High Cognitive Minds

There’s a kind of morbid fascination, for me, in seeing the many ways in which psychology fails to come anywhere near being a science. Educational psychology, in particular, suffers from researchers’ biases that wouldn’t be tolerated in other areas. And one of the most common biases is for the researchers to think they know what they’re seeing.

Eide Neurolearing Blog’s most recent entry centers on the Cookie Thief test. “When you show this picture to adults and ask them to describe it, the usual response is a dry recitation of what people, objects, and events are being seen in the picture.

“But in many kids (often creative ones, young engineers, artists, or gifted storytellers), we get the most insightful, charming, and sometimes downright devious responses.”

The assumption here is that adults have lost the ability to think outside the box. The Eides ask: “Why is it that kids seems so much better at out-of-the-box thinking compared to adults? One reason may be that common expectations of becoming adults include become more organized, being able to plan and anticipate more events, and become more consistent in our behaviors.”

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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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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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