Gifted Children

A guide to identifying gifted children aged 0-8 years and helping them reach their potential.

Ellen Winner uncovers some of the misconceptions about children with special abilities, the emotions they provoke - like envy, fear and rejection - and shows us what these children are really like.

Li briefly outlines three generations of intelligence research over the past 100 years with attention to the origins and limitations of early investigations and the resulting confusion and disagreement in modern reinterpretations of the findings. He discerns an emerging consensus among scholars and researchers that intelligence should be considered primarily as a product of thinking and learning. To find the essence of how thinking is possible and what learning is, Li investigates theory and research in cognitive psychology, developmental linguistics, animal behavior, and many other related disciplines. He proposes the notion of conceptual intelligence, i.e., human intelligence, as a result of thinking and learning through concepts. Li traces how the human species created concepts, and how conceptual thinking and conceptual learning make the human species intelligent and creative. There is nothing mysterious, intuitive, or innate about it. Our past thinking and learning has created the intelligence of today,and will continue to create our intelligence in the future. How to think deeper and learn better are the difficult questions for us now as we consciously venture into new arenas of problem-solving and cognition.

Taking as examples the lives of creative individuals through history, Genius and the Mind considers the nature of creativity and genius from a psychological standpoint. Eleven chapters, contributed by leading researchers, span the range of approaches used to understand the subject. A discussion of heredity considers the extent to which genes play a part in giftedness. The importance of social context in defining and acknowledging creativity is explored. Several chapters look at training and skill development in exceptional individuals, and a number of contributions scrutinize the links between creativity, temperament, and mental health. Mozart's precocity, Byron's mania, the personalities of the Italian Renaissance painters, and the psychoses of many celebrated writers are all discussed, making this a fascinating text for anyone with an interest in the psychology of genius and geniuses, as well as for students and researchers in the field.