High Cognitive Minds

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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I once read a description of gifted people as tending to be dissatisfied and oppositional. I don't remember whether the author saw that as good or bad, but I suspect he came down on the negative side. I think any kind of creativity comes out of dissatisfaction, either with the way things are, or the sense of something missing. And I suppose being dissatisfied automatically makes you oppositional.

I don't know whether it's the same thing when a child is labeled with the term "oppositional disorder." There are plenty of children who are angry and out of control for one reason or other, but I wonder how many are stuck with a psychiatric label when there are good and sufficient reasons for their attitude and behavior. Maybe some of them are already rebelling against the confines of the straight line they're compelled to walk, against the confines of the boxes to which society wants to confine them. Maybe they sense something they can't name, something they know is wrong and needs to be fixed, or an empty space where something should be.

Jacques Barzun's book, The House of Intellect, is one of those that inspires if you're willing to give it the slow, thoughtful reading it demands. Published in 1959, some of the references are dated, and much of it seems to come from an entirely different world than the one we live in now. It's a measure of how much things can change in such a short time.

Even given the current cutting back and outright axing of arts programs in schools, and the near abandonmnent of foreign languages the following paragraphs ring true today. They particularly highlight one of my ongoing concerns, that even the most highly gifted came out of school and college poorly equipped for any kind of intellectual life. There may be less lip service paid to creativity in schools these days, but not because it is being served better; there is simply no time for such "frills." But the self-esteem movement charges on, with the result that our bright young people give more attention to how they feel than what they know.  

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Autobiography of an Autodidact, Steven Utley

"For reasons which now escape me but must have been pretty darn important at the time, I once needed to know the definition of “Planck-Wheeler length.” Perhaps it was just the name. Perhaps I supposed that it must be something really special and magnificent if two people (named Planck and Wheeler, I also supposed) had been required for the job of measuring it."

"In school I was a total washout at science, never attaining even the minimal skill necessary to clear out the chemistry lab with a stink bomb. College-level biology (a required course) found me chronically incapable of recalling the four different kinds of purine or pyrimidine bases to which the RNA molecule’s string of ribose and phosphate groups are linked; uracil was, for some reason, easy to remember, but as for the others — adeline, guano, and ovaltine? The professor didn’t think so, and probably he was right."

"In any event, many long years afterward, for whatever damn reason, I looked up 'Planck-Wheeler length' and discovered, as had Planck and Wheeler and who knows how many others before me, that it is 1.62 x 10-33 centimeters, 'the length scale below which' (according to my source, Nova) 'space as we know it ceases to exist and becomes quantum foam.' "

Quantum foam naturally lead to singularities, and finally Utley was content, or so he thought. "I was content, that is, for a while. Then I began, irresistibly, to wonder what in fudge singularities might be — which brings up another problem with real actual science. Learning one fact usually means having to go chasing off after 837 or even as many as 83733 other facts.

"That, anyway, is how I became the compulsive autodidact I am today, helplessly pursuing my self-education wherever it may lead, and without a coed in sight."

And so it goes.

For the rest of the story: http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue185/autodidact.html

“There are many different aspects of perfectionism (perfectionism researchers have identified over 20), but they can be sorted into three useful groups:self-oriented,other-oriented,and societally imposed.” Perfectionism: Bane or Blessing, Joanna Fletcher

We live in a world in which most people are satisfied with different degrees of “good enough.” So maybe it’s natural that “perfectionism” is considered a problem sufficiently serious to engage the energies of researchers. More than 20 aspects of perfectionism! That’s pretty impressive, but not something to really worry about. After all, perfectionism can be cured, with the help of experts who are trained in the arts of “intervention.” Educational psychologists love that term and have a seemingly unlimited number of ways in which they can apply it to the gifted.

Is a gifted child too introverted, or too intense? Does she have too few friends? Is she an underachiever? Is she too much of a perfectionist? They’re all curable, with the right interventions. Admittedly, these can all be real problems for the individual. But what about when they’re not problems except to those who establish and defend the norms? When intervention becomes interference?

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"The experience of the gifted adult is the experience of an unusual consciousness, an extraordinary mind whose perceptions and judgments may be different enough to require an extraordinary courage. Large numbers of gifted adults, aware not only of their mental capacities but of the degree to which those capacities set them apart, understand this.

"For many, however, a complete honoring of the self must begin with discovering what sort of consciousness, what sort of mind they possess. That their own perceptions and judgments are unusual may have been obvious since childhood, but they may have spent their lives assuming that this difference was a deficit, a fault, even a defect of character or a sign of mental illness."

"These gifted children have disappeared into the vast territory of adulthood. Have they disappeared in the same way prodigies do? No matter how powerful the adult talent of a grownup child prodigy, he is no longer a prodigy, because the term is linked not solely to ability, but also to age. The adult, even if continuing to excel in his earlier domain, is forever an ex-prodigy. Does the gifted child, grown up, similarly become an ex-gifted child?"

For the full article: http://www.stephanietolan.com/gifted_ex-child.htm

One of the frequently cited attributes of introverts is their limited capacity for being with other people. But, like so much else that is supposedly true of the gifted, I've found this to be a half truth. The exhaustion that comes from being too long with other people isn't just a matter of introversion or oversensitivity. What kind of people are we talking about, and how many? Long conversations with one or two people whose minds are like mine is stimulating rather than exhausting. Fatigue sets in eventually, of course, but it's not the kind that comes from interacting with normals.

Interaction with normals is enervating because it requires you to slow down to their thinking speed, to engage in ritualistic conversation which is largely empty of content, and to conceal your own knowledge and thinking style in order not to cause offense.  Conversation with a normal is more a role-playing game than a real conversation. In spite of the common belief that contentless ritualistic behavior is a normal and necessary part of human relationships, it has an uncomfortable similarity to the grooming rituals of monkeys.

For the highly gifted, frustration and boredom are an inherent part of this kind of interaction. It not only precludes the need to think, it may very well interfere with the ability to think. Normals seem to depend on routines which they can follow in comfort rather than making any effort to use their minds. But
the gifted forced into such rituals find their minds chafing and slowing down. It's exhausting and even painful. Escape is a relief, and avoidance becomes a weapon of self-defense.