High Cognitive Minds

Two books have been added to the Books: Giftedness page. They are High IQ Kids, and Losing Our Minds.

Nearly everybody’s shopping, cleaning, wrapping, cooking, so the internet is slowing down. I’m in the middle of an exciting and thought-provoking book, so I’m not much inclined to a lot of writing. The next post on acceleration is written but needs an extensive overhaul. As usual, I went off on a tangent and need to get it back on track.

When I’m reading a good book, I underline and even make notes along the way (only one of the reasons why I prefer to buy books rather then borrow them from the library), but I’ve never developed a good method for keeping track of those notes and references. So, when I’m writing or working out some ideas, it can be almost impossible to find something that I remember from my reading. The last update of a program I use almost daily, Notebook, added Cornell pages to its options. I’d never heard of Cornell pages and found it a useful concept, though not one that I had any immediate use for. But I keep running into references to it on the web, and the light bulb finally went on. So I’m about to start using it while reading—paper notebooks, though; reading in front of the computer isn’t exactly my idea of pleasure.

Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence will get the Cornell treatment because it’s clear that it’s going to be one of my major reference sources. The only bad thing about using paper is the grubby job of reading my own handwriting and transcribing to the computer.

On Intelligence is by the inventor of the Palm Pilot, and even though he’s worked mostly in technology, his true love is the brain. The book presents his theory of intelligence, which, so far, makes more sense than anything I’ve run across. His interest is in developing true intelligence in machines, while mine is in developing true intelligence in humans. There are so many parallels. He said “...we have no productive theories about what intelligence is or how the brain works as a whole.” And one of the quotes that has been engraved on my memory for years is “...a strong theoretical framework for considering the phenomenon of giftedness does not exist.”