– ricettività sensoriale esacerbata: il plusdotato è in grado di elaborare e analizzare un maggior numero di dati della stragrande maggioranza di noi;
– elaborazione arborescente delle informazioni con una ramifi cazione rapida di associazioni di idee che faticano a trovare una struttura; in pratica, l’elaborazione delle informazioni pro-venienti dall’esterno e dall’interno è simultanea, il che signifi ca che ogni messaggio viene processato insieme a tutti gli altri;
– defi cit di inibizione latente: costringe il sistema cerebrale a integrare tutte le info provenienti dall’ambiente senza una selezione preliminare; in altre parole, il plusdotato trova tanto fati-coso organizzare e strutturare il suo pensiero;
– il plusdotato è “campo-dipendente”: smarrito nel fl usso vorticoso della sua percezione della realtà, è incapace di estrapolare l’essenziale perché non riesce a compiere le distinzioni necessarie a un’elaborazione rapida ed effi ciente delle informazioni ricevute;
– rendimento in base al contesto: il plusdotato lavora in modo effi ciente solo se deve confron-tarsi con un numero ristretto di informazioni: in un compito chiuso è rapido e concentrato ed effi ciente, mentre in un compito aperto, girandole di idee e informazioni si rincorrono a ritmi frenetici
– intelligenza intuitiva: il plusdotato pensa per immagini, il linguaggio, le parole e la struttura verbale non sono il suo punto forte.
In altre parole, essere plusdotato non signifi ca essere più intelligente degli altri, bensì avere una diversa intelligenza. Riassumendo, i tratti specifi ci della personalità del plusdotato sono:
ipersensibilità, costante ingerenza delle emozioni, ricettività sensoriale esacerbata, empatia in grado di captare le emozioni altrui, ipertrofi a dei cinque sensi.
L’intelligenza del plusdotato è ricca e potente, ma, come abbiamo visto, si fonda su basi cognitive diverse. Per questo motivo, l’autrice cerca con questo libro di sfatare un mito piuttosto diff uso tra gli studiosi e nell’opinione pubblica: la radicata convinzione che avere un alto poten-ziale cognitivo garantisca una sorta di vantaggio sugli altri quando invece esiste un rapporto stretto e soff erente tra l’alto potenziale cognitivo e la vulnerabilità psichica.
Review of the book “Too Smart to Be Happy,” by Jeanne Siaud Facchin, published in Italy by Rizzoli (2016)
By Lucian Berescu, indipendent consultant, Trento
The author is a famous French psychologist and founder of “Cogito Z,” headquartered in Marseille, the fi rst centre for diagnosing and treating learning disabilities in children and adole-scents. Today, there are two other centres, in Paris and Avignon. The theme of Facchin’s book, of her main professional interest and research activity are gifted people: an almost impossible condition to diagnose, but which involves a very high number of people. At a discursive level, these people often say: «I have so many ideas that go through my head ...»; «I think so many things at the same time that in some moments I get confused and I lose my thread»; «Sometimes my mind goes so fast, it overheats to the point that I’m afraid it can go haywire».
The story of the term “surdoué” is relatively recent in France. It was introduced in 1970 by the psychiatrist Julian de Ajuriaguerra as an equivalent of “highly gifted” in English and became popular in France thanks to Rémy Chauvin and his text “Les surdoués,” translated into Ita-lian in the ’70s with the title “I superdotati.” However, although in the ItaIta-lian tradition the term
“superdotati” has long been used, in recent years scientifi c literature has focused on the term
“plusdotati.”
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Facchin, however, calls the “highly gifted” individual a “zebra”, a term she chose «to clear the fi eld from uncomfortable representations. A unique animal which is rare, the only equine, that the human being is not able to tame, that in the savannah is distinguished by the stripes it uses as camoufl age; that it takes care of its foals in a special way, which is both alike and diff erent».
The topic of “highly gifted” individuals has raised growing interest in recent years, due to two factors especially:
– the increase in psychological counseling, in childhood and adolescence;
– the spread of mental diagnoses.
Mainly the latter were an alarm bell for specialists because it was discovered that children with a high IQ tend to have severe school diffi culties and also exhibit severe psychological problems (behavioral disorders and socialization issues). There is also a growing interest for this topic in academic and educational fi elds, where the teams of specialists in the diagnosis and treatment of young children are increasingly growing, and schools are trying to develop specifi c pedagogical solutions.
If the term “highly gifted” suggests something more than other terms, in fact, those who are highly gifted are simply diff erent, a diversity that is expressed in a marked emotional and cognitive sensitivity. What happens in the brain of a “highly gifted” person and how does one explain their way of living and thinking? According to the author, the cognitive system of a person with a high cognitive potential is organized as follows:
– continuous state of hyperactivity, with sudden connections simultaneously spreading across all brain regions: a constant neural activity that increases cognitive potential but becomes very diffi cult to manage;
– exacerbated sensory receptivity: the “highly gifted” person can process and analyze more data compared to the vast majority of the other people;
– arborescent processing of information with a rapid branching of associations of ideas, strug-gling to fi nd a structure; in practice, the processing of information coming from the outside and from the inside is simultaneous, which means that each message is processed along with all the others;
– latency inhibition defi cit: this forces the brain to integrate all the info from the environment without a preliminary selection; in other words, the “highly gifted” person fi nds it hard to organize and structure his thinking;
– the “highly gifted” is “fi eld-dependent”: lost in the swirling fl ow of his/her perception of rea-lity, he/she is unable to extract the essential information because he/she cannot make the needed distinctions for a quick and effi cient processing of all the information received;
– context-based performance: the “highly gifted” person works effi ciently only if he/she has to deal with a small number of information: in a fast-paced task he/she is focused and effi cient, while in an open task he/she turns to ideas and information at a frenzied pace;
– intuitive intelligence: the “highly gifted” thinks throughout images; language, words, and verbal structures are not his/her highest characteristics.
In other words, being “highly gifted” does not mean being smarter than others, but having a diff erent intelligence. The specifi c personality traits of the highly gifted are: hypersensitivity, constant emotional interference, exacerbated sensory receptivity, empathy capable of capturing the emotions of others, hypertrophy of the fi ve senses.
The intelligence of highly gifted individuals is rich and powerful, but, as we have seen, it is based on diff erent cognitive bases. For this reason, the author seeks with her book to
dispel a reasonably popular myth between scholars and public opinion: the deep conviction that having a high cognitive potential guarantees a kind of advantage over others while there actually is a close and suff ering relationship between high cognitive potential and psycholo-gical vulnerability.
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GENERAL OUTLINES
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research in education, evaluation studies and social research on youth policies. Articles must not have been published previously, nor included in any other national or international journal, with exception of those papers contained in the article that have been presented as abstracts, posters, university theses, seminars, or conferences.
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