Rethinking Giftedness Through a Galvanic Frame

By Dr. Patty Gently on July 8, 2025

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patricia Gently supports gifted and twice-exceptional adults in their own autopsychotherapy through identity exploration, structured reflection, and alignment with inner values. A writer, educator, and 2e adult, Dr. Patty centers depth, integrity, and complexity in all aspects of her work.

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Rethinking Giftedness Through a Galvanic Frame

I’ve spent most of my life wrestling with a word that was supposed to describe people like me:

The gifted.

For years, I said it quietly, if at all. The word felt loaded with assumptions I never agreed to: exceptionalism, elitism, overachievement, even ease. None of these described my inner world, or the worlds of those I’ve spent decades walking alongside. What I knew was a different kind of intensity, one that electrified and unsettled. One that made meaning out of everything, and made rest nearly impossible. One that moved fast, not always forward. And if I had to name it now, I would call it galvanic.

The Problem With “Gifted"

In her book, If This Is a Gift, Can I Send It Back?: Surviving in the Land of the Gifted and Twice Exceptional, Jen Merrill (2012) names the contradiction so many live and few name outright. With equal parts humor and honesty, she writes about the daily absurdities and emotional costs of raising and being someone neurologically wired for more. And her words land because they challenge the very framing of giftedness as something advantageous. For many of us, it isn’t a gift at all. It’s a condition of intensity that society rarely understands, let alone accommodates.

The term gifted has long been used in academic and psychological contexts to designate individuals who perform significantly above norms in areas like intelligence, creativity, or aptitude. This framing is narrow and often misleading, though. It reduces a full-body, whole-person, whole-life neurodevelopmental profile into a score or output. It collapses struggle into success and masks volatility behind achievement.

Worse, the label has become socially fraught. “Gifted” reads as a statement of value, not variation. It has been used to justify educational tracking, exclusion, and superiority narratives. For those of us who live the reality, it rarely feels like a gift. It feels like too much: Too intense. Too porous. Too in our heads. Too lonely.

It often shows up not as recognition, but as erasure. A mismatch between self and environment. A mis-fit.

What Language Does to Identity

Words don’t just describe reality; they shape it. Labels create stories, and those stories become frames we internalize. When a child is labeled gifted while their experience includes overwhelm, dissociation, existential dread, or sensory dysregulation, they begin to assume the problem is them. Not the word. Not the frame. Not the system.

Many of the gifted individuals I’ve worked with, children and adults, struggled to find themselves in the narratives handed to them. They were told they were lucky, but they felt cursed. They were told they were smart, but they felt split. They were told they had potential, but no one knew what to do with their pain.

Misnaming doesn’t just confuse. It wounds.

What Do I Mean by “Galvanic"?

The word galvanic originates from 18th-century studies in bioelectricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that frog legs twitched when touched by metal, revealing that living tissue could conduct electricity. Since then, galvanic has come to mean anything activated by electric charge, startling, intense, reactive, and so alive.

I use it here to describe a particular neurotype: one that is developmentally charged. The galvanic individual is not gifted in the traditional sense of neat test scores or accelerated success. They are wired for activation, transformation, and volatility. Their system takes in more, feels more, reacts more, and especially when supported, integrates more.

To be galvanic is to be fundamentally shaped by responsiveness. By charge. By the inability to stay inert in the face of meaning. Whether that meaning comes through relationships, ideas, injustice, wonder, pain, or beauty, it enters the system like current.

And the system responds.

Hyperneuroplasticity and the Galvanic Mind

A defining trait of galvanic neurotypes is identified as hyperneuroplasticity (Oldman, 2025), the brain’s heightened ability to change, rewire, and reshape itself in response to experience. While all human brains are neuroplastic to some degree, galvanic minds exhibit a kind of intensified neuroplasticity. New ideas don’t just stick, they transform. New insights don’t just inform, they restructure. This is neurobiologically so. 

This kind of brain is rarely still, tending to remain in motion, integrating, adapting, pattern-finding, and meaning-making. That can be a source of incredible insight and creativity. It can also be destabilizing. Hyperneuroplasticity means the self is never final. It is continually revised by interpretation, sometimes faster than the world can keep up with.

Galvanic individuals may appear precocious, driven, or visionary. They may also be fragmented, burned out, and overstimulated. Their skip-thinking and insights may outpace their ability to integrate. Their emotional range may exceed their emotional regulation. They may even be dismissed or disbelieved due to the Cassandra effect, where accurate perceptions or warnings are not recognized or validated by others. They may be indicted as engaging in apophenia, magical thinking, or woo-woo interpretations of the world, rather than recognized as having access to great depth, symbolic insight, and layered understanding. The same wiring that gives rise to beauty also generates crisis. And it is from this tension, the friction between profound insight and persistent misinterpretation, that we begin to see how galvanic wiring impacts not only identity, but also direction. What appears scattered may actually be strategic. What seems uncontained may in fact be synthesizing. This brings us to a crucial aspect of the Galvanic profile: multipotentiality.

Multipotentiality and the Myth of Focus

Another hallmark of the galvanic profile is multipotentiality, or the ability (and compulsion) to develop skill, insight, or synthesis across many domains. Galvanic individuals often resist linearity. They don’t follow one path; rather, they seek to forge several. Or they may switch paths entirely when new meaning emerges.

This frustrates institutions. Schools and employers want specialists. Systems want predictability. But galvanic minds may also be systems thinkers. They often thrive in liminality, intersections, and synthesis. Their “lack of focus” is often mistaken for laziness, immaturity, or inability, when it is actually expansive orientation.

Galvanic individuals may also experience episodes of hyperfocus and monotropic processing where intense, sometimes all-consuming attention is focused to one domain or pattern, followed by shifts into divergent thinking that weaves connections across seemingly unrelated fields. What appears chaotic may in fact be deeply integrative.

Multipotentiality is not a lack of discipline. It is a different ecology of growth.

The Developmental Cost of Being Galvanic

There is a cost to this kind of wiring, though, even if it seems beneficial. Galvanic individuals often live with emotional hypersensitivity, sensory processing challenges, moral intensity, existential overwhelm, and a deep sense of alienation. They may be identified as disordered, having mere fragments of their experience highlighted without addressing systems-level differences.

And burnout is common. So is masking. So is early success followed by collapse. So is the haunting feeling of being too much and never enough, all at once. The effort to regulate an internal landscape that is always in process, always absorbing, interpreting, and responding, can create chronic fatigue that is existential as much as it is emotional or cognitive. The demand to flatten their experiences to meet neurotypical norms is often what fractures them most. Their nervous systems were not built for uniformity.

Many galvanic individuals spend decades wondering what’s wrong with them, when in truth, they are running high-voltage systems in a low-voltage world. Recognizing this is not about excuse-making or self-congratulation. It is about dignity. And it is from that place of grounded recognition that we must begin to build models of understanding that can hold the complexity they carry.

A Frame, Not a Category

And to be clear, galvanic (like giftedness) is not a diagnosis. It’s not even intended to be a new form of labeling. It is offered as a framework and way of describing a nervous system pattern and developmental style. It doesn’t dictate what a person is; it describes how their system tends to move: responsively, reactively, generatively, and at times, in ways that can be destabilizing or dysregulating if not understood in context or supported with attuned care. The volatility is not pathology. It may, however, be expression without containment.

This frame can be used to understand giftedness differently, not as a mark of success or superiority, but as a mode of being. One that includes brilliance, yes, and also fragmentation. One that includes vision and also pain. One that requires support, translation, and care. And one that, when named clearly, may help those living it feel a little less alone in the electric tension of their own becoming.

Naming and Reclaiming Without Exalting

I do not use the word galvanic to elevate anyone. If anything, I use it to name the costs, the cracks, the voltages that run beneath the surface of so many lives. I use it to make visible what often goes unseen: the inner activation that can’t be turned off, the pulsing interiority that is easily misread as instability, precocity, or eccentricity.

To be galvanic is not to be better. It is to be wired in a way that is exquisitely sensitive to meaning and often punished for it. It is to be a living conduit for complexity, to interpret and respond to layers of reality others may never notice, and to feel the weight of that awareness without a clear place to put it. Galvanic individuals may need scaffolding to stay intact. And this support is not sought because one is weak, but because the current running through them may be too strong to hold without care, attunement, accommodation, and space to ground and integrate.

To name the galvanic profile is to resist oversimplification. It is to acknowledge that giftedness has never been about talent alone. It is about intensity, sensitivity, and the cost of consciousness. Naming it may not make it easier. It may make it visible, though, and that visibility is a kind of compassion.

We need language that allows us to speak the unpolished truth. For those who live in the burn of complexity, whose systems are always sparking, who learn and unlearn at a speed that costs them grounding, gifted is no longer a good enough word. It’s too clean. Too proud. Too simple.

Galvanic is messy. Reactive. Alive. It holds contradiction. It makes room for all of it.

Not everyone will resonate with this frame. That’s fine. It’s not meant to replace anything right now. It’s meant to make space for a new conversation. For those who feel themselves charging and discharging in response to life. For those who live in a kind of voltage. For those who were never just gifted, but galvanic.