High Cognitive Minds

Practically everybody wants to be smart. That’s a bit strange since being smart is the easiest path to being disliked and resented. “Smart” as a kind of wish fulfillment, and embodied “smart” are different things altogether, and the disconnect is rarely noticed. Most people want to be normal, but being smart isn’t normal. Using the bell curve as a measure, smart people are actually a minority of humanity, and the very smart are an even smaller minority. No matter. Everyone prefers to think of themselves as above average.

There’s another disconnect—those who are smart would like to be considered normal, while the world insists on viewing smart and normal as nearly incompatible. One thread that runs though media articles about prodigies and the exceptionally gifted is the attempt to reconcile normality and exceptionality. Even if the slant of the article is generally friendly, what comes through quite clearly is that such children are normal in spite of being highly gifted. An article that’s now  a couple of years old is fairly typical. It’s about a girl who, at the age of 13, found that yogurt contains a bacteria which kills E. Coli. She was interviewed at age 16, having recently earned a patent on her discovery. According to the writer, she’s “very, very bright. She's also a normal high school kid with lots of friends.”

Sounds harmless if you don’t think about it too much, but media’s “gee whiz” attraction to very smart kids is always accompanied by the caveat of normalcy. It isn’t enough that the kid has friends or participates in sports; those activities have to be highlighted as evidence that they are still just like regular people. There’s nothing new about this bias; a Life article about the students of the Hunter High School, many years ago, reported on how humble they were in spite of being so smart. Humility isn’t so popular as an attribute these days, but the intent is the same.

There’s really no way out of the dilemma. The public image of minorities is never changed by the reality of individuals. If you believe that all atheists are devils, or that people of color are less intelligent than whites, encounters with individuals who defy that image are just exceptions. The only significant change possible is in your own mind. If being smart isn’t normal, then being smart is something to be grateful for.

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?”

Click to read more ...

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.

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.

…knowledge of a content domain may be one important determinant of whether that child demonstrates gifted performance on memory or reasoning problems that tap that knowledge. …these studies do not address the equally interesting question of how some children have managed to acquire rich and extensive knowledge… Conceptions of Giftedness, Robert Sternberg, Janet Davidson, eds.

Gifted research has been plagued by its emphasis on quantifiable data; the result is that important areas of giftedness remain a mystery to this day. The problem is that testing is entirely dependent on and limited to the questions you’re able to ask.  If you fail to ask the right questions, the tests aren’t going to reveal anything useful. And if you limit testing to just one subset of a population—in this case, school children, extrapolations to other subsets—adults—may be not merely wrong, but irrelevant. The statistics mindset prevents researchers from asking open-ended questions that could evoke a wider variety of responses.

One of the unsolved problems is the developmental process that takes place between childhood and adulthood. What leads to failure or development of talents? How do talents develop, particularly in domains with no formal teaching structure? The other problem, which isn’t so much a problem as an overlooked (or ignored) aspect of giftedness, is the different types of mental processing which are possible. Linda Silverman has made a stab at this with her distinction between visual-spatial and linear processing. But she also acknowledged, partly in response to her readers, that there are other, unexplored and poorly understood processes.

Click to read more ...

I ran across this blog post yesterday, and it was pretty apropos my current trend of mind. There's an element of nastiness in it that I don't care for (the person the blogger is talking about, not the blogger), but I can understand the feelings, even if I wouldn't choose to express them in that way.

A college drop-out’s revenge

Speaking of a high school friend who was an extraordinary artist: "Paul failed to pursue art in college.  After struggling through general liberal arts classes for a few years, he dropped out of college to take jobs involving manual labor.  He has always been a diligent worker, but his jobs have never really challenged him.  When I spoke with Paul today, he indicated that he still has a passion to draw, but hasn’t pursued it. "

Click to read more ...

I've been having a problem with this blog that's all too similar to the problem I used to have with people. Before I learned about intelligence and intellectual giftedness I wondered why most of the people around me seemed so stupid, why they didn't see things that were obvious, why they couldn't figure things out for themselves, why they were completely uninterested in learning anything that was a challenge, that would be useful to them, that would make their lives more interesting. Why was their thinking so limited, in so many ways? Eventually, as I learned more about them, I expected less from them, but that still left me thinking that if I could just find people with my kind of mind, the problem of intellectual companionship would cease to exist.

That didn't happen. Starting with MENSA and similar organizations, I found that high IQ didn't guarantee a commitment to learning, to the search for facts, for clarity, and understanding. It didn't guarantee a sensitivity to the world's complexity or an awareness of the patterns and cycles that dominate human life. Too often, I found myself asking the same question about those with high IQs that I had asked about the general run of people I met: Why are they so stupid?

You can probably see where this is going. Throughout the months of posting to this blog, the question has popped into my head over and over again: why can't they figure all this out for themselves? Why am I bothering to explain things about giftedness that should be perfectly obvious to the gifted? But that's mostly on the days when I wonder if being gifted even really matters, for most of us.

Click to read more ...

When cartoonist Scott Adams lost his voice to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia, he was told that it wasn't reversible-no improvement was to be expected, and no cure. Botox injections can help a bit but their effect is temporary and is somewhat harmful in itself. There were conditions under which Adams could speak, oddly enough, but everyday communication was impossible.

Unlike the majority of people who accept a medical prognosis, Adams decided to see what he could do for himself. "My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped."

Click to read more ...

I don't usually write about emotional issues of the gifted, but I rediscovered this article recently and appreciated that its somewhat different slant would be helpful, particularly for parents of gifted children.  Fostering Adult Giftedness

"Frequently parents and teachers express concerns about fostering growth in gifted children while dealing with the often painful process of coming to terms with their own giftedness and potential.

"It is difficult -- a sort of developmental double-whammy -- to go through your own developmental phases while at the same time teaching, guiding, and/or parenting gifted children."

Author Sharon Lind discusses five methods for recognizing and developing adult giftedness. The first is acknowledging your gifts, and one of the ways to do this is to compare them with those of people you believe to be gifted.
She also stresses the importance of nurturing the development of your personal identity rather than denying or hiding it.

She suggests that you identify your specific overexcitabilities, as Dabrowski defined them, then work to take advantage of their strengths, and cope with whatever problems they tend to cause. Finally, she discusses coping skills, including recognizing and dealing with stress, and learning effective communication skills.

I've been thinking about a series of book reviews for this blog, but I hate writing book reviews, so it's a project that will exist more in my mind than in reality, even though I'll churn one out every now and then. I had thought of starting with the two books that seem most appropriate, since they're the only two that even acknowledge the existence of gifted adults—Gifted Grownups, and Liberating Everyday Genius. But my dislike for both of them and my resistance to reviewing them is so overwhelming that writing about that would probably be more useful.

At the time I read Gifted Grownups I was a member of a forum for older gifted women. Among all those who had read the book, the general consensus was that it didn't contribute much to an understanding of giftedness, and seemed more focused on making everybody feel good about themselves. The very title of the book had set my teeth on edge, since referring to adults as grownups is almost exclusively reserved for times when adults feel the need to talk down to children. Ultimately, I wound up being so disgusted with the book that I got rid of it. So, if I reviewed it, I would have to resort to refreshing my memory with online reviews. Apparently, none of the libraries in my county's library system considered it worth buying, so borrowing it was out, and I certainly wasn't going to buy another copy.

Click to read more ...

Last week was one of those strange times that took me completely away from myself. Ever since, I've been in a kind of mental limbo where writing (and blogging) has been just about impossible. It's a situation I've been in frequently, but this is the first time I've spent so much time thinking about it, pulling it apart and trying to understand it.

Years ago, I read May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. What I remember most clearly from it is her complaint that it took her a long time after visitors left to get back to her writing—to get back to a place where she could write. It's a problem only introverts experience or can understand when it happens to others. Certainly, you can't tell visitors what a disruption of your life, even of your very being, their presence is.

What brought this on was a three-day visit from my youngest son, who lives out of state, and his family. I only spent two full days with them, doing the tourist thing—which includes hours of driving, and eating out, neither of which are a normal (or desired) part of my life, and by the time they left I was completely exhausted. I don't know how well I managed the small talk, but at least there wasn't too much time for it. Was there some grandmotherly way I should have been with the kids, something that was expected and that I missed? I have no idea. I talk to children as if they're reasonable human beings, and seeing them only once every two years or so doesn't do much to stir family feelings, which I pretty much lack, anyway.

Click to read more ...