Beyond intelligence: How Over-Efficient brains integrate the world
For a long time marginalized or dismissed as mere cliché, over-efficiency—whether manifesting as high intellectual potential (HIP) or very high intellectual potential (VHIP)—is now receiving renewed scientific attention. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience, neuro-psychoanalysis and clinical psychology converge to show that it is above all an exceptional brain architecture, rather than a pathological state or romantic ideal.
Studies by Jung and Haier have highlighted a strikingly integrated brain network among over-efficient individuals: increased connectivity between prefrontal and parietal regions correlates with greater energetic efficiency in the brain. In other words, thought moves faster—and more expansively—with a lower energy cost. This “economy of rapid insight” grants these minds a rare capability: converting complexity into clarity, intuition into concept.
Mental architectures of lucidity
From a psychodynamic perspective, contemporary psychoanalysis—particularly the neuro-psychoanalysis developed by Mark Solms—explores how highly integrated brains translate into unusually intense affective and cognitive experience. What Freud glimpsed as “the power of the representable” now finds neurobiological footing: hyper-connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala gives these individuals a finer perception of emotional nuance and symbolic depth.
Rather than “brains in overdrive,” over-efficient minds function like high-yield emotional-regulation systems, able to transform inner turbulence into controlled creativity. Neuro-psychoanalysis emphasizes that this configuration does not equate to instability: it reflects a capacity for fast affect-metabolizing—a process one might call accelerated elaboration.
🔗 Discover more: What science reveals about the hidden differences between gifted individuals and individuals with extremely high IQ
Over-Efficient minds in our communities
True HIP and VHIP represent a tiny percentage of the population—approximately around 2%, according to the latest estimates by the American Psychological Association. Contrary to common belief, most do not display “Dys-” disorders or associated pathologies. On the contrary, recent work (e.g., in Nature Human Behaviour, 2022) indicate better neural plasticity, greater emotional adaptability, and increased resilience to chronic stress—linked to finer cortisol regulation.
This distinction matters: over-efficiency is not a flaw to be fixed, but a potential to embrace. It doesn’t mean pathological hypersensitivity, but rather broad sensitivity, capable of embracing life’s complexity.
The role of neuro-psychoanalysis: a bridge between science and subjectivity
Neuro-psychoanalysis—occupying the interface of brain and unconscious—illuminates over-efficiency from a new angle: integration between logic and emotion, symbol and neurochemistry. Solms (2023) shows how consciousness emerges from the brain’s capacity to “put experience into narrative.” Highly efficient individuals, by virtue of denser structuring in the default-mode network, enjoy a narrative advantage: the ability to introduce meaning where others detect only background noise.
This alliance of introspection and cognition enables a form of embodied intelligence—one that does not separate thought from lived experience. It helps explain why many creators, scientists or philosophers with HIP/VHIP describe an organic relationship with knowledge: a mind that thinks and feels what it thinks.
The pitfalls of social discourse on over-efficiency
Public discourse around “high potential” has often been dulled by over-simplification and conflation. By confusing over-efficiency with distress, hypersensitivity with suffering, society tends to reduce a luminous singularity to an emotional diagnosis. Yet longitudinal studies (Lim et al., 2021) show that true over-efficient minds display high levels of life satisfaction, social success and emotional balance—provided their environment recognizes and stimulates their specificity.
Such recognition also requires humility on the part of “norm-thinking” majority. If most minds operate according to linear, predictable cognitive schemas, over-efficient minds inhabit a multidimensional space. They do not flee from the norm; they observe it from above—not out of arrogance—but out of a need for perspective.
🔗 Read also: Schizophrenia: Between silent suffering and the search for meaning
Neuroplasticity and expanded consciousness
The latest data in functional imaging (Haier, 2024) reveal that the neuroplasticity of over-efficient individuals is not confined to youth: their brain remains malleable longer, especially in frontal and temporal zones. This extended plasticity fosters innovation, curiosity and a rare capacity for redefining mental frameworks.
Psychically, this translates into an ability to integrate contradiction, tolerate uncertainty and generate meaning without collapse. This profile, according to psychoanalyst Véronique Donnadieu (2022), resembles “archipelago thinking”: multiple, fluid, in ongoing dialogue between reason and imagination.
In a world saturated with intellectual conformism, over-efficient minds remind us that free thought is a form of resistance. They embody what neuro-psychoanalysis anticipates: a consciousness capable of illuminating complexity without losing itself, of both feeling and understanding.
Faced with the norm-thinking majority—sometimes convinced that “the world can only exist at their speed”—we might ask, with scientific irony: is ordinary thought truly sufficient to follow the meanders of a mind built to connect the infinite to the tangible?
References
Vaivre-Douret, L. (2025). Identification du haut potentiel intellectuel, conduite à tenir. ScienceDirect.
Cuadrado, J. (2023). Haut potentiel intellectuel, enjeux d’un bilan psychologique. ScienceDirect.
Margerie, V. (2020). Le cerveau Haut Potentiel Intellectuel : une réalité neurophysiologique.
Association Française pour l’Enseignement des Hauts Potentiels (AFEHP). (n.d.). Le point de vue
scientifique sur le haut potentiel.
Association Française pour l’Information Scientifique (AFIS). (2023). Haut potentiel intellectuel : entre
mythes et réalités.
Flora Toumi
Psychoanalyst, Researcher at the Paris Brain Institute, and Doctor of Philosophy
Flora Toumi holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a neuropsychoanalyst and clinical sexologist specializing in resilience and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She works with both civilians and members of the French Special Forces and the Foreign Legion, using an integrative approach that combines Ericksonian hypnosis, EMDR, and psychoanalysis.
As a researcher at the Paris Brain Institute, she regularly collaborates with neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik on the processes of psychological reconstruction.
Flora Toumi has also developed an innovative method for PTSD prevention and founded the first national directory of psychoanalysts in France. Her work bridges science, humanity, and philosophy in a quest to unite body, soul, and mind.
