High Cognitive Minds

I sometimes think about my life and my intellectual development in “what if” terms. What if my various cognitive traits, including the weaknesses and outright disabilities had been identified when I was still in school. How would my life have been different? Testing and diagnosis can be important, but they aren’t always an unadulterated good. I can think of some diagnoses that certainly would have helped, and others that probably would have made my life miserable. I can also think of several that never would have been identified, even today, some of which have been the most importance to my development.

A recent post on the Eide Neurolearning blog discusses the development of fluid reasoning in children, and the consequent capacity for analogical thinking. “In our clinic, we often see wide variations in the abilities of children to reason analogically. And as remarkable as it is to see a young child able to reason fluidly, it's equally surprising how this gift may be missed or under-appreciated by even the most well-meaning teacher and parent.” Because “Analogical reasoning is important for virtually all inventive or creative work.” the failure to identify this ability fairly early can have future consequences.

Analogical reasoning is just one of several traits which I mentioned in an earlier post: Differences of Degree and Kind, traits that we might call “critical invisibles.”  They include the ability to grasp causal patterns, to identify relationships obscured by noise (the signal to noise problem), the ability to unite ideas from different fields of knowledge, and the ability not just to analogize but to move from one level of analogy to another. None of these are likely to be identified by testing when the educational focus is on talents that fit in the curriculum, and that point to specific college studies and careers. For many high cognitives, the invisible abilities may be the most important ones, but they are never identified in young children, and very rarely in older students.

Cognitive traits, along with specific weaknesses or disabilities, are just one set of important invisibles. The other set is the influences on those traits, the whole spectrum of life, and what we learn from it, a good deal of it on an unconscious level. Most of our learning doesn’t take place in school, and may not even be recognized as learning. Chance encounters can change our opinions and beliefs, our interests, and the whole direction of our lives. A perfect example is in the book, Without Conscience: the disturbing world of the psychopaths among us. Robert D. Hare has devoted his professional life to an understanding of psychopaths, becoming an acknowledged expert in a discipline that barely existed when he took his first post-graduate job as a prison psychologist. A different job might have taken him in an entirely different direction. As Robert Root-Bernstein says in Sparks of Genius: “Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients.”

We can look back over our lives and see some of the influences, some of the moments that determined our future direction, some of the mistakes or the could-have-beens. By the time we take that retrospective look it’s usually too late to change anything. But maybe we can find ways to build in stops along the way for introspection and evaluation, methods for looking at interests, abilities, and decisions before they’ve solidified into a life that is less than it might have been.