Gifted Individuals
An IQ of 130 is the starting point at which an individual’s cognitive skills and processes are considered to be gifted. For a complete understanding of what it means to be gifted, however, extra-cognitive or non-cognitive skills and processes need to be considered.
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Common Personality Traits
While each gifted individual is unique in personality, the following are common personality traits they could share:
- An intense drive to explore, understand and master the environment. This drive can feel like a powerful physiological force that is difficult to describe and hard to control or direct
- Intense motivation to explore “big” ideas and “big problems” in detail and in depth.
- A capacity for learning that is immediate and effortless:
- Their unusual capacity to combine razor sharp logical and uncanny intuition makes them bored and impatient with conventional teaching and standard educational settings
- A capacity for precocious accomplishments in many domains – intellectual, artistic, athletic, musical
- Extra sensitivities:
- Physical sensitivities: light, temperature, sound, food, fabric
- Intense allergic responses
- Aesthetic sensitivities: color, rhythm, form, space – a sophisticated sense of beauty well in advance of their years
- A capacity to “tune into” inanimate objects – a special fascination and capacity to bond with the physical environment
- Emotional sensitivities
- Empathy for other people’s pain and suffering
- Emotional insight into others personality structure, intellect and conflicts