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Dedication + Note to Reader

This book is dedicated to every gifted outlier who ever thought they were too weird to be understood or to belong, yet kept on going anyway in devotion to contributing of their unique selves into the good of this world and beyond. Thank you.

Note to the Reader:

Everyone has gifts. I firmly believe and stand for a world in which each person is allowed to find and optimize their gifts.

Being born with a gifted brain, being this type of outlier that is less than 2% of the population, is not our gift. It is something else altogether.

It is more properly understood as the type of vehicle we have been given for journeying in the process of uncovering and using our unique gifts.

In many ways, it is like having a Maserati racing car instead of a Toyota.* It may be an incredibly high performance vehicle, but it also is known to be finicky and occasionally unreliable, requiring very specific kinds of maintenance to function well… or at all, unlike the Toyota, which can reliably go for hundreds of thousands of miles with only basic support. We can’t choose which vehicle we are born with, we can only choose what to do with it and how to care for it. With the right personal system, your Maserati brain can upgrade to a Ferrari, generally accepted as the dominant and most reliable of racing cars.i

We live in a time when, more than ever before in history, we need our most brilliant outliers to rise up, to fully self actualize into what they were born to become.

There is a unique and particular form of joy experienced by these outliers with a highly gifted brain.

It neither makes much sense to others nor is it available by any of society’s traditional pathways to joy.

We live in a time when joy itself is needed for the human species to continue, when only joy will propel us through this narrow passage we currently occupy.

We live in a time in which most of our brightest minds are removed of joy and therefore are creating from other sources than joy, resulting in contributions unable to properly enhance humanity’s positive trajectory.

Sustainable access to joy for those with highly gifted brains occurs through entirely different means and pathways than it does for others.

It is also as much an outlier of experience for the gifted as the gifted themselves are for the overall population.

Will we spiral into a dystopic transhumanist technofeudalism created by a handful of outliers with no access to their unique joy?

Or will we restore ourselves of joy and create the new society for all in correct alignment with Earth?

Fundamentals of the Highly Gifted Brain decodes the gifted outlier and provides understanding of the pathways for expanding their joy... so that the gifted can actualize their soul purpose and contribute meaningfully to the new trajectory for humans on Earth.

This is why I continue to create materials and provide mentoring to other outlier humans. It is core to why I was born.

These materials have been entirely human created by me and only me. No AI was used.

With INFINITE Love,

Melanie

*i I am no expert on cars. I use these car brand names purely for illustrative purpose based on my rudimentary understanding of most people’s perceptions of car brands. They are not intended to be any sort of praise, endorsement, or criticisms of these or any other brands. Insert your own brand names for ‘high performing but finicky’ and ‘reliable but only basic performance,’ as you see fit.

1: Introduction to the Highly Gifted Brain

There are various ways to define giftedness. Every human has gifts and it is vital that we uncover and live these gifts.

For our purposes, I am speaking of the specific brain type with which a small subset of the population is born. This outlier brain places you in the top 2% of intellectual and creative potential. It cannot be learned or taught. It is a birth characteristic, like green eyes which, incidentally, are also seen in only about two percent of the population.

Like extraordinary athletic or musical ability, neurological giftedness cannot be taught, but it can be nurtured or suppressed.

Consider Simone Biles. The incredible potential with which she was born was not something that society would have supported her to properly potentiate had she been forced to stay on traditional school and career pathways. Only very specific training, coaching, and devotion on her part allowed her to transmute this intrinsic gift into becoming the most decorated gymnast in history.

Similarly, our gifted brains have not been supported by typical parenting and societal structures, even for those of us fortunate enough to have accessed highly elite academic settings. These are unfortunately not places that understand the entirety of how we function and flourish.

This outlier brain type is not a skill that can be learned, but we can learn to become skillful in living with it.

There is a wondrous and rare form of joy available to the outlier gifted brain.

YOU ARE DESIGNED FOR THE NEW, but you must learn how to effectively corral the torrent of ideas and energy running through you or it is wasted, which radically degrades morale.

You must connect all of the dots within you at last to reveal your true unique purpose and function of your special brain.

Our journey herein is to decode and uncover what that means and the pathways to get there.

Life design for us has to be approached differently than for most people. It’s easy to spend years, decades - indeed, even one’s whole life - working hard to apply the common wisdom and research about effective life design for satisfaction, productivity, happiness, relationship richness, even health, and yet never fully achieve these goals.

We often hear things to the effect of “why can’t you just be happy with what you have? You have so much. Why do you always want or need more?”

It’s not that you’re (necessarily) greedy for more. Your efforts have likely been intense at times, you’ve probably had more success than others - by society’s yardsticks anyway - yet you probably still feel unfulfilled and sensing a potential you have not yet actualized. You may have even gone so far as to generate burnout in that process, a common issue for us.

Your efforts have simply been directionally inaccurate, carrying you on the wrong trajectory. You’ve felt that wrongness and suffered for it in the scramble to keep going, to get to the destination you feel in your heart, pulsing like the beacon of the North Star in the night sky.

With your gifted brain being less than 2% of the population, it’s as if everyone else is watercolor painting on some variant of white or light paper and you are working with black paper. The methods for watercolor painting on black paper will be vastly different and largely inexplicable to others, while the methods for typical watercolor painting on light paper are readily available for all to find and incorporate.

I didn’t have any teaching or tools to get here during my own life, outside of a couple of specific momentary mentors who had a huge impact but didn’t provide me the pathway instructions, just got me past certain hurdles.

This is one reason why I have dedicated much of my time and creational effort in recent years to sharing the pathway that I researched and developed throughout my life and studies on the outlier brain type we have. I was also raised by a neurosurgeon who loved what he did and spoke animatedly about it at the dinner table. The brain has been at the center of my awareness since I had human awareness.

There is a particular form of joy available to the person with a highly gifted brain IF THEY FIGURE OUT HOW TO HARNESS IT.

This is what I teach in these materials and through private and small group gatherings.

I’ve given tens of thousands of hours of private sessions to other outliers like us and countless more in small groups.

My professional career, before I started my own solo business in mid 2017, spanned decades dedicated to real world applications of neuroscience, psychology, business, and other key research areas with a focus on improving human experience and quality of life. I worked across several sectors. I got an MBA. I managed 8 figure funds. I know virtually all of the research, have even worked intimately with researchers in these fields and others, and I can tell you that as interesting as it is and as useful to most as it is, much of it simply isn’t useful for us and some of it is directly harmful.

Now, you may be wondering if you belong here, if you fit into the category of giftedness to which I’m teaching. So, I’ll share a few examples and descriptions.

I’m not much interested in things like IQ tests, these have been demonstrated to carry bias and can also miss the outliers of creative potential, but it is one metric and one that is well known. This is where that 2% figure comes from; the bell curve of distribution as displayed below:

Most systems that address giftedness, such as schools (in the US at least), will define it as the top 2%. The education field has done some wonderful work on research and academic environments for gifted children. Having raised a gifted daughter in the 99.7% category who is now in her mid 20s, I know this system intimately. It gets some things right but misses the mark entirely on emotional and social supports unless one is lucky enough to have a particularly talented teacher in the mix.

We must look beyond IQ as a comprehensive metric of the outlier gifted brain.

Here are some behavioral and experiential commonalities of those born with highly gifted brains which you may recognize:

We are incredibly driven but only motivated by inner factors versus what others say should drive us.

Life orients around our insatiable interest in pattern recognition, evidenced by phases, often overlapping, of compulsive learning and mastery cycles. I call this the 'ALL THE THINGS' phenomenon.

Our dreams are dramatically crazier and outlandish. We have been told since we were little, "That's not possible," but we don't care what others think, so we then defy expectations time and time again.

We require the experience of forward movement and momentum at a far greater pace and regularity than other people. Very great white shark vibes: forward movement is how we breathe.

We are often highly sensitive to perceptions of fairness, justice, “rules,” while equally dismissive of rules that appear to be illogical or irrelevant. This is especially noticeable in childhood before it has been socialized out of us. It never goes away though, it is merely stuffed down, usually creating puzzlement and even resentment as experiences and observations of perceived unfairness pile up over time.

Our drive for meaning and purpose is everything.

What we crave most deeply is to fully experience clarity about our own true potential in this life and then witness ourselves contributing that potential to the whole, to the world.

The human brain generally is built for pattern recognition and the harnessing of patterns into action. This superpower has previously propelled the evolution of the species.

The gifted human brain runs pattern recognition on steroids.

In fact, as a highly gifted brain human, to be in the experience of rapid pattern recognition and constant massive data input is required for simple baseline enjoyment.

By data, I mean all forms of input, via the 5 senses and beyond, not a simplified computational or merely intellectual sense of the word.

At times, this becomes our kryptonite, when we get lost for too long in the data input and learning phase and don’t take the time to develop and use the process that suits our unique inner design to organize our pattern recognition and translate it into something that can be shared or channeled into tangible creations of our work or play.

The correct coalescing of data is what we require as a foundational basis of positive experience.

What defines correct is unique to each of us and also to the context of the data in question.

But in every circumstance, the coalescing sensation has to be in the right harmony of tightness and looseness as well as the right rates of inflow, synthesis, and outflow.

Too loose, and what wants to be internally synthesized diffuses out and is lost before distillation is complete.

Too tight and it compresses us painfully and also cannot be properly synthesized for transmission outward.

Earlier, I mentioned that one of my reasons for developing this body of work was so that other gifted brain people would have an easier time navigating their unique paths. Another key reason is about where humanity currently sits: in a time of deep turmoil and radical abrupt changes coming fast and furious.

A through line in all of my adult life has been my steadfast inquiry into the nature of the individual, the “ME,” and the workings of community, the “WE,” and seeking to generate the correct ratio of them to each other at both the individual level and the societal level. So that we may finally build a lasting society that functions well for all its members.

Human society is largely shaped by those with a highly gifted brain. This may be hard for some to swallow but it’s true.

For good or bad, key individuals leverage their gifted brain to not just get ahead of the curve but to actually create and shape the curve itself.

A few examples I personally find interesting:

🌟 J.R.R. Tolkien brought magic and multi-species collaboration into homes and hearts across the planet with The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings…

🤍 🕊️ Martin Luther King, Jr dreamt Agape Love and the Beloved Community into our modern vernacular, creating a powerful touch point for social justice and cultural change…

🚗 Henry Ford invented not just the early car but the assembly line production model…

🎶 Taylor Swift disrupted the music industry and, most recently, the movie theater business by showcasing how and why the artist must remain at the center of her art’s ownership and distribution…

💃🏻 Reese Witherspoon built a billion dollar film production company disrupting Hollywood norms by showcasing books and stories by and about women…

The question for you is what do you think of the current curve humanity is on?

More importantly, how do you feel about how YOU are currently contributing to it? Are you in satisfaction with your contribution of your unique and authentic potential?

If you have any interest in the trajectory of human society, as I do, then you’ll understand this fundamental motivation for my work in support of people with these special outlier brains. You are thinking more and more about legacy and how you are affecting society as a whole and its relationship with this marvelous planet Earth we call home.

CONTEMPLATION PROMPTS:

✧ In what ways has your sense of your brain or your mind made you feel different from others?

✧ We outliers often feel there is something wrong with us. We internally define our otherness as a problem. There are many mechanisms that drive this. What happens inside your body when you consider the idea that at least some of what may have made you feel as “other” actually derive from your brain type versus, say, your personality, behaviors, family of origin, or cultural stereotypes?

✧ Left to your own devices, in what ways would you want to create, share, invent, produce that would contribute positively to society or to the world as a whole?

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