Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of which cumulate. (2) The more background factors a growing child has that require constant sensing of what is immediately present (such as ghetto living) the lower that child's IQ score is likely to be. (3) Differences in student style predict score profiles on test batteries and are themselves predictable from a set of interacting demographic factors. (4) When mental functions conflict, some will inhibit others, creating cleavages in human potential. (5) For people's minds to function, there must be higher order integration skills to bridge opposing systems. A three-dimensional classification system for adaptive learning is offered which predicts that IQ scores should not correlate highly with measures of creativity. (DB)