High Cognitive Minds

I just came across an article about the difficulties of growing up gifted and, as usual, found that it was a series of hits and misses. Elaine Aron, the author of several popular books on the highly sensitive person, is a Jungian and a clinical psychologist. Both are powerful filters, and the article demonstrates the limitations of both.

The article was an outcome of her learning about the sudden and unforeseen suicide of a gifted boy in early adolescence. Much of what she has to say is fairly general, and well worth reading, though I do think that her Jungian outlook is less than valuable in considering the problems of the gifted. What caught me up short was that, after talking about mood swings and the many sources of such mood shifts in adolescence, she said "One certain factor in the case of the suicide of this gifted boy was that he was too young to have much experience with sudden mood shifts in the direction of the unbearable emotions I’ve also written about in this issue."

Not only is she wrong; she's dangerously wrong.

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Does the human mind have unused potential? Is the mind still evolving? What is a reasonable line between our imaginings possible realities? Neuropsychology studies and speculates. Literature, particularly science fiction, imagines. I study and wonder.

I've often thought that Frank Herbert's mentats could be far more than just an author's fantasy about the mind's possibilities. Herbert did a lot of that kind of fantasizing, as have other authors such as Poul Anderson and Olaf Stapledon. I've always been attracted to books incorporating those ideas because I sense that they hold a germ of truth. They imagine things which don't exist, but I often have the feeling that some authors write about things they've actually experienced, even if it's only in fleeting moments. Anyone who's used hallucinogens, meditated, or used various methods of mental development knows that we can see and understand far more than our everyday world. The question, of course, is whether these experiences are mere hallucinations or have a kind of reality.

Extraordinary capacities do pop up now and then, and have been extensively documented. Lightning calculation is just one of them. There are real minds of real people that, with the proper education and training, could far exceed normal mental functioning. We wouldn't need them to supplant computers, as they did in Dune, but to do things that computers can't. We need such minds to deal with levels of complexity and abstraction that computers may never be equipped to manipulate. We need minds which can detect patterns, which are capable of looking back into the past and forward into the future, noting the consequences of past actions or inactions, incorporating today's knowledge and information, and projecting all that into reasonable future approximations. We need what various spiritual traditions call the "perfected" or "completed" human, alive to the wonder and complexity of the universe. We need the reality behind the imaginings of Herbert and other speculative writers.