High Cognitive Minds

I’ve come to believe that intellectually gifted children should start learning about human psychology at a fairly early age. But I wonder what the effect would have been if my first exposure to the subject had been a school textbook. Maybe it would have turned me off the subject completely, or it might have led me in the right direction without years of thrashing around without any sense of direction. Who knows?

It’s a truism that many psychologists start out with themselves as their first subject of interest. Which makes my current reading somewhat serendipitous. In the midst of trying to write this post, I started reading Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity, Synthesized, by psychologist Robert J. Sternberg. In giving a brief rundown on what led him to psychology, he turns out to be a perfect example of the truism.

His path started in elementary school, when his extreme test anxiety resulted in a low IQ score. As he put it: “For three years, my teachers thought me stupid, and I obliged, pleasing them by confirming their self-fulfilling prophecies for me.” But his fourth-grade teacher believed in him, and so he started believing in himself and became an “A” student. “By age 13, I was determined to understand why I was now achieving at high levels despite my low IQ...” That led to his learning about IQ testing, and tracking down a Stanford-Binet test and administering it to his classmates. He got in trouble for that, but that didn’t matter, because by then he knew where he was going.

I sometimes wish my path had been so direct, but struggling to figure out what made sense and what didn’t from random reading of whatever I could manage to find taught me a lot that I might not have learned in any other way. What was available, living in a small town, was the pop psychology that’s always ubiquitous on library shelves. It didn’t take long to notice that each author had his own theories about what was generally wrong with people, and their analysis and suggestions for remediation were always based on those theories.  Every one of them was profoundly convinced of the correctness of his ideas, though there no biological foundation under them, and, almost inevitably, no studies to back them up. What little “proof” was offered was merely anecdotal stories of “cures.” Another common feature was that they tended to gather devotees and to act very much like religious gurus as their fame grew.

I never really found anything useful in trying to understand what was wrong with me -- bits and pieces of myself here and there in the descriptions, but it didn’t add up to a whole person--even a flawed one. It was excellent training in BS detection, however, which is actually a pretty good way of describing the scientific method. If it’s authoritatively stated that problem A is caused by parental abuse or neglect and you have problem A, in spite of not having been neglected or abused, you might begin to wonder where the evidence is for the statement.  

It wasn’t until I decided to make a stab at returning to college (many years after a parentally-ordered disastrous freshman year) that I discovered real psychology. Not only Psych 101, but abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. But it was the social psychology course that revealed just how different I was from other people. Different enough that I dropped the course rather than try to cope with test and essay expectations that were clearly going to be biased towards answers that I couldn’t give and remain honest with myself.

Eventually, after several more attempts to get a degree, I gave up. What I wanted to know about, and how I wanted to go about learning just didn’t fit in any college curriculum. Even when I developed a study plan for a college that catered exclusively to mature adults and prided itself on allowing students to design their own curriculum, what I needed for myself was unacceptable.

When giftedness entered the picture, I knew my path was set, but I had no idea of the multiple branchings such a path would take. It didn’t take long to realize that almost the entire literature of giftedness was devoted to moderate giftedness, that most research was limited to school children, that “explanations” of giftedness usually came out of the psychotherapeutic tradition, and leaned heavily in the direction of psychopathology. I moved in the direction of high intelligence and creativity, and from there to where I am now, with giftedness taking somewhat of a backseat, as I become more fascinated with examining the wide range of variations in cognition and intelligence.