High Cognitive Minds

Unless we want to believe in some type of mystical causation or in pure chance, our basic assumption in trying to understand exceptional intellectual capacity must be that all cognitive functions, including the rarest and the most exceptional, are biologically based. If there is a causal mechanism for precocity, for high-level intellectual functioning, and for creativity, it must be a facet, or a combination of facets, of the brain’s structure and operations.

The difficulty in talking about this is the lack of studies specifically intended to reveal the biological basis of giftedness and intellectual creativity. It’s made even more difficult by the lack of studies which might show common mental traits among the gifted and the creative. It’s a dangerous area even to think about because there are so many ways to go wrong. Theories, more or less plausible, are possible, but not proof.

In the literature, both high levels of giftedness and of creativity are more often associated with various types of psychopathology than with fundamental  brain mechanisms. Many lists of identifying characteristics mix cognitive and personality traits without attempting to distinguish between them. To confuse the issue even further, several streams of pop psychology lead people to believe that certain personal characteristics are either indicative of giftedness or are forms of giftedness in themselves. These include Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence, Gardner’s multiple intelligences, and Dabrowski’s oversensitivities as channeled by some giftedness advocates.

To put it plainly: giftedness is not a personality trait. Creativity is not a personality trait. Intellectual giftedness and creativity are collections of cognitive traits.  Both are accompanied by personality traits which may be a direct outcome of particular cognitive traits, and some of which are considered a possible prerequisite for the fulfillment of potential. The abilities which enable creativity in very different domains are all brain-based, some more visual or physical, but all depending, at least to some extent, on cognition.

Societies are created by minds which are similar enough to function in similar ways. In turn, societies maintain their structure by shaping the minds within them to think and act in similar ways. This is the process of socialization and acculturation.

Richard Dawkins wrote: A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. He could have added that the process is automatic and largely unconscious and that, most of the time, it works perfectly. The very existence of societies, cultures, of whole civilizations, their stability and continuity, depends on each new generation's unquestioning acceptance of prevailing mores and customs, and that, in turn, depends on the way the human brain functions. Most children do absorb, quite unconsciously, the beliefs, the behaviors, and the standards of their culture. They are not shaped by evolution to question, to analyze, or to criticize..

But if societies are not to stagnate they must also have individuals, even if only a few, who challenge rather than accept what they see around them, who upset the established order with their ideas, their visions, their creativity. Evolution does seem to have provided those individuals sparingly but steadily throughout history. And if we are ever to have the benefits of evolution, without depending wholly on sheer chance, we must learn to recognize the signs of creative power in the young.

I’ve discussed my reasons for believing that while limited acceleration has its benefits, it isn’t the answer to fulfilling highly gifted students’ needs for mental stimulation and challenge.  Is there a useful and viable alternative to simply shooting through the educational system like a greased pig? I would like to say that there is, but I can’t. What I offer is a very rough and fragmentary start toward developing such an alternative. Parents who are themselves gifted can use it a jumping off place for working with their gifted child. Teachers whose knowledge extends outside the course textbook can also use it as a source of ideas. I present it as a set of guideline, not a curriculum.

At the moment, the guidelines are divided into four categories: cognitive traits, thinking skills, psychology, and knowledge base. Cognitive traits are biological, and are the substrate on which everything else rests. They include memory, temperament, predisposition to thinking styles: verbal or visual, contextual or linear. Thinking skills include analysis/synthesis, pattern-seeking, problem-finding, theorizing/testing. Psychology is about normal thinking and emotional responses, and how the gifted differ, with the aim of adapting to and living comfortably with the non-gifted. Knowledge base: Identifying personal interests, tracking them over time, and making connections between them. Cross disciplinary expansion of interests, making the knowledge base as broad and rich as possible.

Some of the overall goals are to develop mental flexibility and openness, and the ability to think clearly; to encourage and enhance creativity; to discover the pleasures of intellectual exploration; to shape the environment in a way that’s appropriate for the individual, and to create a rich and satisfying life. Modern education rarely supports or even acknowledges these goals, but for high cognitives they are as essential as learning subject matter. They also take time, not the hour to hour schedules of schooling, but the developmental time of the individual. Brains have to mature, understanding and insight have to develop with increasing age and knowledge. Schools do not and cannot support these needs.

Normal schooling actually serves as an impediment to individual development to the extent that it fills the student’s time and restricts learning to defined paths. Carried to extremes, acceleration merely continues that pattern, consuming ever more time and energy that should be used in more productive ways. Rather than provide new options, it just speeds the student toward those that society has already defined and approved. There must be some reason why “…creative achievers tend to discontinue their education when they feel that they have learned enough to continue on their own. They may simply become bored with formal instruction, or disenchanted with what formal institutions have to offer.” Personal and intellectual growth can’t flourish when education is simply a race to the goal line.

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.”

Every once in a while something that I understand and take for granted shines out in a new light and I’m overwhelmed with how completely alien it is to other people. The difference is between knowing it with my intellect and feeling the emotional impact of it. Linda Silverman’s visual-spatial/auditory-sequential theory has been rolling around in my mind for several years. It’s a contribution that I’ve always acknowledged as important even while its inadequacy plagued me. For a long time I thought that it was just a matter of a weakness in how she defined the two modes of learning and thinking. I eventually realized the problem was far greater, but I still didn’t see the implications.

In her book, Upside-Down Brilliance: the Visual-Spatial Learner, she says “Some of my highly gifted, complex friends find this dichotomy too simplistic. Maybe it is. I certainly don’t mean to imply that people are completely one or the other.” I’ve probably read that a dozen times, and never really grasped it. Because there are people who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum that she assumes is an adequate way of looking at the variations.

The problem lies partly in her conception of visual-spatial as some kind of 3-D pictorial processing, an idea which she, a non-visualizer, accepted at face value from someone involved in the arts. Maybe it was her acceptance of this idea that allowed her to forget a statement she made years earlier: “Interviews with adults suggest the existence of other constellations of spatial abilities less related to the visual domain...” That possibility wasn’t within the range of her interests and research, so it wasn’t pursued.

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A search term that brought someone to Gifted Mind recently was memory. Can you be considered gifted even if you have a poor memory?  It's not surprising that this is a worry for individuals who aren't sure they're gifted. In lists of gifted characteristics, you'll always find excellent memory, and the ability to learn quickly. Such lists are generalizations, and every item isn't applicable to everyone, but people tend to take each one as a requirement. If you're a low-energy person, you can't be gifted because one of the characteristics is high energy. If you don't have much of a sense of humor, you can't be gifted...

What is a poor memory? Charles Darwin said of himself that his memory was very poor. He generally had to reread something and then give himself time to mull it over before he grasped it well enough to form a judgement. His memory was slow, and knowing that has always given me comfort because I have the same kind of memory.

There are also types of information that I have trouble memorizing: numbers, codes, and random bits and pieces that can’t be fitted into a context. My problem with numbers is a real learning disability, but my inability to memorize random, disconnected facts is part of my cognitive bias toward contextual processing. Darwin had similar problems with certain kinds of memorization and his notebooks reveal a contextual thinker at work.

The popular belief that quick memorizers are particularly smart is one of the many myths about giftedness. Someone who’s a quick study may be... a quick study and nothing more. An excellent memory gives you an advantage in school and in adult life, but it doesn’t guarantee curiosity, a real interest in learning, or intellectual creativity.

Things I've been thinking about lately: cognitive complexity, information overload, the wisdom of crowds, the technological singularity. They're all related. The problem is to figure out the relationships, and find the implications hiding at the deepest levels. Ideas can sometimes serve as metaphors for other ideas creating concepts that are larger and more inclusive than either of the originals.

It probably wasn't an accident that I discovered this article last night. I've been trying for years to find the right term for the kind of mind that goes beyond the usual conceptions of giftedness, and cognitive complexity is the perfect expression.

"Complexity refers to the extent to which an individual or organization differentiates and integrates an event. Differentiation is the number of distinctions or separate elements (i.e., factors, variables) into which an event is analyzed. Integration refers to the connections or relationships among these elements.

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I've been having a fascinating email conversation with a new friend, and one of the topics we stumbled into was "thinking." We found that we've both had the experience of realizing that most people don't really think much. It's such a simple word, and something we take for granted. In fact, the whole world functions as if people do think. Economists have always assumed that people act on the basis of information, making rational decisions about their lives on the basis of that information. Increasingly though, studies have shown that people, just as often as not, make decisions which are counter-productive, and which are detrimental to their interests rather than beneficial.

This is really a curious state of affairs. We've been persuaded that all people need for conducting their affairs in an intelligent way is education and accurate information. There are thousands of questions we could ask at this point, starting with "Then why is the world in such a mess?" For the answers, we usually depend on reliable scapegoats: greedy corporations, power-hungry dictators, crooked politicians, etc., etc. We do not ask whether the average person has the capacity to think rationally. It's a question that doesn't just spring to mind, but it's also a question that would open a very ugly can of worms if it were to be asked seriously.

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I think that a good part of my problem with this blog is that I'm essaying, rather than blogging. A double entendre, of course, and meant to be. Having started out to be informative, I've let myself be trapped in the need to be informative at all times. It's the same problem I've wrestled with constantly in trying to crank out a book. I managed to talk myself out the belief that a book on creativity and intelligence would be legitimate only if it sounded very professorial. But that was only the first hurdle. I'm still jumping, largely because trying to write more than 500 words or so at a time is usually beyond me. Staying on topic is something like torture when every idea sprouts a multitude of offshoots, all demanding their own five minutes of my attention.

But if I had an A—>B—>C type of mind, then I wouldn't be who I am; I wouldn't see the patterns that evolve out of everyday life or be constantly peering behind the curtain at the man we're supposed to ignore. Maybe what it comes down to is that the facts which can be easily seen and written down in books are not only not very interesting, they may not be as important as we're led to believe they are. They're certainly not interesting to me, except insofar as others' fascination with them tells me something about the average mind.

So... although this blog has driven itself right off the rails, there's no predicting its future direction. It may simply wind up riding off in all directions at once. That's fine by me. I hope it's fine by you.

Does the human mind have unused potential? Is the mind still evolving? What is a reasonable line between our imaginings possible realities? Neuropsychology studies and speculates. Literature, particularly science fiction, imagines. I study and wonder.

I've often thought that Frank Herbert's mentats could be far more than just an author's fantasy about the mind's possibilities. Herbert did a lot of that kind of fantasizing, as have other authors such as Poul Anderson and Olaf Stapledon. I've always been attracted to books incorporating those ideas because I sense that they hold a germ of truth. They imagine things which don't exist, but I often have the feeling that some authors write about things they've actually experienced, even if it's only in fleeting moments. Anyone who's used hallucinogens, meditated, or used various methods of mental development knows that we can see and understand far more than our everyday world. The question, of course, is whether these experiences are mere hallucinations or have a kind of reality.

Extraordinary capacities do pop up now and then, and have been extensively documented. Lightning calculation is just one of them. There are real minds of real people that, with the proper education and training, could far exceed normal mental functioning. We wouldn't need them to supplant computers, as they did in Dune, but to do things that computers can't. We need such minds to deal with levels of complexity and abstraction that computers may never be equipped to manipulate. We need minds which can detect patterns, which are capable of looking back into the past and forward into the future, noting the consequences of past actions or inactions, incorporating today's knowledge and information, and projecting all that into reasonable future approximations. We need what various spiritual traditions call the "perfected" or "completed" human, alive to the wonder and complexity of the universe. We need the reality behind the imaginings of Herbert and other speculative writers.

There are times when I find it impossible to write. More accurately, it's almost impossible to think in an organized, coherent way.  Either there are too many ideas swirling around in my mind, competing for attention, or I'm mentally burned out and can barely think at all. And I wonder whether there's a sense in which mental burnout is real and not just a more or less meaningless figure of speech? I wish I understood what's going on in there.

Intellectually gifted people get used to being told "you think too much," and maybe that's part of the problem. We not only think a lot, we also tend to think about thinking, which sometimes leads nowhere useful and burns up energy that could better be used in other endeavors. Is my mind running away with itself because I have Attention Deficit Disorder or is that just one of the penalties of having an unusually active brain? Have I dropped into a temporary mental limbo because my brain is exhausted from so much hard work, or am I depressed? Am I totally engrossed with my current project because that's a pre-requisite for creativity or because I'm a geek, and if I'm a geek is it because I'm a person with Asperger's? Where does one draw the line in determining what's a disability and what is merely a trait that needs to be understood and managed?

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Here are a few excerpts from an excellent article about Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael Bywater. The pedestal that we place certain people on leads us to think that they have qualities that we lack. The truth is that some of these qualities are common in the intellectually gifted, to one extent or another. Even if we have not have developed them, even if we have failed to recognize their existence, they are there, dormant and waiting. Few people have the capacity to reach Leonardo's heights of creativity, but we can probably accomplish far more than we give ourselves credit for.

"Few artists exert such a hold on the public cultural imagination; the man from Vinci remains in a class of his own. And it is we, of course, who put him there. Why?

"One reason is that he was different. To us, he seems an artist who uniquely straddled the worlds of individual creativity and rational science. He detected similarities and metonyms in the physical world, depicted them and worked upon them with forensic skill. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis: Leonardo was a master of the visual dialectic. His work does not just offer us a world-view, nor (whatever Dan Brown's readers may believe) create clever puzzles for the illuminati. It engages us in argument in the clear, rational light of day - and his conclusions are written upon the modern world."

"In one of Leonardo's more charming observations, he notes the similarity between tresses of hair and flowing water, and draws both to show us. If we then read Ovid, we see Arethusa's tresses enveloped in the stream. It seems to us that Ovid is seeing, impossibly, through Leonardo's eyes. Leonardo influences not just the future, but the past. True, it is our personal construction of the past; but is there any other sort?

"All art, all texts, can have this effect, but Leonardo is more potent than most because of his "genius". This characteristic has been described as the ability to see similarities where mere talent sees only differences - a defining characteristic of Leonardo's work. Arguably, judging by his notebooks, his art was the by-product of his observation of the world, rather than the world being a repository of potential art. His curiosity forces him not only to notice the similarity between water and hair but to look for the reason."

"Leonardo's defining achievement was not his art, but his rare ability to look closely at the world and see it as it is. Most of us cannot."

www.newstatesman.com/Ideas/200609180034