High Cognitive Minds

Little by little, the characteristics so typical of the highly gifted are being de-pathologized--by the people who pathologized them in the first place. I suppose we should be grateful for being given permission to be ourselves, and not carp about it, but carping is what I do best. I have my list of the Phrases I Hate to Hear: "you think too much," "why do you have to analyze everything to death," and my very favorite--"why don't you get out and socialize more?"

Psychologists are finally coming around to the idea that mental health
doesn't absolutely require that you have a flock of friends, party the week-ends away, and spend a good portion of your time on the phone, chatting about the latest ephemera. You can be a loner and be okay. It's a pleasant surprise to read that "Introverts aren't just less sociable than extroverts; they also engage with the world in fundamentally different ways. While outgoing people savor the nuances of social interaction, loners tend to focus more on their own ideas—and on stimuli that don't register in the minds of others."

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I always have so many possible blog topics floating through my head that I really appreciate it when someone saves me the trouble of developing one of them. It's even better when I find that they look at a subject very much the way I do. Sometimes I get a case of "I wish I'd said it first," but not too often, and certainly not in the case of this blog post I discovered a few days ago.

Education is changing in a lot of ways, and the internet is responsible for much of the change. Unfortunately, the public education establishment remains determinedly a decade or so behind the times, but for anyone who's perfectly happy learning on their own, the web is a resource of endless riches. Mellory notes that "So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things." She goes on to develop an idea that I've thought about quite often, that the apps and technologies begin to create something entirely new rather than merely a new version of something old. Her January 17 post is supposed to be the first of several on the topic of converging technologies and their influence on education. I haven't had the time to track down any followup, but it should be worth the effort. In the meantimes, here's a post worth reading for anyone interested in the broader issues in education.

http://mellory.blogspot.com/2006/09/evolution-of-online-autodidact.html

I've been having a fascinating email conversation with a new friend, and one of the topics we stumbled into was "thinking." We found that we've both had the experience of realizing that most people don't really think much. It's such a simple word, and something we take for granted. In fact, the whole world functions as if people do think. Economists have always assumed that people act on the basis of information, making rational decisions about their lives on the basis of that information. Increasingly though, studies have shown that people, just as often as not, make decisions which are counter-productive, and which are detrimental to their interests rather than beneficial.

This is really a curious state of affairs. We've been persuaded that all people need for conducting their affairs in an intelligent way is education and accurate information. There are thousands of questions we could ask at this point, starting with "Then why is the world in such a mess?" For the answers, we usually depend on reliable scapegoats: greedy corporations, power-hungry dictators, crooked politicians, etc., etc. We do not ask whether the average person has the capacity to think rationally. It's a question that doesn't just spring to mind, but it's also a question that would open a very ugly can of worms if it were to be asked seriously.

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I think that a good part of my problem with this blog is that I'm essaying, rather than blogging. A double entendre, of course, and meant to be. Having started out to be informative, I've let myself be trapped in the need to be informative at all times. It's the same problem I've wrestled with constantly in trying to crank out a book. I managed to talk myself out the belief that a book on creativity and intelligence would be legitimate only if it sounded very professorial. But that was only the first hurdle. I'm still jumping, largely because trying to write more than 500 words or so at a time is usually beyond me. Staying on topic is something like torture when every idea sprouts a multitude of offshoots, all demanding their own five minutes of my attention.

But if I had an A—>B—>C type of mind, then I wouldn't be who I am; I wouldn't see the patterns that evolve out of everyday life or be constantly peering behind the curtain at the man we're supposed to ignore. Maybe what it comes down to is that the facts which can be easily seen and written down in books are not only not very interesting, they may not be as important as we're led to believe they are. They're certainly not interesting to me, except insofar as others' fascination with them tells me something about the average mind.

So... although this blog has driven itself right off the rails, there's no predicting its future direction. It may simply wind up riding off in all directions at once. That's fine by me. I hope it's fine by you.