The Mind/Brain Relationship of the Gifted Child.

This paper reviews three studies which examine cognitive processes and brain electrical activity in gifted children. The studies concentrated on mathematically gifted children and/or their sleep patterns. All three studies used the interhemispheric electroencephalogram to examine the gifted child's ability to harness right hemisphere capacities and bring them to bear in intellectual situations. Settings varied from memory representation of faces and world data tests to the use of cognitive skills required to produce dreams. In the sleep studies, the recall of substantive material from REM (rapid eye movement) sleep arousals varied positively with IQ level. But the difference between working and sleep hemispheric ratios was a greater equalization of hemispheric activities during sleep instead of the expected increase in the right hemisphere. The main difference between children with superior IQs and normal controls was that the gifted children slept longer. In the cognitive skills tests during the natural cognitive state at the baseline level, the mathematically talented subjects showed more activation in the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere, suggesting that the right hemisphere of the intellectually precocious child does not become more actively engaged during cognitive processing. (Contains 15 references.) (DB)