Living in High Definition

Reclaiming the language of intensity

I was on the Neurodiversity Podcast with Emily Kircher-Morris last year (Ep. 277: Why Do We Still Debate Overexcitabilities?), working to clear up persistent misconceptions about overexcitability (OE). The conversation addressed a common assumption: that OE is exclusive to the gifted, as though intensity comes with a cognitive threshold.

The historical record tells a completely different story.

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What Dąbrowski Actually Documented

In 1935, Kazimierz Dąbrowski published Nervousness in Children and Youth¹, a comprehensive textbook documenting his work with 250 children and adolescents who had a “normal mental level." These were young people whose nervous systems operated at higher intensities than their environments could accommodate. Giftedness was not his focus. He did note that talented individuals were overrepresented among these nervous children—but the sample was defined by nervous intensity, and the book's entire framework was organized around understanding that intensity, across the full range of mental ability.

Reading through Dąbrowski's detailed observational accounts—translated into English through painstaking work by Michael M. Piechowski—the patterns are unmistakable. His descriptions of psychomotor overexcitability map directly onto what we now call ADHD:

“When preparing a lesson, for example, of a native language, an individual with the above type of attention will start writing an essay that will interrupt in the middle, then start preparing literature, to review it briefly or partially, he finally takes to another task. In other cases, some individuals interrupt their work every 10-15 minutes to take a few steps around the room, or to deal with something else, even give in to the free current of involuntary associations.”

He also documented a pattern familiar to anyone whose child has been told they’re “inconsistent” or “not trying hard enough”:

“In many children and adolescents, I observed a great ability to focus attention in solitude, at home in their room, but great difficulty to focus it in the presence of other people.”

His accounts of sensual overexcitability, social difficulties, and rigid thinking patterns align with autistic presentations. His documentation of emotional intensity, anxiety, and rejection sensitivity describes experiences common across neurodivergent populations.

Dąbrowski observed these traits across his entire sample of children who simply experienced the world more intensely. He was documenting what we would now recognize as widespread human neurodivergence, before we had that language.

The Educational Reality Check

Dąbrowski’s observations about traditional schooling failures read like today’s special education battles:

“A math problem requires focusing attention for a minimum of time without being distracted; in nervous children it is most often difficult due to the strong mental fatigability and the tendency to yielding to the flow of involuntary associations.”

He found that 165 of his 250 subjects had literary abilities—and in the older classes, philosophical ones—with a strong preference for the humanities over mathematics and sciences. These children struggled in traditional educational settings, not due to deficits but because of mismatches between their neurological needs and environmental demands.

The Misdiagnosis Problem

Much of today’s confusion stems from Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults by the late James Webb and colleagues. While groundbreaking for its time, it drew a problematic line: if you’re gifted, you’re being misdiagnosed. If you have overexcitabilities, that’s not ADHD or autism—that’s giftedness.

This framework has aged poorly. It’s deeply out of step with what we know about neurodivergence, yet it’s still treated as gospel in many gifted education circles. We end up telling kids and adults—who may well be autistic, ADHD, PDA, or otherwise neurodivergent—that their neurotype is simply giftedness.

I can't tell you how many times I’ve personally been told by people in this field, “It’s your giftedness that matters,” while dismissing my history of mental illness and neurodivergence. The field has created a hierarchy where giftedness is treated as the explanation that overrides everything else. When giftedness is used to explain away other neurotypes, people lose access to accurate identification and appropriate support.

Dąbrowski's original work supports a far more nuanced view. He observed intensities across populations and understood them as developmental material—the raw substance of growth—rather than markers of intellectual superiority. His approach honored the full complexity of a person's experience rather than collapsing it into a single lens.

The Asynchrony Problem

This same narrowing shaped how we define giftedness itself.

Dąbrowski observed asynchronous development as a common human pattern—an uneven rhythm of maturation that shaped moral and emotional growth across many temperaments. When the Columbus Group recast it in 1991 as the defining feature of giftedness, the pattern shifted from a developmental descriptor to an identity marker. Heightened intensity became proof of giftedness rather than evidence of the diverse ways human nervous systems develop.

Contemporary neurodiversity research restores Dąbrowski’s original inclusivity. As Katy Higgins Lee noted in Positive Disintegration Episode 30, the uneven growth and sensitivity we call asynchrony appear across gifted, autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent populations alike. What differs is how society interprets the pattern—celebrated in one context, pathologized in another.

Recent empirical work confirms this reframing. A comprehensive meta-analysis published in Gifted Child Quarterly examined 20 studies on the relationship between overexcitabilities and giftedness (Olszewski-Kubilius et al., 2025). The findings challenge decades of assumptions: when researchers used rigorous, independent measures of cognitive ability to identify giftedness, the relationship with overexcitability disappeared. Emotional OE—the dimension most emphasized in practitioner literature—showed virtually no connection to giftedness at all.

The apparent relationships only emerged in studies where students were identified as “gifted” through program participation—exactly the conditions where OE characteristics had already been embedded in referral materials and identification checklists. This creates a circular system: OE is used to identify gifted students, those students are studied and found to have OE, and the conclusion drawn is that OE identifies giftedness. The authors conclude this sample bias has been artificially inflating apparent connections for decades.

This broader understanding expands access to frameworks that help anyone experiencing uneven development understand themselves. Dąbrowski’s original observations support this inclusive approach, documenting these patterns across diverse populations of young people whose primary commonality was living with intensity.

What I've Learned

Working across these domains, I can no longer count the number of friends, family, colleagues, podcast guests, and listeners who experience intense sensitivities, emotional flooding, motor restlessness, rich inner fantasy lives, and hyper-responsiveness to their environments.

They include highly gifted people, autistic people, people who are multi-exceptional, and people who are undiagnosed but deeply self-aware.

What they share is the intensity and complexity Dąbrowski described—and the transformative potential his theory points toward. My systematic analysis of Dąbrowski’s earliest work confirms he described what we now recognize as autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergence within his frameworks of nervousness and overexcitability decades before these neurotypes had names.

Restoration, Then

This work is about restoration: reconnecting overexcitability and asynchrony to Dąbrowski’s original, inclusive framework. These concepts describe developmental phenomena that gifted education adopted but did not originate. They belong to a broader understanding of human development. The preservation effort matters—the scholars who kept this theory alive when it might otherwise have disappeared did essential work. And the populations excluded from that effort deserve access to a framework that was always describing them, too.

Dąbrowski’s theory offers tools for making sense of intensity. It offers permission to experience disintegration without shame and a framework for becoming, regardless of where we start. Honoring his vision means recognizing intensity as universal human potential—developmental material available to everyone who lives in high definition.

It’s time for our definitions to catch up with what we know about human development—and what neurodivergent people have been telling us all along.

1. The Polish title was Nerwowość Dzieci i Młodzieży.