High Cognitive Minds

Two books have been added to the Books: Giftedness page. They are High IQ Kids, and Losing Our Minds.

Societies are created by minds which are similar enough to function in similar ways. In turn, societies maintain their structure by shaping the minds within them to think and act in similar ways. This is the process of socialization and acculturation.

Richard Dawkins wrote: A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. He could have added that the process is automatic and largely unconscious and that, most of the time, it works perfectly. The very existence of societies, cultures, of whole civilizations, their stability and continuity, depends on each new generation's unquestioning acceptance of prevailing mores and customs, and that, in turn, depends on the way the human brain functions. Most children do absorb, quite unconsciously, the beliefs, the behaviors, and the standards of their culture. They are not shaped by evolution to question, to analyze, or to criticize..

But if societies are not to stagnate they must also have individuals, even if only a few, who challenge rather than accept what they see around them, who upset the established order with their ideas, their visions, their creativity. Evolution does seem to have provided those individuals sparingly but steadily throughout history. And if we are ever to have the benefits of evolution, without depending wholly on sheer chance, we must learn to recognize the signs of creative power in the young.

I’ve discussed my reasons for believing that while limited acceleration has its benefits, it isn’t the answer to fulfilling highly gifted students’ needs for mental stimulation and challenge.  Is there a useful and viable alternative to simply shooting through the educational system like a greased pig? I would like to say that there is, but I can’t. What I offer is a very rough and fragmentary start toward developing such an alternative. Parents who are themselves gifted can use it a jumping off place for working with their gifted child. Teachers whose knowledge extends outside the course textbook can also use it as a source of ideas. I present it as a set of guideline, not a curriculum.

At the moment, the guidelines are divided into four categories: cognitive traits, thinking skills, psychology, and knowledge base. Cognitive traits are biological, and are the substrate on which everything else rests. They include memory, temperament, predisposition to thinking styles: verbal or visual, contextual or linear. Thinking skills include analysis/synthesis, pattern-seeking, problem-finding, theorizing/testing. Psychology is about normal thinking and emotional responses, and how the gifted differ, with the aim of adapting to and living comfortably with the non-gifted. Knowledge base: Identifying personal interests, tracking them over time, and making connections between them. Cross disciplinary expansion of interests, making the knowledge base as broad and rich as possible.

Some of the overall goals are to develop mental flexibility and openness, and the ability to think clearly; to encourage and enhance creativity; to discover the pleasures of intellectual exploration; to shape the environment in a way that’s appropriate for the individual, and to create a rich and satisfying life. Modern education rarely supports or even acknowledges these goals, but for high cognitives they are as essential as learning subject matter. They also take time, not the hour to hour schedules of schooling, but the developmental time of the individual. Brains have to mature, understanding and insight have to develop with increasing age and knowledge. Schools do not and cannot support these needs.

Normal schooling actually serves as an impediment to individual development to the extent that it fills the student’s time and restricts learning to defined paths. Carried to extremes, acceleration merely continues that pattern, consuming ever more time and energy that should be used in more productive ways. Rather than provide new options, it just speeds the student toward those that society has already defined and approved. There must be some reason why “…creative achievers tend to discontinue their education when they feel that they have learned enough to continue on their own. They may simply become bored with formal instruction, or disenchanted with what formal institutions have to offer.” Personal and intellectual growth can’t flourish when education is simply a race to the goal line.

Nearly everybody’s shopping, cleaning, wrapping, cooking, so the internet is slowing down. I’m in the middle of an exciting and thought-provoking book, so I’m not much inclined to a lot of writing. The next post on acceleration is written but needs an extensive overhaul. As usual, I went off on a tangent and need to get it back on track.

When I’m reading a good book, I underline and even make notes along the way (only one of the reasons why I prefer to buy books rather then borrow them from the library), but I’ve never developed a good method for keeping track of those notes and references. So, when I’m writing or working out some ideas, it can be almost impossible to find something that I remember from my reading. The last update of a program I use almost daily, Notebook, added Cornell pages to its options. I’d never heard of Cornell pages and found it a useful concept, though not one that I had any immediate use for. But I keep running into references to it on the web, and the light bulb finally went on. So I’m about to start using it while reading—paper notebooks, though; reading in front of the computer isn’t exactly my idea of pleasure.

Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence will get the Cornell treatment because it’s clear that it’s going to be one of my major reference sources. The only bad thing about using paper is the grubby job of reading my own handwriting and transcribing to the computer.

On Intelligence is by the inventor of the Palm Pilot, and even though he’s worked mostly in technology, his true love is the brain. The book presents his theory of intelligence, which, so far, makes more sense than anything I’ve run across. His interest is in developing true intelligence in machines, while mine is in developing true intelligence in humans. There are so many parallels. He said “...we have no productive theories about what intelligence is or how the brain works as a whole.” And one of the quotes that has been engraved on my memory for years is “...a strong theoretical framework for considering the phenomenon of giftedness does not exist.”

Thanks to a helpful comment that was posted here recently, I’ve made my first rule for blogging: Don’t introduce a topic until you’re ready to expand on it. My view of the blog as a chain of related ideas isn’t necessarily what others see. Readers, especially new ones, see the current post and whatever others they may choose at random, and the relationships, even when they exist, aren’t exactly shouting their presence. So, the post on acceleration was left hanging out by itself, waiting for me to come back and carry on with the theme it started.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that until I was ready to introduce the idea of high cognitives, which I’ve now done. The article is here. Reading it first will give you the necessary background for this post.

The high cognitive concept is vital to determining whether acceleration is advisable, and what form it should take. In general, acceleration carries forward what we might call the philosophy of education: that children are learners who have to guided along a predetermined curriculum. In complete opposition to this, we have high cognitives who are thinkers as well as learners. Their interests generally include a wide range of subjects about which they are forming opinions and tentative theories. They are also noticing and critiquing errors in what they read or are told by adults, not merely factual errors, but errors in logic and sense.

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If most of the world’s population was color-blind, a color-blind expert on art would be entirely possible. This expert could talk sensibly about the history or art, about various artists and their styles, and even about the elements that go into a work of art. He could discuss balance, line, contrast, and innumerable other details that make up a painting. What he wouldn’t be able to discuss, except in a very limited way, is color. Indeed, if a uniquely-sighted artist created a painting out of small dots of color, the expert wouldn’t even be able to identify the objects in the painting. He would condemn the canvas as a chaotic mass of meaningless dots, and most of the world’s art admirers would agree with him. In such a world, the artist who developed pointillism would have been laughed out of the art world and promptly forgotten.

Protection of professional reputation and career, along with biases in education and training are two significant reasons for the continued lack of information about intellectual traits. But they may not even be the most important reasons. The most important is never, as far as I’m aware, discussed publicly. We could call it the color-blind expert syndrome, and  I’ve found it everywhere in the literature.

Ellen Winner has written about gifted children and about art and by all professional measures, qualifies as an expert in those areas. Yet these quotes from her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities strongly call into question any experiential understanding. Of one gifted child, she said “... he described pictures that he discerned in the grain of wood, and angels and harps in the shapes of clouds — further examples of a need to create visual stimulation for himself.” And of another: “...I would say that underlying all his behavior was a desire to make his environment stimulating. This explains his persistent questions, his creation of math problems, his scientific theorizing, and his omnivorous reading.”

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Sometimes I wonder if the lack of real information about high levels of intelligence is just as much about fear as it is about insufficient data. It’s a thought that occurs to me fairly often, and it was triggered once again by High IQ Kids, the latest addition to my long shelf of books about giftedness and creativity. Titles don’t always tell you exactly what a book is about, but they do usually offer a clue, especially in a crowded field like gifted children. But “High IQ Kids” could mean anything from about 125 IQ, on up. It’s only when you turn the book over that you see the truth, halfway down the back cover. After a typically generic intro, the subject is finally revealed: “Raising or educating highly, exceptionally, or profoundly gifted kids can be daunting.” It’s almost as if the extremes of giftedness have to be backed into slowly, so as not to offend anyone.

As if to reinforce this feeling, I got into a conversation with a grad student who’s thought a lot about the state of gifted education and wonders if there is any useful role for him. One of his advisors told him that writing anything in support of gifted education, whether in his dissertation or a published paper, would harm his future career. One example doesn’t necessarily mean that the attitude is wide-spread, but the way in which the academic literature determinedly steers around long-standing problems, and avoids even the suggestion of anything truly innovative makes it a reasonable possibility.

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Every once in a while something that I understand and take for granted shines out in a new light and I’m overwhelmed with how completely alien it is to other people. The difference is between knowing it with my intellect and feeling the emotional impact of it. Linda Silverman’s visual-spatial/auditory-sequential theory has been rolling around in my mind for several years. It’s a contribution that I’ve always acknowledged as important even while its inadequacy plagued me. For a long time I thought that it was just a matter of a weakness in how she defined the two modes of learning and thinking. I eventually realized the problem was far greater, but I still didn’t see the implications.

In her book, Upside-Down Brilliance: the Visual-Spatial Learner, she says “Some of my highly gifted, complex friends find this dichotomy too simplistic. Maybe it is. I certainly don’t mean to imply that people are completely one or the other.” I’ve probably read that a dozen times, and never really grasped it. Because there are people who don’t fit conveniently along the continuum that she assumes is an adequate way of looking at the variations.

The problem lies partly in her conception of visual-spatial as some kind of 3-D pictorial processing, an idea which she, a non-visualizer, accepted at face value from someone involved in the arts. Maybe it was her acceptance of this idea that allowed her to forget a statement she made years earlier: “Interviews with adults suggest the existence of other constellations of spatial abilities less related to the visual domain...” That possibility wasn’t within the range of her interests and research, so it wasn’t pursued.

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