Not points, so much as setting out a stall for a small but very important subgroup of the neurodiverse.
There are two kinds of genius, celebrity and everyday. The authors I prize for their clarity of thinking in these developing domains are Professor Craig Thomas, who heads Yale's Genius School, and published a prospectus of the traits he has observed in his subjects, in The Hidden Habits of Genius, which includes celebrity in his criteria, and Doctor Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, whose The Gifted Adult, discussing the esoteric traits forming those gifts, identifies everyday genius as a synonym.
I do not intend discussing the celebrity group, as I have worries the noise involved masks banality. Dr Jacobsen's text discusses the hyper-skills most humans lack, creating a clear dichotomy between Clever and Gifted. Gifted implies a Giver, in this sense, unlike the American educational program of that name, which focuses on the precocious prodigy.
I belong to the Gifted. I can generally deliver once I know my objective. Finding what matters in the infinite sea of future possibility is as much beyond me as it is any human. As an example, in early 2015 I studied a very specific question, and held my answers on file for a couple of months until a specialist in the question was approached by a consortium of foreign Nations, asking the exact question. Not roughly, but word for word. My daughter had started work with him that morning, and so was present when the question was asked. At 0200 I heard about it, at 0830 I was answering the senior member of the governing family, by 0930 we had the deal which has placed the UK at the head of the pack now the US has imploded. Within a week the country's top man in the field had approached me, not knowing what was going on, but available for the new project, and so it was up and running. We hadn't met in forty years!
That happened while a panel of senior Harley Street psychiatrists were investigating my mentation, as I'd made a significant contribution to the work which won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. What's on my security record's words, seeing it live's proof, and they weren't the only ones. My career in Defence Diplomacy placed me in Spook Central, the Savile Club, and half the Cabinet were watching, including Rory Stewart, whose career started on the ground I'd prepared completing Gandhj's unfinshed business. Boris saw this as a challenge to his ambition, and in the best Jeffrey Archer style dispatched anyone competent to everlasting perdition.
All well and good until he achieved his goal, becoming Prime Minister, and discovered the job was beyond him. The first hard evidence was Guy Verhofstadt's film of life inside Barnier's Brexit negotiating team. He was never there, and in the end, we crashed out without an agreement, under Article 50 provisions. Then COVID reared it's ugly head, a subject close to my heart as I'd been left running the European crisis desk solo when SARS broke out. Fortunately my Secretary's uncle was General Administrator of the French Hospital in Hanoi, so I was getting frontline live information what was working or not. Thankfully mutated into a mild form and rapidly died out: less happily the Chinese did zilch on the source vector in Wuhan, and we had a return match. They still have zero respect for safety standards.
Boris finally imploded at Christmas 2019. leaving his aides holding the fort, as their testimony to the Covid Enquiry 31.3.2023 explains. Cummings in particular hit the headlines calling for all weirdos and misfits (his blog 2.1.2020, which included a comment confirming my surmise nobody in psychiatry actually has the faintest clue what's going on. I was in any case deeply disordered thanks to Boris' abuse reawakening my childhood trauma, something I've now drained, leaving me with the memories it was protecting me from. I'm at long last coming out of the woods on the medical ramifications.
And that's my purpose asking if anyone else has hyper-ability. I'm only one among hundreds, maybe thousands, destroyed by an egalitarian education system which sees intelligence as a psychiatric issue to be eliminated. I only survived by being just ahead of the wave of social pathologisation in the advent of ASD/ADHD diagnosis in the 1970s onwards. It's a classic case of Management Consultancy, only telling us what we already know. Now don't get me wrong, for most, the diagnosis helps, but not all. I'm trying to find other views from people with unusual abilities', to improve the statistical reliability of the freaking weird and leave the place better than I found it..
