High Cognitive Minds

If there is any single thing that prevents the development of a viable approach to teaching the intellectually gifted, it’s the idea that giftedness is all about learning, about subject matter. It’s the central assumption in debates about acceleration and enrichment. It’s central to ideas about achievement. It’s the reason why research and discussions have gone round and round year after year, reproducing what has already been done to death, and producing nothing of value, either to educational theory or to gifted students. Gifted students learn faster, better, more. That’s the essence of gifted education.

How did I come to these conclusions? By using a cognitive skill that I’ve had all my life. Nobody identified it for me; I wasn’t taught how useful it is or shown how to develop it. It’s one of many skills that I had to discover for myself. And I can’t help wondering how my life might have been different if the discovery and development of such skills had been part of my education. How would the lives of hundreds of thousands of intellectually gifted students been different if it had been part of their education?

This skill has been noted now and then by various writers, and it’s even been given a name: pattern-seeking. But that’s as far as interest in it has gone; it’s just one item in a typical list of gifted characteristics. I suspect that the name isn’t even accurate, if we consider seeking as a conscious activity. Pattern-forming would be closer to what goes on in my mind—an entirely unconscious process that eventually results in the recognition of patterns, just as thinking eventually results (we hope) in ideas.

"Humans do not easily perceive patterns when relationships are obscured by noise (or random exceptions). Even fairly substantial correlations between two variables can look chaotic to all but the most discerning eye." Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius

It may have been this statement that brought my talent for pattern-formation into full consciousness. And it isn’t a psychological need to bring order out of chaos, for making sense of the world, as one writer suggested, thereby dismissing it. It’s a tool for bringing order out of chaos, for making sense of the world. Humans have always sought order, which can be the difference between life and death, progress and decline, but it wasn’t until computers came along that they had a tool capable of working with large amounts of data. Statistics are one way of revealing relationships that “are obscured by noise or random exceptions.” But I doubt that there is a computer program capable of determining that the literature of giftedness is highly repetitive and contains few original ideas.

Computers can only look for what they have been instructed to look for. It takes a human mind to detect a possible pattern that the computer can be programmed to validate or disprove. This is where computers fail us. This is where gifted education fails us. I can look back over more than twenty years of reading the literature on giftedness and recognize that I started noticing its patterns right from the beginning, long before I was conscious of the ability. Now that I’m aware of it, it’s a tool that I can use more effectively. No thanks to my education.