Pleased to meet you, Sam.
Now it's very popular as I was scrolling down the podcasts that we don't introduce ourselves. So the people already know, especially you, Sam.
And if they don't, it's their problem.
I'm a professor of clinical psychology and an author of books in psychology.
Exactly. Your field is narcissism, as I know, but today we are going to talk about something else.
My field is personality disorders. One of them is narcissism.
Okay, great. So it might be intertwining a little bit also with what we are going to talk today.
It's about neurodiversity. So I enjoyed your video about neurodiversity. When you mentioned autistic people, ADHD people and so on.
But since I'm working with a gifted population, I'm a therapist and consultant for gifted people, I was missing one point. And here is my question, Do you think that giftedness is also neurodiversity?
Before I answer this question, assuming I can answer this question, but before I do, I think like in all other pseudosciences, in psychology, there's a problem with terminology.
We tend to use words which are ill-defined. I'm a physicist, among other things. I have a PhD in physics, and this would never, ever happen in physics. Never.
So the word giftedness is bandied about and used to actually refer to populations or cohorts that have very little to do with each other.
For example, there's gifted children, but there's also precocious children. There is prodigies or wunderkind. There is Idiot Savant. And all these are called gifted children.
Giftedness is extremely ill-defined. I couldn't find a single definition that is acceptable to all people who work in the field, which is an exceedingly bad sign.
That's point number one.
Point number two, people tend to either idolize or idealize the gifted child or to demonize the gifted child, which as you say, reflects envy, basically. An unconscious wish probably to destroy the gifted child somehow, to reduce the gifted child to the level of the average person.
But there's also the opposite reaction, mythologizing the gifted child, like idealizing or idolizing or pedestalizing the gifted child as if it was some kind of extraterrestrial phenomenon.
So we have to be extremely careful when we discuss this topic because the language is corrupted and contaminated. And because we are all bound to have emotional reactions which corrupt and contaminate the discourse.
Now, back to your question. It was a long introduction.
It's very good, yeah.
Back to your question.
Neurodiversity is one of these fuzzy, ill-defined terms.
All brains, being the complex machines that they are, all brains are on a kind of continuum or distribution or spectrum or whatever you want to call it.
Neurodiversity has been with us from day one. On the first moment, Homo erectus, you know, stood up. Neurodiversity started probably, probably before.
I even believe that neurodiversity is very common in the animal kingdom, definitely in higher animals like primates and so. So neurodiversity is essentially a meaningless one. It just says brains are different. No kidding. Of course they are different.
Yes, unique. Different.
Each one of us has a brain that is slightly different to the others, slightly different.
Now, there are all groups of populations whose brains have commonalities, so we can somehow characterize them by referring to their brains indirectly or directly. That's a statistical approach to psychology.
So if you're asking me if gifted children deviates statistically from the norm, yes, that's why we call them, that's why they have a name. That's why they're called gifted.
If you ask me if this deviation from the norm implies some commonality in their brains, structural or functional or operational, the best I could answer is possibly. We don't know.
There are no studies that substantiate this at all. In the past, in the 19th century, there was a practice of post-mortem autopsies of brains. People died, and then their brains were dissected and evaluated and so forth and correlated with their lives, how they lived and so on. There was a very useful practice.
Regrettably, we let go of it, and we don't do that much anymore. We prefer fMRIs and, you know, more sophisticated.
So we know a lot about the dynamics of the brain, how the brain works, blood flows and electrochemical signals and biochemical signals. We know a lot about theseneurotransmitters and you name it.
But we don't know a lot about structural changes which are idiosyncratic and correlate or correspond to groups of cohorts, to well-defined populations.
But to summarize, I think it's likely that gifted children or gifted people have brains which are slightly or even meaningfully different to other people on condition that we both agree on what is giftedness, which we left, you know, floating in the cloud.
Yeah.
Well, talking about giftedness, it's the only solution to left it in the clouds.
I agree.
And I'm wondering, you know, if we continue with a more philosophical question, if this is sort of, if this is sort of like a conspiracy, maybe even, you know.
So why this field, it is not so much researched as some other fields, let's say, of course, as you said, it's difficult to express and difficult to see the difference between gifted child, let's say, and a typical child, yeah, because we are as we are, we experience ourselves, we cannot experience a other person, yeah?
But it could be that the effect of envy and ignorance in the field of giftedness and some sort of conspiracy towards us, gifted people, can be in this world like some sort of story. What would you say on that?
It's not only envy, I think there is fear. There's fear.
Gifted people have always been perceived as threats.
And that is because giftedness has been associated with madness. And madness was a direct line to God throughout most of human history. Madness was proof positive that you're in direct communication with the divine, you know, prophets.
So giftedness was perceived as threatening, as destabilizing, as challenging, and of course there was the envy.
Of course there was the envy.
And then we entered the age of political correctness, where everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law is gifted in some way. So you can never be number two.
In the American education system, everyone is number one, for example. Everyone gets a prize. When there's a contest or a competition, everyone gets some kind of prize because there are no losers, only winners.
So in this kind of ethos, in this kind of social attitude or approach, giftedness is perceived as an insult, injurious, discriminatory, politically incorrect. You're not supposed to say that someone is gifted.
Okay, so you are gifted intellectually. I'm gifted in cooking. We're all gifted somehow, you know?
So this egalitarian myth, myth, myth, myth, egalitariantotal, I call it malignant egalitarianism, does not allow for the study of any outliers, not only giftedness, but any outliers, positive or negative.
There is a leveling, there's an attempt to level everything, so that everyone is the same, homogenization of the world of people, so that they don't envy each other, they don't become aggressive, they don't experience unpleasantness and discomfort.
And so giftedness has been waylaid.
But I must also admit that the field is fuzzy. It doesn't strike me as scientific in any way, shape or form.
It strikes me as a kind of variant of impressionism or something. It's very fuzzy.
It's, you know, as far as I'm concerned, a gifted individual, child or not, is someone who is endowed with an inordinate amount of curiosity, is able to make connections where other cannot see them, synoptic connections, is able to spot deficiencies or lacunas which require work, and is able to digest huge amounts of information, far in excess of most other people.
So information processing capacity is much higher.
If you put these four elements together, I think they capture most of the gifted people that we know.
But this is an intellectual emphasis. It could be highly correlated with IQ.
And so it doesn't capture, for example, musical giftedness, artistic giftedness, cooking giftedness. I mean, it doesn't, football giftedness, the giftedness of the body.
When you have this super talented football player at the age of eight, you know, who is one with a ball, who is integrated with a ball.
Exactly.
So this is giftedness as well.
Yes.
And so there's no information processing there. There's no, you know, when you play with the ball, maybe there is some information processing, but it's not the kind that we mean.
Not the intellectual.
Or intellectual, yeah.
I'm a physicist. It's to my taste, it's a very a kind of literature. Not really anything scientific or I'm a bit reluctant actually too.
Well, there are several researches about, as you mentioned, MRI, functional MRI, you know, and they are reporting about that the brains of gifted people are brains on fire, that there is a distinctive difference between the connection.
Allow me to interrupt you uncharacteristically, because I'm trying to be chivalrous.
You cannot study giftedness if you don't agree on a definition.
No number of fMRI machines, statistics, and other pseudo-scientific nonsense can legitimize a field where there's no agreement on the basic language.
So when you put someone in an fMRI machine and you say giftedness is a brain on fire, did you define giftedness to start with? How do I know this person is gifted? Is there a test for giftedness? Is there a battery of tests for giftedness? Are there brain indicators for giftedness?
There is another fuzzy concept. It is the self.
The self is a very fuzzy concept. But when it comes to the self, we did find a few regions in the brain that light up when we ask people to self-reflect, to introspect. These areas light up when the person considers self-concept or self-referential thinking.
So we know that these areas are somehow connected to the experience, subjective experience of the self, whatever the self may be.
I am not aware, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are much more qualified. I am not aware of studies that have correlated specific structures in the brain or operations in the brain to a highly rigorous definition of giftedness. I'm not aware of such studies.
So let me give you another angle perhaps, what I'm trying desperately to communicate.
We could consider giftedness a form of early childhood conditioning.
A child who is exposed to operand conditioning involving positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements will of course become gifted in order to secure the positive reinforcements.
And then later on it will become a self-concept and the child will be emotionally invested, cathected in the self-concept.
And of course, there will be a laser focus on intellectual pursuits and information processing and so on.
So, wow, that's a gifted person.
We know, for example, that IQ is massively influenced by the environment. We know that. We know that we can raise the IQ of a child by minimum 10 points.
10 points, yeah.
With the appropriate upbringing.
So how do we know that conditioning is not simply an environmental form of operand conditioning or even classic conditioning, Pavlovian condition?
How do we know that?
We don't know that.
They're not studies.
How do we know that giftedness is not a reaction to a specific type of society or culture?
There are Japanese studies that have demonstrated that in certain cultures and societies, giftedness rises automatically because giftedness is a form of conformity, conforming.
So if you go to Stanford's Advanced Studies Institute, you would work very hard to appear to be gifted. It would become, you know, peer pressure, conformity, social expectations, modeling, social learning theory, social cognitive theory, yes, modeling, role models.
We need to eliminate this. We need to isolate these influences before we dare to speak about giftedness as a stand-alone construct, which is impervious, which is not influenced by any of the things that I mentioned.
Which is basically impossible.
I think it's impossible, yeah.
Yeah, it's basically impossible.
So yeah, this is why it's everything, it's more vague, but I'm dealing every day with the people who are gifted and who are recognized as gifted by IQ or by creativity or creative batteries and so on.
So basically how I see it is that especially with young children, they have this sparkle inside.
And this is why my primary question for you was because you mentioned in one in the video, about how neurodiversity shapes a unique sense of self.
And this really intrigued me also because of my working with giftedness and gifted people.
It's about the relationship between, let's say, brain, nervous system and the formation of identity of the self in all the people, but of course, especially gifted individuals.
Could you explain this connection? What can we learn from that?
The self is another example of an exceedingly badly, exceedingly ill-defined concept.
But we can talk about subjectivity.
Yeah.
Subjective experience of being you, being yourself.
And we know that there are situations where the formation of this subjectivity is disrupted.
So we end up having identity diffusion or identity disturbance, or what we call disorders of the self.
So, borderline personality disorder, for example, narcissistic personality disorders, psychotic disorders, schizoaffective disorders. These are all examples of where the self is disrupted.
And so we are beginning to accept and to realize that the formation of subjectivity is probably a neuroscientific fact rather than a psychological fact.
And it is influenced by the environment to the extent that certain triggers from the environment are needed to activate these centers in the brain in order to acquire this sense of subjectivity.
But frankly, even people who are children who are totally isolated, for example, feral children who were found in jungles and so on and so forth, even these people had a rudimentary sense of self, of what Freud called the ego, of core identity, as we, that's the term we use today, of core identity.
So it emerges, it's emergent. It's an emergent phenomenon.
And I think it has to do with the brain's complexity. As the brain's complexity increases, and it increases dramatically in the first five years, yes, as the first five years of life, as the brain's complexity increases, the only way to somehow survive is to impose on the brain a narrative organizational principle.
And I think this narrative organizational principle is what we call the self.
It's a story. It's a piece of fiction. It's a narrative, as I said.
But it helps us to organize things, to impose order and structure, some predictability, the ability to navigate behavior or modify behavior so that it doesn't create dissonance or adverse outcomes and so on. It's a very useful piece of fiction, useful narrative.
But every narrative, abuse, love, self, every narrative, social expectations, modeling, learning, everything reshapes the brain, of course, creates new pathways, enhances or decreases certain areas in the brain.
And so the brain is like a mirror. It reflects these processes all the time. And the formation of the self is no exception.
So the brain adapts, there are two areas in the brain, two regions of the brain that adapt, they change, as our self-concept increases with time until it solidifies, around the age of 25, by the way.
Yes.
So it solidifies and becomes what we call I. I did this.
There is a sense of completely false continuity. It's false. It's counterfactual. You are not continuous in any way, shape or form, but you have this lie, internal deception, that you are continuous. And it's a useful thing.
The thing is that I am not aware of any studies that correlate the emergence of the self with giftedness. And I can pretty easily prove that the self has nothing to do with giftedness. Pretty easily, even though I'm not an expert in the field.
Many, many people with a totally disrupted, fragmented or even non-existent self are highly gifted and creative.
So it seems that the self is not a necessary or a sufficient condition for the emergence of giftedness.
We know of borderlines who are super gifted and creative. We know narcissists. We know even of psychotics who are super gifted and creative.
The author of the Oxford English Dictionary was a psychotic.
So it's not true to say that giftedness, as I read in some of your questions, it's not true to say, I think, that giftedness is highly correlated with a strong cohesive, coherent self. It's absolutely defied by the facts. It's counterfactual.
It is a part of mythologizing the gifted child, idealizing and idolizing the gifted child.
Ah, a gifted child, he has a stronger self. He has a dominant self, a self that asserts itself, a self that demands knowledge and this.
I'm sorry, but it's nonsense. Complete unmitigated nonsense.
And the correlation between the emergence of the self and giftedness is also very weak. We see, for example, giftedness in children who do not yet possess a self, because the self constellates and integrates around the ages of five or six, and then becomes full-fledged around the ages of 21 to 25, or even 29, there's a debate.
Yeah.
And so people can be, are immediately, the giftedness is immediately visible when you're two years old, three years old.
Definitely if you're a precocious child or if you're a prodigy.
I mean, it's absolutely immediately clear that you're gifted.
And Mozart was three years old.
He didn't have a self. I doubt if Mozart ever had a self until the day he died.
But okay, we can agree that he did not have a self when he was three years old, and yet he was already performing and amazing. It was amazing three years old.
So I don't think the self has anything whatsoever to do with giftedness, not even remotely, not even a weak correlation.
These are two highly distinct processes. One of them is about organizing your experiences in a way that would make sense. It's a theory of your own mind. It's a theory of mind, mentalization, but mentalization of yourself.
When you mentalize yourself, you create the self. That's one process.
There is nothing to do with your endowments, your talents, your skills, nothing.
And the second process is the actualization, or as Maslow would call it, self-actualization, or innate gifts, whatever they may be.
Whatever they are. Okay.
That would be nice if this will be a connection.
Yeah, but I'm afraid there isn't. I mean, I just cited quite a few examples to demonstrate that, you know, it's evidently untrue.
Yeah.
No, I was thinking like in sort of fairyland, you know.
It would be nice if this would be connected.
I think life would be much simpler.
Yeah, that's the mythologizing part.
What's a myth?
A myth is a kind of fair thing. That's Bettelheim. Bettelheim did a lot of work on fairy tales, and Bettelheim mentions in his book, the Enchantment, the book about Enchantment, he mentions that some of the characters in the grim tales and so on so forth, they're actually gifted.
He doesn't use the word gifted, never mind, but he deals with giftedness.
And he mentions that this alleged connection between some innate property and giftedness, giftedness is considered to be inevitable.
It's something divine. Like you are born with giftedness is considered to be inevitable. It's something divine. Like you are born with giftedness.
It's a gift that you receive from the gods.
Yes. And this gift that you receive from the gods is who you are.
So in folk tales, in fairy tales, and even in modern legends like Disney, Disney movies, these are modern fables, modern legends.
So in all these, your giftedness is who you are, is your essence.
And it is not entirely yours. It's a kind of gift.
Or in Judaism it's a deposit.
And a divine deposit.
So...
Great, yeah, great words.
So even there, if you go a bit deeper, you see that these people are actually saying giftedness is who you are or who you became, but it's not entirely you. It came from the gods.
It's not exactly you. It's like something you possess, like your smartphone. It's an asset or an object. It's not really you. It's you and it's not you.
I understand.
This is probably something that, you know, I see in the...
My clients, this divine sparkle in a way, you know? Like there's something there that it's sparkling. I'm saying this in that kind of term to be more understandable.
But never because I know, I would like to share with you my personal experience.
Yeah, it's great.
At the risk of sounding arrogant and haughty and of course narcissistic.
I've been diagnosed three times throughout my life. I've been IQ tested three times throughout my life. The results were high.
I experience my cognitive processes as not mine, as not mine.
This is a clinical phenomenon known as estrangement. I am estranged from my cognitive processes.
I'm in a status of an observer.
And I'm very often astounded, self-admiring, if you wish, but there's no self there.
It's like, I'm just observing the workings of my brain as if my brain were some kind of alien animal who happens to inhabit my skull, just happens to be there.
But there is a gap, there is a divide, an affective divide, emotional divide, and even cognitive divide, between me and my creativity and my, if you wish, giftedness.
I was diagnosed with, I was measured, my IQ was measured between 180 and 190 IQ, three times over, three times over 25 years.
A lot, yeah.
First of all, first of all, a disclaimer. Anything above 140 IQ, especially in modern tests, matrix, matrix test and ways, anything above 140 IQ is not properly, normatively validated.
In other words, anything above 140 IQ is probably nonsense.
So don't be too impressed with 180. It's just a number.
But it's an indicator of a very high analytical intellectual capacity.
It is so high that it feels alien.
It does not feel me.
Honestly, it doesn't feel me. I don't feel that it's me doing all this thinking.
I understand. I have the same similar feeling, yeah?
Yeah.
So this is an indicator of the bridge or the gap or the abyss between the sense of self, subjective me, and the cognitive intellectual processes that underlie giftedness or intellectual giftedness or maybe the other types of processes that underline musical giftedness or gardening giftedness or whatever it may be.
I believe all these people feel a bit alien, a bit not themselves, notexactly the opposite. It's not that there is a strong sense of self. There is a, the self is weakened by the giftedness. The giftedness attacks the self. The giftedness breaches the boundaries of the self and destabilizes it, diffuses it somehow. I think there's a war between the giftedness and the self. Because when we think about the self, when we read the classical text about the self, which are essentially Jung, and then we have studies of the self in object relations theories and so on self, the word self is no longer used. For example, we don't teach it in Harvard or because it belongs to psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theories, and object relations theories. It died. The word self died in the 1980s, gunn forever. But within this theory, the self is a reflection of interpersonal social interactions. It's the outcome, not reflection, I'm sorry. It's the outcome of these interactions. Lacan said, for example, that the unconscious is the voices of other people. In object relations, the ego of the self is relational. It's an outcome of object relations or narcissistic libido, narcissistic investment. But at any rate, it's relational. It not just emerges, it's interactive. So the self would tend to pull us to the common denominator. Because the self is the aggregate or accumulation of interactions with other people, the self will reflect more other people than us. And because most other people are not gifted, the self would want to be not gifted. The self would want to be socially conforming. The self would want to be socially conforming. The self would want you to function in society. The self would want you not to encounter or experience adverse consequences. And that's why Isaac, for example, Hans Eisen said that creativity is highly correlated with psychopathy. He didn't call it psychopathy. He called it psychoticism. He said creativity is a form of psychoticism or reflect psychotism.
But the definition of psychoticism in Isaac's work is what we call today's psychopathy. He said that if you are creative, you're a psychopath. And I agree fully. If you are creative, if you are gifted, you're an outlier, an outcast. You are thrown, you are not social.
You are, in the best case, a social, and according to, I think, you're antisocial.
So wait a minute. If you are antisocial by being gifted, if you are a social by being, you know, intelligent or intellectually endowed, that would confront head on with the self. Because the self is the exact opposite. The self is super social. The self aspires to the common denominator. The self is socially conformant. There is a war between giftedness and the self. Exactly the opposite of what you wrote in your questions, in my view. That's how I see.
Yeah, it's very basically, I would have to agree with you in that part for sure, because you know I counter it's my own experience also like that, and encounter many people also like that in terms of most of them feel like they are alien, yeah? And then we are trying to, we're trying to embrace the alien part, basically, you know, that it's okay to be like that, feel like that, that giftedness is part of them, and that's basically is a gift. The intensities that we experience due to, you know, brain and nervous system and information. Processing, it's different and how to deal with that intensities, emotional intensities. There are huge in this gifted population because the self, you know, is social, wants to be social, but the other part, the gifted part, it's like, oh my God, I don't know how to handle that. I'm alien, yeah? So we try to embrace this part and not to fit in others, but just be normal in who we are.
Yes, self-accepting.
Yeah.
I think some concepts here could be useful.
The giftedness part is dissonant.
Okay.
While the self is consonant.
The self is always consonant because it is your subjective you. You can't be dissonant with you. You can be dissonant with many other things, but so the self is consulate, while giftedness is dissonant because it often provokes society to penalize you, to excommunicate you, to discriminate against you, to envy you, so it's by definition dissonant.
Another two useful concepts are egodystony and egosyntony. I would say that giftedness is egodystonic while the self is egosyntonic, by definition.
The self is the ego.
So, of course, the self is egosyntonic.
But giftedness is egodystonic.
I have known, when I was nine years old, I was plucked out of high school, and I was sent to Israel's premier university, the technium in Haifa. And I suffered to study at age nine, surrounded by 23 years old and 24 years old, because people serving the army in Israel. And they start university at age 24 so are surrounded by these people and many of them because the technion is a highly selected institution where only the best of the best the cream enter so many of them were gifted and many of them started life as gifted children and I've had access to hundreds of them.
And I can tell you this was a very unhappy bunch.
Okay.
Very egodystonic.
Very, and many of them regretted being gifted.
And, you know, they rejected that part of themselves. There was a lot of self-rejection there.
And they were not good with girls. The men were not good with girls. The girls were not good with men, of course.
So they were not good in courting, in flirting, in interpersonal relationships.
And then later on, when I entered the field of physics, relatively late in life, by the way, I realized the similarities between gifted people and people with autism spectrum disorders, the amazing similarity between the two.
The problem with social cues, the laser focus, the hyperfocus, for example, an intellectual pursuit, the ability to process information inordinate amounts and so these are all typical of people with ASD, with autism.
And I began even to ask whether giftedness was not some form of autism that we have yet to describe or to put in the DSM6, you know.
I'm beginning to think that maybe it's some kind of autistic manifestation or some neurodevelopmental issue because similarities are astounding, absolutely astounding between these two populations.
And sometimes they are misdiagnosed, especially let's say if the IQ is very, very high.
Yes, and many, many autistic people are highly creative.
Yes.
And in their own fields, they're geniuses. They're like, you know, amazing.
But how would you say then, you know, because you said in your video about autistic people that they will feel more comfortable with each other to prevent dissonance, yeah?
But in this context, as you were talking about your story, you know, you think that gifted people should be together with gifted people to feel more at ease or not?
I don't think it's a question of gifted or not gifted, but peer.
So yeah, I think gifted children should be together with gifted children.
But gifted children should not be together with gifted adults.
Okay, yes.
So blocking me out of my peer group and sending me to university at age nine was a disastrous, catastrophic mistake. Lifelong. The impacts are lifelong and they are not good.
Yeah, I'm so sorry.
But what they should have done, they should have found other people like me. Other children like me and then opened a school or classes for.
We do this with intellectually challenged children. Classes for intellectually challenged children. We even begin to have classes for autistic children.
So we shouldhave classes for gifted children, absolutely. Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I am also for that.
Yeah.
It sounds like arrogant, you know, maybe to other typical people, you know.
But nevertheless, I think this is a huge issue and could be in one way also some sort of solution to have gifted children together.
Yeah.
I also think the education system needs to reconstruct itself.
Oh, sure.
Today the education system, or actually not today, but in the last 800 years, the education system was constructed to reflect the average person.
It's an assumption of averageness.
And the reason is that most of the education system, the modern education system, was constructed by manufacturers, by industrialists.
They wanted to teach people basic mathematics, basic reading, so that they can function in factories.
So it was an economically oriented enterprise, modern education.
And of course manufacturers prefer average people.
You know, Charlie Chaplin, the hard times and all this.
They prefer people who are robotic, automatic.
Units.
Units.
For factories, yeah.
And I think we need to create an education system that is responsive to a highly specific, idiosyncratic parameters.
In other words, customized, tailored education system.
We have customized medicine.
Medicine today reacts to your specific genes, to your genetic makeup.
They scan your genes and they tailor your treatment accordingly.
This will be the wave of the future.
Not two people with the same condition will receive the same treatment.
Same should happen in education.
We should have classes with a single student.
That should be the future.
And it's possible to do.
With information technology, it's totally possible to do.
Yeah, I think it's going to go there and that gifted children will have the opportunity to develop.
Because, you know, in one point, some of the giftedness can be very overdeveloped, like, let's say, mathematics or music or other creativity.
But the other side, the emotional intelligence or these social skills or even physical skills, you know, running.
Usually they are very clumsy, you know, I have few of them like that, yeah?
Yep.
So, you know, to really make them feel good and, as you said, personalize the education.
I think we should personalize the intellectual part.
And we should commonalize all the rest.
In other words, the child should be embedded in a peer group where the intellect is not engaged, but where the intellect is engaged, there should be classes of a single student, not only for gifted children.
Each child should receive a tailor-made program, intellectually.
Of course, non-intellectually, sports, playing together, fighting, which is crucial. All these social skills should be developing a group, a peer group, never alone.
But intellectual power should be, there should not be groups intellectually. There's not such thing as intellectual group. That's completely, you know, unrealistic.
Homogenizing people.
That's what the economy wants. Economy wants to homogenize people. As consumers, as workers, there's a huge homogenization attempt.
And the education system is at the forefront of this effort to level everyone, to make everyone indistinguishable from each other. Clones, read clones.
That's definitely the modern education system.
Yes.
It sounds for me like some sort of conspiracy, but you know.
It's not conspiracy. These are the needs of the marketplace.
The economy always dictated education. Education was always a derivative of the economy.
So in the ancient world, most of the education focused on specific tasks or skills that were useful to society.
So in Sparta, the education was mostly military. And in Athens, the education was more liberal. You had music, you had rhetoric.
But even rhetoric, for example. Rhetoric was the core, the core curriculum in Athens, for example. In Athens, you studied 80% of the time rhetoric.
Why?
Because Athens was a participatory democracy, and everyone had to speak. It was a social function. So they taught you to speak. So if you have to work in a factory, mindless, unthinking robot in a factory, then the education system will convert you into a mindless, unthinking robot to cater to the needs and requirements of society in the economy. It's normal.
So what would you recommend that if you have any idea to the gifted part of us become less dissonant with the self, what would you recommend?
You said it, actually. We need to teach these people's self-love. I think it's very difficult to love yourself when you are a freak, when you're an exception in any way, when you stand out for better or for worse. It's difficult for you to love yourself.
I don't think these people have a developed self. I completely disagree with this. And I don't think they love themselves at all. I think there's a war going on. I think they're in a constant state of conflict, in a conflict. So we need to teach them self-love. Self-love has several components, the most important of which, number one is self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-acceptance. And then they need to become their own best friends and so and so forth. But honestly, you know, people should stick to people who are like them.
Yeah, yeah.
We have this myth of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity and it's not working. We tried it for a hundred years.
Yeah. Yeah. We have this myth of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity and it's not working. We tried it for a hundred years. It's not working. You can see it all over Europe with the anti-immigration movements. You know, people should stick to people who are more or less like them. I am not talking in racist terms, not talking about skin color and so on, but culture, for example, you should stick to people who are culturally like you. And so on. So it's the same with endowments, with natural endowments. After all, if I'm an athlete and I want to join the NBA, I go and train with other athletes. I don't go and train with grandmothers in...
Exactly.
I go and train with other athletes. So gifted people need to learn to love themselves, accept themselves, by recognizing that they're not alone. There's a strong sense of being alone, of aloneness, internalized aloneness, internalized solitude, which is not healthy. So they need to recognize they're not alone. Their challenges are unique to the group, not unique to themselves, but unique to a group of people. They need to interact with these group of people. It's not such a small group, like the, you know, as I said, we mythologize these people. It's such as a small group. It's a pretty big group.
And within this pretty big group, you can find love, you can get married, you can have children, you can live a normal life not having to sacrifice your idiosyncrasy or uniqueness.
Yeah.
And so I think that's the only solution to try to force common people, average people, to accept gifted people would only create tension, envy, aggression, and so on. To try to force gifted people, to accept average people would only create contempt and rejection and so. I, coming back to myself, of course, I hold most people in contempt. I can't help it. It's not that I want to hold them in contempt, but I find them contemptible. I hold them in contempt. but I find them contemptible.
I hold them in contempt.
I find it very difficult to convince myself that they are human and have any rights as human. And mind you, I am trained, I'm an intellectual, I'm well read, I'm this, I've all these supposed defenses against this, but they don't work. They don't work because I'm different. And I perceive my different, my differentness, I perceive my difference as superiority.
That is unhealthy. That is not okay, you know, but that is the outcome of having been forced to interact and to integrate with people who are dramatically more stupid than I am.
As simple as it. Yeah. Exactly.
And how is it when you communicate with highly gifted person?
It depends. If the other highly gifted person is competitive and narcissistic and it's one upmanship, mine is bigger than yours, this kind of thing. Then I react badly, of course.
But for example, right now I'm collaborating on a book with a guy who is beyond super gifted. I'm collaborating on my theory in physics with one guy, and I'm collaborating on a book with another. Both of them in my view qualify as geniuses. They're geniuses.
I don't have any problem. We're on excellent terms, we've been working together for many years, I have a single problem. I feel comfortable with them, they understand me. I don't hold them in content. I never have any problem with them, they understand me. I don't hold them in content. I never have any problem with them.
But the majority, the vast majority, all gifted people are forced to interact with, not with their own kind. They are sweet genus. They must interact with their own species, with their own kind.
Yes.
So the self is then more, or the gifted part of the self is then more consonant with the self, if you are connected with the other audiences or the other, let's say, highly gifted people, yeah.
Of course, if your self is the construct that emanates from interactions with people who are like you, then no dissonance is possible.
But if the self represents, consider the self as a Trojan horse, consider the self as an invasion.
So this, if the invading tribe is made up of people who are totally not like you, of course you would have a disown.
But imagine that the invading tribe are copies of you, exactly like you. You would feel at home. You would feel fuzzy and warm and accepted and loved.
This is why it's so important to have the community, to have people who are in similar, let's say, gifted level, yeah.
Exactly.
That applies not only to giftedness. It's a general principle.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think it's an exceedingly bad idea to force people from different cultures to share the same social space.
Not that you don't have to learn about other cultures. Of course you have to learn about other cultures. Other cultures can enrich you. Other cultures can provide you with insights. Other cultures open your eyes. It's an amazing experience.
But to coexist with people who do not share your values.
Do not share your value, or even find your values reprehensible and horrible and so.
To force me to be with this, that is really fantasy.
Or even to have a boss.
Yes.
I mean, yeah, any kind of interpersonal interaction.
That's the fantasy of postmodernism. The fantasy of postmodernism, there are no meaningful differences.
We are all the same. Some of us are gifted there, some of us are gifted here, but we are all the same, essentially.
We are all the same. Some of us are gifted there, some of us are gifted here, but we are all the same, essentially.
We are not the same. Of course, we are not the same. We don't share the same endowments. We don't share the same culture. We are not the same, not in the same sense.
And so we should adhere to our kind. We should cross-fertilize. We should learn about others, expose ourselves.
Of course, only stupid people, you know.
But otherwise, in terms of the environment you're in, it must be more or less like you.
And also for our mental health, basically.
I'm talking about our mental health. I'm talking about as a professor of psychology now.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
So I'm just writing a thesis about gifted adults in the workplace, yeah?
So you can imagine how difficult this would be, you know, to have, let's say, a meaningful message that people will understand.
But I think that it's very important also for the companies and businesses and all over, in every workplace, you know, to start to develop this idea of bringing gifted, a good place for gifted people to thrive.
Yes, I think all companies, beyond a certain size, yeah.
All companies should have giftedness incubators, places, spaces where gifted people can congregate and can provide output that will be useful to the total organization.
So some companies have what is called intrapreneurship, not inter, but intra.
Intra.
So they set up startups, internal startups. Google has this and so on. They set up internal startups and gifted people work in these internal startups. And then the startup becomes a company in its own right and the people who work there become rich and so and so forth. Everyone is happy. So that's an example.
But the entrepreneurship is focused on money, marketing, products.
It's the wrong orientation in my view.
I think if there were incubator spaces where gifted people go with no agenda, no agenda, no business plan, no product, I think these incubators would come up with the most amazing innovations and if you let them free, if you let them go wild, if you let gifted people go wild.
If I used to own big companies, but if I were again to own big companies, I would hire gifted people and give them no agenda. I would just hire them.
Yes, very good.
They're like fertilizer, you know. I would hire them.
Yes.
And then I would tell them, roam free, come to me when you have something specifically wish to discuss.
In the meantime, you have a salary.
Now, of course, this is the concept of scholarship.
This is the concept of scholarship.
Concept of scholarship was very dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Yes.
Were geniuses, like the MacArthur Foundation nowadays, were geniuses, the royals, the monarchs, the kings and queens of the time, they gave money to geniuses, not in order to do something, but they gave them a life-long stipend, a lifelong scholarship, just to be geniuses. That's it. Go and do whatever you want. You're in the payroll of the King of Bavaria. That's it.
Oh, wonderful.
And this is what big companies should do.
They should be the Kings of Bavaria. They should find the Mozart's. They should find the Einstein's. They should find, and they should just give them a salary for life.
And that's it. One condition, though, if they do come up with something, it belongs to the company.
That's all.
And this is how universities work. Universities basically work this way. If you find, if you have research in a university, it belongs to the university.
Yeah.
But universities are bad at this. They're bad. Because the universities are mixtures of gifted and non-gifted people, vast majority non-gifted people. And universities are factories. They have a product. It's called education.
So the gifted person is constantly disrupted. He has to teach. He has to grade exams. He has to talk to idiots who happen to be students, other idiots who are faculty. You know, it's a very disruptive environment.
That's not what I'm talking.
Yes, exactly.
These are all very great ideas. Sam, thank you very much.
So this is maybe just the last question.
What can the gifted people do for human evolution?
For human evolution?
Yes.
For better society.
For a better society.
I'm not quite sure that there is a direct connection or correlation between being gifted and being good.
There is an assumption here that gifted people are good people.
I'm very far from convinced.
Exactly like the self in my view has nothing to do with giftedness.
I think more morality or the evolution of morality in the individual is nothing to do with giftedness.
You can be an exceedingly gifted psychopath.
Yes.
And you could be an exceedingly gifted saint.
So I don't think we can say that giftedness as a phenomenon is conducive to the evolution of humanity in a good way.
Because evolution can be nasty.
Doesn't have to be good.
So I don't think we can...
But of course, gifted people when they are good can contribute much more than non-gifted people when they are good.
Of course, the problem in today's world is a statistical world.
Everything from physics to psychology is statistical. We rely on statistics.
The main branch today is statistics and statistics masquerades as economics, masquerades as psychology, but it's statistics.
And in statistics, we have the concept of average, average, mean, you know.
And so everything is averaged.
And because the number of stupid people far exceeds the number of intelligent people and the number of the not gifted, dramatically exceeds the number of gifted, there is an effect of delusion.
Effect of delusion.
In the past, until very recently actually, until I would say the 1990s, we had gatekeepers.
The role of gatekeepers was to keep out the stupid, the unintelligent, the ignorant, to keep them out.
So you had editors in publishing houses. Not everyone could publish a book. You had editors in newspapers. Not everyone could publish news.
You had gatekeepers. We knew the barbarians outside the gates, and we had an army protecting us.
In the 1990s, we went through a process known as disintermediation.
The gatekeepers were discarded, and now everyone has access to the same means of production, intellectual production.
And this deludes the gifts of the gifted people.
We have a problem known as discoverability. We cannot discover the good stuff because it is immersed and drowning in a tsunami of trash.
And that's the core problem.
And there were attempts to provide quality badges.
There was something called the Open Directory, for example, at the time, and the Open Directory gave badges to specific sites and so on.
It didn't work.
People want, there is the Dunning Kruger effect.
Dunning Kruger effect is when stupid people don't know that they're stupid and they think they're actually geniuses.
And the opposite.
And I think it's too late.
It's too late.
Yes, I think it's too late.
I think we let the genie out of the bottle.
The masses in the intellectual sense, the intellectual muscles, the what I call the stupid people, they have been empowered.
They have at their disposal technologies that allow them to disseminate their stupidity, to co-opt other people, to brainwash other people and so on.
They acquired political power via democracy, which has become idiocracy.
And of course, clever billionaires and clever tycoons and clever businessmen take advantage of this.
They become political figures, or they make a lot of money.
So everyone is happy in this situation.
The stupid people are happy because for the first time in human history, they are super powerful.
The politicians are happy because it's easy to manipulate stupid people.
The billionaires are happy because they're making more money than ever.
And there is this tiny, tiny, tiny group of people, the tiny, relatively speaking, yes?
Yeah.
The 500 million people, maybe.
And these people are giftedThese people are intellectually endowed. These people are.
And they are powerless. They are helpless.
More or less, it's a tsunami and you have a lifeboat, but you're not likely to survive.
This is a species wide problem. Problem with humanity, not likely to survive. This is a species-wide problem. Problem with humanity, not of gifted people.
Humanity is now stigmatizing giftedness. Political correctness and giftedness is stigmatized.
When you stigmatize the wise and elevate the stupid, it's the end.
And you can't put the stupid back in the bottle.
First of all, they broke the bottle. And you need many, many, many bottles.
Too many, I think.
So sad to hear that, yeah.
One of my purpose is also bring awareness to the problem of gifted population you know and for sure what you said now it makes me sad but nevertheless our interview is one of this you know the point of my purpose to bring awareness to all the complexity and problem of gifted people. So thank you much for all the clarity and all your insights. Thank you very much.
So and see you soon. What should we say?
Thank you for having me.