High Cognitive Minds

You can be on the right path all your life without knowing it until you arrive and recognize that it’s where you wanted to be. But I can’t recommend it as the best way to find your life’s work. There are too many side paths, all of them easy ways to get lost and never find your way back. Part of the process of recognition is looking back to see how it happened. That’s rarely an easy task because, while life is chronological, memory isn’t. And sometimes it’s only when you learn something about yourself in the present that you can look back to something in the past and understand its relevance.

I can look back now and recognize that I’ve been “doing” psychology my whole life. Many of my earliest memories are about being engaged (involuntarily) in activities that I didn’t understand, with strangers who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and who were actually enjoying it. Unlike them, I was confused, and even afraid, but tried to follow their lead and do what was apparently expected of me. These were my first reactions to school and to places that my mother apparently thought were the right thing for a child. Why did I understand so little of what was going on around me, and why did everyone else seem to be in the know?

The grand theme of my life became the study of human beings: why they think, believe, and act as they do. The first phase was probably completely unconscious, nothing more than a survival technique. What I couldn’t avoid I had to understand. I became a psychologist long before I had a word for it. The theme has two branches: the things I don’t understand (I’m defective), and the things they don’t understand (they’re defective). And those more or less resolved into the ideas that I don’t know how to be a normal human being, and they don’t know how to use their minds. Or... I’m socially defective and they’re intellectually defective.

The interesting question is why this difference became the core of my life. Outsiders aren’t that rare, and they choose a variety of vocations. You can factor in temperament, talents, and sheer chance, and never come up with a satisfactory answer. Why does any subject capture one person’s lifelong devotion and bore another person to tears? I can see now the effects of both temperament and talents, and I can also see that I might never have found my path except for chance. Chance and the happy accident are acknowledged in studies of creativity, but as far as I can recall, they have no place in the study of giftedness. And that’s too bad, because the greatest benefit of enrichment for gifted children may not be the head start, the boost up, the hoped-for increase in IQ, or future success, but the possibility of a happy accident.