High Cognitive Minds

Teachers want students to learn. But what does that mean? The child who asks “too many questions” wants to know more than the basic facts and definitions that he’s being taught. But if it’s not in the textbook, not a part of the curriculum, he can wind up being considered a troublemaker or a perfectionist. Either one is bad.

Even worse, such a child may expose the teacher’s lack of knowledge beyond the contents of the textbook. Then he is guilty of “challenging authority,” the official term that covers up the teacher’s embarrassment. And if that isn’t sufficient for the teacher’s fragile ego, the child can be disciplined for disrupting the class.

So what do teachers really want students to learn? To read the text, complete their assignments, and open their mouths only to answer the teacher’s questions

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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Was there any time in my childhood or adolescence when someone could have pointed to a particular talent or strong interest and said “There it is, your life path?”  I suppose it could have happened, but whatever they thought they had discovered would have been wrong.

I was a typical early reader, indiscriminately devouring whatever reading matter came my way. And while it’s impossible to prove that any one book or subject was influential in a major way, there were patterns of interest that developed fairly early. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that those patterns eventually resolved themselves into an ever-narrowing set of interests which led me to where I am today. But it’s also easy to see that the final determination of what I would focus on was pure accident.

The error, for those who would like to be able to predict and guide the intellectually gifted thinker, is the belief that a strong focus in childhood is dependably indicative of a future career path. And the error is compounded by evaluating intellectual interests only in relation to their relevance to known career paths. My own winding path shows both the impossibility of prediction, and the difficulty of making a final choice from among many possibilities. Of course, we’re talking here about high cognitives with no apparent talents, but it also tends to be true even of wunderkind who show very strong preferences and talents for particular subjects.

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I sometimes think about my life and my intellectual development in “what if” terms. What if my various cognitive traits, including the weaknesses and outright disabilities had been identified when I was still in school. How would my life have been different? Testing and diagnosis can be important, but they aren’t always an unadulterated good. I can think of some diagnoses that certainly would have helped, and others that probably would have my my life miserable. I can also think of some that never would have been identified, even today, some of which have been the most importance to my development.

A recent post on the Eide Neurolearning blog discusses the development of fluid reasoning in children, and the consequent capacity for analogical thinking. “In our clinic, we often see wide variations in the abilities of children to reason analogically. And as remarkable as it is to see a young child able to reason fluidly, it's equally surprising how this gift may be missed or under-appreciated by even the most well-meaning teacher and parent.” Because “Analogical reasoning is important for virtually all inventive or creative work.” the failure to identify this ability fairly early can have future consequences.

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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.

Thanks to a helpful comment that was posted here recently, I’ve made my first rule for blogging: Don’t introduce a topic until you’re ready to expand on it. My view of the blog as a chain of related ideas isn’t necessarily what others see. Readers, especially new ones, see the current post and whatever others they may choose at random, and the relationships, even when they exist, aren’t exactly shouting their presence. So, the post on acceleration was left hanging out by itself, waiting for me to come back and carry on with the theme it started.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that until I was ready to introduce the idea of high cognitives, which I’ve now done. The article is here. Reading it first will give you the necessary background for this post.

The high cognitive concept is vital to determining whether acceleration is advisable, and what form it should take. In general, acceleration carries forward what we might call the philosophy of education: that children are learners who have to guided along a predetermined curriculum. In complete opposition to this, we have high cognitives who are thinkers as well as learners. Their interests generally include a wide range of subjects about which they are forming opinions and tentative theories. They are also noticing and critiquing errors in what they read or are told by adults, not merely factual errors, but errors in logic and sense.

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A large proportion of my life is centered on the internet, which would seem to make me either a geek with no real life, or a loser who escapes real life via the net. There’s a good bit of overlap between the two, and at least a smidgeon of truth. But over the last couple of months I’ve begun to look at the internet in a new way that’s still evolving in my mind.

My impression is that, even for those who recognize the resources available on the web, it’s still not much more than a supplement to “real” education and real life. Real knowledge exists out there in the three dimensional world, and everything on the net runs a poor second.  I was past that simplistic notion but I hadn’t gone too much beyond it.

The day that changed was the day I fully understood the niche I’ve been working in for so long, and how important the web has been to its development. I already knew that nobody else was doing what I’ve been doing—creating a unique body of work in a stagnant but important area of knowledge. What I finally realized was that my laboratory has been the internet. Without thinking about it as such, I’ve spent the last few years doing field research, and doing it without all the usual supports (necessities)—grant money, colleagues’ oversight and advice, institutional approval, etc.  

And that changes everything. It’s a watershed, in a way that I can’t fully grasp yet. I do know that if I can grasp it—if others can grasp it—it will be a major shift in the way intelligent self-sufficient people conduct their education and their lives. Maybe that’s why it suddenly felt like the right time to build the website.

Early reading ability is considered one of the signs of high IQ in a young child. Even so, reading is a kind of stepchild in considerations of giftedness. It's a basic and necessary skill, and it's expected that everyone will eventually gain an adequate proficiency. Many people don't, however, and a barely functional level of literacy is rapidly becoming the norm, facts which don't seem to cause much concern.

Extraordinary reading skills and the love of reading don't even count for much. In school, they're brushed aside as almost irrelevant. After all, the other students will catch up, and then the early reader won't stand out.

But reading has implications. It isn't just a skill that enables you to read labels, follow instructions, or get a job. How well a person reads, how much they read, and why they read are important details. And they're especially important for gifted education.

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I always have so many possible blog topics floating through my head that I really appreciate it when someone saves me the trouble of developing one of them. It's even better when I find that they look at a subject very much the way I do. Sometimes I get a case of "I wish I'd said it first," but not too often, and certainly not in the case of this blog post I discovered a few days ago.

Education is changing in a lot of ways, and the internet is responsible for much of the change. Unfortunately, the public education establishment remains determinedly a decade or so behind the times, but for anyone who's perfectly happy learning on their own, the web is a resource of endless riches. Mellory notes that "So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things." She goes on to develop an idea that I've thought about quite often, that the apps and technologies begin to create something entirely new rather than merely a new version of something old. Her January 17 post is supposed to be the first of several on the topic of converging technologies and their influence on education. I haven't had the time to track down any followup, but it should be worth the effort. In the meantimes, here's a post worth reading for anyone interested in the broader issues in education.

http://mellory.blogspot.com/2006/09/evolution-of-online-autodidact.html

If you're an average person, millions before you have already figured out most of what you need to know to get through life. How to behave, what to think, what to believe, what to buy. All you have to do is pay attention, follow their example, and you're home free. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. But some don't have such an easy time of it. They go through life not quite being able to figure out why things are done this way and not that way. Or why some things aren't to be talked about, and certainly not questioned.

They take a close look at what we call common sense and find it lacking—in logic, in depth, in consistency. They see that the world runs mostly on common sense, and that it doesn't run very well. But it doesn't take very long to realize that nobody appreciates someone poking and prying into their reality, especially if the result is serious questions about that reality. If you haven't realized that by the second or third grade, then you might just as well learn to go along and get along. The wheel has already been invented; just get with the program.

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"Novelty is more efficient at boosting general learning efficiency than repetition alone." Finally, a study that lays low the idea that mere repetition of material is the best way to enhance learning. For some of us who struggled through school, trying, and largely failing, to memorize large amounts of material, this comes as no surprise.

Dr Emrah Düzel, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, has found that “ 'Current practice by behavioural psychologists aims to improve memory through repeatedly exposing a person to information – just as we do when we revise for an exam. This study shows that revising is more effective if you mix new facts in with the old. You actually learn better, even though your brain is also tied up with new information.' "

It's only in the last few years that I've realized I learn primarily in a contextual way. My "obsessive" study of subjects that interest me has allowed me to learn in the way that apparently best fits my brain—the same material presented in many different contexts. In school, material is usually presented in a single textbook, and the supposition is that learning will take place with repetition of the same material over and over again. No novelty, no context. A true nightmare for people who learn the way I do.

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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."

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