The Mensa Foundation has been exploring whether giftedness is a form of neurodivergence for some time now. We hosted an entire Colloquium on neurodiversity in 2023. We published Dr. Noks Nauta arguing that giftedness does not belong under that umbrella. Our Speaker Series took the question up across two sessions, with Nauta making the case against and Dr. Matt Zakreski making the case for. And we recently commissioned Dr. Sakhavat Mammadov of the University of Georgia to review the literature and help us think the question through. (More on that next month.)
Now we are hearing from Sarah Swenson.
Sarah is a licensed psychotherapist whose practice is neurodiverse couples, often where one partner is autistic. She also works with highly intelligent clients whose thinking creates strain in their relationships. She is a Mensa member.
Her argument is that high intelligence and neurotype describe different things. One is a range of capacity. The other is an organization of processing. When they get collapsed, she says, both groups lose language they need.
Sarah’s is one position on an open question. We are in no hurry to stop asking it.
High Intelligence Is Not Neurodivergence
A strange confusion has entered popular language. High intelligence is increasingly described as though it were a form of neurodivergence in itself. The intention is often generous. People are trying to name the fact that highly intelligent people may feel different, misunderstood, socially out of step, or required to conceal parts of themselves. But the conflation of high intelligence and neurodivergence collapses under examination.
Neurodivergence is a broad term for neurocognitive functioning that diverges from dominant norms. It is often used in relation to autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette’s, epilepsy, mental illness, sensory processing differences, and other forms of neurological, developmental, or cognitive difference. Its breadth is part of its value. But breadth does not mean that every uncommon trait, exceptional ability, or socially difficult experience becomes the same kind of difference.
Some highly intelligent people are neurodivergent, and some neurodivergent people are highly intelligent. The mistake begins when high intelligence itself is treated as a neurodivergence.
Two Different Things
Intelligence refers to capacity: the ability to reason, synthesize, learn quickly, manage complexity, perceive patterns, hold multiple variables in mind, or move with unusual ease through abstraction. Neurotype refers to the organization of perception, attention, sensory processing, communication, regulation, and social cognition. One describes level or range of capacity. The other describes organization of processing. They may coexist in one person, but they do not explain each other.
Why the Confusion Makes Sense
The confusion is understandable because similar social effects can arise from different causes. A highly intelligent person may learn to withhold the full range of her thinking because experience has taught her that complex thought is not always welcome. She may be called intimidating, arrogant, strange, too intense, too analytical, too much, or a “genius,” which can be its own form of reduction. The label sounds admiring, but it often flattens the person into spectacle, turning a living mind into an object of comment.
This kind of withholding can begin early, especially for women. A girl who sees quickly, asks unexpected questions, makes unusual connections, or refuses easy answers may learn that full expression changes the room. People become uncomfortable. They grow bored, defensive, admiring in a way that feels distancing, or eager to reduce her to something more manageable. Over time, she learns to translate downward. She simplifies. She withholds. She lets the conversation proceed at a level that does not reveal the full complexity of what she sees.
That adaptation has a cost. It can produce loneliness, self-monitoring, social fatigue, and a split between the visible self and the actual self. The person may become practiced at sounding more ordinary than she is, keeping the most alive parts of her mind private because the social consequences of revealing them have been too disappointing. This can shape a life.
A Dimension, Not a Category
The mistake lies in confusing the social cost of being misread by others with the structure of neurodevelopmental or neurocognitive difference. Not every challenge to social life derives from neurotype.
High intelligence sits along a dimension of ability. A very tall person is not in a different category of motor development because height creates social inconvenience. A gifted musician is not neurodivergent because musical capacity exceeds the average. A person with an extraordinary memory may experience the world differently in practical terms, but memory itself does not become a neurodevelopmental condition because it is exceptional.
Two Kinds of Adaptation
Highly intelligent people often suffer from the social interpretation of intelligence. Intellectual speed may be misread as impatience, precision as criticism, complexity as overthinking, originality as eccentricity, or intensity as self-importance. The highly intelligent person then adapts to the interpretive limits of the environment, becoming less visible in order to remain socially tolerable.
A neurodivergent person may also adapt constantly, but the source of the adaptation may be different. A highly intelligent person may understand the expected social pattern and choose to modulate herself because she knows what may happen if she does not. An autistic person, for example, may need to construct, memorize, infer, or perform patterns that others experience more intuitively, while also managing differences in sensory processing, communication, regulation, attention, or social interpretation. Both forms of adaptation can be exhausting, but they place different demands on the self.
Different Kinds of Support
This has practical consequences. The support required for a highly intelligent person differs in nature from the support required for a neurodivergent person, even when the visible effects overlap. Both may experience fatigue, depression, social withdrawal, self-doubt, or a distorted self-concept, and both may need help understanding the cost of lifelong adaptation. The source of that adaptation still needs to be understood accurately.
For the highly intelligent person, support may involve recovering permission to think and speak at full scale, distinguishing discernment from self-suppression, finding contexts where complexity is welcome, and undoing the shame that formed around being “too much” for ordinary conversation. The work often involves recognizing how much of the self has been hidden to manage other people’s discomfort.
For the neurodivergent person, support may involve understanding the actual structure of their processing, reducing unsustainable masking, creating environments that fit their nervous system more accurately, clarifying sensory and communication needs, and developing forms of participation that do not require chronic self-erasure. It may also involve understanding how the neurotypical brain differs from the autistic brain, and how much of ordinary social life has been organized around neurotypical expectations, pacing, sensory tolerance, communication style, and relational assumptions. Social life may need to become more explicit, more structured, more predictable, or less punishing.
These forms of support may overlap emotionally. Both can address shame, exhaustion, identity, belonging, grief, and the cost of being misunderstood. Similar effects may still arise from different causes.
When a Word Gets Too Big
The current expansion of the word neurodivergence risks making it so broad that it loses usefulness. If every uncommon trait, every social burden, every form of intensity, and every experience of being misunderstood becomes neurodivergence, the word no longer helps us understand anything with precision. It becomes a cultural synonym for “not average,” a move that may feel inclusive while blurring distinctions that deserve to remain clear.
Neurodivergent people need language that can name specific patterns of cognition, perception, regulation, sensory processing, communication, and adaptation. These realities should not be diluted into a vague celebration of difference. Highly intelligent people also need accurate language. Their experience should not have to be pathologized in order to be taken seriously. The loneliness of a complex mind does not require diagnostic language in order to be real. Sometimes it is the consequence of a large capacity moving through environments that cannot easily meet it.
Language of Its Own
High intelligence seems to be reaching for the language of neurodivergence because ordinary language has failed to describe the cost of uncommon intelligence. We have words for achievement, giftedness, brilliance, and genius, but fewer good words for the private burden of seeing more than one can say, thinking more quickly than one can explain, or finding that the mind’s natural movement exceeds the conversational space available to it. We afford more respect to athletes and musicians of exceptional talent than we do to those whose intelligence sets them apart.
That burden deserves language of its own.
A highly intelligent person may spend a lifetime learning when not to speak fully. She may learn that insight can isolate, that originality can irritate, that precision can be mistaken for hostility, and that complexity can exhaust people who did not ask for it. She may protect herself by becoming less visible, and over time that protection may alter self-concept, mood, confidence, and social life. It can lead to withdrawal. It can create depression. It can make a person feel strangely unreal in ordinary company.
Counseling can help by treating intelligence as a real human capacity around which adaptations may have formed. The work begins by examining those adaptations: when concealment became protection, when protection became habit, and when habit began to feel like identity. From there, the person can begin to recover access to the full range of the mind and seek relationships, contexts, and forms of expression where that mind can exist without apology.
That work requires accurate language. High intelligence and neurotype may intersect in individual lives, but they remain categorically distinct. One describes level or range of capacity. The other describes organization of processing. Confusing them may feel generous, but it creates conceptual fog. It makes intelligence seem like a diagnosis and neurodivergence seem like a general word for difference.
High intelligence does not need to be called neurodivergence in order to be understood. It needs to be recognized as a real human variation with real social consequences. It needs language spacious enough to describe both its gifts and its costs without collapsing it into another category.
Different phenomena deserve different names. That is clarity.
Sarah Swenson is a licensed psychotherapist and coach specializing in neurodiverse couples, including relationships in which one partner is autistic, and in highly intelligent clients whose thinking creates relational strain. She trained at Seattle University, the University of Washington, and Harborview Mental Health Services, writes and teaches widely on neurodiversity and relationships, and is the author of How We Miss Each Other. She is a member of Mensa. Learn more at TheNeurodiverseCouple.com.
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