High Cognitive Minds

I ran across this blog post yesterday, and it was pretty apropos my current trend of mind. There's an element of nastiness in it that I don't care for (the person the blogger is talking about, not the blogger), but I can understand the feelings, even if I wouldn't choose to express them in that way.

A college drop-out’s revenge

Speaking of a high school friend who was an extraordinary artist: "Paul failed to pursue art in college.  After struggling through general liberal arts classes for a few years, he dropped out of college to take jobs involving manual labor.  He has always been a diligent worker, but his jobs have never really challenged him.  When I spoke with Paul today, he indicated that he still has a passion to draw, but hasn’t pursued it. "

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I've been having a problem with this blog that's all too similar to the problem I used to have with people. Before I learned about intelligence and intellectual giftedness I wondered why most of the people around me seemed so stupid, why they didn't see things that were obvious, why they couldn't figure things out for themselves, why they were completely uninterested in learning anything that was a challenge, that would be useful to them, that would make their lives more interesting. Why was their thinking so limited, in so many ways? Eventually, as I learned more about them, I expected less from them, but that still left me thinking that if I could just find people with my kind of mind, the problem of intellectual companionship would cease to exist.

That didn't happen. Starting with MENSA and similar organizations, I found that high IQ didn't guarantee a commitment to learning, to the search for facts, for clarity, and understanding. It didn't guarantee a sensitivity to the world's complexity or an awareness of the patterns and cycles that dominate human life. Too often, I found myself asking the same question about those with high IQs that I had asked about the general run of people I met: Why are they so stupid?

You can probably see where this is going. Throughout the months of posting to this blog, the question has popped into my head over and over again: why can't they figure all this out for themselves? Why am I bothering to explain things about giftedness that should be perfectly obvious to the gifted? But that's mostly on the days when I wonder if being gifted even really matters, for most of us.

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