Michael Piechowski noted that Dąbrowski used the term psychic overexcitability to "underline the enhancement and intensification of mental activity much beyond the ordinary".
It manifests as an increased appreciation of aesthetic pleasure such as music, language, and art, and delight from tastes, smells, textures, sounds, and sights.
Intellectual: OE manifests itself as an extreme desire to seek understanding and truth, to gain knowledge, and to analyse and categorise information.
Often children high in Imaginational OE do not differentiate between truth and fiction, or are absorbed in their own private world with imaginary companions and dramatizations.
[5] A small amount of definitive research has led to the belief that intensity, sensitivity and overexcitability are primary characteristics of the highly gifted.
[8] While this theory has been commonly accepted, alternate research disputes the concept of overexcitabilities and suggests that the five-factor model of personality, specifically openness to experience, better explains these heightened behaviors.