Intense world syndrome and Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities

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Does your child complain about the seams in his socks? Put her hands over her ears when the movie starts in the movie theater? Have trouble sitting still? Get moved almost to tears by a piece of music or work of art? These are signs of the kinds of intensities that can be seen in gifted children.

Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski identified five of these intensities, which he called "overexcitabilities" or "supersensitivities": Psychomotor, Sensual, Emotional, Intellectual, and Imaginational. Gifted children tend to have more than one of these intensities, although one is usually dominant.

Overall, there were significant differences (p < 0.001) between the comparison groups in both minicolumnar width (cw) and mean cell spacing (mcs). Although our supernormals did not exhibit deficits in communication or interpersonal skills the resultant minicolumnar phenotype bears similarity to that described for both autism and Asperger’s syndrom

"Spindle cells appear to play a central role in the development of intelligent behavior and adaptive response to changing conditions and cognitive dissonance. They emerge postnatally [emphasis added] and eventually become widely connected with diverse parts of the brain, evidencing their essential contributions to the superior capacity of hominids to focus on difficult problems."

Spindle neurons are known to be found in reduced numbers in those with ASD. Perhaps they helped the neuroscientists compensate for – and even exploit the benefits of – the bias towards local processing inherent in reduced width minicolumns?

the alleles that cause autism could have been with humanity for at least 40,000 years.

"Assuming 30 to 35 years per generation (which is conservative), there have been 1100 to 1300 generations since the two populations diverged. This presumably should have been enough time to eliminate the various alleles that cause autism from the gene pool, if they are in fact deleterious.

Obviously this has not occurred. This means that the individual alleles that in combination cause autism must individually or in lesser combinations have had a beneficial effect to compensate for the reduced reproductive rates of autistics

As many of you should know by now I'm interested in both Autism and Gifted world, doing my researches I've found a bounch of interesting articles I want to share with you

As many of you should know by now I'm interested in both Autism and Gifted world, doing my researches I've found a bounch of interesting articles I want to share with you:

From: http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted10 ... excite.htm



Intense world: http://heybryan.org/docs/Intense_world_syndrome.pdf
http://heybryan.org/intense_world_syndrome.html

From: http://a-shade-of-grey.blogspot.com/200 ... utism.html







For the ones who don't want to read the articles:
basically the intense world syndrome explanation of Autism and Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities in gifted children can have a similar genetic source. The difference seems in the development of Brain compensatory mechanics. Basically autistic children have smaller and oversensible neurons that lead to hyperfocusing / savant ability / particular spotting / sensory issues. The difference with "gifted" brain is not here, they are the same. The difference is that while neurons dispersion in autistic brain is similar to NT dispersion, "gifted" people have a more "compacted" neuron scattering leading to a "shorter distance for long range interaction" who is impossible otherwise.

Sincerely, I think that "Dabrowski's overexcitabilities" a bit "mumbo-jambo". The name itself (Dabrowski's overexcitabilities) sends the message that is an invention of one guy than a result of serious research.