High Cognitive Minds

Human pattern detection is tied to survival needs--recognition of foods, weather patterns, and various types of dangers. Our ability to recognize a known individual from some distance away may owe its existence to the need to identify possible enemies before they're close enough to be a danger. These are all concrete forms of pattern detection, tied to the five senses.

What is less common, and vitally important in an increasingly complex world, is the ability to detect more abstract patterns, those that shift and evolve, and which may be obscured by "noise" in the environment. They may seem obvious in hindsight, once someone points them out, but detecting them depends on the ability to discern subtle clues and to ignore distracting elements.

Pattern seeking is not necessarily a voluntary act. For many highly gifted, it is a natural part of how their minds work, and an essential part of their creativity. That's one reason why books purporting to teach creative thinking are little more than crutches, enabling the average person to do in limited ways and under limited circumstances, what creative people do as easily as breathing.

Here are a couple of fairly trivial examples from my own experience.
1. After a major snow storm in February, 2003, as more cars are dug out in an area with very limited parking, the number of available spaces decreases rather than increases. Since there is no median strip between the sidewalk and the street, the area available for shoveled snow is also limited. It's illegal to throw the snow into the street, so once a parking space is cleaned out and the car moved, car owners adjoining it will use that space to dump the snow from their own shoveling.

2. In the weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, American flags were at a premium. Cars displayed as many as two or three flags, and lawns were lined with them. A year later, hardly any flags were to be seen. After the re-entry destruction of the Columbia shuttle, there was a small increase in the number of flag-waving cars. As many commentators wrote, the emotional impact of the accident was far less than the media tried to make out, and the small increase in flag waving would seem to support that.

Either of these examples could serve as the basis of one or more studies: sociological study of people's behavioral responses to tragedy, statistical study of the loss of parking spaces, possibly leading to solutions....

Experience has taught me that most people could care less about such patterns. Pointing them out to friends and relatives, becomes, in the course of time, proof of nerdy weirdness. As I suspect is generally true of pattern-seekers, I've learned to keep my observations to myself. One consequence is that pattern-seeking, while acknowledged as important to certain types of creativity,  is a poorly understood aspect of cognition.  

How would awareness and a better understanding of this capability affect the lives of the intellectually gifted? How would it change their perception of themselves? How would it change their educational and career goals? And most important, how would it affect a world sorely in need of solutions to hopelessly complex problems?