High Cognitive Minds

If most of the world’s population was color-blind, a color-blind expert on art would be entirely possible. This expert could talk sensibly about the history or art, about various artists and their styles, and even about the elements that go into a work of art. He could discuss balance, line, contrast, and innumerable other details that make up a painting. What he wouldn’t be able to discuss, except in a very limited way, is color. Indeed, if a uniquely-sighted artist created a painting out of small dots of color, the expert wouldn’t even be able to identify the objects in the painting. He would condemn the canvas as a chaotic mass of meaningless dots, and most of the world’s art admirers would agree with him. In such a world, the artist who developed pointillism would have been laughed out of the art world and promptly forgotten.

Protection of professional reputation and career, along with biases in education and training are two significant reasons for the continued lack of information about intellectual traits. But they may not even be the most important reasons. The most important is never, as far as I’m aware, discussed publicly. We could call it the color-blind expert syndrome, and  I’ve found it everywhere in the literature.

Ellen Winner has written about gifted children and about art and by all professional measures, qualifies as an expert in those areas. Yet these quotes from her book, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, strongly call into question any experiential understanding. Of one gifted child, she said “... he described pictures that he discerned in the grain of wood, and angels and harps in the shapes of clouds — further examples of a need to create visual stimulation for himself.” And of another: “...I would say that underlying all his behavior was a desire to make his environment stimulating. This explains his persistent questions, his creation of math problems, his scientific theorizing, and his omnivorous reading.”

I think anyone who has seen images in clouds or in wood grain would say that they see the images because they’re there. There are several issues here. First, the biology underlying the human ability and tendency to identify images from minimal clues.  Apparently Winner is unfamiliar with this well-established area of research. Second, the professional bias which leads Winner to find psychological motivations behind every action, and third the need to explain in one’s own terms what one can’t experience. Throughout the literature, a good deal of gifted mental functioning is habitually explained away as the outcomes of psychological factors such as family disfunction, stress, need for control, or, as in this case, the need to create stimulation for oneself. Biology never comes into the picture.

There’s a large element of cognitive dissonance here. Unless we’re looking at such extreme specialization that the author is completely unaware of other areas of research. It isn’t a secret that early theories of a continuity of mental functioning have fallen by the wayside. Lewis Terman’s belief that everybody used the same mental attributes meant that those of subnormal intelligence thought in the same ways as the brilliant. The only difference was that they had less to work with. But it’s widely accepted now that some people think in ways that are drastically different from the norm. So how does Winner (and she’s not alone in this) manage to insist that intellectual traits are merely motives?  

We do have to come back to reputation and career, but we can also add personal discomfort with whatever one doesn’t understand. What you haven’t experienced yourself, you have to explain in terms that you’re familiar with. Cognitive dissonance, the conflict of incompatible ideas, is dealt with either by ignoring it completely, or by explaining it away. So, it’s easy to regard a child’s scientific theorizing as an attempt to create mental stimulation for himself. This is one more way in which an essentially alien consciousness is pushed into the background, to become the invisible presence that I talked about in an earlier post.

Psychologists ask why they’ve been unable to come up with a theory of the developmental process that leads from gifted childhood to creative adult. They seem to be unaware that they have effectively shut off that possibility themselves. By ascribing extraordinary mental traits to adults, but explaining them away in children, they create gaping holes in the developmental path and leave themselves unable to say anything except “In the last analysis...creative giftedness is a mystery, just as life itself."