High Cognitive Minds

I’ve come to believe that intellectually gifted children should start learning about human psychology at a fairly early age. But I wonder what the effect would have been if my first exposure to the subject had been a school textbook. Maybe it would have turned me off the subject completely, or it might have led me in the right direction without years of thrashing around without any sense of direction. Who knows?

It’s a truism that many psychologists start out with themselves as their first subject of interest. Which makes my current reading somewhat serendipitous. In the midst of trying to write this post, I started reading Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity, Synthesized, by psychologist Robert J. Sternberg. In giving a brief rundown on what led him to psychology, he turns out to be a perfect example of the truism.

His path started in elementary school, when his extreme test anxiety resulted in a low IQ score. As he put it: “For three years, my teachers thought me stupid, and I obliged, pleasing them by confirming their self-fulfilling prophecies for me.” But his fourth-grade teacher believed in him, and so he started believing in himself and became an “A” student. “By age 13, I was determined to understand why I was now achieving at high levels despite my low IQ...” That led to his learning about IQ testing, and tracking down a Stanford-Binet test and administering it to his classmates. He got in trouble for that, but that didn’t matter, because by then he knew where he was going.

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In his book, Intelligence: a New Look, Hans Eysenck makes a point that has been stated by others, in the ongoing discussion about whether genetics or environment is more influential in giftedness. “ Children, as they grow up, increasingly choose their environment; the choice itself is driven by genetic factors. And they interpret their environment in terms of their genetic contributions.” One example that he selected, from the many possible, was the life of the mathematician, Michael Faraday, who came from a poor family and had almost no schooling except for what he managed to scrabble for himself.

Similarly, Dean Keith Simonton, in The Origins of Genius: “if the parents had not provided opportunities in the home for the desired stimulation, the children would probably seek out stimulation elsewhere.”

“...a child with certain inborn talents may soon put pressure on the environment to make it conform more closely to feed those talents. To the outside observer it may appear as if the environment is influencing the child’s development, but instead it is the child’s genetic disposition that is influencing the home circumstances. The research literature on child prodigies is replete with examples of future geniuses who insist on pursuing specific enthusiasms even in the face of parental discouragement.” Simonton’s example was Pascal, another mathematician from an unpromising background.

 That is a quite different position from one that was fairly common about twenty years ago:  “...giftedness cannot be understood solely as a cognitive trait, but rather must be understood as a complex interaction between a peculiarly supportive environment that the individual helps create, but over which the individual has only limited power.” Frances D. Horowitz, The Gifted and Talented: developmental perspectives

I suspect that research done since then has encouraged many writers to modify their view, but it still has enough support to influence ambitious parents of gifted children. And it isn’t a simple matter of whether a supportive environment is or isn’t a necessity. There is, today, some question about how much influence a highly enriched intellectual environment actually has on future achievements. I don’t think there’s any argument that an enriched environment is a benefit, regardless of whether the child is gifted or average. The confusion about its value probably lies in what effects it's expected to have.

That’s a subject for another post.

It’s a subject that comes up over and over again. Should we tell Johnny that he’s gifted, and if so, when? Anyone who knows my opinion of giftedness as a concept won’t be surprised that my answer is “No, don’t tell Johnny he’s gifted—ever. If the term ever had any meaning, its death knell has been sounded by the increasingly shrill cries of the parents of the swarms of average kids: “Every child is gifted!” I’m sorry to drag brute reality into such a sensitive issue, but not every child is gifted, and we aren’t all geniuses from birth.

So, what should you tell Johnny, and when? That’s more easily answered if we make some important distinctions. Schools want children to learn facts, and it wants them to learn those facts as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The student who learns quickly and has a good memory has a distinct advantage, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a special gift. “Continuum” is a useful way of thinking about this. Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan has remarked on the preference of psychologists for “characteristics like intelligence that fall on a continuum...” Learning capacity, which is dependent on memory, and memory itself, can be measured on a continuum. So the only thing special about the average academically gifted child is that he has more of what everybody has.

Schools have difficulty with children who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum, whose abilities are what we could call “breakaway.” That could be anything from unique ways of incorporating knowledge to advanced talents that simply don’t fit into the curriculum, the scheduling, or the teacher’s experience and training. The time for discussion is when the child is starting to recognize those aspects of himself, and has suffered the first bumps and bruises of running headlong into expectations and rules that he is unwittingly violating. It’s time for the parents to put two and two together and help the child make sense of his experiences.

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If most of the world’s population was color-blind, a color-blind expert on art would be entirely possible. This expert could talk sensibly about the history or art, about various artists and their styles, and even about the elements that go into a work of art. He could discuss balance, line, contrast, and innumerable other details that make up a painting. What he wouldn’t be able to discuss, except in a very limited way, is color. Indeed, if a uniquely-sighted artist created a painting out of small dots of color, the expert wouldn’t even be able to identify the objects in the painting. He would condemn the canvas as a chaotic mass of meaningless dots, and most of the world’s art admirers would agree with him. In such a world, the artist who developed pointillism would have been laughed out of the art world and promptly forgotten.

Protection of professional reputation and career, along with biases in education and training are two significant reasons for the continued lack of information about intellectual traits. But they may not even be the most important reasons. The most important is never, as far as I’m aware, discussed publicly. We could call it the color-blind expert syndrome, and  I’ve found it everywhere in the literature.

Ellen Winner has written about gifted children and about art and by all professional measures, qualifies as an expert in those areas. Yet these quotes from her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities strongly call into question any experiential understanding. Of one gifted child, she said “... he described pictures that he discerned in the grain of wood, and angels and harps in the shapes of clouds — further examples of a need to create visual stimulation for himself.” And of another: “...I would say that underlying all his behavior was a desire to make his environment stimulating. This explains his persistent questions, his creation of math problems, his scientific theorizing, and his omnivorous reading.”

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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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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.

…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.

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If there is any single thing that prevents the development of a viable approach to teaching the intellectually gifted, it’s the idea that giftedness is all about learning, about subject matter. It’s the central assumption in debates about acceleration and enrichment. It’s central to ideas about achievement. It’s the reason why research and discussions have gone round and round year after year, reproducing what has already been done to death, and producing nothing of value, either to educational theory or to gifted students. Gifted students learn faster, better, more. That’s the essence of gifted education.

How did I come to these conclusions? By using a cognitive skill that I’ve had all my life. Nobody identified it for me; I wasn’t taught how useful it is or shown how to develop it. It’s one of many skills that I had to discover for myself. And I can’t help wondering how my life might have been different if the discovery and development of such skills had been part of my education. How would the lives of hundreds of thousands of intellectually gifted students been different if it had been part of their education?

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When a problem remains unsolved year after year, generation after generation, we need to consider whether there is something wrong with the process of problem-solving. Giftedness is a complex, multi-faceted problem with no apparent solutions. Which is, I suppose, one of the reasons why I've found it a source of endless fascination. Psychologists who believe that giftedness can be studied scientifically, have been no more successful in understanding it than anyone else. The parable of the blind men and the elephant doesn't even begin to convey the difficulties involved in thinking about giftedness.

What are some of the factors that stand in the way?
1. Professional biases
2. Dominant educational paradigm
3. Gaps in understanding the child-to-adult developmental continuum
4. Disregard of modern research in neurobiology
5. Disregard for the gifted, particularly adults, as a source of valid information and insights.

"There has not been much theoretical development of ideas related to the gifted and the talented, and, with some exceptions, no large bodies of data have been collected in order to illuminate the genesis of giftedness or to detail the components of giftedness and how they function. It is clear that a strong theoretical framework for considering the phenomenon of giftedness does not exist." The Gifted and Talented: developmental perspectives, Frances Horowitz, ed.