MyGiftedLife.org

Haha - I see so much of myself in that list.

Trillian - I loved me some Sherlock Holmes in sixth grade and middle school. But it wasn't the cases that held my attention. It was that I identified with Holmes and also I really liked the Holmes/Watson relationship. My favorite Holmes story is The Dying Detective, as it plays to all my emotional kinks. Woot go go male angst about a dying loved one!

And then at night in bed I would imagine time traveling to hang out with Holmes. Of course, unlike Laurie R. King, I didn't actually go and write out my Mary Sue self-insertion Holmes fanfic and get it published.

I also devoured Agatha Christie back then - read And Then There Were None in second grade. Again, I don't remember it really being the mystery that interested me. Plot is not generally my doorway into a story, I suppose.

As for my generally preferred type of fiction - 19th century classics, yo!


I recently realized that I am not actually INFP. I am ENFP. Oh, so ENFP. But anyway, this has a point, yes! The F is all crazy out of whack like 150% F preference or something. So, you know, I am not a T and J math genius. I am all emotional and social and verbal. My giftedness does not express itself in solving puzzles or doing advanced math or science or being all academic. So, this had a point...oh yeah! I was going to relate it to reading Holmes, etc. for the characters and their relationships as opposed to reading it for the puzzle of the mystery.

Also, the bits about being pro-dark...the Sims story I finished in February featured a villain (the hot dude in my avatar) who does sort of fit the whole mad scientist thing, lol. My online bff is also into MBTI and we figure Seth is an INTJ who hilariously failed at the "ten rules for success as an INTJ" on personalitypage. Anyway, the point is - I have a great affection for the character, and I let that show. Because I have this thing where I let everything show.

Some people were indeed disturbed by my obvious attraction to a character who killed quite a few people, occasionally with fire. Oh, I could write a novel in the Bullying and Standing Out forum about my experiences writing Valley.

Most people agreed with me that Seth is highly awesome, though. But even those people seemed to have a stricter moral code - but then I did bring up the D&D thing once on my forum and said I'd be chaotic good and most of them said they'd be boring old lawful good. And they would talk about Seth getting his comeuppance and stuff and I was like "Whut?" I'm not about punishment and I didn't even see where he deserved to be punished. The dude was crazy, not evil. I like to think that in the end he was redeemed.

To paraphrase Panic! At The Disco - I write tragedies, not sins.

So to sum up - this list is totally awesome and I see me in almost all of it, I agree with Trillian about the dark stuff, and I'd like to think further about the differences between math-y type gifted people and verbally gifted people.

great list indeed !

I wish I could get an French translation for the list which I would like to share with my friends on our Forum, most of them aren't bilingual
And I am not too good at doing translations

Thanks for all the help you may provide me

You could start with the Google Translation, which should be okay but not good.

Google translation

Then you could just fix the translation, which might make it easier than doing the whole thing yourself. It helps with some languages, but not with others.

But if you intended to post the article elsewhere, I suggest you ask permission from Lisa because it's copyrighted. She's very nice, and if you send her a PM she might be happy to help.

PM deepwaterscoach

Lisa - It's a very extensive list, and I think it would become more valuable, and easier to spot what might be missing, if, instead of being just a list, you could arrange it into categories and put together similar items - e.g. I spotted items about having different age friends in two different places in the list.

If it was split into categories you could then compare it to categories in the literature e.g. Dabrowski's over-excitabilities or Gardener's Multiple Intelligences - which might highlight what's missing from your list or, better still, what might be missing from published theories!

What categories? Well, as it's your list, it's kind of up to you to work that out! Unless anyone else wants to...

Also - is there anything that can be said about the physical characteristics of the gifted? I once read something about IQ and height being correlated - are we all taller than expected? There is a stereotype of the gifted child as top of the class at everything, beauty queen and captain of all the sports teams. On the other hand there's another of the nerdy one with glasses who is useless at PE!

IQ and height are correlated (though not that strongly, if I remember correctly) because of a third factor: good nutrition.

Eating well isn't going to make you a genius. It's just going to allow you to develop to full potential.

I'm sure nutrition is a factor, but it's plausible that the same genetic factors might influence development of the brain and other parts of the body. When I was a student I noticed that many of my fellow students complained of difficulty getting shoes wide enough to fit them - do intelligent people tend to have bigger feet? Or just to care more about comfort? Or is it just a coincidence?

There was an item on BBC Radio 4's programme "In Touch" about the connection between Retinoblastoma - a childhood eye cancer - and intelligence. Based on the anecdotes of teachers in schools for the blind who reckoned retinoblastoma sufferers were always very bright, someone had surveyed a group of people of all ages made blind by it and found they had an average IQ over 130 and in terms of mobility, employment, independence, family life etc they did as well as sighted people. Why?? - further research needed.

I also read a few years ago an article in NewScientist magazine that claimed that Alheimers has less effect on people who are highly intelligent and educated - they don't show symptoms until the brain deterioration is well advanced, then decline and die rapidly. Presumably because the intelligent educated brain can work around bits of itself no working properly.