynistic and racist claims, spouting nonsense from The Bell Curve and other works designed to denigrate marginalised people, or being otherwise horrible for other reasons.
NIs may learn differently from the general population, but that’s different from saying that they’re better than others.
It took me until I was an adult to find people I could relate to, but I’m glad I did. InterGifted has a number of communities and resources targeted towards NIs, and the focus is more qualitative than quantitative. Good luck!
- “Neurodivergently intelligent” is my coinage and a term I prefer over “gifted”; it’s a clearer description of the phenomenon. ↩︎