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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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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You can be on the right path all your life without knowing it until you arrive and recognize that it’s where you wanted to be. But I can’t recommend it as the best way to find your life’s work. There are too many side paths, all of them easy ways to get lost and never find your way back. Part of the process of recognition is looking back to see how it happened. That’s rarely an easy task because, while life is chronological, memory isn’t. And sometimes it’s only when you learn something about yourself in the present that you can look back to something in the past and understand its relevance.

I can look back now and recognize that I’ve been “doing” psychology my whole life. Many of my earliest memories are about being engaged (involuntarily) in activities that I didn’t understand, with strangers who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and who were enjoying it. Unlike them, I was confused, and even afraid, but tried to follow their lead and do what was apparently expected of me. These were my first reactions to school and to places that my mother apparently thought were the right thing for a child. Why did I understand so little of what was going on around me, and why did everyone else seem to be in the know?

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There’s a short discussion in the forum’s Welcome to High Cognitive Minds thread that keeps tugging at me, and this post is partly a response. Mer said “There aren't a lot of personal stories that detail other people's experiences as intellectual outliers living outside of academia. Where are they?” One of the ways we learn about ourselves in by reading the experiences of others like us. And Mer’s right--there are darned few examples of highly gifted people writing about their own development. I can think of two reasons for that. The first is the one I mentioned in my reply to her--we tend to be private people. Given that introversion is more likely as IQ goes up, that makes sense. But the other reason may be more influential.

We’ve learned not to talk about our intelligence, our knowledge, our hopes and ambitions. We learned that lesson in a variety of ways--by being ignored, criticized, or made fun of. By being accused of snobbery, showing off, or of thinking that we know everything. For many of us, school taught us much more about the need to stay hidden than it did about developing our abilities or finding a path that we could devote ourselves to. If you’re accomplished and famous, it’s okay to write about your childhood, the books you loved to read, and the strange ideas that you had about how the world worked. If you’re not famous, your autobiography would get comments like “Why should we be interested in this nobody?” Or “A boring display of ego.” And then it would sink like a stone, going into the remainder bins, and then off to the shredder.

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I think that a good part of my problem with this blog is that I'm essaying, rather than blogging. A double entendre, of course, and meant to be. Having started out to be informative, I've let myself be trapped in the need to be informative at all times. It's the same problem I've wrestled with constantly in trying to crank out a book. I managed to talk myself out the belief that a book on creativity and intelligence would be legitimate only if it sounded very professorial. But that was only the first hurdle. I'm still jumping, largely because trying to write more than 500 words or so at a time is usually beyond me. Staying on topic is something like torture when every idea sprouts a multitude of offshoots, all demanding their own five minutes of my attention.

But if I had an A—>B—>C type of mind, then I wouldn't be who I am; I wouldn't see the patterns that evolve out of everyday life or be constantly peering behind the curtain at the man we're supposed to ignore. Maybe what it comes down to is that the facts which can be easily seen and written down in books are not only not very interesting, they may not be as important as we're led to believe they are. They're certainly not interesting to me, except insofar as others' fascination with them tells me something about the average mind.

So... although this blog has driven itself right off the rails, there's no predicting its future direction. It may simply wind up riding off in all directions at once. That's fine by me. I hope it's fine by you.

There's a quote from John Stuart Mill's autobiography that has always tickled me because it illustrates so well how we make assumptions about other people based on our own interests and abilities. He received a classical education typical of the time, so Homer's Iliad was naturally part of his curriculum.

He said "...It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it
became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted:
I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through.
I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste
apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think,
observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of
narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I
should have expected both a priori and from my individual
experience."

I wonder how old he was when he discovered that his taste in literature wasn't shared by the average schoolboy. Since he was educated at home, by his father, I imagine that it was at least a few years before real-life experience taught him differently.

Even after years of such experience, and in full knowledge of how different my mind and my interests are from the norm, I still have those moments of impatience when assumption takes over. "Why would anyone say something that stupid?" "Doesn't she know anything at all about...?" I'm not sure it's possible to reach a point where hard-won knowledge about education and intelligence always rule, rather than the assumptions that we'd like to pride ourselves on having left behind.

There are times when I find it impossible to write. More accurately, it's almost impossible to think in an organized, coherent way.  Either there are too many ideas swirling around in my mind, competing for attention, or I'm mentally burned out and can barely think at all. And I wonder whether there's a sense in which mental burnout is real and not just a more or less meaningless figure of speech? I wish I understood what's going on in there.

Intellectually gifted people get used to being told "you think too much," and maybe that's part of the problem. We not only think a lot, we also tend to think about thinking, which sometimes leads nowhere useful and burns up energy that could better be used in other endeavors. Is my mind running away with itself because I have Attention Deficit Disorder or is that just one of the penalties of having an unusually active brain? Have I dropped into a temporary mental limbo because my brain is exhausted from so much hard work, or am I depressed? Am I totally engrossed with my current project because that's a pre-requisite for creativity or because I'm a geek, and if I'm a geek is it because I'm a person with Asperger's? Where does one draw the line in determining what's a disability and what is merely a trait that needs to be understood and managed?

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If any of my readers think they detect a strong streak of cynicism in my posts, they're right. I suffer from a sort of intellectual schizophrenia in which despair, cynicism, and apathy battle with hope and the determination to make a difference, however small, before I exit this life. I'm well aware that the kind of writing I do and the subjects I cover will appeal to a minute fraction of all those who stumble across this blog. So why do I write?

I don't have a great deal of faith in the future of humanity. I do have a strong belief that the people best able to deal with the realities and complexities of modern life, and help ameliorate some of the worst problems, will be found among the most intelligent and imaginative among us. But the obstacles to using one's mind as it should be used are many, and the most significant one is the near-total lack of the necessary education. Nobody taught me the many subjects with which I've developed a reasonable speaking acquaintance, or the one in which I consider myself fairly expert. Nobody taught me logic, the use of scientific thinking, the need for objectivity and impartiality, or respect for facts and rationality. I learned all of these on my own, over many years, with a lot of trial and error and backtracking from dead ends. And the questions never leave my mind: why was I forced to spend so much time learning for myself what should have been part of my formal education? Why should so much of my life have been taken up in the quest for the knowledge I needed that actually putting it to use comes at the very end of my life, when enthusiasm is hard to come by, and the necessary energy is so often insufficient?

So I write just in case I can strike a spark in one or two minds. Maybe because of something they read here a very few will be inspired to fill the gaps in their education and self-knowledge, and find in themselves the ability to do something really worthwhile—before they're too old and tired. The subtitle of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, one of my favorite books, is "Science as a Candle in the Dark." There are fewer candles every year, and we are left mostly with sputtering matches constantly in danger of going out forever. I have very little faith in the usefulness of any effort, but I'll probably keep striking matches until there aren't any more to strike.

I remember my school years as mostly one long stretch of misery. The main feature was boredom—never ending, inescapable, and excruciating. In the years since, I've thought about boredom many times, and experienced it many times, but never with the intensity I felt when I was a student. So I still remember the shock and resentment I felt years back when I read a book on underachievement in gifted children. Typically, the book's concentration was on getting children to do what adults thought they should be doing. There were all sorts of "interventions" possible, mostly having to do with increasing motivation and enforcing discipline. The author's attitude was that teachers and parents shouldn't put up with complaints of boredom, which were merely grabs for attention. Underachieving children were described as fundamentally manipulative, and boredom was just one of the tools they used in their campaign against adult expectations.

Of course, there wasn't even the remotest hint that it might be useful to ask children why they were bored, and what being bored meant to them. That would have taken time and patience, plus the initial willingness to believe that boredom was real and that it might be a word for something the children felt but had no words to express.  

Even as an adult, as much as I've thought about it, I've never been able to get a firm grip on boredom, define just what it is and why it can sometimes be so awful. But a few nights ago, reading Hothouse Kids: the Dilemma of the Gifted Child, I came across a couple of quotes that helped me think about it more productively. "Boredom is integral to the process of taking one's time." And "If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation."

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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.

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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.

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