High Cognitive Minds

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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"Educators with expertise in gifted education are frustrated trying to help other educators and parents understand that while high achievers are valuable participants whose high-level modeling is welcomed in classes, they learn differently from gifted learners. In situations in which they are respected and encouraged, gifted students' thinking is more complex with abstract inferences and more diverse perceptions than is typical of high achievers. Articulating those differences to educators and parents can be difficult." Bertie Kingore

How can you use your mind to its full potential if you don't know what kind of mind you have? For gifted adults who have struggled with the feeling that  there's something of value in them that needs to be freed and used, this is an important question. It goes far beyond the distinction between visual-spatial and auditory-sequential learning and thinking, and the lists of gifted characteristics that include such non-cognitive items as physical sensitivities, high energy level, and sense of humor.

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"Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average." Wikipedia

"Children identified as gifted typically have mental abilities in the upper two and one-half to three percent of the population." Guiding the Gifted Child

Gifted child--"any of various children who are naturally endowed with a high degree of mental ability. Since little is known about special abilities, the term is usually confined in psychological and educational writings to a child whose innate general ability rises above a certain specified borderline." britannica.com

There are many kinds of giftedness, but as the above quotes indicate, popular use of the word and the technical use are not the same. Pick out any half dozen or so studies of gifted children and you will find that the focus is on mental abilities. Some studies have included musical, artistic, dramatic, and other talents, but generally in a context of how those abilities are affected by intelligence.  

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