High Cognitive Minds

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to the young winners of prestigious science competitions, take a look at this new series of articles from Scientific American. “Where Are They Now?” profiles winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. The first profile, of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, suggests that the series might offer some insights into the life paths of the gifted, at least those with a talent for science.

Chemistry wasn’t the first career choice for Hoffmann, who won his Westinghouse prize in 1955 for a study of cosmic ray particles. His parents wanted him to become a doctor. Inspiring college courses almost turned him into an art historian, but he had to compromise with his parents’ ambition for him. "I had enough courage to tell my parents I wasn't going to be a doctor, but not enough courage to tell them I wanted to go into the history of art. So I went to graduate school in chemistry," he says. "I fell into it, but I love it."

The profiles will be published on a weekly basis. I’ve set up an RSS feed on my reader so that I don’t misss  any.

The Watcher: Roald Hoffmann 

Or not so brief. I'm having a hard time thinking about giftedness issues lately -- just too many other things buzzing around in my head. But I will get back to the There to Here series.

In the meantime... I just dropped into the Davidson forum, as I do now and then and discovered that Linda Silverman's Upside Down Brilliance is now out of print, and people are jacking up the price outrageously. I bought a copy some time back, and now I'm thinking seriously about copying the material I'll need for references and then putting it up for sale on half.com.

Since I'm not teaching or raising kids, most of the book is really no use to me. I never pass up a chance to turn over an investment at a profit, but I hate gouging people. Any ideas about a fair price, keeping in mind that it's currently going for $60.00 and up?

Was there any time in my childhood or adolescence when someone could have pointed to a particular talent or strong interest and said “There it is, your life path?”  I suppose it could have happened, but whatever they thought they had discovered would have been wrong.

I was a typical early reader, indiscriminately devouring whatever reading matter came my way. And while it’s impossible to prove that any one book or subject was influential in a major way, there were patterns of interest that developed fairly early. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that those patterns eventually resolved themselves into an ever-narrowing set of interests which led me to where I am today. But it’s also easy to see that the final determination of what I would focus on was pure accident.

The error, for those who would like to be able to predict and guide the intellectually gifted thinker, is the belief that a strong focus in childhood is dependably indicative of a future career path. And the error is compounded by evaluating intellectual interests only in relation to their relevance to known career paths. My own winding path shows both the impossibility of prediction, and the difficulty of making a final choice from among many possibilities. Of course, we’re talking here about high cognitives with no apparent talents, but it also tends to be true even of wunderkind who show very strong preferences and talents for particular subjects.

Click to read more ...

I sometimes think about my life and my intellectual development in “what if” terms. What if my various cognitive traits, including the weaknesses and outright disabilities had been identified when I was still in school. How would my life have been different? Testing and diagnosis can be important, but they aren’t always an unadulterated good. I can think of some diagnoses that certainly would have helped, and others that probably would have my my life miserable. I can also think of some that never would have been identified, even today, some of which have been the most importance to my development.

A recent post on the Eide Neurolearning blog discusses the development of fluid reasoning in children, and the consequent capacity for analogical thinking. “In our clinic, we often see wide variations in the abilities of children to reason analogically. And as remarkable as it is to see a young child able to reason fluidly, it's equally surprising how this gift may be missed or under-appreciated by even the most well-meaning teacher and parent.” Because “Analogical reasoning is important for virtually all inventive or creative work.” the failure to identify this ability fairly early can have future consequences.

Click to read more ...

You can be on the right path all your life without knowing it until you arrive and recognize that it’s where you wanted to be. But I can’t recommend it as the best way to find your life’s work. There are too many side paths, all of them easy ways to get lost and never find your way back. Part of the process of recognition is looking back to see how it happened. That’s rarely an easy task because, while life is chronological, memory isn’t. And sometimes it’s only when you learn something about yourself in the present that you can look back to something in the past and understand its relevance.

I can look back now and recognize that I’ve been “doing” psychology my whole life. Many of my earliest memories are about being engaged (involuntarily) in activities that I didn’t understand, with strangers who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and who were enjoying it. Unlike them, I was confused, and even afraid, but tried to follow their lead and do what was apparently expected of me. These were my first reactions to school and to places that my mother apparently thought were the right thing for a child. Why did I understand so little of what was going on around me, and why did everyone else seem to be in the know?

Click to read more ...

There’s a short discussion in the forum’s Welcome to High Cognitive Minds thread that keeps tugging at me, and this post is partly a response. Mer said “There aren't a lot of personal stories that detail other people's experiences as intellectual outliers living outside of academia. Where are they?” One of the ways we learn about ourselves in by reading the experiences of others like us. And Mer’s right--there are darned few examples of highly gifted people writing about their own development. I can think of two reasons for that. The first is the one I mentioned in my reply to her--we tend to be private people. Given that introversion is more likely as IQ goes up, that makes sense. But the other reason may be more influential.

We’ve learned not to talk about our intelligence, our knowledge, our hopes and ambitions. We learned that lesson in a variety of ways--by being ignored, criticized, or made fun of. By being accused of snobbery, showing off, or of thinking that we know everything. For many of us, school taught us much more about the need to stay hidden than it did about developing our abilities or finding a path that we could devote ourselves to. If you’re accomplished and famous, it’s okay to write about your childhood, the books you loved to read, and the strange ideas that you had about how the world worked. If you’re not famous, your autobiography would get comments like “Why should we be interested in this nobody?” Or “A boring display of ego.” And then it would sink like a stone, going into the remainder bins, and then off to the shredder.

Click to read more ...

In his book, Intelligence: a New Look, Hans Eysenck makes a point that has been stated by others, in the ongoing discussion about whether genetics or environment is more influential in giftedness. “ Children, as they grow up, increasingly choose their environment; the choice itself is driven by genetic factors. And they interpret their environment in terms of their genetic contributions.” One example that he selected, from the many possible, was the life of the mathematician, Michael Faraday, who came from a poor family and had almost no schooling except for what he managed to scrabble for himself.

Similarly, Dean Keith Simonton, in The Origins of Genius: “if the parents had not provided opportunities in the home for the desired stimulation, the children would probably seek out stimulation elsewhere.”

“...a child with certain inborn talents may soon put pressure on the environment to make it conform more closely to feed those talents. To the outside observer it may appear as if the environment is influencing the child’s development, but instead it is the child’s genetic disposition that is influencing the home circumstances. The research literature on child prodigies is replete with examples of future geniuses who insist on pursuing specific enthusiasms even in the face of parental discouragement.” Simonton’s example was Pascal, another mathematician from an unpromising background.

 That is a quite different position from one that was fairly common about twenty years ago:  “...giftedness cannot be understood solely as a cognitive trait, but rather must be understood as a complex interaction between a peculiarly supportive environment that the individual helps create, but over which the individual has only limited power.” Frances D. Horowitz, The Gifted and Talented: developmental perspectives

I suspect that research done since then has encouraged many writers to modify their view, but it still has enough support to influence ambitious parents of gifted children. And it isn’t a simple matter of whether a supportive environment is or isn’t a necessity. There is, today, some question about how much influence a highly enriched intellectual environment actually has on future achievements. I don’t think there’s any argument that an enriched environment is a benefit, regardless of whether the child is gifted or average. The confusion about its value probably lies in what effects it's expected to have.

That’s a subject for another post.

Older posts for which commenting was closed have now been opened. If you've visited posts and were frustrated by not being able to comment, please give it another try. If you find one that I missed, leave me a note in the Guest Book, and I'll fix it.

“…the theory of critical differences, …a distinction which arises not because we are dealing with a new species of ability, but from the fact that when human capacities surpass certain levels of performance, the achievements to which they give rise may take on altered characteristics. ( David Wechsler, The Range of Human Capacities)

Jerome Kagan, David Henry Feldman, and John Gardner have all commented on the near-universal preference for viewing intelligence as part of a continuum. It’s much easier to believe that individuals merely have less or more of what everybody else has than to consider the possibility of “critical differences.”  The emphasis on IQ scores is a symptom of this desire for continuity, and is also a way to sweep other views under the rug.

Wechsler is partly correct and partly incorrect. It depends what capacities you’re looking at. A virtuoso pianist is using the same skills as a moderately talented amateur, but is so far superior that it amounts to a critical difference. This is just as true in many fields of endeavor. But when we turn to cognition, it may be more realistic to say that there is, indeed, a new species of ability.

Click to read more ...

Unless we want to believe in some type of mystical causation or in pure chance, our basic assumption in trying to understand exceptional intellectual capacity must be that all cognitive functions, including the rarest and the most exceptional, are biologically based. If there is a causal mechanism for precocity, for high-level intellectual functioning, and for creativity, it must be a facet, or a combination of facets, of the brain’s structure and operations.

The difficulty in talking about this is the lack of studies specifically intended to reveal the biological basis of giftedness and intellectual creativity. It’s made even more difficult by the lack of studies which might show common mental traits among the gifted and the creative. It’s a dangerous area even to think about because there are so many ways to go wrong. Theories, more or less plausible, are possible, but not proof.

In the literature, both high levels of giftedness and of creativity are more often associated with various types of psychopathology than with fundamental  brain mechanisms. Many lists of identifying characteristics mix cognitive and personality traits without attempting to distinguish between them. To confuse the issue even further, several streams of pop psychology lead people to believe that certain personal characteristics are either indicative of giftedness or are forms of giftedness in themselves. These include Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence, Gardner’s multiple intelligences, and Dabrowski’s oversensitivities as channeled by some giftedness advocates.

To put it plainly: giftedness is not a personality trait. Creativity is not a personality trait. Intellectual giftedness and creativity are collections of cognitive traits.  Both are accompanied by personality traits which may be a direct outcome of particular cognitive traits, and some of which are considered a possible prerequisite for the fulfillment of potential. The abilities which enable creativity in very different domains are all brain-based, some more visual or physical, but all depending, at least to some extent, on cognition.

It’s a subject that comes up over and over again. Should we tell Johnny that he’s gifted, and if so, when? Anyone who knows my opinion of giftedness as a concept won’t be surprised that my answer is “No, don’t tell Johnny he’s gifted—ever. If the term ever had any meaning, its death knell has been sounded by the increasingly shrill cries of the parents of the swarms of average kids: “Every child is gifted!” I’m sorry to drag brute reality into such a sensitive issue, but not every child is gifted, and we aren’t all geniuses from birth.

So, what should you tell Johnny, and when? That’s more easily answered if we make some important distinctions. Schools want children to learn facts, and it wants them to learn those facts as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The student who learns quickly and has a good memory has a distinct advantage, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a special gift. “Continuum” is a useful way of thinking about this. Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan has remarked on the preference of psychologists for “characteristics like intelligence that fall on a continuum...” Learning capacity, which is dependent on memory, and memory itself, can be measured on a continuum. So the only thing special about the average academically gifted child is that he has more of what everybody has.

Schools have difficulty with children who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum, whose abilities are what we could call “breakaway.” That could be anything from unique ways of incorporating knowledge to advanced talents that simply don’t fit into the curriculum, the scheduling, or the teacher’s experience and training. The time for discussion is when the child is starting to recognize those aspects of himself, and has suffered the first bumps and bruises of running headlong into expectations and rules that he is unwittingly violating. It’s time for the parents to put two and two together and help the child make sense of his experiences.

Click to read more ...

Mass education is designed for the average student.
Its goal is to provide students with the basic knowledge they need in order to function in the modern world. The most efficient way to do this is by standardizing curriculum and teaching methods. This is what teachers are trained to accomplish.

Differentiated curriculum is a political football
School financing is always subject to current economic conditions. Changing levels of funding means that special interest groups must fight for a portion of what is available. As a small and almost invisible minority which generally arouses animosity rather than sympathy, the gifted have an uphill fight. The mentally and physically handicapped are both visible and sympathy-evoking,  and are supported by a large and vocal block of special-needs advocates. When the needs of the underdogs are perceived to be in conflict with the needs of those who “have it all,” public sentiment will always favor the underdog, and politicians will take the path of least resistance.

No foundation exists for differentiated gifted programs
There is general agreement that programs for gifted students need to be highly differentiated to meet the wide range of intelligence and skills. The standard approach is broadly defined programs with vague goals. They are designed more for appearance and to deflect complaints and criticism than for actual results. A multitude of problems stands in the way of any real change. 1. A lack of trained teachers, and the costs of special training. 2. Lack of measures for evaluating students’ needs and abilities. 3. Scheduling and curriculum chaos that would ensue from individualizing education to the extent necessary. 3. Lack of real commitment to gifted education, and even disbelief in the concept of giftedness.

Click to read more ...