Giftedness and Magical Thinking: How Magical Is It?

By Dr. Patty Gently on August 28, 2024

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patty Gently (Formerly Williams) is a trauma therapist and coach who specializes in EMDR, ND-Affirmative DBT, and IFS modalities. Through Bright Insight she works to counsel, coach, and advocate for gifted, twice-exceptional, and neurodivergent persons, along with other marginalized populations.

Giftedness and Magical Thinking: How Magical Is It?

Oh, the most beautiful rabbit holes. I often find them in therapeutic coaching sessions (I am so lucky, seriously).

A Topic Worth Exploring - With Openness

From time to time, the topic of magical thinking comes up. It did again. This time though, it mixed with another path I take, mentally, as I do the good work of depathologizing mental health as more broadly explored by the beautiful Dr. Kazimierz Dąbrowski. I'll back up though and explain further.

Stories Behind My Inquiry

I am often pulled to the topic of delusion, hallucination, and general psychosis. It is fascinating to me in the wake of the neurodiversity movement aimed at also depathologizing mental health. How are we to best address this often-distressing topic from a neurodiversity-affirming perspective? Well, maybe we start by exposing ourselves to the lived experiences of others that diverge from our own. In an effort to reduce bias and broaden our own perspectives that is, we learn what else is out in the world beyond our own personal cultures and understandings.

My father, a retired electrical engineer, told me a story about a woman with schizophrenia who could hear the electricity in the walls. She would call and complain about issues that nobody else could see. People thought she was nuts. My father checked out her apartment home with tools of the trade and found that she was completely correct about what she sensed and a potentially problematic area of her home. Was she nuts? It seems she simply had super senses. Did this cause other non-neurotypical behaviors of hers to present as delusional? Hmmmm…

I’ve had friends who were schizophrenic and proposed more “uncheckable” information, or data that seemed simply irrational. It gets me thinking about the reality though, of the neurodiversity movement where we seek to accept the lived experiences of neurotypes that are different than our own and aim to accept labels as identity rather than pathology. A slippery slope? Maybe. I don’t know. However, it is a lovely thought experiment.

I had an older friend who lived in his car. He was a lovely Black man in his 60s who reported only watching the news because of his schizophrenia. Per this friend, when he was eight years old he watched a horror film that he believed was real. It scared him away from fictional media content. Since he identified the news was factual, though, he did not worry about watching it, believing it to be safe for his multidimensional mind. This seems reasonable enough.

This friend also reported often talking on the phone with “Aunt Hillary” and “Uncle Bill” Clinton, common players on the news around that time. I mean, I could not prove he didn’t know the former president and first lady. I assumed he did not though because it seemed unlikely. When I interacted with him, however, I spoke as though I accepted his reality. What if I truly tried to frame it as reality—his unique truth? What if he really did talk to the Clintons? I know, I know—again—a slippery slope. Slippery especially since if he was not medicated, he shared he could be violent.

I cannot help but wonder if my friend’s unmedicated violence and socially odd behavior were because of a neurological rewiring as a result of the mismatch between self and environment. I mean, if you are chronically misunderstood and are told you are wrong if not delusional, would you or I risk developing violent behaviors too? This is yet ANOTHER slippery slope I will hold off from for now, though the question can linger in your brain. It certainly lingers in mine, so I can hold, turn, work through and work with it.

How Magical Is Apophenia?

So here is the thing though, and the pushback to the application of magical thinking or the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of a causal link. How many of us gifted pattern-finders and meaning-makers have been accused of magical thinking or something similar such as apophenia? How many of us have come to a “once is a pattern” conclusion based on skip-thinking or intuition that we could then trace the logic of, only to be told, “You cannot possibly know that.” How many of us did, in fact, absolutely know what we said we did (though initially labeled ridiculous or even erroneous). Bringing this back to a pathological understanding, according to Blain et al. in their 2020 Journal of Abnormal Psychology article,

Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—often termed Psychoticism or positive schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. One promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves “apophenia,” conceptualized here as a disposition toward false positive errors. Apophenia and positive symptoms have shown relations to Openness to Experience (more specifically, to the openness aspect of the broader Openness/Intellect domain), and all of these constructs involve tendencies toward pattern seeking (abstract).

Well now. Ain’t that something?

In common conversations with other gifted folx, there arises the topic of being misunderstood and even not being believed in our knowledge. While in grad school, I remember interviewing a former supervisor principal where I brought up the topic of post-traumatic growth. Upon doing so he asked, “How do YOU know about that?” Now, this is certainly an example of a microaggression where he pictured me as knowing less than him because of his Ed.D., age, and you know, tall, White, handsome maleness (sorry y’all, it's true). Never mind the fact that I was always intelligent, clever, a school nurse under him, and working on my master’s in clinical mental health counseling at that moment - AND Google y’all. Lots of people have access to information about PTG - not just Dr. So-In-So.

This microaggression and example is a stone’s throw from other experiences where, because of our biases and differences in worldviews, we may also tell a child “You are too young to know that or ask these questions.” It is also not so different from, “That is not important,” or “You are jumping to conclusions.” Is it not important? Are we jumping blindly though? Or are we open to experiences and therefore need to keep doing the good bias-reduction work to make sure our conclusions or explorations are sound enough for us? That is, can we just objectively seek knowledge of what is true?

So how magical is apophenia? Blain et al., like so many professionals, and really westerners at large, see apophenia and magical thinking as erroneous. For those of us with a history of being told we do not know what we know or experience, it may be easier to wonder if we are mis-framing this phenomenon, or at least jumping to conclusions about jumping to conclusions. Is it possible that what some call magical thinking is just imaginational overexcitability or openness to experience, where we readily explore possibilities? If we paired this openness with good ol' objectivity and bias-reduction work, could it yield the most beautiful awareness or opportunity?

Let Me Tell You About My Brother

Oh, and hopefully he does not mind.

My middle-aged brother (we will call him B), by some people’s standards, is an odd duck. He does not think like others—neurodivergent to the gills. As a toddler, B would pull all the canned food out of the cupboards and unroll all the toilet paper. ALL THE TP! As a preschooler and through elementary school, he would take apart everything to explore how they worked. I remember seeing circuit boards and telephones around that he got to. I think Mom and Dad would bring home spares (good job, Mom and Dad). B would create contraptions, and he attached a toilet scrubber to a drill before it was cool (he reported not accounting for the “splash factor” though). Elementary school science projects would involve turning his kiddie BMX bike and body into a generator to run a television. He would eventually obsess about perpetual motion.

As an adult, my brother always had “wild ideas.” Some might say his thoughts and plans were preposterous and contrived of magical thinking-business plans that would breed from experiences and, you betcha, openness to experience and imaginational overexcitability.

Well now.

Most people would tell B that his ideas were too outlandish and not grounded in the reality of adult necessity. In some ways, they were absolutely right. The practical thing is safe and arguably “best” for families per typical social standards and our current capitalistic economic structuring. However, I wonder if Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, or Einstein were offered similar judgments. How many seemingly “crazy ideas” are the ones that turn into that one thing we never thought of and cannot live without? How many inventors and successful entrepreneurs were also deemed unreasonable? And how many times did they fail and struggle before they succeeded, gloriously?

And are not most of these brilliant minds at least a little eccentric? I know they are certainly misunderstood.

Magical Thinking In Relation to Synesthesia … Oh!

Have you heard of synesthesia? Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon where stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. As an example, some synesthetes report tasting colors or seeing sound. Other people report seeing color auras around people where there is likely a visual representation of what they sense intuitively. When people hear about the abilities of synesthetes without exposure to the experience or many people who say it is real, the first common response is to deny that this phenomenon exists. However, it has been scientifically and medically validated, objectively.

I discussed synesthesia with a fellow synesthete in the context of exploring cPTSD and Stephanie Foo’s book, What My Bones Know. We considered together how when a person experiences a traumatic upbringing, their neuropathways can reroute to incorporate hypervigilant and remain safe. For gifted individuals with complex and dense neurology (and autistic individuals with a higher-than-average amount of synapses), this rewiring is compensatory, including pathways that may not look typical. Neurodivergent folx with such a dense and complex neural network may also have more unique or seemingly complex neuro-workarounds. Can this look like magical thinking, apophenia, synesthesia, or skip-thinking? It's a fair hypothesis. I will not go too far down this road although I will ask: Could this explain some tendencies towards monotropic thinking or demand avoidance? Again, a possibility to ponder.

So What Am I Getting At?

I guess my point is this: Maybe magical thinking is not always so magical. Sure, if we arrive at a conclusion that is not grounded in any detectable, objective data, it could seem magical and may be truly erroneous. What if it is not though? What if the more open and imaginationally overexcitable of us can go there?

I propose we do good bias reduction work and appropriate, objective data collection to allow for other possibilities beyond pathology or judgment. At a minimum, doing so seems kind and accepting.

And acceptance is kinda my jam.