Gifted - or Cursed?

 

It's probably why so many "gifted" folk end up struggling with substance abuse - gotta numb the disconnectedness and maybe kill a few brain cells along the way.  It'd make life so much simpler.

 

 

The Double-Edged Sword of Giftedness, Part 1: Cognitive Traits

Ah, William... HE knows that Robert E. Lee traveled with a pet hen...

 

Published on December 3, 2011 by Christopher Taibbi, M.A.T. in Gifted-Ed Guru

"So help me figure this out," she says. She waves her fork in the air distractedly.

"Ok, what's that?" I ask. I watch as she dips her fork into a small Dixie cup size serving of dressing and then spears another bite of her salad.

"Why is it that whenever I am doing group work—you know, whole class discussions or cooperative learning in small groups or whatever—it's going to be my gifted kids that cause all the trouble. Boy do they sure like to stir up the muck."

We, this young blond haired lady and I, are sitting at a table in the teachers' lounge at one the four schools I am assigned to service as part of my job, the school's gifted specialist. I look her over a bit more carefully, trying to judge the question's intent by the questioner. She's fairly young, mid-20s I'd guess, and just two years into her teaching career. Her tone and body language do not indicate any real animosity or bitterness, per se, so I eliminate garden variety complaining from the list of reasons she has raised this topic. There can be a fair amount of cattiness in the teachers' lounge particularly, I've noticed, among those who are not new to the profession. Most of the time the more seasoned teachers are merely expressing frustrations but sometimes it can be downright snippy and it is for this reason that I usually avoid eating here. Still, on occasion, I find myself with no other place to eat and so I join the ranks.

"And you're sure it's your gifted students that are doing this?" I counter. "It's not just that they're the easier ones to spot?"

 

She considers the question a moment. "Well, sure, it's not always them. Of course there are others that may act up too. But they do it in a more predictable way, I guess. I mean, with my gifted kids, it's like they want to question everything or play devil's advocate for everything or raise points about things that really don't matter all that much to what we're talking about. And they do it because I think they just like to see how everyone reacts—not because it really matters to what we're doing at the time."

 

I know what she is talking about in more general terms. In fact, it's a concern I've heard in similar forms before—sometimes even from the parents of these students themselves at conference time.

 

What each is responding to as they voice these thoughts aloud is the frustration they feel as they

consider why behavior issues sometimes get in the way of what they feel should be some especially promising potential for exciting thinking and learning. There are reasons why this happens and this phenomenon is what I call the "double-edged sword of giftedness."

                                                               ***
We must take stock of one very important truth: gifted students are no different in many ways from any other student. Each has his or her own level of patience, willingness to take risks, respect for authority, etc. To think that gifted students/children will automatically respond to any situation (whether that be in school or at home) in a particular, even predictable, way is to make too simple the whole nature of social interaction.

 

Still there are characteristics of gifted students that are common enough to this particular group that they should be made a part of any new teacher's curriculum before they enter the classroom—and in many teacher ed programs, they are. These characteristics, if understood, might help adults—like the one who sits across the table from me now—better understand why they find themselves facing situations like the one she has just described.

 

                                                                 ***

 

I glance at the clock and try to decide how best to tackle this topic, how to parse it, because it is not one that can be covered in its entirety with the mere fifteen minutes we have left in this short lunch period. For the moment, it seems as if identifying the common cognitive characteristics that most typically cause trouble is as good a place to start as any because for each of these particular cognitive traits, there is a brighter/more positive side as well as one which causes frequently some degree of consternation.

 

I run through a quick checklist in my mind, take another swig of my Diet Coke, and begin.

                                                                  ***

 

Cognitive Trait #1: Gifted students tend to be more adept at seeing the "whole picture" and see value in doing so. Frankly, this is something we all wish we were better at sometimes. Being able to see the larger context of the issue at hand is what allows us to have "perspective"—to see and measure the importance of our own point of view beyond our own ego. Seeing the "whole picture" allows a good thinker to consider alternative courses of action that others may not even conceive of—and to consider decisions about those actions based on what is better for those in a larger sense. It's what most of us would agree we want to see in a leader—that ability to better understand the nuances of complex ideas and concepts that, to others, may seem too abstract or even downright unrelated. But in the classroom or over dinner conversation at home, this same trait can be highly irritating.

 

Mark, for example, is the child who seems to always raise questions about things that don't really matter to others. If the school topic under discussion is bullying, for example, then why would we care about how the Native Americans perceived the colonists? If we are discussing the family budget at home, then why in the world would we stop that conversation to consider what Roosevelt thought about the Great Depression? To bring these other issues up is mildly amusing, at best, and distracting at worst. But to Mark, these topics seem highly pertinent because he is considering how people in history might have already dealt with similar issues to help us better consider the current topics at hand.

 

Cognitive Trait #2: Gifted students are likely to have intense interests in a particular subject and, correspondingly, a vast storehouse of knowledge about that topic. University professors make their life's work studying everything from Mark Twain (ahem, Samuel Clemens!) to Boolean Algebra. Chefs can specialize in everything from pastries to pasta. Doctors know the differences between fifteen iterations of cancer and how they metastasize; an effective NASCAR pitcrew boss can effectively supervise as his team strips a car engine and reassembles it in mere moments. Most of us would never deny that having a passion to learn about nearly any subject is anything other than a positive. What these people know and contribute to the culture is never questioned.

 

And yet consider nine year old William who is terrifically interested in the Civil War. He is a gifted learner who, with sufficient resources at home, has more than mastered the minimal requirements typically laid out in the 4th grade. When the teacher seeks to impress upon the rest of the class a few of these facts, William chimes in with his own material (facts which are, frankly, more interesting and memorable than those deemed "essential" by the state curriculum). William knows the main figures of the Civil War, as well as the dates and locations of the key battles. But he also knows a great deal about Andersonville prison, black market trade among Northern and Southern soldiers, and that Robert E. Lee traveled with a pet hen throughout much of the war.

 

Cognitive Trait #3: Gifted students, put plainly and simply, learn and retain more information/skills much faster than their non-gifted counterparts. What takes most students up to twenty-four repetitions of practice to master, may likely only require the gifted student two or three rounds of practice. Algebraic thinking processes, balancing chemistry equations, conjugating irregular French verbs—the gifted learner may very well not need the time the rest of the class requires to sort out these thinking skills.

 

So, then, what is a new teacher (who is, as yet, unskilled in differentiation) to do when a child in 3rd grade has mastered two-digit division and does not need to do the practice worksheet containing twenty more of the problems he has already shown he can successfully solve? Similarly, what is the parent at home to do when the child refuses to complete that very worksheet that was assigned for homework? What are each to do with this child when the boredom of rote (and unneeded) practice begins to manifest itself as a behavior issue?

 

Cognitive Trait #4: Gifted students have a more advanced vocabulary than their age peers and are adepts at manipulating discussion of the subject at hand using appropriate "jargon." Paul, a sixth grader, loves biology class. He is easily able to answer the teacher's questions about any topic from cell biology to genetics using, appropriately, words like "mitosis", "permeable", and "double helix." He even knows what DNA stands for. He is confident as he discusses and explores the topic in the room.

 

But to his peers in middle school, Paul sounds "uppity"-and since this is middle school they tell him this in less than kind ways. Sometimes the way he talks just plain confuses them—and on a good day, his teacher.

 

There are two sides to this issue. Sometimes their use of advanced language makes this student seem as if they understand the material better than they actually do. And when questions they have go unanswered, the student is confused further. If the teacher then spends more time helping those who do not seem to understand, the student can easily grow frustrated and behavior issues can ensue.

 

Cognitive Trait #5: Gifted learners are adept at analogical thinking and use it effectively and efficiently to solve problems and reason their way through tasks. They do this by often intuiting the right questions to ask or eliciting the correct elements and details within the learning concept. Joy, for example, is asked to solve a multi-step math word problem about percentages. She is able to recall similar methods to accomplish this style of problem as she tackled ratios and fractions earlier in the year. Others around her, however, are less than sure precisely how to proceed.

 

Elsewhere in school, this is a great transferable skill to employ on long term projects and often this student is sought to be the leader of group projects because he can more easily see the finished project and map out the intermediate steps for others. But this responsibility can also frustrate the gifted student—especially when others in the group do not pull their weight. For this reason, he may refuse to work with others or may ask the teacher for alternate assignments—especially if the one offered to the whole class seems a tad too simplistic.

                                                            ***

 

Ms. Hope tightens the cap on her vinaigrette and zips it away in her lunch box. There is more movement around me as other teachers too begin packing their lunch materials away. Beginning long conversations in a teachers' lounge is not usually a good idea, and I am proven right on this point yet again. But it will wait. I throw my own can into the recycling basket. The second part of this issue is one that we can resume easily next time.

 

Now, however, it's time to pick up our students from the cafeteria.

 

Back to work.

Show Me Your Calves: Slaves to Fashion

 

Most neuroscientists would agree that well over 90% of our behavior is generated outside of consciousness. We are more slaves to our biology than we realize. Our rational minds represent a very small layer floating atop a vast well of unconscious drivers. Business leaders who understand biological programming and can leverage it possess an enormous advantage.

 

 

There is a whole science around manipulating people's drives to get them to behave in a certain way; cast their vote for or against, buy a product, ignore the man behind the curtain.  It used to just be an art - marketing, manipulation, a slight of hand. 

 

Now, with the crystallization of NLP, neuromarketing and such, it's a science.  Other people are learning how to make you think their desires are your original inception. 

 

But who pulls the puppet-masters' strings?  When they feel they're smart and everyone else is dumb, their confidence blinds them to their own motivations.

There's only one way to illuminate the shadow-world of the semi-conscious mind.  The answer's a variation on a theme we've come across time and again -

Recognize that we are imperfect, accept that we're part of something larger than ourselves and come to terms with the fundamental premise that no man nor woman is an island - together, we're a system.

Sounding a little too pseudo-religious for your liking?  You can interpret it that way, if you like - really, though, it's just science.

Great Leaders Decide With Their Guts, Not Just Their Brains (By Mark C. Crowley)

The limbic centre of our brain is ancient; it is the repository for both genetic memory (fear the dark, fear snakes) and learned experiences.  The limbic system allows us to react to stimuli by pulling out related memories from the hypothalamus and filtering them through the amygdala, centre for reactive emotions.  If you had a bad experience with a tattooed man in your past and meet someone new with tattoos, it's this process that will give you a negative bias.  It's an incredibly useful tool, but it doesn't allow us to overcome reactive urges - that's where the neocortex comes in.

 

The neocortex permits us to apply executive function, overriding instinct, take risks, innovate.  This is the part of our noggin that humans have to a larger degree than other species and has allowed for social development, science, etc. 

 

The best decisions, of course, are made through a balanced approach of reaction and foresight.  It's a tricky line to walk, but one we can do when we do it consciously.

 

Great Leaders Decide With Their Guts, Not Just Their Brains

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Mark C. Crowley

 

“Dig up all the information you can, then go with your instincts. We all have a certain intuition, and the older we get, the more we trust it… I use my intellect to inform my instinct. Then I use my instinct to test all this data. ‘Hey, instinct, does this sound right? Does it smell right, feel right, fit right?

General Colin Powell

 

 

The idea of using intuition when making important decisions is greatly frowned upon in business.

We’ve been taught that conscious reasoning alone is the sure-fire way of choosing the best course of action, and that our intuition is impulsive and inherently misguiding. Stand up in a meeting and say, “I feel this is the right decision even though the financials don’t fully back me up,“ and expect an immediate backlash.

 

While we’ve all learned to be publicly dismissive about intuition, I’m absolutely certain you can quickly recall an experience when an inner voice steered you away from a disastrous outcome. Is it logical that this voice doesn’t also speak up when workplace dilemmas need resolution? Is that inner guidance untrustworthy in our jobs but fully reliable in our personal lives?

 

I’m guessing you have a hunch on the answers to both these questions, but if your mind isn’t yet fully able to reconcile the conflict, I have good news. Science is coming to your aid.

 

According to Dr. Rollin McCraty, Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, human intuition – flashes of insight that can’t be judged by reasoning – is real. More importantly, there’s compelling new research that proves leaders who act on their intuition achieve greater success.

 

Through the research performed by HeartMath and other organizations, we now know there are three unique types of intuition:

 

(1) Implicit Knowledge: We learn something and forget we learned it. While we’re taking a shower or are out for a run, it sneaks up from our unconscious into our conscious. Voila, the insight we need in the moment pops into our heads. About 95% of what’s written about intuition relates to “implicit knowledge.”

 

(2) Energetic Sensitivity: Our nervous system literally is sensitive to environmental signals (it’s like a big antenna). Psychologist, Gary Klein, tells the story of a team of fire fighters that entered a house where the kitchen was ablaze. While hosing down the fire, the commander suddenly heard himself yell, “Let’s get out of here!” without knowing why. The kitchen floor collapsed immediately after– but not before all firefighters escaped. Only after the experience did the captain recall the impressions that prompted his “sixth sense of danger.” The fire had gotten unusually hot and quiet, and his intuition discerned it.

 

(3) Non-Local Intuition: “Everyone has an experience of it,” says McCraty. “You drive down a road you travel all the time and have the sudden impulse to slow down. As you round the corner, you see a small child in the street or an accident that just has happened. In situations like these, the heart senses the nature of events ahead of time, before they actually occur…. This intuition stuff about unknown future events that you cannot explain through implicit learning is nevertheless real. The central core of every religion on the planet is the heart is our primary access point to wisdom and courage. Science is now supporting what’s always been believed.”

 

For many years, the Australian Graduate School Of Entrepreneurship has been studying repeat entrepreneurs, people with long careers who’ve built businesses multiple times with great success.

In looking for common characteristics, the researchers discovered something amazing – and especially useful for business leaders. 80% of the entrepreneurs acknowledged relying on their intuition when making important decisions. When weighing their options, in other words, they relied on their cognitive capacities and intuitive capacities – heart and mind.

 

In his recent book, Onward, Starbucks CEO and hugely successful entrepreneur, Howard Schultz, admits to routinely consulting his intuition and to taking frequent action on the guidance it gives him. Overruling financial analysis that strongly panned both these ideas, Schultz chose to remove a very popular breakfast item from the menu and to close all Starbucks’ stores for three hours of employee training. Had he relied on his mind alone to guide these actions, he never would have pursued them. Perhaps not coincidentally, Starbucks’ stock is up 400% over the past decade while the S & P 500 average return is a mere 60%.

 

As Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast And Slow, making important decisions tied to intuition alone can prove disastrous. But what science now has proved is that we have two sources of human intelligence, and letting them both have a say is a very wise move.

Pull Back the Veil to Reveal...

"It's as if Boorman were guiding us down a magic corridor and kept parting the curtains in front of us."

  -  Pauline Kael

"You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe?"

  -  Mal, Inception

"I am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

  - Inscription from a statue of Isis

Today, I read an article about how overconfident people succeed, frequently in spite of the limits of their talents.  Promotions, monetary success, etc aren't about skills in many fields, ranging from sales to politics to polling - it's about confidence.  When these people are in positions beyond which their skills are suited - say, management, they can actually impede success of their direct reports.  Mistakes aren't owned. they are trickled down.  Underlings get thrown under the bus, which continues to chug along the wrong trajectory.

I have also written about the cognition of confidence, too - people who are expert at a given task tend not to be hyper-confident.  There is always doubt that perhaps, they've missed something in their analysis, a better example could have been found, etc.  This is how expertise is developed - uncertainty and the need to do better drives these individuals to push beyond the limits of what they know.

If you're overconfident, there's no need to pursue new facts that will cloud the issue - you have the answer, the ability, the skill without modification.  You just need to keep doing what you know.   Which is why overconfidence is the enemy of expertise.

Ignorance is a veil blocking off the dark corners of our mind.  When we pull back those veils, we find new things, new facets, new capacities to build and connect ideas - then communicate them.  When we're overconfident in the model of us we've established, we're telling ourselves we've already pulled back all the curtains; there's nothing left to discover.  We're deluding ourselves we're the best at what we do, we know more than others, the answers are ours, if victory were solely up to us, it would be assured.

Yet nobody's perfect, there is always room for improvement.  The right push, the right crisis - the right motivation will shake our worlds enough to show the impermanence of the walls we've established as safe ground, forcing us to lift another veil. 

With the slightest disturbance, the dream's going to collapse.

Dreams make for another great metaphor.  By their nature, dreams are removed from reality and include impossible detail, but we don't question that while we're in the dream.  When we awaken, it becomes clear to us that the things we accepted could not be - nuance was missing, detail, texture.

Such is perception.  We imbue what we perceive with emotional value - it is that internally described value, not the nature of the thing perceived, that shapes our judgement.  On the surface, the employee who under performs is incompetent and that's all there is to it, or the boss is a superficial egomaniac who cares less about results and more about flaunting their position.  One level deeper, the employee might have been sold that they are something they are not - same too the boss.  There might be family, health, all kinds of issues that shape who that person is and what lineage they bring to a given moment of contact.  The same basic principle applies to someone who looks in the mirror and "feels fat" despite what anyone tells them; it's the feeling of the thing, not the thing itself, that resonates.

You can say that's all irrelevant - all that matters is the bottom line or the pay cheque.  You can tell yourself to keep home and personal and work and social lives separate, but there's just one person in which those worlds are equally grounded - you.  In experience, you find that it's hard to keep those worlds from collapsing in on each other. 

When you cling to your confidence and try to deny the possibility that reality has more depth than you've credited it with, confidence can quickly turn in to fear of the unknown and in response, anger.  When you come to accept that you are not perfect and have much to learn, you tear down another veil.

Maybe you don't like the metaphors; maybe allegory isn't your thing.  Try it this way:

Ambiguous visual images are fascinating because it is often difficult to imagine seeing them any other way--until something flips within the brain and the alternative perception is revealed. This phenomenon, known as perceptual rivalry, is of great interest to neuroscience. Because rivalrous illusions produce changes in perception that are independent of changes in the stimulus itself, they may help to understand how the brain gives rise to conscious experience.

Pay no attention to what's behind the curtain.

Don't Be Afraid of The Other

The other aspect is that the Sikhs were targeted by the apparent “White Power” sicko, ex-soldier Wade Michael Page, because they are identifiably “different” — not because there is any reason to be upset at what Sikhs do, or represent.

Peter Worthington writes a heart-felt piece, heart-breaking in its simple honesty.  We don't let people buy and uses bombs or landmines because they serve one purpose - to kill people in quantity.  Gun rights activists aren't crying foul over this fact.  Well, assault rifles are just that - rifles designed to assault multiple parties.  By the same token, we don't allow people to walk around streets with swords strapped to their hips - again, because those swords would serve one purpose - duels, revenge, combat.  Handguns serve the same purpose - they are designed to kill people.

Make the argument that more people with guns will lead to less violence due to a leveling of the playing field.  But then provide one example in history that backs that assertion up.  You can't; the history of weapons is the history of increasingly powerful violence.  As weapons have broadened their scope from killing one to killing millions, we use them less because the risks are less.  The more firepower you have, the more powerful you feel - and the more strongly you feel the need to defend that power.  It's psychological; if you walk around with a gun, the temptation to use it either assertively or defensively multiplies.  The same rule applies to office politics or political attack ads; if you go looking for a fight, you're sure to find one.  It's that simple.

This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don't understand.

But there's a much deeper message in Worthington's piece, one of understanding.  We fear the unknown - we're programmed to.  It's a genetic fail safe that protects us from threats that emerge from the darkness faster than we can consciously process them.  Truly, that's all that instinct is; the triggering of pre-programmed or learned experiential biases that kick in an immediate, reactive response.  With aggression comes threat and with threat, the need for rapid response.  You will get anxious about public displays of gay behaviour for the same reason a you would be suspicious of a man in a turban or a woman wearing a veil - a hormone called cortisol.  This is the same hormone that will make you feel uncomfortable in the presence of a leper or burn victim; your limbic brain is perceiving something it registers as a threat and preparing your body for a fight-or-flight response.  It's no different from being afraid of the dark.

As we learn to populate the dark with knowledge rather than confabulation, it loses its terror.  The exact same truth applies to people.  I've been around the world, literally, exploring the ways in which people are similar and different.  Like many others, I've studied language, culture, history, geography, even neurochemistry to figure out where the commonalities lie.  I've spent nights with street people in Lima, Peru, watching them exhibit the most basic tenet of society - altruism.  I've laughed at the way in which an Arab Moroccan university professor stigmatized Italians in the same way an Italian grape grower stigmatized Moroccans.  Kids in small town Korea or post-war Sarajevo or downtown Toronto all want the same things from life; to have opportunity, to be happy, to be loved, to leave something behind.  We all feel the same way - what changes is the Way in which we express those feelings.  To me, there are no monsters in society; just behaviour, what causes it and how that behaviour can be influenced.

If I could have one wish, it would be for every person on earth to have the opportunity to be a stranger in a strange land and experience first-hand the kinship that connects all of us.  Homo sapiens are one species; there is far more that binds us together than there is separating us and where the differences lie, so to does opportunity.  Back to guns - where did gunpowder come from?  Thinking of China - where did pasta noodles come from?  What does the First Nations medicine wheel have to contribute to Western approaches to medicine?  Why is it that cultural groups from around the world land on the same metaphors, symbols like the tree of life, fire, the snake, the pyramid?  These aren't externally imposed things - they're internally derived.

JFK hit the nail on the head: "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."

We can continue to focus on killing or dominating each other over personal fears, or we can learn to move forward together in understanding.  If we limit ourselves to looking through the lens of one political or cultural tribe, or even as one nation pitted against others, we are blinding ourselves to our shared birthright as human beings.  The true enemy we share is not external troubles, but internal fears.

When understanding is achieved, violence becomes unnecessary; threats cease to hold power over you and instead become opportunities to be seized. 

Fear can be overcome, but only by doing so consciously.

How Your Brain Completes The Picture:

Raiendg tihs? Tath’s cfaootunibaln ta paly.

If you didn't recognize word #3, ask yourself; if it was a word you were familiar with, would you have?

Connecting what we see - what we sense - with what we know and feel is patterning, relationship-building.  It comes in many forms.

Look at romantic relationships as an example; how many of them fail because one partner assumes they put in more effort than the other?  Or taken another way - how many relationships succeed because one partner overestimates the contributions of the other?

And how does this relate to politics and the robo-call scandal?

Isn't the mind a wonderful thing?

Seeing The World Through A Human Lens

If Panksepp is right, his rats could, in effect, be laughing in the faces of those scientists who, he says, still “deem the emotional feelings of animals to be outside the bounds of empirical measurement.”

Human being like the idea that we are somehow different and disconnected from all the other species on the planet.  As such, we have genetic superiority and moral authority over the earth and its creatures and are entitled to act as we please. 

Science is steadily disproving such notions.  In fact, the better we understand both human and animal brains, the more it seems we have in common with our fellow Terrans.  If anything, it's our unconscious need to distinguish that gives cause for our conscious tendency to label.

Have you ever noticed that we anthropomorphize animals to relate to them, naming our pets and calling them "part of the family":

And dehumanize people, taking away their names and calling them "vermin" or "dogs" or referring to them as children to mistreat them:

Wonder why that might be?