High Cognitive Minds

So many choices, so little time. What to major in in college; what career to prepare for; what project to work on next. Intellectually curious grasshopper minds agonize in ways that the average person never has to think about. Chance and expediency usually intervene to make the final choices, just as they do for that average person, but the questions usually continue. The problem is that the choices we're eventually forced to make don't satisfy the mind. There's too much computing power going to waste, and a sense that one's life is also going to waste.

And the central problem always remains: how to choose. There are ironies here. For the young person heading off to college all the doors are still open, but there isn't much experience to act as a guide. For the mature person, many of the doors have closed, and some have irrevocably locked, but now there's a lifetime of experience that might point to this choice—or that one. If you finally know which choice would have been the best one, then you have a chance to change things, to open closed doors, maybe even to force open some that you thought were locked forever. It might mean jumping to a new career, or working on a project that can be either a hobby or a part-time parallel career.

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"What is the single most important quality that suits you for a career in science? People often say 'curiosity,' but surely that can't be the whole story. After all, everyone is curious to some degree, but not everyone is destined to be a scientist. I would argue that you need to be obsessively, passionately, almost pathologically curious. Or, as Peter Medawar once said, you need to 'experience physical discomfort when there is incomprehension.' Curiosity needs to dominate your life." V. S. Ramachandran, "The Making of a Scientist"

This quote is from one of the newest additions to my library, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, a collection of essays by scientists in a wide variety of fields, edited by John Brockman. For me, science has always been the model for clear thinking, even for subjects far removed from science itself. And studies of science and scientists also provide a good deal of what we know about intellectual creativity. Some people may find this surprising, assuming that science is a very dry, tedious affair. But one of the better kept secrets is that most scientists place a high value on imagination and intuition.

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When a problem remains unsolved year after year, generation after generation, we need to consider whether there is something wrong with the process of problem-solving. Giftedness is a complex, multi-faceted problem with no apparent solutions. Which is, I suppose, one of the reasons why I've found it a source of endless fascination. Psychologists who believe that giftedness can be studied scientifically, have been no more successful in understanding it than anyone else. The parable of the blind men and the elephant doesn't even begin to convey the difficulties involved in thinking about giftedness.

What are some of the factors that stand in the way?
1. Professional biases
2. Dominant educational paradigm
3. Gaps in understanding the child-to-adult developmental continuum
4. Disregard of modern research in neurobiology
5. Disregard for the gifted, particularly adults, as a source of valid information and insights.

"There has not been much theoretical development of ideas related to the gifted and the talented, and, with some exceptions, no large bodies of data have been collected in order to illuminate the genesis of giftedness or to detail the components of giftedness and how they function. It is clear that a strong theoretical framework for considering the phenomenon of giftedness does not exist." The Gifted and Talented: developmental perspectives, Frances Horowitz, ed.

I finished reading Alissa Quart's Hothouse Kids: the dilemma of the gifted child, a few days ago and have been mulling it over ever since. It's an odd book, being divided pretty much between discussions of children who are gifted, but mainly under-served or completely unserved by the schools, and those children who are "wannabe" gifteds, though It's really the parents who are wannabes, desperate to give their children a status that they may not be able to live up to. Aside from the disturbing aspects of the book, it served to confirm my feeling that the whole concept of giftedness has changed drastically, becoming ever more muddled over the years.

Giftedness has always been more than just a way of indicating intelligence and talent. Whether it's a status symbol or a political and cultural football depends on the mood of the times, with prodigies serving as its poster children, viewed with either awe or as victims of parental abuse. It's redefined to be more inclusive even while the reality of the concept is being questioned and actual support for gifted programs is being laid waste.

It's also the victim of two simultaneous trends: the dumbing down of public education, which is part of the general upswing of anti-intellectualism; and the self-esteem movement, which concentrates on personal feelings to the exclusion of all else. Young people know less, but they feel more, and one of the invidious results is that they have a bloated estimation of their abilities and their capacity for insight. The combination of ignorance and ego can be seen everywhere on the web, particularly on forums and personal weblogs. The functionally illiterate, including those who call themselves gifted, offer their second-hand opinions on complex subjects, and expect to be praised for their wisdom. And they usually are, by others who share their ignorance and sense of entitlement.

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I remember my school years as mostly one long stretch of misery. The main feature was boredom—never ending, inescapable, and excruciating. In the years since, I've thought about boredom many times, and experienced it many times, but never with the intensity I felt when I was a student. So I still remember the shock and resentment I felt years back when I read a book on underachievement in gifted children. Typically, the book's concentration was on getting children to do what adults thought they should be doing. There were all sorts of "interventions" possible, mostly having to do with increasing motivation and enforcing discipline. The author's attitude was that teachers and parents shouldn't put up with complaints of boredom, which were merely grabs for attention. Underachieving children were described as fundamentally manipulative, and boredom was just one of the tools they used in their campaign against adult expectations.

Of course, there wasn't even the remotest hint that it might be useful to ask children why they were bored, and what being bored meant to them. That would have taken time and patience, plus the initial willingness to believe that boredom was real and that it might be a word for something the children felt but had no words to express.  

Even as an adult, as much as I've thought about it, I've never been able to get a firm grip on boredom, define just what it is and why it can sometimes be so awful. But a few nights ago, reading Hothouse Kids: the Dilemma of the Gifted Child, I came across a couple of quotes that helped me think about it more productively. "Boredom is integral to the process of taking one's time." And "If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation."

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I've been thinking about a series of book reviews for this blog, but I hate writing book reviews, so it's a project that will exist more in my mind than in reality, even though I'll churn one out every now and then. I had thought of starting with the two books that seem most appropriate, since they're the only two that even acknowledge the existence of gifted adults—Gifted Grownups, and Liberating Everyday Genius. But my dislike for both of them and my resistance to reviewing them is so overwhelming that writing about that would probably be more useful.

At the time I read Gifted Grownups I was a member of a forum for older gifted women. Among all those who had read the book, the general consensus was that it didn't contribute much to an understanding of giftedness, and seemed more focused on making everybody feel good about themselves. The very title of the book had set my teeth on edge, since referring to adults as grownups is almost exclusively reserved for times when adults feel the need to talk down to children. Ultimately, I wound up being so disgusted with the book that I got rid of it. So, if I reviewed it, I would have to resort to refreshing my memory with online reviews. Apparently, none of the libraries in my county's library system considered it worth buying, so borrowing it was out, and I certainly wasn't going to buy another copy.

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