The Genius Theory

[TheRavenMother]

Can people be only born to be a genius and discovered early, or can you actually develop a genius state of mind even when you have established an adult life? Can it just come on at the spur of a moment; can you be trained to be a genius?

It is a known fact that if you do well early on in school you get more support in furthering your self than if you show lack of self motivation at a young age.
However, saying that – many children who show a lot of academic potential are also held back by adults. I can personally say I have experienced this, my self when I was in school. I was home educated most of my life, but when I was eventually in schools once in a while teachers used me more as a classroom assistant than a pupil because I was 18 months above average (take mathematics aside) so therefore my development couldn’t further onto better things, I was also considered borderline photographic memory ability and under went some tests for this. But because of lack of help from the schools for my abilities and the fact that as a child I was also much more deaf than I currently am, and my mother was also a religious extremist and didn’t approve of RE as a collective form in schools unless it was pure Christian only… I was removed from the educational system and raised at home. Unfortunately my mother was dyslexic and found me too much work to educate, and my father was too strict and nasty that education became a chore and I was eventually just left at home doing nothing until I was 12 when I was forced to live away by social services for a while.
By this time, my ability went down to being only 6 months above average, due to the fact I took upon myself to educate my self through books from the library, and kinda lived a little like the girl in the storybook Matilda until I was 15.
By the time I was 12 however, with all the stress in my life my memory became affected and therefore just about normal. I have been trying very hard to get back to borderline photographic status again. As I believe that you can be trained into it, especially if one can train themselves in skills such as speed reading that is a form of photographic memory.
This is also another part of psychology I am interested in – whether or not things such as photographic memory and genius can be educated in even adults, just like speed-reading can be. Therefore if I can prove this theory, then I will attempt the theory that telekinesis is also trainable, by doing some research in that eventually.

The issue which I am trying to raise here is… if the child is healthy, and has above average ability they will get more support than a genius child who is unhealthy. But I want to know why? Because with the right motivation and support, any child can be a genius if you find their main focus, interest and talent at an early age: Maybe not a genius in everything, but every child even a down syndrome child has some kind of main focus and talent in their life, which must be worked upon – as then, and only then do I believe that you will find genius qualities in that child!
Hence why I also believe that everyone has at least 1 subject they excel in, and therefore if they excel in that they should concentrate only on that as their life mission (as well as their hobbies and passions) Because then and only then will self happiness and confidence arrive.

I would be very interested in discovering 2 things about each person in IS, if you care to cooperate with me?

The things I want to know about you are…

What are you main talents? What do you excel in more than anything; it can be 1 thing, up to 5 things.

The next question is…

What do you enjoy doing? (That you can personally do for your self)

This is sort of making my self IS life coach in a way – but I could advise you on which areas to go into which will make you happy, and other people can join in too, about what they think you are suited to as well.

Because you are not here on Earth to just live, breath, work, eat, sleep – you are here for a reason, and that reason is within the tools that are within you (your talents, your enjoyments, your passions) If you concentrate on just them things only, you might be able to discover that after a while, you might excel so much in that thing you enjoy and have talents in that you too, will be worthy of genius recognition.
That’s not ego… that’s just not setting yourself the limits that society has provided you with!

[sashamexico]

good info!

[{{d*@*b}}]

I totally relate to this. My parents were very supportive and really pushed independant thinking. I started out at a Montesori school for predchool and kindergarten. If you don't know montesori, their whole philosophy is based around independant thought. The children are given choices about what they want to learn and guide themselves through their lessons with help from the teachers. I then was put into public school and they could not handle my constant questioning, my obliviousness to authority, and my creative ability. I was constantly seeing therapists, psychologists and even held back a year under the suggestion of the school administration. I felt disconnected and disrespected early on. In response I could care less about school they thought I was the problem and I thought otherwise.I was then accepted to a highly regaurded private school with full scholarship in the sixth grade/ This school was full of lawyers and politicians kids. Most of the students were from old money and I was sleeping on a mattres on the floor of a one bedroom apartment. We had to wear ties and khaki pants every day and were taught how to be sheep. I started getting serious migranes at that age and the school had me seeing psychologists who pumped me up on drugs so I could conform. Somedays I would be on so much codeine I would have to spend half the day sleeping in the nurses office. They gave me an I.Q. test in ninth grade and found I had not only a photographic memory but when time was taken out of the equation my scores were extremely high. At that point, in the early 90's, ADD/ADHD was really becoming a trend. The had me see a psychiatrist who prescribed dexedrine and prozac and diagnosed me with severe ADD/depression. It got to the point were if I forgot to take my afternoon dose of speed I was notified infront of the whole class that I had to go take my meds. It was humiliating to say the least and I really started to reject the idea of school. Due to the drugs I was on I had a great attention span but became very aggressive and could not eat or sleep well. The doctor helped me sleep by prescribing sleeping pills. I found out, when I got older, that the school sent everybody who had "problems" to the same psychiatrist and he was known for over medicating children with ADD and depression. My junior year I had all my cholarships taken away and soon after was kicked out mid-year for not being the "ideal" student they had thought I was. My last days at that school I was told I was a loop hole finder and was kicked out of just about every class. So I would spend my days skatboarding in the parking lot waiting for my friends to be dismissed.
I finished high school at an alternative boarding school in Massachusets, which I also got full scholarship to. This school was the best for me. The supported independant thinking and honored every students interest.They required athletic credits but offered things like Yoga, Tai Chi, Aikido, and snowboarding. We even had an ultimate frisbee team. The history classes offered included art and spirituality, in which we learned about Walt Whitman, the Gnostics, the harmonic choir, Balinesian Gamelan music and culture, Buddhism, zen, taoism, Carl Jung, Carlos Casteneda, etc. This was a school made for indigos. Everyday we had a Quaker styl morning meeting were anybody could stand up and talk about whatever subject they wished. This school, within two years made all the difference in my life. It made me see there are others out there like me. They even let me quit the meds cold turkey and my grades sky rocketed.
So to answer your questions:
I am great at being creative in general. I am talented in music and the visual arts. I actualy am talented at melding the two. I am great with technology, thus I consider myself a new media artist. I also love the ancient medias. I am currently teaching my self encaustic painting. I enjoy creating even more if I get to start from scratch, i.e. making my own paints with pigments and resins or another type of medium, recording found sounds and making new sounds to build a composition, inventing new instruments. I don't like to know to much about what I am doing. Ideally every creative endevor I work on should be a new experience and a blend of completly different mediums. I like to let images develop naturaly instead of having total control.

I enjoy taking care of animals,cooking, eating,music people watching, observing.I guess I enjoy what I do.

Wonderful thread. It will be interesting to see all the responses. Shining

[skel]

i can relate a bit to this, teachers would always recognize me for some sort of brilliance.

[Deni]

When I was in second grade my mother was told that I was learning disabled because I refused to listen and I didn't do my school work. Then I was given an IQ test and my mother was told that I was a genius and that the reason I didn't listen and didn't do my work was because I was too smart and I was bored. I think the truth of it is that I am somewhere between learning disabled and genius, but I think that I'm smarter now than when I was a child just because I know more now than I did then.

[ReluctantAdultIndigo?]

I've always been told that I'm "super-smart". I even skipped a grade when I was younger. But by the time I hit high school, I was pretty much fed up with the educational system (the whole authority thing) and I started to resent my own intelligence because of the academic expectations of my parents. That's when I started getting thrown out of the house and ending up as a street kid. Ended up being "street-smart", literally, instead of book-smart. That whole thing has carried over into adulthood, in the sense that I really dislike reading and literature in general. (There are other reasons as well, but they aren't relevant to this thread).
My mother once told me that my IQ was 149--she wasn't trying to make me feel good about myself, she was trying to make me feel guilty about NOT being an academic or living up to her expectations. As far as I know, that number doesn't mean anything--that and five dollars might buy me a cappuccino at a fancy coffee shop.

So what are my main "talents"? Based on my own observations, I'd say understanding conceptual knowledge and being able to transfer it from one field to another. In other words, I can take my understanding of the basic principles from one subject and see how it parallels with the ideas behind something else.
I'm tempted to say that my main talent might also be musical--not only did I used to play drums at an elite level, I also used to play stringed instruments better than most dedicated string players. (This really used to upset the fragile egos of most guitar players I met--the humiliation of being out-played by a drummer!) However, for a number of reasons, I'm no longer musically active, so I probably can't say that anymore.

What do I enjoy doing? Good question. Again, I'm tempted to say music but the truth is, I've come to hate the industry so much that I seem to have lost my passion for it. I've encountered a lot of hostility towards the kind of music that I wanted to create--in fact, a lot of other musicians have taken almost "moral" offence to my ideas, while most other people have simply dismissed my ideas because of it's lack of mass appeal. Like politics, musical tastes or ideas swing like a pendulum and it's my observation that music in general has taken a turn for the very conservative. "Avant-garde" experimental thinking has been silenced in favour of traditionalism. For that reason, I don't think I'd be exaggerating by saying that I've been "kicked out" of music. Even so called "avant-garde" jazz of today is actually a reversion to older forms.
There was a post-modern assertion during the 1980's that "painting was dead" because everything that could be done with surface and pigment had already been tried. Well, perhaps it's time to declare that music is also dead.
These days, I'm psychologically exhausted and the truth is that I don't really honestly enjoy doing much of anything anymore.

[TheRavenMother]

Speed reading is apparantly one of the best ways to train your brain to become more intelligent and at genius standards. For naturally, if you read more the more you know.
In the past I was considered borderline photographic memory (as a child to be more precise) but I lost this ability due to time and lack of encouragment and education to help me continue to become photographic.
Therefore my reading speed as a child was a lot more, because I remember reading upto 3 average adult sized educational books each day!
These days I can manage when my mind is clear and relaxed to read 30 pages within 15 minutes.

I just did a speed reading and accuracy test on this website. http://www.readingsoft.com/

The average person reads at just 200 words per minute, and I scored 411, so I am still above average in that. However, my memory skills when questioned about the text I read, scored at only 47%
With time, this score can and will improve. Because a year ago I did a speed reading test and my usual 30 pages within 15 minutes managed to go upto 54 a minute - however, I stopped the lessons and stopped reading, so I am back to the drawing board.

Let me know what you scored please xxx

[Amur]

I think it's possible to free the mind of blockages and then program it directly to new standards in whatever one is good at. But to achieve that one must first remove the mind-clutter and ego that is resisting good change and what not shit that has been programmed to oneself from start. It might also be necessary to completely change the underlying 'geometrical' foundations or algorithms that one has incorporated from ones own parents and so forth. In the end it should be possible to do all these changes but one should also be conscious of the things one is doing or atleast be in knowledge of it on an unconscious level.

There's quite alot of mindpower that isn't tapped in yet at all.

[ReluctantAdultIndigo?]

...For naturally, if you read more the more you know...

That's not necessarily true. What you read, no matter what the subject or source, is merely reportage of another person's experience or viewpoint. At best, it is second-hand information; at worst, it is nothing more than unreliable hearsay.
IMO, true knowledge comes only from direct, first-hand experience. Even then, what you learn from that is entirely dependent on how much you reflect or analyse the experience and is still only relevant to your own perspective on the world.

[green]

It is sad that children who show talents in some areas are refused fertile ground to tread upon, simply because that area does not fall within the standards of authority, be it their parents or the school system. My parents caught my talent for the visual arts when I was probably four, at the insistence of a preschool. My city also happens to have arts magnet middle and high schools, and so from middle school on, I've been honing my talent. I got really good at replicating exactly what I see in very little time, but not much focus was on conceptual or expressive work. I learned about that elsewhere, but I'm lucky for that.

I never took a test for photographic memory, but I suppose I'd score rather well. I also have a natural musical ear, and have a good auditory memory. Like d@b, I love to make things with my hands, from start to finish. If I see something that is handmade, I can visually dissect it and probably replicate it well enough. And like Reluctant, I tend to look at things in a parallel form, always relating something to what it is similar to. I guess I think in metaphors. I'm also pretty skilled with language, and am a walking spelling dictionary. I don't read very fast because I'm so filled up with the sounds of words and the images they create that I don't move very fast. Kind of deliberate going.

But what I like doing is solving problems and spreading ideas and information. I like to do things for the community where it needs it. Support for urban farming, for the artist's recluse, stuff like that. I like to help people understand things, or see things differently.

[TheRavenMother]

Interesting that I should do this post a few days ago, especially as tonight I have had a head injury in which I had lost conciousness for a couple of minutes, still slightly concussed, but getting a little better... feeling dizzy - natural fighter though. Mum insisted in taking me to the hospital but I will wait until I feel worse before doing that.

Because I know how delicate the brain is, I was thinking it was important anyways to keep my mind active - and whilst in the hospital waiting for a dr in A+E for 4 hours average UK waiting time in those places, my brain will not be stimulated and any problems I might have had could have got worse.
So I decided to stay at home and keep stimulated, looking for brain exercises... for example... using my left hand more than the right (I am slightly ambidextrous anyways, but it doesnt hurt to do this)
I know it sounds crazy, but since the accident my left hand coordination for writing seems to have got better!

I wanted also to post this as I found it on a website and found it very interesting...

Research on the physical results of thinking has shown that just using the brain actually increases the number of dendritic branches that interconnect brain cells. The more we think, the better our brains function – regardless of age. The renowned brain researcher Dr. Marian Diamond says, "The nervous system possesses not just a 'morning' of plasticity, but an 'afternoon' and an 'evening' as well."

Dr. Diamond found that whether we are young or old, we can continue to learn. The brain can change at any age. A dendrite grows much like a tree – from trunk to limbs to branches to twigs – in an array of ever finer complexity.
In fact, older brains may have an advantage. She discovered that more highly developed neurons respond even better to intellectual enrichment than less developed ones do. The greatest increase in dendritic length occurred in the outermost dendritic branches, as a reaction to new information.

As she poetically describes it: "We began with a nerve cell, which starts in the embryo as just a sort of sphere. It sends its first branch out to overcome ignorance. As it reaches out, it is gathering knowledge and it is becoming creative. Then we become a little more idealistic, generous, and altruistic; but it is our six-sided dendrites which give us wisdom."