High Cognitive Minds

An article on underachievement and ways of motivating gifted underachievers who are working below their potential — Is a student who’s making all As working up to his potential? Is school achievement an adequate measure of potential?

One idea from various sources that sticks in my mind — students need a well-rounded education. Concentration on one or a few interests, especially if that interferes with curriculum requirements, is a bad thing. Students must be encouraged to balance their interests. Is the normal school curriculum a balanced education? Don’t outside interests broaden a student’s knowledge.

Is it possible that obsessive interests, pursued long enough are indicative of a talent and possible future intellectual creativity? Is it more important that a student exist within the very limited constraints of the typical curriculum or that they acknowledge and nourish their own needs?

Why are the people who are supposed to be the experts saying the same things and asking the same questions they’ve been saying and asking for at least fifty years? John D. Wasserman, Ph.D—associate professor at George Mason University, clinical neuropsychologist, expert on psychological testing. I read what he has to say and I’m going but? but! but...

“Exceptionally and profoundly gifted children...have been found to have qualitatively and quantitatively unique cognitive characteristics that differentiate them from intellectually gifted children performing at lower ranges of intellectually gifted ability (i.e., an IQ between 130 and 160).” Tell me something new, please.

“...the news media in every community will periodically cover an exceptionally or profoundly gifted child: a nine-month-old who names objects and uses words; an eighteen-month-old who knows the alphabet; a three-year-old who is able to read more than children’s books;...or a ten-year-old who graduates from high school.” These are wunder-kids, the prodigies who wow the crowds, but does that make them profoundly gifted? The fact is that the majority of these media wonders grow up, settle into unspectacular but comfortable careers, and are never heard of again.

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I’d just like to see

thinking come back

in style —

I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. You are the hottest, sexiest, most empowered generation ever. You’re in charge of your own evolution now that we’ve deciphered the DNA code. The future is going to be different. You can’t be bought off because there are just too many of you. You can make the world into anything you want. Open up all the world’s future possibilities. —Tim Leary

So what happened?

Found on an extraordinary page of mostly graphics, some with descriptions, some without. Collectively an incitement to thought and wonder. Collective Perception

Ainan Cawley. This seven year old prodigy’s name comes up fairly often in the search terms, twice in the last two days.  Today’s issue of the Times Online has an article about his father’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to find a university placement for him. Ainan’s extreme giftedness has naturally been a subject of interest to many people, an interest constantly promoted by his father, even to the extent of responding to letters to the editor, and answering questions or leaving comments about giftedness all over the web, always leaving the URL of his blog. I have no doubt that he will show up here in response to this post.

But what I’m interested in is encapsulated in his responser to a comment on the Times article. He said “It is far more harmful to ignore the intellectual needs of a prodigy, than to engage them.” The assumption that rapid acceleration and early college is the only way to avoid ignoring a child’s intellectual needs is at the heart of books like Accidental Genius, and of Mr. Cawley’s efforts to have Ainan admitted to college.

He is following in the footsteps of generations of parents trying to understand and encourage their children’s extraordinary abilities. It isn’t his fault, any more than it was the fault of Michael Kearney’s parents, who followed the same path, that more than fifty years of research into giftedness has nothing to offer them in the way of alternatives. The mother of “Adam,” one of the prodigies discussed in David Feldman’s 1986 book, Nature’s Gambit, was desperate to support her son’s intellectual development. At one point she asked how to find an Aristotle capable of educating Adam. It was clear that she had a much better understanding than most parents, including Mr Cawley, of the kind of education her son needed, but had no idea how to go about providing it.

Does it require an Aristotle to educate these children?

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A search term that brought someone to Gifted Mind recently was memory. Can you be considered gifted even if you have a poor memory?  It's not surprising that this is a worry for individuals who aren't sure they're gifted. In lists of gifted characteristics, you'll always find excellent memory, and the ability to learn quickly. Such lists are generalizations, and every item isn't applicable to everyone, but people tend to take each one as a requirement. If you're a low-energy person, you can't be gifted because one of the characteristics is high energy. If you don't have much of a sense of humor, you can't be gifted...

What is a poor memory? Charles Darwin said of himself that his memory was very poor. He generally had to reread something and then give himself time to mull it over before he grasped it well enough to form a judgement. His memory was slow, and knowing that has always given me comfort because I have the same kind of memory.

There are also types of information that I have trouble memorizing: numbers, codes, and random bits and pieces that can’t be fitted into a context. My problem with numbers is a real learning disability, but my inability to memorize random, disconnected facts is part of my cognitive bias toward contextual processing. Darwin had similar problems with certain kinds of memorization and his notebooks reveal a contextual thinker at work.

The popular belief that quick memorizers are particularly smart is one of the many myths about giftedness. Someone who’s a quick study may be... a quick study and nothing more. An excellent memory gives you an advantage in school and in adult life, but it doesn’t guarantee curiosity, a real interest in learning, or intellectual creativity.

…knowledge of a content domain may be one important determinant of whether that child demonstrates gifted performance on memory or reasoning problems that tap that knowledge. …these studies do not address the equally interesting question of how some children have managed to acquire rich and extensive knowledge… Conceptions of Giftedness, Robert Sternberg, Janet Davidson, eds.

Gifted research has been plagued by its emphasis on quantifiable data; the result is that important areas of giftedness remain a mystery to this day. The problem is that testing is entirely dependent on and limited to the questions you’re able to ask.  If you fail to ask the right questions, the tests aren’t going to reveal anything useful. And if you limit testing to just one subset of a population—in this case, school children, extrapolations to other subsets—adults—may be not merely wrong, but irrelevant. The statistics mindset prevents researchers from asking open-ended questions that could evoke a wider variety of responses.

One of the unsolved problems is the developmental process that takes place between childhood and adulthood. What leads to failure or development of talents? How do talents develop, particularly in domains with no formal teaching structure? The other problem, which isn’t so much a problem as an overlooked (or ignored) aspect of giftedness, is the different types of mental processing which are possible. Linda Silverman has made a stab at this with her distinction between visual-spatial and linear processing. But she also acknowledged, partly in response to her readers, that there are other, unexplored and poorly understood processes.

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