About the site...
Dozens, and maybe hundreds of books have been written about giftedness; hundreds, and maybe thousands of articles have been written about giftedness. Two of the books and a handful or two of articles are about adults. Giftedness is for school children. It’s a term that came out of educational psychology and has no relevance outside that field and the classroom.
When was the last time that you gave someone an answer to a problem or a question and they exclaimed “Oh, you must be gifted?” Nobody cares if you were labeled gifted as a school child. Your employer is no more interested in your IQ than in where you went to elementary school. So why do adults wonder and even worry about whether they are still gifted? If they were really ever gifted? IQ is the basis for schoolroom giftedness, but IQ is a measure of intelligence, the capacity for learning and comprehension. It cannot be and has never been a measure of achievement, either in school or in adult life.
The purpose of the Gifted Mind blog, since its beginning, has been to leave the concept of giftedness behind, as far as that’s possible; to move people’s thinking out of the schoolroom, out of the narrow framework of statistics and theories. IQ is the beginning of our understanding of intelligence, not the final word. The term "high cognitive" is a gesture in that direction. Because it's descriptive, it's more meaningful than "gifted," and can apply to children and adults without the need for endless numbers of adjectives. And it can be neatly reduced to "highcog." I'm a highcog. How about you?
Intelligence has many components, and the ways in which it can be used are probably infinite. But you can’t make full use of what you don’t understand. High Cognitive Minds continues the blog and expands on it. It’s intended both for those just learning about their intelligence, and those who are looking for in-depth knowledge that will allow them to make sense of their lives and perhaps even change them. Intellectual giftedness can be understood only from the inside. That’s what this site offers.
About the author...
She has always been a misfit. As a child, she looked around at the strange creatures who were supposed to be her peers, and withdrew in confusion. As she became older, she looked around at the adults who ruled her life, and unconsciously developed the habit of passive resistance to arbitrary and illogical rules and demands. In her forties, she discovered a book for gifted teens and it changed her life. She began to understand just why she was a misfit. She also began to realize that the experts don’t really know very much about minds that work differently, despite all their research and theorizing. Understanding her own mind and the minds of others like herself became an obsession.
The internet allowed her to meet people with similar minds and who were also looking for answers. It allowed her, for the first time, to compare the ideas of the “experts with what highly gifted people had to say. She was able to test her insights against the reality of others’ experience, confirming that, for the most part, the experts have nothing much of value to offer adults.
But that was true only of the experts who limited their inquiries to school children. Growing bored and frustrated with the repetitive and unhelpful nature of the literature of giftedness, she turned to exploring intelligence and creativity. Bingo! These writers had nothing to say about kiddies sitting at their school desks. But they had a lot to say about the creative process and creative adults. Many of them also take biology into account. Fancy that! Now the author reads the literature of giftedness just for laughs. (A few very wonderful writers excepted.)
She starts too many blogs and abandons them, always looking for sources of inspiration that can't be outgrown. She currently writes at A Spectrum of Minds, a brand-new blog which explores various ways of looking at mind and intelligence, particularly those which are out of fashion, ignored, or too strange to take seriously.