High Cognitive Minds

There’s a kind of morbid fascination, for me, in seeing the many ways in which psychology fails to come anywhere near being a science. Educational psychology, in particular, suffers from researchers’ biases that wouldn’t be tolerated in other areas. And one of the most common biases is for the researchers to think they know what they’re seeing.

Eide Neurolearing Blog’s most recent entry centers on the Cookie Thief test. “When you show this picture to adults and ask them to describe it, the usual response is a dry recitation of what people, objects, and events are being seen in the picture.

“But in many kids (often creative ones, young engineers, artists, or gifted storytellers), we get the most insightful, charming, and sometimes downright devious responses.”

The assumption here is that adults have lost the ability to think outside the box. The Eides ask: “Why is it that kids seems so much better at out-of-the-box thinking compared to adults? One reason may be that common expectations of becoming adults include become more organized, being able to plan and anticipate more events, and become more consistent in our behaviors.”

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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.

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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I’d just like to see

thinking come back

in style —

I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. You are the hottest, sexiest, most empowered generation ever. You’re in charge of your own evolution now that we’ve deciphered the DNA code. The future is going to be different. You can’t be bought off because there are just too many of you. You can make the world into anything you want. Open up all the world’s future possibilities. —Tim Leary

So what happened?

Found on an extraordinary page of mostly graphics, some with descriptions, some without. Collectively an incitement to thought and wonder. Collective Perception

"I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men... I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or a book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited... My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time I can generally recollect where to search fro my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry."    

IQ tests, and many of the other tests which we take throughout our schooling, emphasize speed and memory. Both are considered so important in determining intelligence, that we would have to judge the above quotation as the statement of a real loser. He would be a terrible bore at a party, unable to appreciate the witty back and forth banter or join in games which depend on the fast identification of bits of cultural trivia. And he'd certainly never qualify as a quiz show contestant. Who would want such a plodder as either a friend or a colleague?

We're taught that the race goes to the swift, and are constantly pressured to do more and do it faster. But what is it that we're doing, and who will even remember it once it's done? How much of our lives do we spend running races that go nowhere? Maybe we need to stop and take some time to think about the author of the quote. Charles Darwin took more than twenty years to accomplish something that changed the world: the publication of On The Origin of Species.

"It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.  These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions:  hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow."   Werner Heisenberg

Studies of creativity show that the most accomplished thinkers have had a wide range of interests, starting in childhood and continuing throughout their lives. Creative thinking requires both breadth and depth of knowledge, including knowledge of the past and its relationship to the present.

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 

Human pattern detection is tied to survival needs--recognition of foods, weather patterns, and various types of dangers. Our ability to recognize a known individual from some distance away may owe its existence to the need to identify possible enemies before they're close enough to be a danger. These are all concrete forms of pattern detection, tied to the five senses.

What is less common, and vitally important in an increasingly complex world, is the ability to detect more abstract patterns, those that shift and evolve, and which may be obscured by "noise" in the environment. They may seem obvious in hindsight, once someone points them out, but detecting them depends on the ability to discern subtle clues and to ignore distracting elements.

Pattern seeking is not necessarily a voluntary act. For many highly gifted, it is a natural part of how their minds work, and an essential part of their creativity. That's one reason why books purporting to teach creative thinking are little more than crutches, enabling the average person to do in limited ways and under limited circumstances, what creative people do as easily as breathing.

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Most of our predictions are based on very linear thinking. That's why they most likely will be wrong. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

One of the things that puzzles many gifted people about the non-gifted is their general inability to think in new ways, even at the personal, everyday level. Whether it's solving a problem that should be perfectly obvious, anticipating the future, or thinking about larger issues, the average person seems to lack the tools for thinking through a problem in any but the most stereotypical ways

Linear thinking limits responses to change, taking one step at a time, never looking to the side, where non-obvious relationships may exist, only straight ahead.  Linear is the view that progress is a series of logical steps from what's already known and understood. Unfortunately, the rule of nature seems to be that, while nature itself is not linear, most humans are linear thinkers.

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