High Cognitive Minds

Every once in a while something that I understand and take for granted shines out in a new light and I’m overwhelmed with how completely alien it is to other people. The difference is between knowing it with my intellect and feeling the emotional impact of it. Linda Silverman’s visual-spatial/auditory-sequential theory has been rolling around in my mind for several years. It’s a contribution that I’ve always acknowledged as important even while its inadequacy plagued me. For a long time I thought that it was just a matter of a weakness in how she defined the two modes of learning and thinking. I eventually realized the problem was far greater, but I still didn’t see the implications.

In her book, Upside-Down Brilliance: the Visual-Spatial Learner, she says “Some of my highly gifted, complex friends find this dichotomy too simplistic. Maybe it is. I certainly don’t mean to imply that people are completely one or the other.” I’ve probably read that a dozen times, and never really grasped it. Because there are people who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum that she assumes is an adequate way of looking at the variations.

The problem lies partly in her conception of visual-spatial as some kind of 3-D pictorial processing, an idea which she, a non-visualizer, accepted at face value from someone involved in the arts. Maybe it was her acceptance of this idea that allowed her to forget a statement she made years earlier: “Interviews with adults suggest the existence of other constellations of spatial abilities less related to the visual domain...” That possibility wasn’t within the range of her interests and research, so it wasn’t pursued.

But those “other constellations” are part of what I’ve come to think of as contextual processing. It’s the central characteristic of a subset of the gifted that I’ve named high cognitives. When writers make the distinction between the academically gifted and the intellectually gifted, It is this group they’re referring to as intellectually gifted. But the distinction isn’t made very often, and once made, there’s no attempt to pursue it. Why is this so? 

People who are not visually oriented still have a frame of reference in which they can understand it intellectually because they can see what is being referred to. People who have trouble with auditory processing of information have a frame of reference because they can hear. But there is apparently no frame of reference when it comes to understanding contextual processing. There are many statements in the literature of giftedness and creativity about cognitive leaps, and understanding that seems to come out of nowhere. And the conclusion is always that it’s a mystery.
 
Why are intellectual giftedness and contextual processing important? Because they hold the potential for creativity. Ellen Winner rightly distinguishes between gifted children who become experts in adulthood, and those who become creators. It is, in fact the difference between the academically gifted and the intellectually gifted. But these are still merely categories. There are many reasons why creativity remains such a mystery despite decades of research and theorizing, but the one that stands out in my mind as overriding all others in importance is the simple fact that very few people possess the cognitive traits which can lead to creativity. High cognitives are a kind of alien consciousness, incorporating known types of processing into more primary and dominant modes for which other people have no reference. They are invisible presences, sensed but not really seen, a category without content.