High Cognitive Minds

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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