High Cognitive Minds

There’s a short discussion in the forum’s Welcome to High Cognitive Minds thread that keeps tugging at me, and this post is partly a response. Mer said “There aren't a lot of personal stories that detail other people's experiences as intellectual outliers living outside of academia. Where are they?” One of the ways we learn about ourselves in by reading the experiences of others like us. And Mer’s right--there are darned few examples of highly gifted people writing about their own development. I can think of two reasons for that. The first is the one I mentioned in my reply to her--we tend to be private people. Given that introversion is more likely as IQ goes up, that makes sense. But the other reason may be more influential.

We’ve learned not to talk about our intelligence, our knowledge, our hopes and ambitions. We learned that lesson in a variety of ways--by being ignored, criticized, or made fun of. By being accused of snobbery, showing off, or of thinking that we know everything. For many of us, school taught us much more about the need to stay hidden than it did about developing our abilities or finding a path that we could devote ourselves to. If you’re accomplished and famous, it’s okay to write about your childhood, the books you loved to read, and the strange ideas that you had about how the world worked. If you’re not famous, your autobiography would get comments like “Why should we be interested in this nobody?” Or “A boring display of ego.” And then it would sink like a stone, going into the remainder bins, and then off to the shredder.  

If you aren’t “somebody” you’re nobody, and nobody wants to hear about your little life. And that’s a problem for the intellectually gifted who may never be famous but still need to know how others like them got through their lives. How did the little boy who was slow to start talking, and who was never very good at math get to be Albert Einstein? How did the slow pupil who seemed destined for the aimless life of a spoiled aristocrat get to be Charles Darwin? Those stories are well-known and fascinating, and they do illustrate certain points of commonality with us ordinary folks, but they aren’t necessarily good models for our own lives.

For one thing, they’re mostly fragments put together long after the fact--by other people. Darwin’s autobiography is very short, and as befits a private person, not very forthcoming about the trials and tribulations of his boyhood or his later life. The same can be said for a lot of autobiographies of famous men--and most of the famous are men. Diaries and letters supplement some of what is missing, but not all of it. Einstein’s life is much more similar to ours in its educational details than Darwin’s, but he didn’t grow up in a world of television, movies, computers, and wildly fluctuating fashions in mass education, testing, and definitions of who is or isn’t gifted, and what we should expect from the gifted.

So I’m going release my death grip on my need for privacy, and start posting about how I got from an unfocused omnivorous bookworm to this blog and website. It will be an experiment, something I’ve been thinking about for some time--not an autobiography, but an intellectual journey. It isn’t necessarily typical, but maybe others will find some points of similarity, and some ideas about uncovering their own developmental paths.