High Cognitive Minds

In Guiding the Gifted Child, the chapter on motivation includes a discussion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory has been thoroughly dissected and criticized over the years, and is still influential, despite its shortcomings. Human needs, for those not familiar with Maslow, develop in the following sequence: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, need for self-esteem and love, and finally, the need for mental understanding and self-actualization. Maslow’s theory was that lower needs must be met before the person can move on to fulfill the higher ones, and the authors of Guiding the Gifted Child concur.

The authors suggest that failure in some of the earlier needs may be at the root of underachievement in gifted students. Of course, the fulfillment of basic needs is vitally important. Lives can be stunted and twisted by their lack, and this is just as true for even the most highly gifted. And there's no doubt at all that confidence in oneself, which we now prefer to call self-esteem, can make or break an individual's struggle for self-actualization.

But the assumption that the highest level, that of self-actualization, must always wait on the satisfaction of earlier needs may not always be correct. The possession of strong drives in the direction of a talent can make itself felt even in children who are very far from secure in the fulfillment of their basic needs. Such drives can express themselves even in the total absence of such fulfillment, and may even override normal movement toward satisfaction of basic needs. For these individuals, intellectual self-actualization is a basic need.

The literature on genius is full of examples of those whose need to satisfy their artistic or intellectual drives overcame physical and emotional poverty and the absence of nearly everything that would normally be considered primary. It seems very probable that at least some of the “tortured geniuses” we read about may be those who primary needs were never met.

But what are the chances that such a drive would be recognized in a child? After all, intellectual concerns are the domain of adults, not of children. Parents and teachers may recognize in a vague way that giftedness can create psychological needs very different from those of the average child. But they will frame those needs in terms of what they understand about average children. They are unlikely to have any concept of a mind biologically shaped for constant high-level activity, one that causes real mental suffering when it is confined to what is considered appropriate for a child of a particular age. As Stephanie Tolan says in Is it a Cheetah?, in which she uses the analogy of the cheetah to delineate the problems of highly gifted children, "This is an animal biologically designed to run."

"Instead of an internal developmental reality that affects every aspect of a child's life, "intellectual talent" is more and more perceived as synonymous with (and limited to) academic achievement." Advanced reading skills are generally seen as nothing more than an unusual, but not necessarily important, developmental pattern; the other children will catch up eventually, and the early reader’s uniqueness will disappear. An unusual propensity for asking questions and for persisting in them merely points to a student who is likely to do well academically.

To highlight the problem, consider a child who shows early artistic or musical skills. Those skills are usually seen as signs of a talent that can benefit from being supported and developed. A talent for math or science also has a chance for recognition and support. But an intellectual drive with no clear focus has no obvious outward signs. Intellectual skills take years to develop and school rarely provides support or any way for a student to demonstrate them, even in an immature form. Well into college, the student may not yet have produced work that could be considered an unmistakable indication of exceptional talent.

So, what we eventually have is an adult who may or may not have been identified as gifted; who has always had an unquenchable drive for knowledge and understanding, a drive which may have been so strong that it interfered with her willingness to conform to the school curriculum; who knows that she is capable of much more but has no idea what that might be; who feels the loss of something terribly important in herself. That she experienced the drive and felt this loss even in childhood is, according to Maslow's theory, impossible. And being impossible, no one will look for it or recognize it when it exists.

Guiding the Gifted Child, James T. Webb, Elizabeth Meckstroth, Stephanie S. Tolan