High Cognitive Minds

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to the young winners of prestigious science competitions, take a look at this new series of articles from Scientific American. “Where Are They Now?” profiles winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. The first profile, of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, suggests that the series might offer some insights into the life paths of the gifted, at least those with a talent for science.

Chemistry wasn’t the first career choice for Hoffmann, who won his Westinghouse prize in 1955 for a study of cosmic ray particles. His parents wanted him to become a doctor. Inspiring college courses almost turned him into an art historian, but he had to compromise with his parents’ ambition for him. "I had enough courage to tell my parents I wasn't going to be a doctor, but not enough courage to tell them I wanted to go into the history of art. So I went to graduate school in chemistry," he says. "I fell into it, but I love it."

The profiles will be published on a weekly basis. I’ve set up an RSS feed on my reader so that I don’t misss  any.

The Watcher: Roald Hoffmann 

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 my my life miserable. I can also think of some 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.

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So many interesting subjects to learn about. So many possible directions. There’s a new career or avocation out there somewhere, waiting for you to discover it. But how do you choose? Another change of perspective may be useful here—stop thinking about yourself as just a learner. That’s a powerful mindset inculcated by 12 to 16 years of education, and then by the necessity to learn specific skills to carry out the demands of our jobs. Gifted children are encouraged to see themselves as learning machines, and as little more. You learn for grades and academic honors; you learn for the best jobs; you learn in order to keep that complex mind busy.

Think about yourself as an explorer. The chances are very good that everything you study on your own time is part of your explorations into something that consistently attracts you. If you’re looking for a meaningful path for your life, ask this question: what have you been exploring? The answer is in the pattern of your interests.

What subjects have you gone back to over the years—in the books you’ve read, the courses you’ve taken that weren’t a requirement for something or other, even the movies you’ve watched? Are there themes you can follow and connections you can make? When you read a new book or study a new subject, does it bring up echoes of others, start you thinking along familiar paths, but with new branchings? Does it present interesting questions? What you’re looking for isn’t a specific field of study, but something you connect with emotionally and intellectually, something that will offer you a long-term challenge. It should take you in a new direction—find or create a new career, start a research project, develop and finance a foundation or a scholarship fund, invent something unique and wonderful.

To continue... Living with the feeling that there’s something you should be doing with your life is like an itch that you can’t scratch. So, how do you go about scratching it? There are three parts to this problem:

1. Figure out what you want to accomplish
2. Figure out how to do it

The third, which is really the first part, is figuring out what’s kept you from thinking about it seriously. We live in a society that’s job and career oriented. Whatever you’re doing, it has to be full-time, and it has to enable you to make a decent living. How many people can afford to give that up in order to go in a brand-new direction? How many are willing to take the risk that the new direction won’t work out, or won’t be any more satisfying even if it does work out? How many times have you heard the expression “don’t quit your day job?”

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Hungry mind. Must keep it fed. More books. New subjects. Never enough time. So much to learn.

What do you do with all that knowledge? My guess is that most gifted adults consider their reading and learning as an avocation—not much more than a way to feed a need. It’s a pleasurable need, of course, and it can be useful, but when it comes right down to it, in what way is it different from how the average person spends their time? You’re probably more insightful about important issues, see deeper into the antics of politicians and hucksters, worry more about the state of the world, but what does it amount to? You can make more intelligent choices about what to buy, who to vote for, how to spend your time, but is that all?

You have the feeling that there should be more. That you should be doing more. Potential. The guilt-creating bugaboo that keeps whispering “you’ve neglected me.” But there’s the job, and the family, and whatever other obligations you’ve undertaken. No time to focus. No energy for any more projects. And where would you even begin if you wanted to do something more important with your life? Oh well, there are more books waiting to be read.

Sometimes I wonder if the lack of real information about high levels of intelligence is just as much about fear as it is about insufficient data. It’s a thought that occurs to me fairly often, and it was triggered once again by High IQ Kids, the latest addition to my long shelf of books about giftedness and creativity. Titles don’t always tell you exactly what a book is about, but they do usually offer a clue, especially in a crowded field like gifted children. But “High IQ Kids” could mean anything from about 125 IQ, on up. It’s only when you turn the book over that you see the truth, halfway down the back cover. After a typically generic intro, the subject is finally revealed: “Raising or educating highly, exceptionally, or profoundly gifted kids can be daunting.” It’s almost as if the extremes of giftedness have to be backed into slowly, so as not to offend anyone.

As if to reinforce this feeling, I got into a conversation with a grad student who’s thought a lot about the state of gifted education and wonders if there is any useful role for him. One of his advisors told him that writing anything in support of gifted education, whether in his dissertation or a published paper, would harm his future career. One example doesn’t necessarily mean that the attitude is wide-spread, but the way in which the academic literature determinedly steers around long-standing problems, and avoids even the suggestion of anything truly innovative makes it a reasonable possibility.

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A subject that I’ve been pondering from many angles is acceleration for highly gifted students. I’m not sure when I became interested in it, but it may have been with my first reading of Accidental Genius. The book is written by Kevin and Cassidy Kearney, the parents of Michael Kearney, an extraordinary prodigy who caught the attention of the media in the 90s. It’s an account of Michael’s accomplishments and his parents’ philosophy, if you can call it that, of raising an enormously gifted child. For me, the book was an appalling illustration of how not to do it. I doubt that Michael’s experiences were typical, but they’ve probably been in the background of my mind every time I’ve read an article on the pros and cons of acceleration.

What I’ve come to believe over the years is that acceleration is an inadequate response to a real need. Its support is rooted in the inadequacy of traditional schooling, but basically follows the same path. As long as acceleration merely means getting through school as quickly as possible, even if it includes the addition of advanced courses, then the ultimate result isn’t going to be significantly different than following the normal curriculum at the normal rate.

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So many choices, so little time. What to major in in college; what career to prepare for; what project to work on next. Intellectually curious grasshopper minds agonize in ways that the average person never has to think about. Chance and expediency usually intervene to make the final choices, just as they do for that average person, but the questions usually continue. The problem is that the choices we're eventually forced to make don't satisfy the mind. There's too much computing power going to waste, and a sense that one's life is also going to waste.

And the central problem always remains: how to choose. There are ironies here. For the young person heading off to college all the doors are still open, but there isn't much experience to act as a guide. For the mature person, many of the doors have closed, and some have irrevocably locked, but now there's a lifetime of experience that might point to this choice—or that one. If you finally know which choice would have been the best one, then you have a chance to change things, to open closed doors, maybe even to force open some that you thought were locked forever. It might mean jumping to a new career, or working on a project that can be either a hobby or a part-time parallel career.

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"What is the single most important quality that suits you for a career in science? People often say 'curiosity,' but surely that can't be the whole story. After all, everyone is curious to some degree, but not everyone is destined to be a scientist. I would argue that you need to be obsessively, passionately, almost pathologically curious. Or, as Peter Medawar once said, you need to 'experience physical discomfort when there is incomprehension.' Curiosity needs to dominate your life." V. S. Ramachandran, "The Making of a Scientist"

This quote is from one of the newest additions to my library, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, a collection of essays by scientists in a wide variety of fields, edited by John Brockman. For me, science has always been the model for clear thinking, even for subjects far removed from science itself. And studies of science and scientists also provide a good deal of what we know about intellectual creativity. Some people may find this surprising, assuming that science is a very dry, tedious affair. But one of the better kept secrets is that most scientists place a high value on imagination and intuition.

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