High Cognitive Minds

“…the theory of critical differences, …a distinction which arises not because we are dealing with a new species of ability, but from the fact that when human capacities surpass certain levels of performance, the achievements to which they give rise may take on altered characteristics. ( David Wechsler, The Range of Human Capacities)

Jerome Kagan, David Henry Feldman, and John Gardner have all commented on the near-universal preference for viewing intelligence as part of a continuum. It’s much easier to believe that individuals merely have less or more of what everybody else has than to consider the possibility of “critical differences.”  The emphasis on IQ scores is a symptom of this desire for continuity, and is also a way to sweep other views under the rug.

Wechsler is partly correct and partly incorrect. It depends what capacities you’re looking at. A virtuoso pianist is using the same skills as a moderately talented amateur, but is so far superior that it amounts to a critical difference. This is just as true in many fields of endeavor. But when we turn to cognition, it may be more realistic to say that there is, indeed, a new species of ability.

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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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