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Intelligence
By Eddie Rodriguez May 06, 2011 3,922,142 views
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You know that phrase, "Ignorance is bliss"? There's a reason it's stuck
around all these years. Because having the upper hand in intelligence
might give you an advantage in some areas, like crossword puzzle
solving and quantum physics-ing, but it also might just screw up your
life forever.
For instance, if you're smart ...
#5.
You're Probably a Night Owl -- And That's a Bad Thing
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Recently, scientists discovered a quirky side effect to having a high
IQ: You tend to stay up until later hours and get up later in the
morning. That's right -- the more intelligent are also much more likely
to be night owls. Which isn't such a surprise when you consider that
intelligent people are infamous for burning the midnight oil to cram
for tests, write papers, touch up those earnings reports, etc.
Photos.com
And spending reports.
It appears to just be evolution -- the more intelligent members of a
species are, in general, the first to change habits (their big brains are
wired to seek out novelty). Since humans have been day-dwellers
during most of their existence, it's primarily the smarties who prefer to
habitually stay up until the wee hours and to do the types of tasks that
are easier to accomplish when you don't have the day-dwellers
hanging around and distracting you. Stuff that requires concentration,
in other words.
So let the early birds keep their measly worms. The nights owls get to
feast on the juicy field mice of accomplishment!
So What's the Problem?
Well, being a night owl does have some negative side effects. And by
"some" we mean, "You're pretty much screwed."
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And we mean REALLY screwed.
For starters, studies have found that "eveningness" is associated with a
high degree of emotional instability. That means you tend to be less
agreeable and conscientious than the average Joe. Oh, and you don't
just make others' lives miserable. Thanks to your late-night habits,
likely brought on by high intelligence, you're also three times more
likely to suffer symptoms of depression.
And the fun doesn't end there, geniuses! Turns out that, short of
becoming a competitive asbestos eater, staying up late at night is
about the worst thing you could do for your physical
health. According to a number of studies, night owls are at higher risk
for heart disease and suffer more arterial stiffness than those who go
to bed early.
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It's important to note, however, that not all night owls are geniuses.
The direct cause might have less to do with the fact that you stay up
than with some of the other things you're doing while your eyes get all
nice and bloodshot. You see, people who tend to stay up late also tend
to do other unhealthy things at night, such as overeating. Then, once
they do eventually hit the hay, they experience more sleep
interruptions when those pesky morning larks get up and start
noisying about.
All this adds up to some nasty artery stress and whacked-out circadian
rhythms, a nice recipe for a massive coronary. So be sure to thank
those dumbass early risers and your high intelligence for your
inevitable heart attack.
Photos.com
Causes of death: Morning-type wife and a 155 IQ.
#4.
You're Less Likely to Pass On Your Genes
Another unfortunate stereotype of smart people is that they're socially
awkward nerds who are doomed to lives of celibacy until they get out
of high school hell. Unfortunately, that one turns out to be totally true.
But it's not all bad news. There's evidence that the highly educated get
more enjoyment out of sex than the dumb jocks and that really, all the
lovin' you need to be happy comes from having sex with just one
partner per year. So even the nerdlingers among us can find one
person to get along with, then have highly enjoyable loser-geek sex,
eventually leading to populating the planet with loser-geek children,
right?
Photos.com
"Timmy! You'd better not be drawing dicks on my math!"
So What's the Problem?
Smart boy, please. Those genes you're carrying aren't going any-
goddamn-where. Unbeknownst to the smarties, their education levels
and IQ are conspiring to keep them childless and perhaps leading
them to adopt 30 cats when they're in their late 70s.
It all starts with the smart ladies. A 2008 national census reported that
women who had dropped out of high school had the most children on
average. And the more education women achieved, the fewer children
they were likely to have, with the fewest children being born to
women who had finished graduate school.
The explanation, according to the Census Bureau, is simple: Women
wanted to finish school before they were saddled with nine months of
fetus-carrying. Then, for smart people of both sexes, there's the career
to think about, and promotions, and who has time for a needy mini-
human during all that? And of course, IQ plays a direct role here,
since it has also been found that women with lower IQs are less likely
to know how to use birth control properly, leading to more unplanned
pregnancies.
Photos.com
"OK, but I'll need a glass of water. I can't swallow them dry."
But that's just the ladies. The smart fellas must be picking up the slack
somehow, right? Maybe by getting a little dumb-girl nookie on the
side? Not so. Research shows that countries with high national IQs
tend to have lower childbirth rates in general compared with countries
that can't collectively tie their shoelaces together. That's right -- entire
nations are missing the evolutionary point of fucking as their IQs rise.
#3.
You're More Likely to Lie
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The problem with being the smartest guy in the room is that you
usually know you're the smartest guy in the room. For some people,
that's not a big deal. They can relate to others just fine and know how
to navigate around everyone else's deficiencies without being
complete pricks. Others, however, know they have an intellectual edge
and can't help but abuse it.
So What's the Problem?
In addition to giving you an advantage in brainpower, IQ apparently
also bestows the gift of deception.
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"Me? No, it was already like this when I got here."
After all, in order to lie and get away with it, you also have to keep the
truth in mind and manipulate it, and you might even have to cover up
your lies upon further questioning. All of this involves integrating
several brain processes in much the same way that you would solve a
complex calculus problem. This means that the age at which you start
lying, and the effectiveness with which you do it throughout your life,
are controlled by how smart you are.
In one study, scientists put people in brain-imaging machines and
found that the regions of the brain that light up when a person
metaphorically sets his pants on fire are the same that control
"executive functioning." These are high-order thinking and reasoning
abilities that include working memory, which, you guessed it, is the
single biggest component of your IQ.
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Suuuuure, Mr. Hawking. The universe is expanding and boundless.
We're onto your game!
Another study simply tracked the tendency of children to lie as they
got older (that is, as that aforementioned part of their brains
developed). The researchers simply placed young kids in a room with
a toy Barney under a cloth and told the kids not to peek at the toy
when the researchers left the room.
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They later conducted the same test, replacing the toy with a live cobra.
Of course, 9 out of 10 kids totally peeked, but the percentage of kids
who lied about whether they peeked grew as the kids got older. At age
2, 25 percent of the kids lied about peeking; at age 3, half lied; and by
age 4, 90 percent of the kids who peeked at the purple dinosaur
refused to admit their guilt. That would also seem to imply that the 25
percent of kids who fibbed at age 2 possessed higher cognitive
abilities than their peers.
In other words, if you want to know whether your kid is gifted, simply
track the specific age at which he starts trying to bullshit you.
Speaking of which ...
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Though some measurements were admittedly questionable.
Why? Well, their theory goes that smarter students do better in school
(Cracked breaks new ground yet again!), which leads to more
encouragement from teachers and parents, which in turn leads to more
motivation to stay in school, then yadda yadda yadda, bingo-bango,
master's degree in economics!
So What's the Problem?
It turns out that all this book learnin' is teaching you more than just the
Pythagorean theorem -- it's also making it easier for you to believe
some laughably wrong and even seriously weird stuff.
Via Mastermarf.com
One problem is that education leads to one overall inaccurate belief:
You think you're smarter than you are. Three studies have found that
people who fall for investment scams are better-educated than the
average person but don't seek advice because they think they're
immune to making mistakes. In one study, researchers found that 94
percent of college professors think their work is superior to their
peers'. These fellows fail to realize that intelligence doesn't always
translate to real-world ability, and thus they tend to overestimate the
quality of their work.
Via Smartiq.com
Whoa! Sure is getting crowded at the smart end of the bell curve.
Right, guys?
It seems to go back to the old saying about how the wisest man is the
one who realizes he knows nothing. Or, as Michael Shermer, the
author of Why People Believe Weird Things, puts it: "Smart people
believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they
arrived at for non-smart reasons."
That's why the more education you get, the more likely you are to
believe in, say, ghosts and the supernatural. One study found that 23
percent of college freshman believed in the paranormal, compared
with 31 percent of seniors and 34 percent of graduate students. Which
leads us to wonder ... what the fuck are schools teaching these days?
#1.
You're More Likely to Be Self-Destructive
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On one hand, it seems like the smarter you are, the greater your ability
to know the dangers of, say, shooting heroin. So self-destructive
habits are traits of the low-class and stupid, right? Eh, not really...
The thing is, the great minds have something in common with
proverbial death-prone kitties: curiosity. Researchers have finally
begun to understand the link between curiosity and intelligence on the
molecular level, thanks to scientists from the University of Toronto
and Mount Sinai Hospital who discovered a protein in an under-
explored part of the brain that controls both traits.
Via Wiredtowinthemovie.com
It's always in the last place you look.
Makes sense. Weird shit like monkey-powered time machines can be
invented only by people with enough brain smarts to make them work
and enough curiosity to want to see such awesomeness in the first
place.
So What's the Problem?
Extra-curious people are also extra-likely to be substance abusers.
British scientists published the results of a long-term study showing
that smart people were more likely to be drunks. People who fell into
the "very bright" category (IQs of 125 or greater) were not only more
likely to experiment with alcohol but also were more likely to drink
excessively and binge drink than their dimwitted counterparts.
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These men are living, breathing supercomputers.
And yeah, they pretty much found the same link between high
intelligence and psychoactive drug use. It also turns out that intelligent
people are much more likely to indulge in illicit substances such as
marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. The smarter you are, the more
likely you are to be tripping balls at any given moment.
Photos.com
"Duuuuude. We should totally rent The Wall tonight!"
As for why, remember when we said earlier that smart people's brains
seek out novelty and thus are the first to experiment with any new
habit? Well, one theory explaining the link between substance abuse
and intelligence is that both alcohol and drugs are novel substances, in
evolutionary terms. Humans have been consuming alcohol for only
about 10,000 years, and the earliest recorded drug was only 5,000
years ago. So when something is novel, the curiouser and most
intelligent among us are more likely to want to try it out.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19174_5-unexpected-downsides-high-
intelligence_p2.html#ixzz2rMkvP02R
Having a high IQ is not always good news
Bruce G Charlton
There are so many advantages to having a high IQ that the disadvantages are
sometimes neglected – and I don‘t mean just short-sightedness, which is commoner
among the highly intelligent. It really is true that people who wear glasses tend to be
smarter!
First it is worth emphasizing that high IQ is mostly very good for you.
This has been known since Lewis Terman‘s 1920s follow-up study of Californian high
IQ children revealed that they were not just cleverer but also taller, healthier and
more athletic than average; and mostly grew-up to become wealthy and successful.
Indeed, Geoffrey Miller has put forward the idea that IQ is a measure of biological
fitness. Since it takes about half of our genes to make and operate the brain, most
damaging genetic mutations will show-up in reduced intelligence. So it would have
made sense for our ancestors to choose their mates on the basis of intelligence,
because a good brain implies good genes.
This applied to William James Sidis (1898-1944), who is often considered to have
had the highest-ever IQ (about 250-300). Sidis was a child prodigy, famous
throughout the USA as having enrolling at Harvard aged 11 and graduated at 16. Yet
he was certainly ‗maladjusted‘, and had a chaotic, troubled and short life. Indeed,
Sidis was widely considered to have been a failure as an adult – although this failure
has been exaggerated, since it turns out that Sidis published a number of interesting
books and articles anonymously.
On the one hand, the ranks of genius are often recruited from amongst the more
creative and stable of ultra-high IQ people; but on the other hand there are also a
high proportion of chronically-disaffected ultra-high IQ people that have been termed
‗The Outsiders‘ in a famous essay of that title by Grady M Towers
( www.prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html )
Sidis himself demonstrated, in exaggerated form, three traits which I put forward as
being aspects of high IQ which are potentially disadvantageous: socialism, atheism
and low-fertility.
1. Socialism
Higher IQ is probably associated with socialism via the personality trait called
Openness-to-experience, which is modestly but significantly correlated with IQ. (To
be more exact, left wing political views and voting patterns are characteristic of the
highest and lowest IQ groups – the elite and the underclass - and right wingers tend
to be in the mid-range.)
2. Atheism
Something similar applies to atheism. Sidis was an atheist, and it has been pretty
conclusively demonstrated by Richard Lynn that increasing IQ is correlated with
increasing likelihood of atheism. The most famous atheists – like Richard Dawkins
and Daniel Dennett – are ferociously intelligent individuals.
So, higher IQ may be associated with greater selfishness. In other words, smarter
neighbours may be less troublesome on average, but they may also be less helpful.
3. Fertility
This trend has, if anything, increased in recent years as ever-more high IQ women
delay reproduction in order to pursue higher education and professional careers.
Indeed, more than 30 percent of women college graduates in the UK and Europe
have no children at all – and more than half of women now attend college.
Since IQ is highly heritable, this low fertility implies that over time high IQ will tend to
select itself out of the population.
The good news is that while the advantages of high IQ are built-in; the disadvantages
of high IQ are mostly a matter of choice.
People can potentially change their political and religious views. For example, Sidis
apparently changed from being a socialist to a libertarian, indeed many adult
conservatives went through a socialist phase during their youth (declaration of
interest: this applies to me).
And religious conversions among the high IQ are not unknown (declaration of
interest: this applies to me). For instance, GK Chesterton and C.S Lewis being
famous examples of atheists who became the two greatest Christian apologists of the
twentieth century.
Indeed, although it does not often happen, smart people can also choose to be more
fertile. One example is the Mormons in the USA, whose average IQ and fertility are
both above the national average, and where the wealthiest Mormons also have the
biggest families. Presumably - since wealth and IQ are positively correlated - this
means that for US Mormons higher IQ leads to higher fertility.
So, on the whole it remains good news to have a high IQ - although perhaps not too-
high an IQ. But perhaps the high IQ community needs to take a more careful look at
the question of low fertility. It may be that, under modern conditions, high intelligence
is stopping people from ‗doing what comes naturally‘ and having large families.
Human reproduction could be one situation where the application of intelligence may
be needed to over-ride our spontaneous emotions or the prevailing societal
incentives.
Or else at some point in the future, high IQ could become very rare indeed.
The higher the IQ, the higher the sense of individuality and the
independence of mind. Exceptionally gifted people care (much)
less about what other people think of them, and are less
sensitive to praise, and even less to flattery.
Because they care less about the opinion and esteem of others,
they tend to be less socially oriented, but also feel less easily
lonely. Maybe it is because they have a very heightened sense
of the "self".
For example, it's been noted that liberals and atheists are, on average,
more intelligent than conservatives or the religious. Liberals and atheists
themselves have often crowed about such results - and the conservatives
and the religious have decried them and questioned their objectivity -
but, if "the Hypothesis" has explanatory power, then the reason people
hold the beliefs of liberalism or atheism has nothing to do with the
superiority of the ideas themselves.
Kanazawa defines liberalism for the purposes of his book as a concern for
non-genetically related others and the providing of resources to them. In
that light, liberalism is profoundly evolutionarily novel. No human
groups, whether in the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) or
up to nearly the present, have been liberal; on the contrary, they have
been concerned only about members of their own group. Likewise, no
human groups have ever, on the whole, been atheistic; they have all been
religious. (Kanazawa found the only evidence of significant atheism in
formerly Communist societies.) Another way of saying all of this is that it
appears that human beings are hard-wired by evolution to be
conservative and theistic.
Now, what is general intelligence anyway? Without going too far afield,
there is some debate as to whether intelligence is domain-specific or
domain-general. Domain-specific psychological qualities are those that
have evolved to solve problems that were frequent in the EEA, for
example, a sense of direction or tracking ability. Because this ability was
so important in the EEA, it evolved into a domain-specific skill, and there
is no correlation between a person's IQ and his ability to track his own
whereabouts. A similar judgment can be made about psychological
qualities such as the detection of cheaters or understanding what another
person might be thinking. General intelligence, on the other hand, came
about - such is the claim - to solve evolutionarily novel problems.
One can see where this is going: the presence of higher IQ whether on the
personal or societal level can lead to beliefs and behaviors that are
evolutionarily disadvantageous. Here is the basis for Bruce Charlton's
"clever sillies" hypothesis (discussed by Kanazawa); in this light, a
"deficiency of common sense" might be interpreted as "potentially
maladapted to our evolutionarily derived nature".
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People with high IQ scores aren't just more intelligent - they also process
sensory information differently, according to new study.
Scientists discovered that the brains of people with high IQ are
automatically more selective when it comes to perceiving moving
objects, meaning that they are more likely to suppress larger and less
relevant background motion.
‗It is not that people with high IQ are simply better at visual perception,‘
said Duje Tadin of the University of Rochester. ‗Instead, their visual
perception is more discriminating.'
+2
Scientists discovered that the brains of people with high IQ are more
selective when perceiving objects in motion, meaning that they are more
likely to ignore larger and less relevant background motion
'They excel at seeing small, moving objects but struggle in perceiving
large, background-like motions.‘
The discovery was made by asking people to watch videos showing
moving bars on a computer screen.
Their task was to state whether the bars were moving to the left or to the
right.
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+2
That ability to block out distraction helps to explain what makes some
brains more efficient than others
The researchers measured how long the video had to run before the
individual could correctly perceive the motion.
The results show that individuals with high IQ can pick up on the
movement of small objects faster than low-IQ individuals can.
'That wasn't unexpected, Tadin says.
The surprise came when tests with larger objects showed just the
opposite: individuals with high IQ were slower to see what was right
there in front of them.
‗There is something about the brains of high-IQ individuals that prevents
them from quickly seeing large, background-like motions,‘ Tadin added.
In other words, it isn't a conscious strategy but rather something
automatic and fundamentally different about the way these people's
brains work.
The ability to block out distraction is very useful in a world filled with
more information than we can possibly take in.
It helps to explain what makes some brains more efficient than others.
An efficient brain 'has to be picky' Tadin said.
The findings were reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
WHAT IS AN IQ AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
An intelligence quotient or IQ is a score derived from a set of
standardised tests developed to measure a person's cognitive
abilities or ‘intelligence’ in relation to their age group.
IQ tests do not measure intelligence the way a ruler measures
height , but rather the way a race measures speed.
Modern IQ tests produce scores for different areas - such as
language fluency and three-dimensional thinking - with the overall
score calculated from subtest scores.
The average score, according to the bell curve, is 100.
Studies have linked IQ scores to morbidity and mortality and even
social status.
The average IQ scores for many populations have been rising at an
average rate of three points per decade since the early 20th
century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect.
It is disputed whether these changes in scores reflect real changes
in intellectual abilities.
Low IQ individuals are not monsters. Rather, they are simply people with a more limited
range of behaviour than the common run of homo sapiens, just as children display a more
limited range of behaviour than a normal adult. In particular low IQ individuals have
difficulty with abstractions. This has implications both for problem solving and the empathic
understanding of other people.
A low IQ means that its possessor will find it difficult to deal with the demands of an
advanced society because such a society will require a good deal of abstract thought,
knowledge acquisition which is not related to the natural world, constant learning as
information becomes outdated or additional information has to be learnt.
Of course the problems associated with a low IQ are not restricted only to the racial groups
which possess an inferior IQ distribution In a country with an average IQ of 100
approximately a quarter of the population will have an IQ of 89 or less. Approximately ten per
cent of such a population will have an IQ of 80 or less. But there are two important
differences between such a society and a low IQ community. First, in a high IQ society the
number with IQs which make them unfitted to live independent lives is comparatively small.
Second, those with low IQs can rely on the help of the much larger group who form the higher
IQ majority, the exact reverse of a low IQ society.
Because of the way human beings generally behave, favouring those most like themselves, it
is probable that that the more ethnically/racially homogenous a society is the more likely it is
for the low IQ individual to receive help from higher IQ individuals because of the enhanced
sense of group solidarity. (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism edited by Frank Salter provides
substantial statistical evidence that as the diversity of a society increases support from the
majority population for social provision falls).
High IQ behaviour
High IQ behaviour is more complex than low IQ behaviour for the beautifully simple reason
that the high IQ individual has a wider range of intellectual competence than the low IQ
individual.
A high IQ will, other things being equal, give its possessor an advantage in any occupation
which relies significantly on IQ related skills. This does not have to be a high status
occupation. For example, someone with an IQ of 160 will tend to be a more expert machinist
than someone with a low IQ.
The higher the IQ the more people will tend to earn and the higher status job they will tend to
occupy. However, when it comes to making a fortune (as opposed to inheriting it or gaining it
through good fortune such as a win on the lottery), IQ is probably not the prime determinant.
At best it might be a necessary but not sufficient condition but even that is dubious. Think of
all the highly intelligent academics whose material circumstances are modest and the many
people of little education and no obvious unusual intelligence who end up as multi-
millionaires. The making a fortune would seem to be more a question of personality – having
a risk-taking personality – persistence and circumstances. It is noteworthy that most
successful entrepreneurs have quite a few attempts before succeeding. This suggests that a
large part of their success is simply the willingness to keep trying and a disregard for the
social harm they cause while failing. It may also be that because a high IQ is more likely to
lead to higher intellectual activity, those with a high IQ are simply more interested in that
activity rather than making money or building a company (entrepreneurship is not only about
money). More prosaically, much will depend on a person’s social circumstances. Many
entrepreneurs have some financial help from inheritance or family assistance, whether that be
financial or simply growing up in a business environment.
inShare
The results showed that siblings of those with schizophrenia only had
elevated IQs if they themselves had any history of mental health issues,
or if other members of their family did. Those siblings who did not have
a family history, excluding the member with schizophrenia, had average
IQs compared to siblings with a robust family history. Verweij also found
that the individuals with schizophrenia, who also had a family member
with mental health issues, had higher IQ scores than the individuals with
schizophrenia and no family history.
This study provides much needed insight into the unique association
between IQ and genetic predisposition for schizophrenia. Verweij added,
“Since the association between IQ scores and family history of
psychiatric disorder in siblings is not extensively investigated, more
research is needed to further address this question.”
Andrea Kuszewski
Andrea Kuszewski
The Rogue Neuron
We have all heard the term ―Nutty Professor,‖ which brings to mind the
highly intelligent yet socially inept individual; excelling in the academic
world, yet failing miserably in the realm of common sense. Is there an
evolutionary explanation for why this phenomenon exists?
Bruce Charlton, editor-in-chief of the journal Medical Hypotheses, says
―yes‖. He calls these people ‗Clever Sillies‘ in his article, ―Clever Sillies—
Why the High IQ Lack Common Sense.‖ Charlton proposes that high IQ is
not just a cognitive ability, but also a cognitive disposition. He says:
My suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and
personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a
tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving,
and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved
behaviour which could be termed common sense.
Charlton suggests that a tendency to rely on analytic ability to problem-
solve everyday situations results in inappropriate behaviors and ideas. I
agree that an over-use of analytical problem-solving in situations that
don‘t require it is inappropriate. He goes on to suggest that the reason for
their strange or inappropriate responses and behaviors in these social
situations stems from their personality trait of Openness to Experience,
one of the big five traits of the Five Factor Model of Personality defined by
Costa and McCrae. Openness is one of the only personality traits that is
highly correlated with IQ; it is characterized by a preference for novelty,
experiencing new things and ideas, and appreciation for art and
aesthetics.
He goes on to explain why he feels this trait explains ‗clever silliness‘:
Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the
many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is
not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for
which humans have evolved ‗domain-specific‘ adaptive behaviours. And
since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the
social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems,
the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average
intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and
behave maladaptively.
Initially, this makes some sense. But I feel that while he is touching on a
very important issue, he is missing the application of this logic completely.
A person with high IQ who overuses analytical ability to problem-solve in
social situations is much like the 170 IQ person who can‘t find their way
out of a paper bag, such as I described in my article ―What Makes a
Genius?‖ There is definitely a ―personality type‖ that can be found in this
range of IQs. However, where I think he misses the point is when he says
that Openness is the cause for this phenomenon.
Charlton claims that by the high IQ person generating many novel ideas
using analytical methods, they appear as foolish and silly to the rest of the
population, and thus are maladaptive behaviors. But I only see this as
problematic if the person is not only high in the Analytic component of
intelligence, but also deficient in another facet of intelligence, the part that
correlates with common sense.
Openness is characterized by not only novelty-seeking behaviors, but also
creative thinking. Not all people who are high IQ are also highly creative,
as I already discussed in my previous article. But people who are high IQ,
plus high in Openness, and also high in Practical Intelligence (the third
facet of Intelligence described by Sternberg in his Triarchic Theory of
Intelligence), are the ones who are able to have many novel, strange
ideas, but also able to appropriately apply them to social situations. The
practical application of novel ideas to situations which result in
appropriate, beneficial outcomes is the definition of creativity. Just
because someone has a novel idea does not mean it will be ―strange‖ or
―silly‖; it depends on the context and application of those novel ideas, and
that is where the person who is high in Practical Intelligence as well as
high in Analytical Intelligence differentiates himself from the ―Nutty
Professor.‖
It is not the presence of novel or seemingly foolish ideas that makes one
silly, it is the absence of the ability to appropriately apply those novel
ideas to the social situation at hand—what we call using common sense.
So while the author of this article was correct in saying that high IQ
people do indeed often fall in the category of ―Clever Sillies,‖ many others
do not. The reason for this socially inept personality type alluded to by
Charlton is not the presence of the trait of Openness, but rather the
inability see the value of the generated novel ideas and know when and
where they are best put to use.
So, do all high IQ people lack common sense? No, but the person with
high IQ and high common sense, or Practical Intelligence, is definitely a
rarer breed of genius.
The Gifted Development Center has been in operation since June, 1979, and we
have assessed over 5,600 children in the last 30 years. By concentrating totally on
the gifted population, we have acquired a considerable amount of knowledge
about the development of giftedness. In 1994-1995, three noted researchers
spent post-doctoral internships assisting us in coding our clinical data to enable
statistical analysis: Drs. Frank Falk and Nancy Miller of the University of Akron,
and Dr. Karen Rogers of the University of St. Thomas. Here are some of the
highlights of what we have learned so far:
2. Giftedness can be observed in the first three years by rapid progression through
the developmental milestones. These milestones should be documented and
taken seriously as evidence of giftedness. Early identification of advanced
development is as essential as early identification of any other exceptionality.
Early intervention promotes optimal development in all children.
3. When parents fail to recognize a child’s gifts, teachers may overlook them as
well. Rita Dickinson (1970) found that half of the children she tested with IQs of
132 or above were referred for behavior problems and not seen as gifted by their
teachers or parents. Parent advocacy is critical for gifted children’s emotional and
academic growth. Associate Director, Bobbie Gilman’s (2008a) award-winning
book, Academic Advocacy for Gifted Children: A Parent’s Complete Guide, can
guide parents in effectively advocating for their children. Challenging Highly
Gifted Learners (Gilman, 2008b) is an excellent book for teachers and parents.
4. Children and adults can be assessed at any age. However, the ideal age for
testing is between 5 and 8 ½ years. By the age of 9, highly gifted children may hit
the ceiling of the tests, and gifted girls may be socialized to hide their abilities.
Unless they are absolutely certain they are right, gifted girls are often unwilling to
guess, which lowers their IQ scores.
5. Brothers and sisters are usually within five or ten points in measured ability.
Parents' IQ scores are often within 10 points of their children's; even grandparents'
IQ scores may be within 10 points of their grandchildren's. We studied 148 sets of
siblings and found that over 1/3 were within five points of each other, over 3/5
were within 10 points, and nearly 3/4 were within 13 points. When one child in the
family is identified as gifted, the chances are great that all members of the family
are gifted.
6. Second children are recognized as gifted much less frequently than first-borns or
only children. They often go in the opposite direction of their older siblings and
are less likely to be achievement oriented. Even the first-born identical twin has a
greater chance of being accepted in a gifted program than the second-born!
Males above
Females above 160 IQ Total
160 IQ
1979 –1989 94 89 183
1990 – 2009 507 298 805
1979 – 2009 601 387 988
8. Gifted girls and gifted boys have different coping mechanisms and are likely to
face different problems. Gifted girls hide their abilities and learn to blend in with
other children. In elementary school they direct their mental energies into
developing social relationships; in junior high school they are valued for their
appearance and sociability rather than for their intelligence. Gifted boys are easier
to spot, but they are often considered ―immature" and may be held back in school if
they cannot socialize with children their own age with whom they have no common
interests.
10. This asynchrony is often seen in large discrepancies between index scores on
the fourth edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV). In
these cases, the Full Scale IQ score should not be used to select gifted students for
programs. Instead, the General Ability Index (GAI), which omits Working Memory
and Processing Speed, provides a better estimate of the child’s reasoning ability.
The GAI has been endorsed by the National Association for Gifted
Children: http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=375. Extended norms are now
available for the WISC-IV:http://harcourtassessment.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-
us/Productdetail.htm?Pid=015-8979-044&Mode=resource
11. The fifth edition of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (SB5) measures
mathematical and visual-spatial abilities better than abstract verbal reasoning
abilities. When the SB5 is used for selection of gifted students for programs, the
cut-off score for admission should be lowered to 120 IQ. Different scoring options
are available for gifted children, including Rasch-ratio scores. The publisher
permits the administration of the older version of theStanford-Binet (Form L-M) to
assess abstract verbal abilities, especially in exceptionally gifted children, and
recommends that it be administered in conjunction with the SB5 so that various
scores can be compared (Carson & Roid, 2004).
13. Gifted children have better social adjustment in classes with children like
themselves. The brighter the child, the lower his or her social self-concept is likely
to be in the regular classroom. Social self-concept improves when children are
placed with true peers in special classes.
14. Perfectionism, sensitivity and intensity are three personality traits associated
with giftedness. They are derived from the complexity of the child's cognitive and
emotional development. According to Dabrowski's theory, these traits—related to
overexcitabilities—are indicative of potential for high moral values in adult life.
The brighter the child, the earlier and more profound may be his or her concern
with moral issues. But this potential usually does not develop in a vacuum. It
requires nurturing in a supportive environment.
15. About 60% of gifted children are introverted compared with 30% of the general
population. Approximately 75% of highly gifted children are introverted.
Introversion correlates with introspection, reflection, the ability to inhibit
aggression, deep sensitivity, moral development, high academic achievement,
scholarly contributions, leadership in academic and aesthetic fields in adult life, and
smoother passage through midlife; however, it is very likely to be misunderstood
and ―corrected‖ in children by well-meaning adults.
16. Mildly, moderately, highly, exceptionally and profoundly advanced children are
as different from each other as mildly, moderately, severely and profoundly
delayed children are from each other, but the differences among levels of giftedness
are rarely recognized.
17. There are far more exceptionally gifted children in the population than anyone
realizes. Approximately 18% of the 5,600+ children we have assessed in the last 30
years are exceptionally gifted, with IQ scores above 160 IQ. As of January 1,
2009, we found at least 988 children above 160 IQ, including 281 above 180 IQ
and 87 above 200 IQ. We have entered massive data on 241 of these children—
the largest sample in this IQ range ever to be studied (Rogers & Silverman, 1997).
Only two comprehensive studies have been published to date on children in these
ranges. Leta Hollingworth (1942) found 12 children above 180 IQ between 1916
and 1939 and Miraca Gross (1993; 2004) studied 60 Australian children with IQ
scores above 160.
18. Many cases of underachievement are linked to chronic early ear infections (9 or
more in the first three years), with residual effects of auditory sequential processing
deficits and attentional problems. Spelling, arithmetic, handwriting, rote
memorization, attention, and motivation to do written work are all typically
affected.
19. Gifted children may have hidden learning disabilities. Approximately one-sixth
of the gifted children who come to the Center for testing have some type of
learning disability—often undetected before the assessment—such as central
auditory processing disorder (CAPD), difficulties with visual processing, sensory
processing disorder, spatial disorientation, dyslexia, and attention deficits.
Giftedness masks disabilities and disabilities depress IQ scores. Higher abstract
reasoning enables children to compensate to some extent for these weaknesses,
making them harder to detect. However, compensation requires more energy,
affects motivation, and breaks down under stress or when the child is fatigued.
21. Difficult birth histories, such as long labor, heads too large for the birth canal,
four or more hours of Pitocin to induce labor, emergency C-sections, cords
wrapped around any part of the infant’s body, and oxygen at birth, can lead to
sensory processing disorder (SPD). Parents, teachers, and pediatricians should be
alerted that the critical period for ameliorating sensory-motor deficits is from birth
to age seven. When gross or fine motor weaknesses are seen, pediatric
occupational therapy should be sought immediately, rather than waiting for the
child to ―outgrow‖ the problem.
22. Giftedness is not elitist. It cuts across all socio-economic, ethnic and national
groups (Dickinson, 1970). In every culture, there are developmentally advanced
children who have greater abstract reasoning and develop at a faster rate than their
age peers. Though the percentage of gifted students among the upper classes may
be higher, a much greater number of gifted children come from the lower classes,
because the poor far outnumber the rich (Zigler & Farber, 1985). Therefore, when
provisions are denied to the gifted on the basis that they are "elitist," it is the poor
who suffer the most. The rich have other options.
23. The more egalitarian gifted programs attempt to be, the less defensible they
are. Children in the top and bottom three percent of the population have atypical
developmental patterns and require differentiated instruction. Children in the top
and bottom 10 percent of the population are not statistically or developmentally
different from children in the top and bottom 15 percent, and it is not justifiable to
single them out for special treatment. More and more school districts are realizing
this in this new millennium, and are providing in-depth services for those who need
them the most. Self-contained, multi-age programs for the gifted and radical
acceleration are gaining in popularity.
Anxiety Linked to High IQ
Excessive worry might not be such a bad thing after all — a new small study
suggests that such anxiety may have evolved in people along with intelligence.
The results show, among people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, high
IQ scores were associated with high levels of worry.
In addition, those with anxiety disorder tended to have higher IQ scoresthan healthy
people, as well as higher levels of activity in regions of the brain that aid in
communication between parts of the brain. These regions are thought to have
contributed to the evolutionary success of humans, the researchers say.
Although we tend to view anxiety as not being good for us, it is linked with
intelligence — a highly adaptive trait, said Dr. Jeremy Coplan, study researcher and
professor of psychiatry at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.
High levels of anxiety can be disabling, and patients' worries are often irrational,
Coplan said. But "every so often there's a wild-card danger. Then, that excessive
worry becomes highly adaptive," Coplan said.
"People who act on the signals of that wild-card danger are likely to preserve their
lives and the lives of their offspring," Coplan said.
Because the study was small, more research is needed to confirm the findings.
In the study, 26 patients with anxiety disorder and 18 healthy people completed an IQ
test, along with a questionnaire to assess their level of worry.
Among the participants with anxiety disorders, the higher their worry level, the greater
their IQ score was.
Interestingly, the opposite was seen in healthy patients: those with high IQ scores
tended to have low levels of worry, and those with low IQ scores tended to have high
levels of worry — a finding that agrees with earlier research.
Too little worry can be problematic for individuals and society, Coplan said. Some
people are "incapable of seeing any danger, even when danger is imminent, he said.
"If these folks are in positions as leaders, they are going to indicate to the general
populace that there's no need to worry," Coplan said. In some situations, like the
recent real estate bubble, that lack of worry can have societal consequences, he
said.
Pass it on: In some situations, excessive worrying is advantageous, and the trait
may have co-evolved with intelligence.
Brain plasticity – the ability of brain to reorganise itself by growing new brain cells or
connections.
Energy supply to the brain - particularly when it‘s working hard.
With a smarter brain, there are all-round cognitive benefits for attentional focus and grit,
problem solving efficiency, learning capacity and memory – much like there are all-round
physical benefits to being in good shape physically. Having a higher IQ also directly
improves health and life-expectancy as this data shows:
IQ and life-expectancy
Summary
In previous editorials I have written about the absent-minded and socially-inept ‗nutty
professor‘ stereotype in science, and the phenomenon of ‗psychological neoteny‘ whereby
intelligent modern people (including scientists) decline to grow-up and instead remain in
a state of perpetual novelty-seeking adolescence. These can be seen as specific examples
of the general phenomenon of ‗clever sillies‘ whereby intelligent people with high levels of
technical ability are seen (by the majority of the rest of the population) as having foolish
ideas and behaviours outside the realm of their professional expertise. In short, it has
often been observed that high IQ types are lacking in ‗common sense‘ – and especially
when it comes to dealing with other human beings. General intelligence is not just a
cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of
higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including
the trait of ‗Openness to experience‘, ‗enlightened‘ or progressive left-wing political
values, and atheism. Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for
this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of
IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-
solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour
which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often
useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing
societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for
which humans have evolved ‗domain-specific‘ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved
common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that,
when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than
those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and
behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent
people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in
addition ‗advertising‘ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a
modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-
exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among
the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.
Hence the phenomenon of ‗political correctness‘ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas
have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole
nations.
***
On the whole, and all else being equal, in modern societies the higher a person‘s general
intelligence (as measured by the intelligence quotient or IQ), the better will be life for
that person; since higher intelligence leads (among other benefits) to higher social status
and salary, longer life expectancy and better health [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]. However,
at the same time, it has been recognized for more than a century that increasing IQ is
biologically-maladaptive because there is an inverse relationship between IQ and fertility
[6], [7] and [8]. Under modern conditions, therefore, high intelligence is fitness-
reducing.
(This statement requires a qualification. When a person has suffered some form of brain
damage, or a pathology affecting brain function, then this might well produce generalized
impairment of cognition: reducing both general intelligence and other forms of evolved
cognitive functioning, depending on the site and extent of the brain pathology. Since a
population with low IQ would include some whose IQ had been lowered by brain
pathology, the average level of social intelligence or common sense would probably also
be lower in this population. This confounding effect of brain pathology would be expected
to create a weak and non-causal statistical correlation between IQ and social
intelligence/common sense, a correlation that would mainly be apparent at low levels of
IQ.)
As examples of how IQ may help with evolutionary novelties, it has been abundantly-
demonstrated that increasing measures of IQ are strongly and positively correlated with
a wide range of abilities which require abstract reasoning and rapid learning of new
knowledge and skills; such as educational outcomes, and abilities at most complex
modern jobs [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [11]. Science and mathematics are classic
examples of problem-solving activities that arose only recently in human evolutionary
history and in which differential ability is very strongly predicted by relative general
intelligence [12].
However, there are also many human tasks which our human ancestors did encounter
repeatedly and over manifold generations, and natural selection has often produced
‗instinctive‘, spontaneous ways of dealing with these. Since humans are social primates,
one major such category is social problems, which have to do with understanding,
predicting and manipulating the behaviours of other human beings [13], [14], [15] and
[16]. Being able to behave adaptively in dealing with these basic human situations is
what I will term having ‗common sense‘.
Kanazawa‘s idea is that there is therefore a contrast between recurring, mainly social
problems which affected fitness for our ancestors and for which all normal humans have
evolved behavioural responses; and problems which are an evolutionary novelty but
which have a major impact on individual functioning in the context of modern societies
[9] and [10]. When a problem is an evolutionary novelty, individual differences in general
intelligence make a big difference to each individual‘s abilities to analyze the problem,
and learn to how solve it. So, the idea is that having a high IQ would predict a better
ability in understanding and dealing with new problems; but higher IQ would not increase
the level of a person‘s common sense ability to deal with social situations.
For example, in some populations there is a positive correlation between IQ and the
personality trait of Openness to experience (‗Openness‘) [18] and [19]; a positive
correlation with ‗enlightened‘ or progressive values of a broadly socialist and libertarian
type [20]; and a negative correlation with religiousness [21].
The over-use of abstract reasoning may be most obvious in the social domain, where
normal humans are richly equipped with evolved psychological mechanisms both for
here-and-now interactions (e.g. rapidly reading emotions from facial expression, gesture
and posture, and speech intonation) and for ‗strategic‘ modelling of social interactions to
understand predict and manipulate the behaviour of others [16]. Social strategies deploy
inferred knowledge about the dispositions, motivations and intentions of others. When
the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic,
abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ
people, they are ignoring an ‗expert system‘ in favour of a non-expert system.
In suggesting that the most intelligent people tend to use IQ to over-ride common sense
I am unsure of the extent to which this is due to a deficit in the social reasoning ability,
perhaps due to a trade-off between cognitive abilities – as suggested by Baron-Cohen‘s
conceptualization of Asperger‘s syndrome, including the male- versus female-type of
systematizing/empathizing brain [22]. Or alternatively it could be more of an habitual
tendency to over-use abstract analysis, that might (in principle) be overcome by effort or
with training. Observing the apparent universality of ‗Silly Clevers‘ in modernizing
societies, I suspect that a higher IQ bias towards over-utilizing abstract reasoning would
probably turn-out to be innate and relatively stable.
Indeed, I suggest that higher levels of the personality trait of Openness in higher IQ
people may the flip-side of this over-use of abstraction. I regard Openness as the result
of deploying abstract analysis for social problems to yield unstable and unpredictable
results, when innate social intelligence would tend to yield predictable and stable results.
This might plausibly underlie the tendency of the most intelligent people in modernizing
societies to hold ‗left-wing‘ political views [10] and [20].
I would argue that neophilia (or novelty-seeking) is a driving attribute of the personality
trait of Openness; and a disposition common in adolescents and immature adults who
display what I have termed ‗psychological neoteny‘ [23] and [24]. When problems are
analyzed using common sense ‗instincts‘ the evaluative process would be expected to
lead to the same answers in all normal humans, and these answers are likely to be stable
over time. But when higher IQ people ignore or over-ride common sense, they generate
a variety of uncommon ideas. Since these ideas are only feebly-, or wholly un-,
supported by emotions; they are held more weakly than common sense ideas, and so are
more likely to change over time.
For instance, a group of less intelligent people using instinctive social intelligence to
analyze a social situation will presumably reach the same traditional conclusion as
everyone else and this conclusion will not change with time; while a more intelligent
group might by contrast use abstract analysis and generate a wider range of novel and
less-compelling solutions. This behaviour appears as if motivated by novelty-seeking.
Applying abstract analysis to social situations might be seen as ‗creative‘, and indeed
Openness has been put forward as the major personality trait which supports creativity
[19] and [25]. This is reasonable in the sense that an intellectual high in Openness would
be likely to disregard common sense, and to generate multiple, unpredictable and
unfamiliar answers to evolutionarily-familiar problems which would only yield a single
‗obvious‘ solution to those who deployed evolved modes of intelligence. However, I would
instead argue that a high IQ person applying abstract systemizing intelligence to
activities which are more usually done by instinctive intelligence is not a truly ‗creative‘
process.
It therefore seems plausible that the folklore or stereotypical idea of the eccentric,
unworldly, absent-minded or obtuse scientist – who is brilliant at their job while being
fatuous and incompetent in terms of their everyday life [28], might be the result of this
psychological tendency to over-use abstract intelligence and use it in inappropriate
situations.
My hunch is that it is this kind of IQ-advertisement which has led to the most intelligent
people in modern societies having ideas about social phenomena that are not just
randomly incorrect (due to inappropriately misapplying abstract analysis) but are
systematically wrong. I am talking of the phenomenon known as political correctness
(PC) in which foolish and false ideas have become moralistically-enforced among the
ruling intellectual elite. And these ideas have invaded academic, political and social
discourse. Because while the stereotypical nutty professor in the hard sciences is a
brilliant scientist but silly about everything else; the stereotypical nutty professor social
scientist or humanities professor is not just silly about ‗everything else‘, but also silly in
their professional work.
The results of cognitive stratification and IQ-advertising are therefore bad enough to
have destroyed the value of whole domains of the arts and academia, and in the domain
of public policy the results have been simply disastrous. Over the past four decades the
dishonest fantasy-world discourse of non-biological political correctness has evolved to
dominate the intellectual arena of whole nations – perhaps the whole developed world –
such that wrong and ridiculous ideas have become not just mainstream, but compulsory.
Because clever silliness is not just one of several competing ideas in the elite arena – it is
both intellectually- and moralistically-enforced with such zeal as utterly to exclude
alternatives [32]. The first level of defence is that denying a PC assertion is taken as
proof of dumbness or derangement; such that flat-denial without refutation is regarded
as sufficient response. But the toughest enforcement is moral: anyone smart and sane
who disbelieves the silly clever falsehoods and asserts something different is not just
denounced as dumb but actually pilloried as evil [33].
I infer that the motivation behind the moralizing venom of political correctness is the fact
that spontaneous human instincts are universal and more powerfully-felt than the absurd
abstractions of PC; plus the fact that common sense is basically correct while PC is
perversely wrong. Hence, at all costs a fair debate must be prevented if the PC
consensus is to be protected. Common sense requires to be stigmatized in order that it is
neutralized.
Ultimately these manoeuvres serve to defend the power, status and distinctiveness of the
intellectual elite [34]. They are socially-adaptive over the short-term, even as they are
biologically-maladaptive over the longer-term.
Conclusion
Because evolved ‗common sense‘ usually produces the right answers in the social
domain, yet the most intelligent people have personalities which over-use abstract
analysis in the social domain [9] and [10], this implies that the most intelligent people
are predisposed to have silly ideas and to behave maladaptively when it comes to solving
social problems.
Ever since the development of cognitive stratification in modernizing societies [29], the
clever sillies have been almost monopolistically ‗in charge‘. They really are both clever
and silly – but the cleverness is abstract while the silliness is focused on the
psychological and social domains. Consequently, the fatal flaw of modern ruling elites lies
in their lack of common sense – especially the misinterpretations of human psychology
and socio-political affairs. My guess is that this lack of common sense is intrinsic and
incorrigible – and perhaps biologically-linked with the evolution of high intelligence and
the rise of modernity [35].
Stanovich has also described the over-riding of the ‗Darwinian brain‘ of autonomous
systems by the analytic system, and has identified the phenomenon as underlying
modern non-adaptive ethical reasoning [36]. Stanovich has also noted that IQ accounts
for much (but not all) of the inter-individual differences in using analytic evaluations;
however, Stanovich regards the increased use of abstraction to replace traditional
‗common sense‘ very positively, not as ‗silly‘ but as a vital aspect of what he interprets as
the higher status of modern social morality.
Yet, whatever else, to be a clever silly is a somewhat tragic state; because it entails
being cognitively-trapped by compulsive abstraction; unable to engage directly and
spontaneously with what most humans have traditionally regarded as psycho-social
reality; disbarred from the common experience of humankind and instead cut-adrift on
the surface of a glittering but shallow ocean of novelties: none of which can ever truly
convince or satisfy. It is to be alienated from the world; and to find no stable meaning of
life that is solidly underpinned by emotional conviction [37]. Little wonder, perhaps, that
clever sillies usually choose sub-replacement reproduction [6].
To term the Western ruling elite ‗clever sillies‘ is of course a broad generalization, but is
not merely name-calling. Because, as well as political correctness being systematically
dishonest [33] and [34]; in relation to absolute and differential fertility, modern elite
behaviour is objectively maladaptive in a strictly biological sense. It remains to be seen
whether the genetic self-annihilation of the IQ elite will lead-on towards self-annihilation
of the societies over which they rule.
Note: I should in all honesty point-out that I recognize this phenomenon from the inside.
In other words, I myself am a prime example of a ‗clever silly‘; having spent much of
adolescence and early adult life passively absorbing high-IQ-elite-approved, ingenious-
but-daft ideas that later needed, painfully, to be dismantled. I have eventually been
forced to acknowledge that when it comes to the psycho-social domain, the
commonsense verdict of the majority of ordinary people throughout history is much more
likely to be accurate than the latest fashionably-brilliant insight of the ruling elite. So,
this article has been written on the assumption, eminently-challengeable, that although I
have nearly-always been wrong in the past – I now am right….
An Unfulfilled Life: How High
Intelligence Has Led To My Love/Hate
Relationship With Work
I don't like to write about intelligence. It is one of those topics that for
some reason seems taboo. My experience has been that people get angry,
defensive, and critical when I bring it up. But I want to break my own
rules today and talk about it because I read this article about career
advice for geniuses and began reflecting on my own unfulfilling work
history. I began to wonder if many of you read this blog because you view
the world much like I do. Many of you are probably quite intelligent and as
such have lived through a series of similarly unfulfilling jobs. I hope you
reach the end of this post and feel a sigh of relief, knowing that you aren't
the only one that has this struggle.
The post is divided into three parts. First, my own history and experience.
Secondly, why I think intelligence can be a curse at work, and why
companies don't embrace the best and brightest. Thirdly, what you can do
if you are an intelligent but unfulfilled employee and what to do if you are
a manager that needs to engage a highly intelligent individual.
I will say upfront that entrepreneurship may be an excellent path for
highly intelligent people interested in business, because it requires
analysis and decision making on many different levels with different time
frames and different problem domains – everything a genius really wants.
1. My Experience
I should have known something was wrong with me in the sixth grade
when, given the chance to present a topic to the class, I chose "Atoms
and Molecules." Most other students chose celebrities, sports figures, or
historical events. I mixed vinegar and baking soda and listened to the
class laugh as it overflowed my jug and soak the surrounding carpet. I
was always in the advanced classes and went on to a high school for
smart kids and did well but was more interested in girls and basketball
during this period of my life. Otherwise I could have applied myself much
more.
I went to college and majored in Electrical Engineering, but I often found
the classes boring. I remember sitting in the back of my Electromagnetics
class and reading a book on Fuzzy Logic because I found it more
interesting and the college didn't have a course in it. As a senior, I took an
ASIC design course and missed a key lecture on how to draw various
transistor implementations of logic gates. It was an important component
of the course, so I had to learn it on my own for the exam. A bonus
problem on the exam was some sort of funky logic equation that we had
to implement in as few transistors as possible. I was the only person in
the class to get it right, and I even beat the implementation of the
professor. Since I learned it on my own I had developed a different way of
thinking about these problems, and he was so impressed he offered me a
scholarship to grad school to come work in his lab. This was the late 90s
though, and tech was lucrative so I wasn't going to give up good money
for more schooling.
During my college years I also managed a restaurant that had lost money
for three years and had it's first profitable quarter about six months after I
came on board. I started to think that maybe I had unconventional ideas
because I was smart, and not because I was crazy.
I started my professional work career and found that I had problems. I
loved to tackle new things, unique problems, and I loved to debug
hardware. But I hated doing many of the tasks that seemed to be part of
the job. I didn't relate well to others when it came to unspoken
expectations. If I was given lots of leeway in how to do something it was
almost certain to turn out in a way that my manager did not anticipate. It
seemed that I never had the same set of assumptions about a problem as
anyone else.
I did some excellent things and I flopped on some things. Whether I was a
good or bad employee depended on who you talked to. I didn't deal well
with the structure. The career path was pretty much the same for
everybody and I didn't have the chance to pursue projects that I found
interesting. I was just given stuff that managers thought I should be doing
based on my experience level and were the internal openings were.
After awhile I finally went to see a psychologist. I told him I thought I had
problems because my worldview seemed to be so dramatically different
than everyone else I knew. He suggested I take an intelligence test, which
is how I ended up in MENSA. For the first time in a long time, I breathed a
sigh of relief. It didn't fix anything, but it did give me some external
verification that helped me deal with everything.
Throughout my career, I have felt, and still feel, like I could contribute so
much more if given the chance. I feel like I live in a world where everyone
expects things to work a certain way but to me the rules seem arbitrary
and in some ways that makes it much more difficult to fit in. I have not
had a normal career path, and by and large this is seen as a negative
rather than a positive. I'm not sure where I will end up, but I keep looking
for that job where I get paid to work on really hard really unique
problems.
The irony in the fact that I am usually bored with my jobs is that I really
love to work. My hobbies usually consist of side projects and businesses
that are fun and challenging. My parents joke that the things I do for fun
are things most people consider work. That is the love/hate relationship I
am talking about. I love to do things. I love to think, analyze, discuss,
debate, research, build, debug, etc. When I get home from work, I blog, I
work logic puzzles, I study Chinese, I read (mostly non-fiction and lots of
textbooks). I don't like to do things that don't require my brain to be
engaged. But I end up hating most jobs because it seems that companies
try to take all the thinking out of the work – probably because most
people don't like it.
The one deviation was my first major foray into entrepreneurship. I
thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of it all but, for various reasons,
eventually sold my stake to my business partner.
2. Intelligence as a curse at work.
Out of all the possible tests you could give someone, the single best
predictor of on the job success is raw intelligence. If you don't believe me,
look it up. The problem is that even intelligence only has a weak
correlation with job success (which means that we are really not very
good at predicting who will be successful in what positions, without
spending a lot of time and money looking at many different components of
the person and the job). Add to that the fact that even intelligent people
are frequently wrong (though statistically they may fare better than
others), and you see why the value in hiring really smart people might not
be readily evident to most companies.
The finding, published in Current Biology reveals that people who have high IQ scores process
sensory information differently.
The brains of people with high IQ were automatically more selective when they perceived objects
in motion. More specifically, they are more likely to suppress larger and less important
background motion.
"It is not that people with high IQ are simply better at visual perception. Instead, their visual
perception is more discriminating. They excel at seeing small, moving objects but struggle in
perceiving large, background-like motions."
The study was composed of two series of tests on 67 people with an average IQ score of 100
(each participant took one of two forms of the IQ test), which is normal.
The participants watched a visual test where they were shown movies of circular grids, large and
small, that look as if they are moving to the right or left. Volunteers were asked how many frames
of the movie they needed to see to find the motion.
Results revealed that people with high IQ can detect the movement of small objects faster
than low-IQ people can.
These results were expected, however, it was surprising to see that those with high IQs were
slower to see what was already in front of them.
Tadin explains, "There is something about the brains of high-IQ individuals that prevents them
from quickly seeing large, background-like motions."
Therefore, the authors believe it is not a conscious strategy but instead something automatic and
fundamentally different about the way their brains work.
The skill to eliminate distraction could be helpful in a world filled with more information than we
can possibly absorb. It explains why some brains are more efficient than others.
Concern over the adjustment of gifted-level children, however, has not abated. Even
at the time of Terman's landmark work, another respected authority in the field, Leta
Hollingworth (1942), contended that highly intelligent children were prone to develop
social and emotional adjustment problems. Similar concerns have been repeated by
many others (Austin & Draper, 1981; Janos & Robinson, 1985; Lajoie & Shore, 1981;
Powell & Haden, 1984; Roedell, 1984; Schauer, 1976).
Thus, it appears that two distinct, seemingly antithetical, views exist regarding the
adjustment of highly intelligent children. Research in the Terman tradition generally
indicates that high intelligence is associated with healthy adjustment. What might be
termed the Hollingworth perspective regards high intelligence as associated with
adjustment problems (Hollingworth, 1942). (Note: The point of this article is not to set
the personal views of Terman and Hollingworth at opposite ends of continuum,
creating a strawman argument. Rather, the influential contributions and status of both
authorities make their names convenient guideposts for identifying--and legitimizing--
two contrasting perspectives on the relationship between adjustment and IQ.)
Taken to its logical conclusion, one view leads to the hypothesis that there is a
positive correlation between intelligence and adjustment. In contrast, the other view
suggests that the correlation would be negative.
A number of studies have claimed poor adjustment in very high IQ children, but these
studies were based on uncertain adjustment criteria and typically did not include
appropriate comparison groups (Kincaid, 1969; Selig, 1951; Zorbaugh, Boardman, &
Sheldon, 1951). Studies that contrasted higher and lower IQ groups directly suggest
a different view. Gallagher and Crowder (1957) found that 35 children with 150+ IQs
were generally well adjusted, despite a few exceptions. Gallagher (1958) found that
150+ IQ (Stanford-Binet) children were among the most popular children in their
respective classes and found no differences between subgroups of 150-164-IQ and
165-205-IQ children. Lewis (1943), however, did report greater maladjustment and
underachievement in a higher (145+) IQ group than in a lower (125-144) IQ group.
Freeman (1979) contrasted a "High IQ" group (IQs of 141-170, mean 155) with a
"Moderate IQ" group (IQs of 97-140, mean 120) on both parent- and child-report
measures of adjustment. Results were generally favorable in both groups, and there
was little indication that the High IQ group was less well adjusted.
Janos (1983) compared 32 "highly gifted" children (IQs above 164) and 49
"moderately gifted" (IQs of 120-140) on several standard adjustment measures. On
Achenbach and Edelbrock's Child Behavior Checklist, there were not significant
differences between groups. Interestingly, even within the highly gifted group, higher
IQs were associated with better adjustment on the Behavior Problems subscale (r = -
.518). There were no differences between groups on the Connor's Teacher Rating
scale, the Vineland Adaptive Behavior scales, or the Piers Harris Children's Self-
Concept scale. However, Janos did conclude that a "significant minority (20-25%)" (p.
96) of highly gifted children suffered adjustment problems.
Feldman (1984) reviewed follow-up data on the 26 subjects in Terman's project who
scored above 180 IQ and 26 subjects with lower, but still gifted-level, IQs (mean
150). There were few differences between the two groups; and he concluded that
exceptionally high IQs did not truly distinguish these individuals from other, more
moderately high IQ subjects.
In summary, there are persistent reports of adjustment problems among the highest IQ
groups, but the evidence is contradictory and largely unpersuasive. Some very high IQ
children with adjustment problems may be expected by chance without the existence of a
specific relationship between IQ and adjustment. One problem is that the use of widely
varying cutoff scores makes comparison across studies difficult. An alternative approach
would be to investigate the direction and magnitude of correlations between IQ and
adjustment within the gifted range, eliminating the need for an arbitrary cutoff.
A second problem is that most studies consider the relationship between IQ and adjustment
in isolation and do not control for possible confounding variables that could obscure the
relationship. Two kinds of confounding variables are considered in the present study:
respondent bias or defensiveness in reporting adjustment problems, and overall family
adjustment. In previous work Cornell and Grossberg (1986) found that controlling for
respondent bias through validity scales associated with the adjustment instrument altered the
pattern of results in a meaningful way. Cornell and Grossberg (1987) also found that family
adjustment, as assessed by the family Cohesion scale of the Family Environment Scale
(Moos & Moos, 1981), was consistently related to both parent and child measures of child
adjustment.
METHOD
Subjects
All 83 children received individual IQ testing with either the Stanford-Binet (65 children) or the
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised (WISC-R; 18 children). Mean IQ for the
entire sample was 139.95 (SD, 11.3). There was no significant difference between children
tested with the STanford-Binet and the WISC-R. The mean IQ for public school children
(143.3) was significantly higher than that for the private school children (137.7), t = 2.29, p *
.05. This mean IQ difference appears to be attributable to a difference in selection criteria for
the gifted programs by the two schools. The policy for the public school was not to include
children with IQs below 130, while the private school admitted children with IQs as low as
120, provided that there was evidence of exceptional talent or ability in some area (e.g.,
creative writing).
In preliminary analyses, there were no differences between public and private school children
in any of the 12 adjustment measures. Simple correlations were calculated between IQ and
each adjustment measure separately for public and private school children. When
correlations were compared by r to z transformation, there were no significant differences
between groups. For these reasons, public and private school children were combined in the
data analyses to follow.
The families were predominantly white, middle-class families residing in suburban Southeast
Michigan. On the 7-point Hollingshead scale for educational attainment (Hollingshead, 1975),
mothers obtained a mean score of 5.77 and fathers a mean score of 6.16. Additional
demographic data and methodological information are reported elsewhere (Grossberg,
1985).
The Revised Personality Inventory for Children, Short Form (PIC) (WIRT, Lachar, Klinedinst,
& Seat, 1977) is a 280-item true-false questionnaire completed by the child's parent. The PIC
scales selected for use in this study are the Adjustment Scale, a screening measure of
overall psychological adjustment, and 9 of the 12 standard clinical scales (see Table 1).
In addition to scales assessing the child's adjustment, the PIC contains three validity scales,
which are designed as measures of distortion or bias. The Lie scale attempts to identify
parents with a defensive response set that involves describing the child in extremely virtuous
terms and denying minor, commonly occurring problems. The Defensiveness scale assesses
the parent's tendency to minimize the child's problems. The F scale is constructed to identify
exaggeration of problems or random responding.
Parents (primarily mothers) competed the PIC, FES, and a family background questionnaire
in group meetings held at school. They were given explicit instructions on having their
children complete the Self-Esteem and Anxiety measures independently at home and return
them in stamped, addressed envelopes provided for them.
RESULTS
A series of simple correlations were calculated between IQ and each of the adjustment
measures (see Table 1). Eleven of 12 correlations for the full sample of 83 children (IQ range
120-168) were in the direction of more favorable adjustment for higher IQ children, but only 3
were statistically significant.
One possibility was that there were significant negative correlations between IQ and
adjustment in the higher IQ ranges which were masked by correlating across the full 120-
168-IQ range. As a result, additional correlations were calculated for successively smaller IQ
ranges, omitting lower IQ groups. The second set of correlations was for the 65 children
falling into the 130-168 range, and the third set was for 21 children in the 145-168-IQ range.
None of these correlations were significant.
DISCUSSION
The present study finds modest support for the view that IQ is positively related to healthy
personality adjustment within the gifted range. Concerns raised by the Hollingworth view that
very high IQ is associated with poor adjustment were not supported. Children with higher IQs
tended to be less anxious and nervous (Anxious, child report). According to parent report on
the PIC, they were less likely to evidence problems in physical or cognitive development
(Development scale) or exhibit behavior and discipline problems (Delinquency scale).
The IQ-adjustment relationship was reexamined after controlling for the influence of both
respondent bias and family Cohesion through multiple-regression analyses. As reported in
Table 2, this combination of predictor variables (validity scales and Cohesion entered
together, followed by IQ) was significantly related to each of the 12 adjustment measures
beyond the .01 level. Multiple correlations ranged from .43 to .78, indicating that these
predictors account for 18.5% to 60.8% of the variance in adjustment for this sample. This
procedure resulted in somewhat stronger support for the Terman hypothesis, with the
addition of a significant partial correlation between IQ and PIC Adjustment.
Several qualifications to the present findings are in order. The sample consists of children 7
to 11 years old and therefore the results do not exclude the possibility of high-IQ-related
problems at other ages. Also, the 83 children ranged from 120 to 168 IQ, including 4 children
scoring at the ceiling for the WISC-R or Stanford Binet norm tables. It is possible that the
serious adjustment problems hypothesized to be associated with high IQ in fact only occur in
children with IQs beyond the norm tables (essentially 4 or more standard deviations from the
mean). Scores at this level, however, should be regarded with great caution. Standard IQ
tests are not designed to discriminate at such a high level, and these scores may be
unreliable and of questionable meaning.
Moreover, it should be noted that, in principle, only a fraction of the gifted population should
fall beyond the range included in this study. If one takes an IQ score of 2 standard deviations
above the mean as an arbitrary cutoff, then in accord with the normal distribution, about
2.27% of the population falls into the gifted range. Those 4 or more standard deviations
above the mean would make up only .0000317/.0227 or 0.14% of those in the gifted IQ
range.
Another limitation to the present study is that all subjects were already enrolled in gifted
programs. To the extent that adjustment problems arise from the high-IQ child's difficulties in
coping in a regular classroom, these problems would be ameliorated in this sample. Only
further work comparing gifted-level children in regular and gifted programs (or before and
after placement in a gifted program) can adequately address this question. There is reason
to believe, however, that placement in a gifted program is not entirely facilitative of the child's
self-esteem. Studies by both Rodgers (1979) and Coleman and Fults (1982) reported a
decline in self-concept scores following placement in a gifted program.
Problems?
Although high IQ appears to be associated with better adjustment, it clearly does not render
the child invulnerable to adjustment problems. Several hypotheses concerning the reasons
why high-IQ children suffer adjustment problems can be considered.
The most parsimonious explanation is that high-IQ children develop adjustment problems for
reasons (social, familial, intrapsychic) no different than do other children. The child's high IQ
is such a remarkable attribute that it may be falsely perceived as associated with any
adjustment problems the child develops. The "contrast effect" of high IQ coupled with
maladjustment has an ironic, compelling quality that draws attention and may lead to
superstitutious reasoning about a causal connection between them. Society's ambivalent
attitudes toward high-IQ individuals also may foster a willingness to cast giftedness in a
negative light (Cornell, 1984). Finally, it may be that a troubled child would emphasize his or
her talents defensively--for example, affecting an overintellectualized, arrogant manner--
thereby creating a link between maladjustment and intelligence that is secondary, not
primary.
An alternative explanation is that high intelligence does place some children at risk for
adjustment problems. Here again, however, it is not necessary to assume that intelligence
per se directly fosters maladjustment. Family members, teachers, peers, or others may
respond to the child's intelligence with rejection, jealousy, fear, or other negative attitudes.
The absence of an appropriate school program or lack of intellectual peers also may have
adverse effects. Not high intelligence, but rather the consequences of high intelligence in
some social environments, may have a negative effect on personality adjustment. These
factors need to be studied systematically and ruled out before accepting the hypothesis that
high intelligence is a direct, primary source of maladjustment.
practicing many proven cognitive tools such as mnemonics, problem-solving heuristics, creativity techniques and
decision-making tools. An increase in the intelligence level can only result in a better life, health, and standard of
living. Below you will find some simple intelligence boosters:
Deep thinking: in life it‘s not enough to just react to events, and situations, rather we should have a conscious
objective and select our actions to get nearer our objective. Also it‘s important to think about consequences of our
actions, to minimize the possibilities of errors and regret. Deep thinking would normally help you live better, and
reach your goals.
Good reasoning: it is the key to success, especially if performed consciously and in the proper order: 1) have an
objective, 2) make a general sensing about it, 3) determine your decision based on your sensing, 4)
make alternate plans (along the main objective), 5) select the best response/ plan. 5) start by carrying out your
plan, 6) observe results, 7) store experiences (for future reference).
Learning from past experience: it is believed that many inventions were actually re- nventions; for example
Egyptians 2000-4000 years ago were using some unique techniques to build their temples, buildings… but since
the early Egyptians were not good at keeping records of what they were doing, many of their inventions/
techniques were lost, and they had to be reinvented many centuries after them, which means that we had to start
from point zero again because we didn‘t keep records of our discoveries. You can apply that to your own life,
learning from the past experience either bad or good is very beneficial, and can save you a lot of time and effort.
A good way to do that is journal writing which is a useful way to develop self understanding, and to analyze
events, in addition to provide a record of how we change over time.
Practice: you cannot learn swimming from a book, the same thing should be taken into consideration when
dealing with ―thinking‖; you cannot learn to think without practicing. And as mentioned earlier, a good way to start
is with cognitive tools such as brain exercises: mnemonics, problem-solving heuristics, creativity techniques,
brainstorming, puzzles, brain teasing games… etc.
Ginko Biloba extracts: apparently have vasodilatory effects, and have in some studies shown it could treat some
symptoms of Alzheimer‘s disease. They also appear to have some effects on short term memory. But no study to
confirm these results yet.
Choline: A natural amine, often classed in the vitamin B complex. There is evidence that drugs that stimulate the
cholinergic systems improve certain memory tasks, and there is much speculation that adding extra choline to the
diet would lead to better general memory performance.
Caffeine: caffeine acts as a mild stimulant to the nervous system, blocking the neurotransmitter adenosine and
resulting in a feeling of well-being and alertness. It increases the heart rate, blood pressure. Although it‘s not
smart to take it as a smart drug, it is however probably relevant anyway, simple, relatively safe if not taken
excessively. May be one cup or less a day is considered to be within the safe range.
Glucose: has been shown to improve memory when given in certain dosages in association with a learning task;
how to exploit this to improve cognition in general is a more complex problem, because it can have negative
effects as well.
Giftedness : is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. The fact of having a mind ahead of the
physical growth, and could be simply the equivalent of ―intelligence‖.
Creativity: mental process of generating new ideas or concepts,or new associations between existing ideas or
concepts.
Superhuman:
Super-brain : also called mega-brain is used as a term to refer to machines or individuals who can perform/
process complicated tasks in a relatively faster speed.
High Intelligence Society : usually refers to a community where people with higher I.Q/ geniuses meet and
exchange their ideas for the benefit of humanity, and to encourage the uses of intelligence. Usually a certain I.Q
score should be obtained to join one of those societies.
Just because you have a high IQ, it does not mean that you will be rich or famous, or
even happy. It does mean that you probably feel different than most other people. And,
if there is no one else to help you to understand that and to guide you, you may feel
confused and lonely. Yes, really!
Trying to Understand
Here is a long phrase someone used recently to search for information on the web. Their search
landed them here on this page. How very accurate this statement is!
"people with a high iq often find themselves a little lonely among people who just don't think in the
same ways. people with high iq's are in no way better than others. they just think in different ways"
There is No Perfection
High IQ does NOT make you perfect, or even close
Many times in my life I have thought to myself, "I just want to be normal"! I felt so often
unhappy, isolated and misunderstood. In my teenage years, I would stay up late at night
gazing out the windows of our house and thinking, "Is there something wrong with me? Why
can't I just live a 'normal' life? If I could only find someone who thinks like I do....".
You might have said to me, "But, there is no normal. Everyone is different. The idea of
'normal' is flawed". But, I would say to you, now, that when you think differently than most
of those around you, when you see the world through an alternate lens, when you "see"
even more than meets the eye, and no one else can understand you, you FEEL less than
normal. People don't relate to you. Some may even scorn or laugh at you. And, it can stop
you in your tracks. If you do not know what is happening and why, your self esteem can
suffer and you can become paralyzed. You can fail to move forward. You can give up.
This is why I want to help others who are also dealing with having a high IQ. When only 2%
or less of the population can think the way that you do, you DO feel different and if you do
not know why, it can be hard to find your way. It may be that the way you need to steer your
"boat" is much different than the way most others do it. You may need a guide to help you
learn to navigate effectively.
This list is from the Gifted & Creative Services of Australia, which offers information on the
experience of being a gifted child or adult. Click on the link in the following section for
expanded info from this group.
Click this link to read more about the list included in the section above.
The list begins..."Gifted adults differ intellectually from others and are more
sophisticated, more global thinkers who have the capacity to generalize and to see
complex relationships in the world. Gifted adults have a heightened capacity to
appreciate the beauty and the wonderment in our universe...."
Click on the link above to visit and to read the entire list.
How Being Gifted Means Being Different
Oh my, this is a wonderful essay written by Rebecca Trotter back in 2008 on the site
called Word Press. Here is a quote lifted from the essay, but please click on the link
and read the entire piece.
"This fundamental different-ness combined with a lack of insight into the reality of
the how other people's minds work underlies a lot of the social difficulties which
highly intelligent people often experience. Unfortunately, the social problems that
unusually intelligent people, particularly kids, commonly experience are usually
pinned on some failure on their own part." ~ Rebecca Trotter
This is a link to a very interesting opinion piece by Amy Sundberg on her blog The
Practical Free Spirit. She talks about how men and women are very different in the
way that they display their intelligence.
The testing revealed a very high IQ and indicated that I was, indeed, having problems with
my memory, after all. My memory should have been above normal to correspond with my
IQ. It also showed that I did not have any degenerative neurological illnesses. That was good
news. And, through a process of elimination, it was determined that lack of sleep was the
culprit in terms of memory issues.
I do remember my mother telling me, when I was in high school, that I had a high IQ, but I
never heard any numbers and it never occurred to me that it might be something to pay
attention to. In fact, I had forgotten all about it. Now I knew about my high IQ and I
wondered what, at this point in my life, it might mean to me and what I could do with it.
Mensa International
A Resource for IQ Testing and more
Here is one of the sources for determining your IQ. Mensa, the well-known international
high IQ society, offers their own IQ test which is administered, in person, by one of their
representatives. I have encountered people who thought that Mensa was a social group in
that you had to receive an invitation to join. This is not the case. The social aspect of Mensa
is tha,t once you are a member, you have an opportunity to socialize and interact with other
members if you choose to do so. Belonging to Mensa makes it easier to find and socialize
with others who have a high IQ, but the only qualifying guideline for membership is having
an official IQ of 130 or higher.
Mensa International
In order to belong, you must provide proof that you have taken a qualified IQ test
and achieved a specific IQ score, or higher. There are several different tests which
can be used as proof and each one has slightly different scoring. As I mentioned, you
may also arrange to take, in person, a test administered by Mensa for purposes of
qualifying you for membership.
Like me, it seems others have had a difficult time of it with their high IQ trait. Here is some
information to help you understand what those difficulties can be and to learn how you can
cope with them.
This interesting site has quite an array of information about raising a gifted child, and
this particular article helps to explain, even more than I have already, just how
challenging it can be to be "gifted" with a high IQ.
<i>Misdiagnosis of the Gifted</i>, an article for Mensa by Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary
Rocamora, M.A.
People with a high IQ face many challenges and one of them is that it is easy to
misunderstand and misdiagnose a person who is gifted in this way. Because we make
up only 2-3% of the population, getting correctly identified by psychotherapists and
others as gifted is unusual. More often, our uniquely sensitive nature is
misinterpreted for something else, resulting in a diminishment of self-understanding
and self esteem.
A New Book
I have read this book and commented on it in the next section. It's great.
The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm)
by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen
From the book jacket: "Demystifying what it means to be a gifted adult, this book
offers practical guidance for eliminating self-sabotage and underachievement,
helping Everyday Geniuses and those who know, love, and work with them to
understand and support the exceptional gifts inherent in these unique personality
traits."
Buy Now
Book Review
The Gifted Adult
There is, included in the book, a self-scored test which you can take to determine what some
of your personal characteristics are. I do feel that the test is too simplistic and too
dependent upon you being very self-aware and very honest with yourself, but that is minor.
Mensa Art
For Artists with a High IQ as well as those interested in their work
I am a visual artist, so I was very pleased to find this site. It offers a look at Mensa members
who are fine artists, and includes a profile of each artist with a gallery of their work. Exciting,
huh? Check it out. Work is offered for sale, as well.
Members of Mensa share their passion for art on this website. There is art for
expression, art for investment, and art for art's sake.
Why So Sensitive?
It's All About a High Level of Awareness
Do you often ask yourself why you have to be so sensitive? Do you introvert yourself in order
to avoid feeling overwhelmed or frustrated? Do people often tell you to just "get over it"?
Being extra-sensitive goes hand-in-hand with having a high IQ. It can be very disorienting.
Until you understand it better, it can be downright confusing. But, once you understand this
as a trait, you can try and turn it into an advantage.
I can remember telling one of my bosses that, within the company, I was like the canary in a
coal mine. I knew this was true. I would tend to be sensitive to and aware of a problem long
before others. I wanted to help by sharing what I could so easily see. How presumptuous of
me. She did not want to hear it. There were, indeed, big problems which finally surfaced and
the business eventually had to be sold, but not before much discord and unhappiness for
everyone.
At least I understood what was going on and was able to keep things in perspective. And, I
"got out" before the changes took place.
In 4th grade I made a 3-dimensional map of the US out of homemade play-doh-like clay for a
class homework assignment. I carefully shaped all the states, including elevations, and added
color. I worked very hard at it and had a great time doing it. I proudly took the map into class
and my teacher failed me on the project. She told me that my mother must have made it for
me and that I had cheated. I was very confused and I couldn't convince her otherwise. Even
after my mother called her to complain, she still insisted that I couldn't have made it.
During classes in elementary school, when the teacher would ask the class a question, I
always knew the answer, but was careful to not raise my hand. I didn't want to be different.
Initially, I had felt that when no one else in class raised their hand, I must be wrong. If no one
else knew, and if what I thought was the answer had come so easily and obviously to me, it
must not be correct, but it always was. Eventually, I didn't want to draw attention to myself
and I didn't want to get in trouble for always knowing the answers when none of my
classmates did. Elementary school was very, very confusing for me.
I was intrigued to find this school which caters to profoundly gifted young people.
The Davidson Academy of Nevada is a free public school for profoundly gifted middle
and high school students. Located at the University of Nevada, Reno, Davidson
Academy students can develop their intellectual abilities at an appropriately
challenging pace and access college courses when ready.
I am not personally familiar with this school, but found it in my search for
information. If anyone has feedback on the Davidson Academy or other programs for
gifted children, please post at the end of this article.
Generally speaking, I find people will make jokes about my high IQ or feel threatened by it.
Because of this, I hesitate to let others know about it. Most people have a preconceived idea
about what it means to have a high IQ and it is nowhere near the truth. I hope that by
writing this, there can be a greater understanding among those who read it. Please pass it
on!!
Neihart, M.
Roeper Review
Vol. 22, No. 1
September 1999
The second view is that gifted children are more at-risk for adjustment
problems than their nongifted peers, that giftedness increases a child's
vulnerability to adjustment difficulties. Supporters of this view believe that
gifted children are at greater risk for emotional and social problems,
particularly during adolescence and adulthood. Their hypothesis is that the
gifted are more sensitive to interpersonal conflicts and experience greater
degrees of alienation and stress than do their peers as a result of their
cognitive capacities.
Historically, one view prevails over the other. In the late 1800's, it was
widely accepted that giftedness increased vulnerability (Lombroso, 1889).
However, this view was later traded for the notion that the gifted are
better adjusted when Terman and his associates' (1925, 1935, 1947)
longitudinal research suggested that people of high ability exhibited less
incidence of mental illness and adjustment problems than average. In
1981, a gifted high school student named Dallas Egbert killed himself. His
highly publicized suicide increased awareness that gifted children can have
psychological difficulties, that they are not immune to problems. People no
longer assumed that the gifted were superior in their psychological
functioning. The phrase, "social and emotional needs of the gifted" was
coined at this time. There was a surge of research attempting to measure
the adjustment of gifted children (Berndt, Kaiser, & Van Aalst, 1982;
Freeman, 1983; Janos, Marwood & Robinson, 1985; Lajoie & Shore, 1981;
Leroux, 1986; Prentky, 1980; Reynolds & Bradley, 1983 ; Richards, 1989;
Scholwinski & Reynolds,1985; Tomlinson-Keasey & Warren, 1987).
Suicide, delinquency, anxiety, and depression were some of the specific
factors investigated in gifted populations during this period.
During the nineties, the debate continues regarding whether gifted people
are more or less at-risk than their nongifted peers. Interestingly, there is
research support for both views. How then, do we reconcile them? What
can we say about the impact of giftedness on psychological wellbeing?
Researchers are increasingly examining smaller and smaller pieces of the
gifted experience (Baker, 1995; Cross, Cook & Dixon, 1996; Dixon &
Scheckel, 1996; Gust & Cross, 1997; Hewitt, Flett, & Ediger, 1996;
Jackson, 1998; Jamison, 1989, 1993; McCallister, Nash, & Meckstroth,
1996; Parker & Mills, 1996; Rothenberg, 1990; Richards, 1989).
Investigators employ a variety of approaches to evaluate the impact of
giftedness on children's adjustment. Some examined global measures of
adjustment such as self concept. Many measured specific factors known to
be associated with either positive or negative adjustment such as
depression, anxiety, delinquency, or social coping. The aims of this article
are to highlight the research that supports these contrasting views and to
suggest ways to reconcile the paradox.
Welsh (1969) used the MMPI and the Adjective Checklist to measure
adjustment of more than 1000 high ability adolescents who attended the
Governor's School of North Carolina. There was no tuition fee for the
program so his results were not confounded by socioeconomic factors, as
is often the case in studies done with summer programs. However, the
selection criteria for the governor's program likely excluded any child who
manifested behavioral or emotional problems. Welsh found no indicators
of deviance in the sample.
Gair (1944), Gallagher and Crowder (1957), Mensh, (1950) and Jacobs
(1971), each studied the psychological wellbeing of high ability children by
analysis of Rorschach responses. Gair determined that his adolescent
subjects showed better emotional adjustment and greater maturity of
personality than same-age peers of average intellectual ability. However,
subjects for his study were initially selected via teacher recommendations
which may have precluded any distressed students from participating.
Jacobs (1971) concluded that gifted kindergartners demonstrated greater
awareness of self. "The gifted children's greater utilization of color
supports the conclusions from the F% factor that the gifted demonstrate
greater awareness of self" (p.198). In addition, his results indicated that
personality development of the gifted subjects was advanced over that of
the nongifted sample he included. He stated that the difference was not a
qualitative one, but rather a quantitative difference in that the personality
development of the young gifted child is more similar to that of an older
child.
Some studies concluded that there are no differences between the self-
concepts of gifted and nongifted children (Bracken, 1980; Hoge &
McSheffrey, 1991; Maddux, Scheiber, & Bass, 1982; Tong & Yewchuk,
1996). Other studies demonstrated that intellectually or academically
gifted children report more positive self-concepts (Ablard, 1997; Chan,
1988; Colangelo & Pfleger, 1978; Janos, Fung & Robinson, 1985; Milgram
& Milgram, 1976), and a few found lower self-concepts for gifted students
(Coleman & Fults, 1982; Forsyth, 1987; Lea-Wood & Clunies-Ross, 1995).
At one time there was speculation that the gifted are overrepresented
among suicide attempters (Delisle, 1982; 1986;1990; Lajoie & Shore,
1981). Delisle stated that perfectionism, fear of failure or success, and
social isolation may be predilections leading to suicide among gifted
adolescents. Lajoie and Shore (1981) reviewed the literature linking high
ability and suicide and concluded that there may be some link between
the two. Grueling and Deblassie (1980) stated that suicide attempts are
most prevalent among females under twenty with an above average IQ.
Hayes and Sloat (1990) observed that 8 out of 42 reported incidents of
suicidal gestures in 69 schools involved academically gifted students.
There is no clear evidence, however, that gifted youth are
overrepresented in the numbers of suicidal teens (Dixon & Scheckel,
1996; Gust & Cross, in press). In a study mentioned previously, Baker
(1995) found no differences in suicidal ideation among moderately gifted,
highly gifted, and average adolescents. There is clear evidence, however,
creatively gifted adults, writers in particular, commit suicide at rates
higher than the general population. This finding is discussed in more detail
in a later section.
For example, Reynolds and Bradley (1983) conducted one of the few large
scale studies that involved a comparison group. They evaluated 465 gifted
children ranging from grades 2 through 12 and compared them to a
random sample of 329 average ability children. Using the Revised
Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) (Reynolds & Richmond, 1985),
they found a statistically significant difference in anxiety scores between
the two groups, with the gifted group earning lower scores on every scale.
They concluded that gifted children as a group experience emotional
problems less frequently than their average ability peers and that existing
problems are less severe for the gifted group.
Scholwinski and Reynolds (1985) expanded upon this study and tested
more than 5000 gifted and average ability children between the ages of 6
and 19 with the RCMAS. They sampled all geographic regions of the
United States and selected subjects from urban as well as rural and inner
city schools. Out of the total sample, 584 children were identified as gifted
(IQ 130 or more). In their investigation, the higher IQ subjects
demonstrated significantly lower levels of anxiety than their average IQ
peers. Both the Reynolds and Bradley (1983) and Scholwinski (1985)
studies were limited in that the gifted children were originally identified
through teacher nominations, perhaps biasing the sample against children
with emotional or behavioral problems. Also, since scores were summed
for all age ranges, it is not possible to determine whether there were
significant differences in adjustment among age groups. However, these
studies tend to support the view that intellectually gifted children
experience superior psychological adjustment.
Only one empirical study found gifted students to have significantly higher
levels of anxiety than regular students. Tong and Yewchuk (1996)
administered the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale to 39
academically gifted students and 39 nongifted students in a Canadian high
school. The gifted group yielded significantly higher levels of anxiety than
the nongifted group. This finding may be different from the findings of all
other studies because Tong and Yewchuk's subjects were high school
students. All other studies of anxiety either focused on younger children or
aggregated their results across age groups. Perhaps anxiety among gifted
students does dramatically increase in high school.
Cross, Coleman, and Stewart (1995) compared two groups of high ability
teenagers who attended Tennessee Governor's Schools. They compared
94 students who reported themselves as similar to peers and 379 who
reported themselves as different from peers. Subjects responded to a 75-
item questionnaire and were asked to indicate how they would respond in
each of three scenarios where the potential for being stigmatized existed.
The authors found that gifted students vary considerably in how different
or similar they feel to their nongifted peers and that regardless of these
feelings of difference, both groups indicated they would use a variety of
coping strategies in potentially stigmatizing situations. There were
significant differences between the two groups in responses to two of the
three scenarios. Those who reported feeling different were more likely to
use truth telling as a strategy than were those who reported feeling the
same. "It is not clear at this time how personal characteristics of the
subjects influence self-perceptions and behaviors. It does, however, make
a case for the existence of psychosocial developmental differences among
gifted students" (p. 185).
Dauber and Benbow (1990) compared highly gifted and moderately gifted
adolescents (mean age 13.7) on measures of social relations and found
significant differences. Subjects were identified as gifted or average by
scores on the SAT. The highly gifted sample included approximately 200
students who scored at least a 700 on the SAT math, and about 100
students who scored at least a 630 on the SAT verbal. The moderately
gifted sample included approximately 100 students whose combined score
on the SAT was 540. Subjects completed a lengthy questionnaire with
items relating to personality and social relations. The authors found
significant differences between verbally and mathematically precocious
students, the former reporting the lowest social status and lowest feelings
of importance. The authors also observed that the moderately gifted
subjects reported more favorable profiles overall than did the highly gifted
group. "The extremely gifted students viewed themselves as more
introverted, less socially adept, and more inhibited. The extremely gifted
adolescents also reported that their peers saw them as much less popular,
less socially active, less athletic, and less active in leading the crowd.
Thus, extremely precocious students may be at greater risk for social
problems than modestly gifted students" (p. 13).
Discussion
The impact of giftedness on psychological well-being has often been
examined as a dichotomous question. "Are gifted children more, or less
at-risk for psychological problems than their nongifted peers?" The
research reviewed here suggests that neither conclusion can be drawn for
gifted children. Rather, the research suggests that the psychological well-
being of a gifted child is related to the type of giftedness, the educational
fit, and the child's personal characteristics such as self-perceptions,
temperament and life circumstances.
When global measures of adjustment are used, overall results suggest
that gifted children are at least as well adjusted than their nongifted peers
(Gallucci, 1988; Howard, Hamilton & Franks, 1995; Nail & Evans, 1997).
There is little evidence of psychological risk among academically or
intellectually gifted children when global measures of adjustment are
examined. For example, results of studies investigating self-concept of
gifted children are mixed and difficult to generalize because self-concept
changes with development. The studies do seem to suggest that
educational placement, or the educational fit influences the adjustment of
the child. Specifically, the findings of several studies demonstrated that
gifted children in full time, segregated classrooms have either lower self-
concepts or lower perceived competence than do gifted students in part
time options (Chan, 1988; Coleman & Fults, 1985; Feldhusen, et al, 1990;
Kolloff, 1989; Karnes & Wherry, 1981).
Authors: James T. Webb, Edward R. Amend, Nadia E. Webb, Jean Goerss, Paul Beljan, F.
Richard Olenchak
Citation: Abstracted from Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults:
ADHD, bipolar, OCD, Asperger’s, depression, and other disorders. (2004) Scottsdale: Great
Potential Press. Available from the publisher.
Many gifted and talented children (and adults) are being mis-diagnosed by psychologists,
psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other health care professionals. The most common mis-
diagnoses are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder
(OD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Mood Disorders such as Cyclothymic
Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Depression, and Bi-Polar Disorder. These common mis-diagnoses
stem from an ignorance among professionals about specific social and emotional characteristics
of gifted children which are then mistakenly assumed by these professionals to be signs of
pathology.
In some situations where gifted children have received a correct diagnosis, giftedness is still a
factor that must be considered in treatment, and should really generate a dual diagnosis. For
example, existential depression or learning disability, when present in gifted children or adults,
requires a different approach because new dimensions are added by the giftedness component.
Yet the giftedness component typically is overlooked due to the lack of training and
understanding by health care professionals (Webb & Kleine, 1993).
Despite prevalent myths to the contrary, gifted children and adults are at particular psychological
risk due to both internal characteristics and situational factors. These internal and situational
factors can lead to interpersonal and psychological difficulties for gifted children, and
subsequently to mis-diagnoses and inadequate treatment.
Internal Factors
First, let me mention the internal aspects (Webb, 1993). Historically, nearly all of the research on
gifted individuals has focused on the intellectual aspects, particularly in an academic sense. Until
recently, little attention has been given to personality factors which accompany high intellect and
creativity. Even less attention has been given to the observation that these personality factors
intensify and have greater life effects when intelligence level increases beyond IQ 130
(Silverman, 1993; Webb, 1993; Winner, 2000).
Perhaps the most universal, yet most often overlooked, characteristic of gifted children and adults
is their intensity (Silverman, 1993; Webb, 1993). One mother described it succinctly when she
said, ―My child‘s life motto is that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.‖ Gifted children
— and gifted adults– often are extremely intense, whether in their emotional response, intellectual
pursuits, sibling rivalry, or power struggles with an authority figure. Impatience is also frequently
present, both with oneself and with others. The intensity also often manifests itself in heightened
motor activity and physical restlessness.
Along with intensity, one typically finds in gifted individuals an extreme sensitivity–to emotions,
sounds, touch, taste, etc. These children may burst into tears while watching a sad event on the
evening news, keenly hear fluorescent lights, react strongly to smells, insist on having the tags
removed from their shirts, must touch everything, or are overly reactive to touch in a tactile-
defensive manner.
The gifted individual‘s drive to understand, to question, and to search for consistency is likewise
inherent and intense, as is the ability to see possibilities and alternatives. All of these
characteristics together result in an intense idealism and concern with social and moral issues,
which can create anxiety, depression, and a sharp challenging of others who do not share their
concerns.
Situational Factors
Situational factors are highly relevant to the problem of mis-diagnosis (Webb, 1993). Intensity,
sensitivity, idealism, impatience, questioning the status quo–none of these alone necessarily
constitutes a problem. In fact, we generally value these characteristics and behaviors–unless they
happen to occur in a tightly structured classroom, or in a highly organized business setting, or if
they happen to challenge some cherished tradition, and gifted children are the very ones who
challenge traditions or the status quo.
There is a substantial amount of research to indicate that gifted children spend at least one-fourth
to one-half of the regular classroom time waiting for others to catch up. Boredom is rampant
because of the age tracking in our public schools. Peer relations for gifted children are often
difficult (Webb, Meckstroth and Tolan, 1982; Winner, 2000), all the more so because of the
internal dyssynchrony (asynchronous development) shown by so many gifted children where their
development is uneven across various academic, social, and developmental areas, and where
their judgment often lags behind their intellect.
Clearly, there are possible (or even likely) problems that are associated with the characteristic
strengths of gifted children. Some of these typical strengths and related problems are shown in
Table 1.
Enjoys organizing things and people into structure and order; seeks to systematize.
Large vocabulary and facile verbal proficiency; broad information in advanced areas.
Intense concentration; long attention span in areas of interest; goal-directed behavior; persistence.
Common Mis-Diagnoses
ADHD and Gifted. Many gifted children are being mis-diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD). The gifted child‘s characteristics of intensity, sensitivity, impatience, and high
motor activity can easily be mistaken for ADHD. Some gifted children surely do suffer from
ADHD, and thus have a dual diagnosis of gifted and ADHD; but in my opinion, most are not. Few
health care professionals give sufficient attention to the words about ADHD in DSM-IV(1994) that
say ―…inconsistent with developmental level….‖ The gifted child‘s developmental level is different
(asynchronous) when compared to other children, and health care professionals need to ask
whether the child‘s inattentiveness or impulsivity behaviors occur only in some situations but not
in others (e.g., at school but not at home; at church, but not at scouts, etc.). If the problem
behaviors are situational only, the child is likely not suffering from ADHD.
To further complicate matters, my own clinical observation suggests that about three percent of
highly gifted children suffer from a functional borderline hypoglycemic condition. Silverman (1993)
has suggested that perhaps the same percentage also suffer from allergies of various kinds.
Physical reactions in these conditions, when combined with the intensity and sensitivity, result in
behaviors that can mimic ADHD. However, the ADHD-like symptoms in such cases will vary with
the time of day, length of time since last meal, type of foods eaten, or exposure to other
environmental agents.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Gifted. The intensity, sensitivity, and idealism of gifted children
often lead others to view them as ―strong-willed.‖ Power struggles with parents and teachers are
common, particularly when these children receive criticism, as they often do, for some of the very
characteristics that make them gifted (e.g., ―Why are you so sensitive, always questioning me,
trying to do things a different way,‖ etc.).
Bi-Polar and other Mood Disorders and Gifted. Recently, I encountered a parent whose highly
gifted child had been diagnosed with Bi-Polar Disorder. This intense child, whose parents were
going through a bitter divorce, did indeed show extreme mood swings, but, in my view, the
diagnosis of Bi-Polar Disorder was off the mark. In adolescence, or sometimes earlier, gifted
children often do go through periods of depression related to their disappointed idealism, and
their feelings of aloneness and alienation culminate in an existential depression. However, it is
not at all clear that this kind of depression warrants such a major diagnosis.
Dual Diagnoses
Learning Disabilities and Giftedness. Giftedness is a coexisting factor, to be sure, in some
diagnoses. One notable example is in diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities. Few
psychologists are aware that inter-subscale scatter on the Wechsler intelligence tests increases
as a child‘s overall IQ score exceeds 130. In children with a Full Scale IQ score of 140 or greater,
it is not uncommon to find a difference of 20 or more points between Verbal IQ and Performance
IQ (Silverman, 1993; Webb & Kleine, 1993; Winner, 2000). Most clinical psychologists are taught
that such a discrepancy is serious cause for concern regarding possible serious brain
dysfunction, including learning disabilities. For highly gifted children, such discrepancy is far less
likely to be an indication of pathological brain dysfunction, though it certainly would suggest an
unusual learning style and perhaps a relative learning disability.
Similarly, the difference between the highest and lowest scores on individual subscales within
intelligence and achievement tests is often quite notable in gifted children. On the Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children – III, it is not uncommon to find subscale differences greater than
seven scale score points for gifted children, particularly those who are highly gifted. These score
discrepancies are taken by most psychologists to indicate learning disabilities, and in a functional
sense they do represent that. That is, the levels of ability do vary dramatically, though the range
may be ―only‖ from Very Superior to Average level of functioning. In this sense, gifted children
may not ―qualify‖ for a diagnosis of learning disability, and indeed some schools seem to have a
policy of ―only one label allowed per student,‖ and since this student is gifted, he/she can not also
be considered learning disabled. However, it is important for psychologists to understand the
concept of ―asynchronous development‖ (Silverman, 1993), and to appreciate that most gifted
children show such an appreciable, and often significant, scatter of abilities.
Poor handwriting is often used as one indicator of learning disabilities. However, many and
perhaps most gifted children will show poor handwriting. Usually this simply represents that their
thoughts go so much faster than their hands can move, and that they see little sense in making
writing an art form when its primary purpose is to communicate (Webb & Kleine, 1993; Winner,
2000).
Psychologists must understand that, without intervention, self-esteem issues are almost a
guarantee in gifted children with learning disabilities as well as those who simply have notable
asynchronous development since they tend to evaluate themselves based more on what they
cannot do rather than on what they are able to do. Sharing formal ability and achievement test
results with gifted children about their particular abilities, combined with reassurance, can often
help them develop a more appropriate sense of self-evaluation.
Sleep Disorders and Giftedness. Nightmare Disorder, Sleep Terror Disorder, and Sleepwalking
Disorder appear to be more prevalent among gifted children, particularly boys. It is unclear
whether this should be considered a mis-diagnosis or a dual diagnosis. Certainly, parents
commonly report that their gifted children have dreams that are more vivid, intense, and more
often in color, and that a substantial proportion of gifted boys are more prone to sleepwalking and
bed wetting, apparently related to their dreams and to being more soundly (i.e., intensely) asleep.
Such concordance would suggest that giftedness may need to be considered as a dual diagnosis
in these cases, or at least a factor worthy of consideration since the child‘s intellect and sense of
understanding often can be used to help the child cope with nightmares.
A little known observation concerning sleep in gifted individuals is that about twenty percent of
gifted children seem to need significantly less sleep than other children, while another twenty
percent appear to need significantly more sleep than other children. Parents report that these
sleep patterns show themselves very early in the child‘s life, and long-term follow up suggests
that the pattern continues into adulthood (Webb & Kleine, 1993; Winner, 2000). Some highly
gifted adults appear to average comfortably as few as two or three hours sleep each night, and
they have indicated to me that even in childhood they needed only four or five hours sleep.
Multiple Personality Disorders and Giftedness. Though there is little formal study of giftedness
factors within MPD, there is anecdotal evidence that the two are related. The conclusion of
professionals at the Menninger Foundation was that most MPD patients showed a history of
childhood abuse, but also high intellectual abilities which allowed them to create and maintain
their elaborate separate personalities (W. H. Smith personal communication, April 18, 1996).
Relational Problems and Giftedness. As one mother told me, ―Having a gifted child in the family
did not change our family‘s lifestyle; it simply destroyed it!‖ These children can be both
exhilarating and exhausting. But because parents often lack information about characteristics of
gifted children, the relationship between parent and child can suffer. The child‘s behaviors are
seen as mischievous, impertinent, weird, or strong-willed, and the child often is criticized or
punished for behaviors that really represent curiosity, intensity, sensitivity, or the lag of judgment
behind intellect. Thus, intense power struggles, arguments, temper tantrums, sibling rivalry,
withdrawal, underachievement, and open flaunting of family and societal traditions may occur
within the family.
―Impaired communication‖ and ―inadequate discipline‖ are specifically listed in the DSM-IV (1994)
as areas of concern to be considered in a diagnosis of Parent-Child Relational Problems, and a
diagnosis of Sibling Relational Problem is associated with significant impairment of functioning
within the family or in one or more siblings. Not surprisingly, these are frequent concerns for
parents of gifted children due to the intensity, impatience, asynchronous development, and lag of
judgment behind intellect of gifted children.
Health care professionals could benefit from increased knowledge concerning the effects of a
gifted child‘s behaviors within a family, and thus often avoid mistaken notions about the causes of
the problems. The characteristics inherent within gifted children have implications for diagnosis
and treatment which could include therapy for the whole family, not in the sense of ―treatment,‖
but to develop coping mechanisms for dealing with the intensity, sensitivity, and the situations
which otherwise may cause them problems later (Jacobsen, 1999).
Conclusion
Many of our brightest and most creative minds are not only going unrecognized, but they also are
often given diagnoses that indicate pathology. For decades, psychologists and other health care
professionals have given great emphasis to the functioning of persons in the lower range of the
intellectual spectrum. It is time that we trained health care professionals to give similar attention
to our most gifted, talented, and creative children and adults. At the very least, it is imperative that
these professionals gain sufficient understanding so that they no longer conclude that certain
inherent characteristics of giftedness represent pathology.
Yet what, practically speaking, does IQ mean? I intend not to look at the common way of regarding it,
which is a measure of rarity in the population, but in a practical sense. What real life difference does IQ
make to a person?
There are two practical facets I wish to look at, two which are relatively little known. Firstly, when given
a problem to solve and the time taken to complete the problem is measured, research has shown that a
10 point drop in IQ corresponds to a DOUBLING of the time taken to complete the problem. That fact
needs some consideration before we move on.
What does a doubling in the time to solve a problem mean for an IQ drop of 10 points? Well, think of it
this way: with a 10 point drop, the time taken is double; with a 20 point difference, the time taken is
four times; with a 30 point drop it is eight times; and so on. This difference can become truly huge for
large differences in IQ. If there is a 100 point drop, the difference in time is 1,024 times. (This assumes,
of course, that the relationship holds across all levels of human IQ - but that is the only assumption
being made for this to be true.)
It is easy to understand how this is so if we compare the problem solving skills of a person with "genius
IQ" and someone who is subnormal, say comparing an IQ of 150 with an IQ of 50. It would be no
surprise at all if it took a 1,000 times longer for the person of 50 IQ to solve a problem which challenged
the genius.
This has very real practical implications and allows us to better understand the meaning of IQs in a real
way. Someone with a higher IQ than someone else will, generally, solve a particular problem more
quickly. If the IQ difference is huge, the time to solve can be very different indeed. In the real world,
given our finite lifetimes and shortage of time in general, this can mean that, practically speaking, even if
the person of lower IQ would eventually solve the problem, that they won't: there simply won't be the
time. In a time critical job, like air traffic controller, or stock trader, or surgeon, a higher IQ can be the
difference between success and failure, profit and loss, life and death.
I want you to think about this again: a person of IQ 200, can solve problems a thousand times faster
than the average person. (Obviously we would have to use a hard enough problem to see the difference,
at work: something easy for both levels of intelligence would not distinguish them.)
There is another difference in problem solving revealed by IQ. Any given problem of fixed difficulty will
be open to solution by a spread of IQs. What differs is the chance of the problem being solved. At the
lower IQs the chance of a solution is correspondingly less, until at a certain fixed IQ, NO-ONE below that
IQ can solve the problem. At the other end, there is an IQ above which EVERYONE solves the problem.
This again has real world applications. If you have a hard problem to solve, there will be a minimum IQ
required to solve it, below which no-one can do so, no matter how much time they have to do so. It
should also be noted that for very high IQs almost all real world problems will be susceptible to their
intelligence, and readily solved.
I think this way of looking at IQ is much more valuable for understanding what they mean, than the
conventional one of looking at rarity. It tells us in a very real way, what can be expected of people of
different IQ levels, in practical terms.
Is it only true because they literally test the subjects when they are in thier stages of illness.
Since depression is decremental to the brain , one could believe they have low scores.
If testing before , or testing one's that are predisposed they are likely to have relatively higher
IQs.
Has there been research that tests otherwise seemingly healthy people that are predisposed to
depression , and then test them after?
If intelligent people are less at risk at developing more serious disorders , what this suggests also
is that some of the same genetic and brain differences that lead to mental illness may also cause
lower IQ (again, in some but not all people) - which is a more logical explanation of the
correlation of low IQ and mental illness.
High IQ and real life functioning is shown , where "They have demonstrated that the symptoms of
schizophrenia are less severe and the ability to function in daily living is better for those with a
higher IQ."
Some it seems High IQ acts like a buffer , one that protects from more devasting symptoms and
increasing functioning in society despite being mentally ill , which makes them more resilent.
What research shows is that a lower IQ means a greater disposition for schizophrenia but this
does not imply that all people with mental illness have low IQ , because the exception of John
Nash contradicted it.
But Higher IQs are still exposed to these disorders , in conclusion it only effects the prognosis
because of service utilization and reduced impact on social outcome because of taking
medication.
-----
Quote:
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
- Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)
Hemingway, who took his own life in 1961, knew his share of both intelligent
people and of unhappiness. He lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, four
wives and an unknown number of failed romantic relationships, none of which would help
him to develop happiness if he knew how. As Hemingway's quote was based on his life
experience, I will base the following speculation on both my personal and my professional
experience as a sociologist. Not enough study exists to quote on this subject.
Western society is not set up to nurture intelligent children and adults, the wayit dotes over
athletes and sports figures, especially the outstanding ones.While we have the odd notable
personality such as Albert Einstein, we also have many extremely intelligent people working
in occupations that are considered among the lowliest, as may be attested by a review of
the membership lists of Mensa (the club for the top two percent on intelligence scales).
Their emotional development, characterized by their ability to cope with risky orstressful
situations, especially over long periods of time, also lags behind that of the average person.
Adults tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are
intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the
intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience.
They go through the tough times alone. Adults don't understand that they need help and
other kids don't want to associate with kids the social leaders say are outsiders.
Western society provides the ideal incubator for social misfits and those with
emotional coping problems. When it comes to happiness, people who are socially inept and
who have trouble coping emotionally with the exigencies of life would not be among those
you should expect to be happy.
This may be changing in the 21st century as the geeks gain recognition as people with great
potential, especially as people who might make their fortune in the world of high
technology. Geeks may be more socially accepted than in the past, but unless they receive
more assistance with their social and emotional development, most are destined to be
unhappy as they mature in the world of adults.
People with high intelligence, be they children or adults, still rank as social
outsiders in most situations, including their skills to be good mates and parents.
Moreover, they tend to see more of the tragedy in the communites and countriesthey live
in, and in the world, than the average person whose primary source of news and
information is comedy shows on television. Tragedy is easier to find than compassion, even
though compassion likely exists in greater proportion in most communities.
People with high IQs are also more likely to smoke marijuana and take other illegal drugs
compared with those who score lower on intelligence tests, according to a study from
Cardiff University in Wales. Researchers speculated that individuals with a higher IQ are
more willing to experiment and seek out novel experiences. In addition, smart teens
aren‘t likely to see occasional drug use as particularly harmful, though they may not
understand the serious risk of addiction or be able to accurately assess their own risk
factors.
In addition to being more likely to use drugs, people of high intelligence are typically less
willing to admit a problem and seek professional help and harder to treat when they
arrive in treatment. Here are a few reasons that intelligence can actually become a
handicap to recovery:
Clinton McCracken, a research scientist who specializes in addiction, learned this lesson
the hard way. In 2010, he published a cautionarytale called ―Intellectualization of Drug
Abuse‖ in The Journal of the American Medical Association documenting his own drug
problem. Believing that his intelligence and training would protect him from addiction,
McCracken was disillusioned when his daily marijuana habit and intravenous opiate abuse
led to the death of his fiancée and loss of his postdoctoral fellowship.
Although tragic, McCracken‘s story is not unusual. Like many doctors, lawyers and other
high-functioning addicts, he was able to continue functioning at a high level until
something happened that shook his illusion of control and almost overnight ruined his
personal and professional life.
Because the intellectually gifted face unique obstacles in overcoming addiction, they
often fare best in specialized addiction treatment programs for professionals. In these
programs, care is provided by a team of fellow professionals who understand when to
challenge defenses and when to offer support. Particularly for those who are treatment-
resistant, general and profession-specific support groups can help them remain open to
feedback from peers who are also in recovery.
Where IQ falls short in furthering our health and happiness, research suggests emotional
intelligence could pick up the slack. Defined, in part, as the capacity to identify and
regulate one‘s emotions, emotional intelligence improves our interactions with others and
equips us with the skills to navigate a changing world. It is also a protective force against
addiction.
In a study from a university in Barcelona, researchers found that students with high
emotional intelligence were less likely smoke tobacco or marijuana than those with fewer
emotion regulation skills. Emotional intelligence has also been linked to lower rates of
stress and depression and better overall satisfaction with life.
Addiction doesn‘t care how smart you are or how much money you make. Your wits may
serve you well in many areas of life, but you simply can‘t think your way out of a drug or
alcohol problem. Certainly, learning about the disease and understanding its biological
roots is an important part of recovery. But a much bigger – and more challenging – goal
is developing the emotional intelligence and practical coping skills to change your daily
life
In the article “Identifying the Most Intelligent Person in the World” by Dayahka
writes: Howard Gardner, Harvard educational psychologist, has identified nine (9)
types of intelligence. Traditional education (and IQ tests) have measured only two of
these types (mathematical and linguistic). All people have these nine types of
intelligence, but they develop usually only one or two of them. No one is known to
have mastered all nine (none of the great masters or gurus or buddhas).The most
intelligent person in the world would have to be the person with the most
development of all nine intelligences (Gardner calls them smarts). Since IQ measures
only two types of smarts, we‘d first need IQ tests for the other seven before we could
begin to identify the smartest person in the world. However, since no one (according
to Gardner) has developed more than two or three smarts, we would end up in
endless wrangling over which of the nine is the best type of smart. Then we could end
in meaningless discussions like asking if someone with a 138 IQ in linguistics is
smarter than someone with a 137 IQ in mathematics. The highest IQ score recorded
was 228 by Marilyn Vos Savant (at age 10). However, high IQs are notoriously
difficult to measure meaningfully. There are many critics who doubt the ability of
modern IQ tests to meaningfully measure intelligence…
In the article “Genius Isn’t About Intellect As Most People Believe, It’s More About
The Way The Brain Works” by Devon K writes: Contrary to popular
belief, genius isn‘t about intellect as much as most people believe. Even though they
rate genius based on IQ, there are some very smart people who are not geniuses and
some very dumb people who are. The reason for this is that genius is actually more
about how the brain/mind works than how smart someone actually is. The brain can
be trained to focus on intelligence and thus allow the genius to become exceptionally
smart. However, the brain can also be applied (or not applied) too many other things
and thus lead to many, many other outcomes (besides intelligence). Don‘t confuse all
of this with people being called a ―musical genius‖ or other such thing. In many ways
that‘s a label people use to try and make the person ―more than‖. That isn‘t to say
they are not a genius, only that the word ‗genius’ is being used in an arbitrary fashion
without regard for what it actually is.
In the article “Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?” by John Cloud writes: Is it
possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social
life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another
Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes? How to produce genius is a very old question,
one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel
Kant and Darwin‘s cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs.
Pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The
Story of Success. The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre
is Dean Keith Simonton‘s book ‗Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies’. For
most of its history, the debate over what leads to genius has been dominated by a
bitter, binary argument: is it nature or is it nurture — is genius genetically inherited,
or are geniuses the products of stimulating and supportive homes? Simonton takes
the reasonable position that geniuses are the result of both good genes and good
surroundings. His middle-of-the-road stance sets him apart from more ideological
proponents like Galton (the founder of eugenics) as well as revisionists like Gladwell
who argue that dedication and practice, as opposed to raw intelligence, are the most
crucial determinants of success. And, Anders Ericsson who has become famous for
the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of
dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors.
“Geniuses are those who have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to
acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement” and who
then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both
“original and highly exemplary.” ~ Simonton
In the article “Top 5 Mad Geniuses” by Jane McGrath writes: Is insanity the secret
companion to genius? It turns out some of the world‘s greatest geniuses were quite
mad. In fact, some scientists claim that a far greater percentage of creative types
(poets, painters, musicians and the like) have been afflicted with bipolar disorder
than the general population. Some of the world‘s most renowned creative minds,
including writers Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway; composers
Irving Berlin and Sergey Rachmaninoff; and painters Paul Gauguin and Jackson
Pollock are all believed to have suffered from the illness Despite evidence of a link
between genius and madness, no one has proved that such a link exists. However,
scientists at the University of Toronto have discovered that creative people possess
little to no ―latent inhibition‖, that is, the unconscious ability to reject unimportant or
irrelevant stimuli. As University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson
puts it, ―This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra
information constantly streaming in from the environment. The normal person
classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more
complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is
always open to new possibilities.”
Think you are smart? Well, if your IQ is 130, that puts you ahead of 98% of people. Of
course that means there are still 120 million people who are smarter than you (the
other 2%). Also, recent research shows that a person‘s level of self-discipline is more
predictive of success than their IQ level. In other words, don‘t take too much meaning
from your score on an IQ scale. IQ scores measure the ability to carry out symbolic
thinking, while intelligence is a multidimensional entity, a human characteristic too
complicated to be accurately and sufficiently measured by any IQ test. IQ tests merely
photograph one‘s cognitive level/mental performance… Being a genius and being
successful are two different things, although they can be combined in many
individuals…
"Two of the most anomalous are Cuba and Vietnam, which have higher percentages disbelieving
in God (40% and 81%, respectively) than would be expected from their IQs of 85 and 94
(respectively). This is likely attributable to these being former or current communist countries in
which there has been strong atheistic propaganda against religious belief. In addition, it has
sometimes been suggested that communism is itself a form of religion in which Das Capital is the
sacred text, Lenin was the Messiah who came to bring heaven on earth, while Stalin, Mao, Castro
and others have been his disciples who have came to spread the message in various countries."
Too bad they still used the data in their analysis. But then so did Zuckerman.
Here‘s the picture of the data (the news media and Wikipedia have this backwards; the authors
call atheism ―non-religiosity‖, a category which is fuzzy and which probably includes some theists,
of a sort):
If we accept the data as is we learn that for IQs around 100, percent atheism runs from
near 0% to over 80%. This means, of course, that IQ has little to say about percent atheism
when IQs are around 100, which is defined as the mean. The USA, incidentally, has IQ 98.5 and
percent atheism 10.5%.
The bottom IQs, and also lowest percent atheists, belong to Cameroon, Central African Rep,
Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Haiti,
Liberia. You get the idea; many from the 1960s and 1970s, some earlier. But is it fair to compare
Africa to modern Europe?
Another serious problem is that Zuckerman and friends cobbled together over sixty
studies. Their Table 1 shows that the mechanism to measure IQ was different in different
locations. The proportion of males varied from unknown, to low, to 100%. The measures of
religiosity differed at different locations. Religions were also hugely different (is it the same to
believe in animism as Protestant Christianity?). The samples, particularly in developed countries,
were college kids, but elsewhere more non-college and precollege people were used. The lowest
sample size was 22, but most were a hundred or so, with one topping out at over 14 thousand.
And we already mentioned the widely disparate years the samples were taken.
Data of every flavor was observed, data that should not be mixed without an idea of how to
combine the uncertainty inherent in each study and in how, say, kinds of IQ measurements map
to other kinds of IQ measurements. In other words, they mixed data which should not be mixed,
because nobody has any idea how to make these corrections.
But suppose somebody did know how. Then what? What could we possibly learn? Nothing. Or
nothing of any use, except perhaps the extent which enculturation works (to convert people to
atheism and theism). Look: we have already agreed that many people much smarter than us
have been theists, but we also know that some clever folks have been non-theists. If we‘re after
raw body counts, the theists win handily.
Just because a person is or isn’t intelligent contributes nothing, not a thing, to the truth or
falsity of any proposition (not related to the individual). Does God exist because Aristotle,
perhaps the greatest intelligence of all, said so? Of course not. Is relativity true because Einstein,
no small brain, thought it up? Again no. If it were true that merely being intelligent conferred truth
then we would never have political disagreements, because all we‘d have to do is give everybody
an IQ test and put whoever scored highest in charge.
Except that highly intelligent people believe stupid and false things. And at a rate too
depressing to contemplate.
I am a member of Mensa. I have an IQ of 152, and yet, I feel stupid and worthless.
I was an underachiever when I was in gradeschool and in high school. I cannot keep my mind
on one thing. School bored me. I'd often play hookey. I'd go home after recess and read the
books that I wanted to read.
I'm good at a lot of things, but I'm "a jack of all trades and a master of none," as Shakespeare
would put it. Most of the time, I just feel like a jackass.
Nobody thought that I would be a college dropout. I was a full scholar at the Ateneo de
Manila University, one of the top universities in our country. I didn't graduate from college
because I couldn't focus on my studies. A lot of things vied for my attention, which was
scattered all over the place.
Last year, I had a major depressive episode. I was a call center professional. I knew I was
good at my job, but for some reason, I felt stupid. I also had this nagging feeling that I was
about to lose my job although there was no reason for me to worry. I was always anxious. I
felt that I was always doing something wrong.
I'm now staying in my hometown, in a province hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest
city. Jobs are scarce for college dropouts like me, but I have Internet access so I
telecommute. I do have a job. I work as a transcriptionist, and again, I have this nagging
feeling that I am about to lose my job. I have been making a lot of mistakes and sometimes,
I'm late in submitting my transcripts because I can't focus on my job. I need to keep this job
because I'm the breadwinner of our family.
I went to a psychiatrist last year and I was told that I may have attention deficit disorder
(ADD). She prescribed some medications but I decided against taking them because of the
side effects. I have had gastrointestinal problems before and the medicines she prescribed has
some adverse effects on the gastrointestinal system. Besides, I cannot afford to buy the
medicines.
I don't know what to do. Is there any treatment for ADD that does not require oral
medications?
I want to stop feeling like a failure. Most of my former classmates are now successful
professionals here and abroad. I envy them. The future seems to be so bleak for me. I don't
know what to do. Please help me.
Prior research has established that the more time a person spends in education, the more likely
their broad economic views are to match that of the typical economist (pdf). Caplan and his
colleague Stephen Miller point out that these studies failed to take into account the influence of
intelligence. After all, it's known that people with higher IQ tend to spend longer in education and
intelligence itself may also directly influence economic beliefs.
To overcome this problem, Caplan and Miller have focused on answers to the General Social
Survey, a massive US poll of national opinions performed every two years. Crucially, it includes
questions about the economy and a small test of verbal IQ.
Caplan and Miller's finding is that the link between educational background and 'thinking like an
economist' is weakened when IQ is taken into account because IQ is the more important factor
associated with economic beliefs. It's a complicated picture because IQ and education may be
mutually influential. However, if one assumes that education is unable to raise IQ, but that IQ
affects time spent in education, then the researchers said 'the net effect on economic beliefs of
intelligence is more than double the net effect of education.' Even if one assumes that education
can also affect IQ, 'intelligence still has a larger estimated effect [on economic beliefs],' they said.
Does the link between higher intelligence and 'thinking like an economist' mean that economists
are generally right and the public wrong? In answer to this question, Caplan and Miller cite Shane
Frederick, a decision-making scholar at Yale's School of Management, who's previously
argued that it depends on the type of question. For financial issues, he argued, it pays to emulate
those 'with higher cognitive abilities'. However, Frederick noted that 'if one were deciding between
an apple or an orange, Einstein's preference for apples seems irrelevant.'
Caplan and Miller say they agree with Frederick about this, before concluding boldly: 'The fact
that the beliefs of economists and intelligent non-economists dovetail is another reason to accept
the "economists are right, the public is wrong" interpretation of lay-expert belief gaps.'
_________________________________
Dyslexia
The list above indicates that those who show reading difficulties in childhood can
also cope well with their deficiency later in life and become avid readers and
skilled writers. Research shows that intense training in dyslectics helps them use
the right part of their brain to take over the limited functionality in the left part.
Even a few weeks of intense phonological training (e.g. breaking down and
rearranging sounds to produce different words) can help noticeably improve
reading skills. Unlike normal adults, phonological training shows increase in the
activity in the right temporoparietal cortex. This part of the brain works in spatial
tasks and may be the main compensatory structure in phonological training. This is
the sister region of the left temporoparietal cortex responsible for visual motion
processing which is underactive in many dyslexics. The earlier the phonological
regimen is taken on, the better the overall result. Advanced brain scans could
identify children at risk of dyslexia before they can even read.
Several genetic regions on chromosomes 1 and 6 have been found that might be
linked to dyslexia. In all likelihood, dyslexia is a conglomeration of disorders that
all affect similar and associated areas of the cortex. With time, science is likely to
identify and classify all individual suborders with benefits to our understanding of
how low-level genetic flaws can affect the wiring of the brain and enhance or
reduce a particular component of human mental capacity.
Whether today's models of dyslexia are correct or not, the main lesson of dyslexia
is that minor genetic changes affecting the layering of the cortex in a minor area of
the brain may impose inborn limitation on the overall intellectual function. At the
same time, dyslexia shows that the brain exhibits a strong ability to compensate for
its inborn or acquired limitations, and intense training can often result in
miraculous turnabouts
Intelligence, creativity and genius are generally regarded as highly valuable assets
of the human mind. As a strong positive correlation exists between IQ and the
median earned income, most people would gladly boost their IQ, improve creativity
or accept being called a genius. Exceptions to this rule are few and most revolve
around a claim that intelligence may be an obstacle on the way towards universal
happiness. Here are a few exemplary arguments against human intelligence listed
by the detractors of genius:
In this article, I will tacitly ignore the above claims and assume that you would
gladly become more intelligent, creative or innovative. I believe it can be shown
that an increase in knowledge and creative power can statistically leads to more
"goodness" (see: Goodness of knowledge). I will tacitly assume throughout this text
that achieving creative genius is a desirable goal.
What is intelligence?
You will find many definitions of human intelligence of which three make the most
of the daily use of the word:
In this article, I will focus on ways towards developing the intelligence in the sense
of problem solving ability (i.e. Definition 1). After all, the whole purpose of
education is to improve our problem solving ability, i.e. the ability to optimally
answer questions such as What to eat for dinner? What job to take? How to build a
better mouse-trap? What should my position on abortion be? Which party should I
vote for? etc.
Later in the article, I will argue in support for the scientifically obvious
statement: well-designed training can produce amazing results in enhancing
intelligence(Definition 1). However, this statement is surprisingly little understood
in general population. It falls into the category of scientific facts that may find more
skeptics than believers. Naturally, vox populi does not detract from the merits of
evolution, genetic engineering, human cloning, Big Bang theory, sociocybernetics,
neuropsychological interpretation of the thought and consciousness, etc. However,
to make the obvious more digestible, I will use the computer metaphor to illustrate
the building blocks of intelligence and genius
The neural network of the brain can be seen as mental hardware. It includes inborn
ROM memory as well as highly plastic RAM. The inborn wiring and structure of
the brain may roughly be compared to a ROM memory. If you stop eating for a
day, program stored in your ROM will make you experience hunger. Things we
learn in life can be considered software that is stored in your RAM.
If you doubt a mental ROM exists try the following experiment: look at the
computer screen, keep your eyes open, stay conscious and yet try not to perceive
the picture of the screen. Seems impossible? Now try to superimpose the face of a
loved person by using the power of your imagination. This is easy for most people.
Here is your RAM in action superimposing over a ROM-enforced perception. You
can even imagine touching parts of the imaginary face. Yet the screen underneath
does not seem ready to go away. The impulses from the retina hit the visual cortex,
and you can do little about it.
Humans do differ in their brain power. Some get a biological head start, others get
handicapped from early childhood. In cannot be stressed enough though that the
optimum path towards maximum achievement is always through training. The
starting point is not relevant for choosing hard-work learning trajectory. It is also
important to know, that in majority of cases, mental limitations can be overcome.
Some major disabilities, such as Down syndrome or brain injury can pose a
formidable challenge. However, practice shows that a huge proportion of the
population see a problem where it does not exist. Many people write to me about
their memory problems just to discover (e.g. with SuperMemo analytical tools) that
qualitatively their memory does not differ from their peers. What usually prevents
people from reaching intellectual heights is personality and the environment
(school, family, etc.). Many do not live up to their potential simply because of
insufficient motivation or belief in their own powers. Others fail due to parental
inattention. Those factors are statistically by far more important than inborn
limitations.
Scientists have studied Einstein's brain to look for the clues as to his genius. On
cursory examination, they could hardly find any. Later it transpired that some areas
of his brain were indeed better developed and nourished by a rich fabric of glial
cells, i.e. brain cells that are, among others, responsible for the right environment
for neurons to work in. Yet it is difficult to predicate as to whether all these
differences were inborn or were rather a result of his training in abstract thinking.
Anatomical studies show that various areas of the human brain may substantially
differ in size between individuals. Yet it is not easy to find correlations between
these difference and mental powers. In people with a normal range of IQ, the
volume of cerebral cortex may vary twice between one person and the next. So may
the extent of differences in metabolic rates in the same organ. Similar differences
have been found between such critical brain structures as the hippocampus,
entorhinal cortex, and the amygdala. Connections between the hemispheres can
dramatically differ in volume (e.g. seven-fold difference for the anterior
commissure). The left inferior-parietal lobule (located just above the level of the
ears in the parietal cortex) is larger in men, and was also found to be larger in
Einstein's brain as well as in the brains of mathematicians and physicists. On the
other hand, the two language area of the cortex: Broca and Wernicke areas are
larger in women, which may explain why women might be superior in language
processing and verbal tasks. Bigger men have bigger brains but are not smarter.
A racially sensitive subject of lower SAT test scores among blacks and Hispanics
in the US has been a matter of debate for a number of years. The differences could
not be explained by the material status of families or the neighborhood factor.
Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele has conducted revealing experiments
in which black students could do equally well on the test as long as they were not
told they are being scored.
The ability to "see" the future is one of the best tests for genius. The nature of
spacetime does not seem to make it possible to probe the future like we can probe
the past via historical records. However, the laws of physics provide a strong
platform for peeking into what may happen. A ball falling freely to earth may be an
easy guess based on the Newtonian laws of gravity. However, the true difficulty in
predicating the winner of Gore-Bush clash in October 2000 came out only after the
election day on November 7. Guessing the winner of the 2004 election today would
be yet harder. Guessing on the state of mankind beyond 2100 is a game reserved
for only the best-equipped futurist minds. Predictive powers are so good in probing
genius because they test all of these: (1) nimbleness of the mind, (2) extensive
knowledge on the mechanics of the universe and the society, and (3) the
abstractness of reasoning rules. Write down your predictions of the future today. In
five years you will be amazed with your own predictive lapses. When will we be
able to cure AIDS or cancer? When will we talk freely to computers? What job will
you land after graduation? Would you predict the web explosion in 1990 (i.e.
before the publishing of the web protocols)? Or in 1994 (i.e. already after Filo and
Yang started collecting their Yahoo links)? What knowledge do you think you lack
today to make your predictions more accurate?
Predictive powers are the cornerstone of success in business. Those who can see
the technologies and trends that will shape a market in 3-5 years are posed to do
well. Here comes the value of basic sciences such as math and physics in extracting
trends from the chaos of the modern world. The value of math and physics comes
from the fact that it equips you with highly abstract rules with a wide range of
applications. This is why it pays highly to learn artificial intelligence, neural
networks, sociology, neurophysiology, systems theory, statistics, evolutionary
psychology, history, etc. Those sciences formulate rules that make it possible to
better understand the reality, and most of all, draw conclusions about the reality.
Those rules are the tools of computation for processing the picture of reality in your
mind.
Here is an example: when Alan Turing developed the concept of his Turing
machine, he equipped his genius brain with the tool for understanding computation.
The Turing machine is a sort of a toy computer that scans a tape of symbols and
stamps the tape depending on the currently read symbols and its own state. Turing's
early intuition was that his toy computer, given enough time, could compute
everything that is computable. If future was deterministically computable from the
quantum states of subatomic particles, the Turing machine could compute it. If
future was non-deterministic, the density function of individual outcomes could be
computed too. The Turing machine became the simplest possible metaphor for the
human brain. Turing could see the parallel between the shifting states of the Turing
machine and the states of the human mind, including emotional states and the most
complex computations of the human thought. Turing could then state boldly that
one day machines will be as intelligent as humans. The famed Turing test is based
on putting a computer in one room, a human in another, and testing if outside
observers could distinguish between the two by means of a conversation (e.g. via a
computer terminal). Once computers become indistinguishable from humans, they
will have been said to have passed the Turing test. Most of people living at Turing's
time (the 1930s) would disagree, but their predictive powers were limited by lack
of tools for understanding the mind and computation. Turing machine and basic
truths about its properties, equipped Turing's brain with tools that made it easy for
him to see the simple parallel between the mind and the machine. For most
researchers in the area of artificial intelligence, it is obvious that the Turing test will
be passed sooner or later. Perhaps in 2010, perhaps in 2040, but it will happen. In
the 1950s, Herbert Simon, using the same abstract rules related to computation,
spoke loudly about his belief that the computer will beat the world chess champion
within ten years. He was off by thirty years. This illustrates the difficulty in
predicting the future, as well as the power of some basic abstract rules. In this case,
Simon concluded that given the appropriate objective function for evaluating chess
positions, it is only the matter of the number of moves the computer can process
before it can produce better moves than a human being. He underestimated the
power of human brain in simplifying (read: representing) the chessboard situation.
Yet the ultimate outcome of Simon's prediction was inevitable and obviously true.
This example illustrates how a simple abstract tool (Turing Machine) can be used
to predict the future (fate of the Turing test) by providing a simple model of
complex reality (human brain and its behavioral characteristics).
Ray Kurzweil is probably best know for his improbable-sounding predictions of the
future. Machine intelligence is not only obvious to him. It should also come sooner
than most AI researchers predict. Kurzweil's predictive powers come from
immense knowledge of technology, sciences, and the society. Kurzweil's case
shows how extensive learning equips the brain with genius powers of which
predictive powers are so noticeable. Kurzweil predictions (including world wide
web) have already materialized in a number of cases. Read Kurzweil's lips. That
could be the shortest way towards reading the future save your own years of heavy
learning.
In 1977, the bright mind of Ken Olson, President of the Digital Equipment
Corporation, committed a notorious blunder expressed at the Convention of the
World Future Society. Olson said: There is no reason for any individual to have a
computer in their home. Possibly reading this text on your home PC, you may
wonder how Ken Olson could possibly be considered bright if he could not see an
obvious value of the PC? His blunder does not detract a bit from Olson's brain
powers. After all, he did not reach the top of DEC by chance or connections. He
built it from the ground up. His creative powers were in this particular case
curtailed by his own experience with computing (fascination with the power of
VAX and VMS in juxtaposition to a weakly microcomputer). Yes, knowledge can
be detrimental too. Einstein's relativity theory gained him the most identifiable
status of the ultimate genius of science mostly due to the fact that he was able to
extricate himself from the Newtonian mold that is so natural to our day-to-day
thinking. Not being able to break the mold is not a sign of lacking genius! It is
simply a sign of being burdened with the prejudice of one's current knowledge. In
no way should this mean that learning on its own can be detrimental. It never is as
long as we do not apply the creative mold to the learning process itself. One of the
most important rules your genius brain needs to store in the very beginning is that:
no rule is true for ever. Rules can be added, modified, deleted or replaced. You
need to strengthen your rules related to fuzzy logic. In simple words, you have to
learn to think in terms of the probability of truth
What is creativity?
Creativity is usually defined as the ability to generate new ideas that are both
highly innovative as well as highly useful. A new idea will not be called creative
unless it is quite hard to come by. For example, if you decide to paint your car
orange with little blue ants all over it, you won't fall into a highly creative field.
After all, everyone can paint her car like this. That you do not see blue ants in the
streets comes from the fact that a number of objects that could take ants' place is
near to infinite. An art expert passing a judgment on your car's artistry could
perhaps change the verdict. On the other hand, if you keep on churning dozens of
ideas which have little or no practical value, few will consider this a highly creative
effort. Similarly, potentially valuable ideas that live and die in your brain without
ever being converted into a practical application will not pass the test of the
definition used herein. In this article, we will adhere to the pragmatic criterion in
judging creativity. Let us analyze the basis of creativity and ways to improve
creativity via training and application of relevant tools and/or techniques. We will
skirt around artistic creativity, which falls out of my own professional focus, and is
by far more relativistic: artistic creativity is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.
Personality factor
In the 1970s, Laszlo Polgar, a teacher from Hungary, concluded that all normal
children could be driven to a genius level with sufficient attention and training. If
this does not happen on a regular basis, he claimed, it only comes from parental
inattention and lack of patience. An average parent is busy with her or his own life
and does not devote sufficient time to raising the kids. According to Polgar, it is
easy for a parent to say: "Oh, this child has no genius!" and do nothing further.
Interestingly, Polgar had no impressive scientific credentials in the field of child
care and education (unlike Boris Sidis), so when he decided to experiment with his
own kids, many accused him of using dictatorial methods for the case of a genius
show. Few would take Polgar seriously, his methods even led to a clash with the
Hungarian government. For details of Polgar experiment see Polgar sisters.
Polgar's optimistic claim does not leave much place for genetics. Throughout
history, most prodigy training occurred in families with high average IQ. Hence it
is again hard to separate nature from nurture.
If genetics comes into play in limiting genius, it is less so in the area of the sheer
brain power, processing speed, associative power, number of neurons, creative
power, etc. Human genius seems to be by far more limited by the personality
profile which has a strong genetic background. In simple terms, if the child is ready
and willing to be trained for genius, it will likely succeed. The main obstacle is in
the fact that a child may not want to accept a heavy load of training.
Except for mental disorders, important personality factors that limit overall
creativity include low stress tolerance, aggression, impulsivity, depression, and the
resulting poor motivation. On the other hand, traits such as curiosity, perfectionism,
runaway creativity, and compulsiveness may enhance development if properly
channeled and rationalized.
Such largely inborn factors as the overall level of serotonin or dopamine in the
brain can determine stress tolerance, probability of suicide, as well as aggressive
and violent behaviors.
Destructive personality factors are highly correlated with each other. For example,
non-virgin adolescent girls are 6 times more likely to attempt suicide, 6 times more
likely to use alcohol, and 18 times as likely to run away from home as compared
with their counterparts who were able to delay their early sexual experience.
One of the basic premises of developing a genius brain is: learn to capitalize on
positive emotions and circumvent negative emotions.
Emotion management skills may actually be the most important factor that will
determine if a person will or will not develop its full genius potential. As argued
throughout this article, personality factor seems overall more important than low-
level information processing powers of the brain. Negative emotions are probably
the number one cause of the scarcity of genius in industrialized nations.
The power of emotion comes from the fact that they are wired into the low-level
brain structures that cannot easily be controlled by rational thinking originating in
the prefrontal cortex. An angry individual can command its brain to cool down;
however, it cannot instantly reduce the level of adrenaline that has already been
released into the bloodstream. A drug addict can decide rationally to give up drugs,
but when the physical effects of craving hit his system, his rational brain is often
powerless.
In the course of evolution, the emotional circuits of the brain played a critical role
in survival. Emotions help translate the inner needs of the organism into behavioral
modes and actions. Once your blood glucose level drops down, one of the
outcomes will be the activation of the appetite center. As a result, thinking of food
will pervade all your actions. With time, all your attempts at genius endeavor may
fade into insignificance as your brain will keep on reverberating the hunger
message. In this case, your need for food is converted into hunger, and your brain is
turned into a food-hunting mode. Similar mechanisms are involved in satisfying
thirst or reproductive needs.
Yesterday I asked you to take an IQ test; not because I want to see how smart you all are, but
because I want you to have some loose idea of your own IQ before I tell you the story of one
man’s IQ and how it affected the entire first part of his life.
I want to note that this is not a professional case study – which, after reading, I’m sure you’ll
agree! This story does, however, include the ―facts‖ as they were presented to me.
This man – we’ll call him Bob – was born in the mid to late 1960s, so mental health care wasn’t
quite what it is today and parents didn’t have as much information about about mental health –
especially the mental health of their children – as they do today; his parents were taking him to a
psychiatrist by age two.
Bob continued to show signs of ―mental illness‖ throughout childhood and adolescence. By his
early teens, the mental health professionals he saw during this time didn’t seem to ―help,‖ i.e.
change his ―strange‖ behavior. His parents grew frustrated, and even though he showed no signs
of learning disabilities, by age 14 they enrolled Bob in a special school for the mentally
handicapped.
From age 14 to age 18 he attended this school. Shortly after he graduated, he and his longterm
girlfriend (who was not thought to have a mental health condition) broke up. Bob was extremely
distressed. His parents assumed his sadness was some sort of mental breakdown, so they sent him
to a state mental institution.
Once Bob entered the working adult world, he faired as any other adult would. He lived on his
own, became employed, had romantic relationships, traveled, etc. Because of the stress and
confusion brought on by the events of, well, his entire life up until that point, Bob sought the
services of other mental health care professionals – professionals who could not find anything
―wrong‖ with him.
Bob is now an adult in his late 30s/early 40s. Aside from a mild, situational depression due to the
recent death of his best friend, Bob still functions ―normally.‖ He doesn’t see any psychiatrists or
other mental health professionals, and he isn’t on any kind of medication for mental illness. Bob
doesn’t feel anything is mentally ―wrong‖ with him at all, and he attributes anything he feels
about his mental health in his childhood and teenage years to the way his parents reacted to him.
At some point during this story, Bob’s IQ was tested. It was over 170. Despite varying theories on
IQ scores and what they mean, an IQ of over 170 is still thought to be ―genius,‖ or close to it.
Now, I realize many folks with mental illness have high, even extremely high, IQs. However,
most of these folks also still display symptoms of whatever mental illness they have – whether it
be bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, etc. According to no one but his parents, Bob showed
no signs of a mental health problem.
Could Bob’s behavior as a child simply been that of one with great intelligence? Did Bob’s brain
activity confuse his parents and the staff of the school for the mentally handicapped? Was Bob’s
mind lacking the stimulation it needed? Given the fact that mental health care of the 1960′s left
much to be desired – compared to that of today – could Bob’s intelligence have been repeatedly
confused with mental illness?
Is it possible that Bob slipped through the cracks of the mental health care system – only, in the
reverse?
I’m not a psychiatrist; I can only speculate about this situation. I want to know what you all think
about it. Chime in. Let’s discuss.
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Is a high IQ a burden
as much as a blessing?
By Sam Knight
ON THIS STORY
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What makes us happy?
The Inventory – Alain Ducasse
Savant – the surname is real, it was her mother‘s maiden name – has had a unique
claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test
as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985,
Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on
an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a
corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.
The resulting publicity changed Savant‘s life. She appeared on television and in the
press, including on the cover of an in-flight magazine that Jarvik chanced to pick up.
He decided to track her down and ask her out. It also led to the role for which she
remains best known in America, writing a question-and-answer column, ―Ask
Marilyn‖, for Parade, a Sunday magazine syndicated to more than 400 regional
newspapers. For the past 22 years, Savant has tended their ceaseless queries – ―How
happy are larks, really?‖ ―My wife blow-dries her hair every day. Can the noise
damage her hearing?‖ – and in the process achieved a status that is Delphic yet
tabloid. To her fans and other members of the world of high IQ, Savant is a
prodigious, unusual talent who delights in solving problems. To her detractors, she is
either trivial, someone who has squandered her gift, or proof, if they needed it, that
IQ scores don‘t add up to anything. In whatever form, she lodges in people‘s minds.
As evidence of her imprint on the national consciousness, Savant featured in an
episode of The Simpsons in 1999. She was a member of the Springfield Mensa society,
along with Geena Davis, the Hollywood actress and one-time star of Earth Girls are
Easy.
In conversation, Savant steers clear of fancy remarks. She is overtly normal. ―People
expect me to be a walking encyclopaedia or a human calculator,‖ she says, or to ―have
very unusual, very esoteric, very arcane gifts and I‘m really not that way at all.‖
Instead, she talks with the practised clarity of her columns, the pedantry of someone
wary of misinterpretation. At one point, for example, Savant was describing a house
where she lived in St Louis. ―You could actually see stars,‖ she said, ―unlike here in
New York, where you can only see Venus,‖ then she halted. ―I‘m sorry, Venus is not a
star.‖ When Savant, who is the author of several plays and half-a-dozen self-help
books, does makes a cultural reference, she is careful not to sound too snooty. She
prefers Proust to Joyce, she told me, although, she concedes, ―Joyce does some nice
bits in Ulysses.‖
This blandness masks the rarity of her brain. Because whatever else Savant is, she is
not a fraud. Her IQ has been tested and tested and tested again. When I asked her to
describe how her mind approaches a problem, she said: ―My first thought, maybe not
thought, it‘s almost like a feeling, is overview … It‘s like, almost, a wartime decision. I
keep thinking about all of the fronts, what‘s supplying what, where are the most
important points … ‖ Jarvik, her husband for the past 21 years, says Savant‘s gift is to
be able to approach questions dispassionately, without our usual fears of or hopes for
a particular answer. Walter Anderson, the chief executive of Parade, who has been
friends with Savant since he hired her in 1986, believes she is a genius and, as with
other geniuses, her ability is inexplicable to him. ―Marilyn just does it,‖ he said. ―Her
answer is so quick. If light or electricity travels at 186,000 miles per second, do you
realise how quick those synapses are? She knows the answer to your question. She
knows the answer before you‘ve finished the question.‖
All of which only makes people wonder why Savant has found no higher purpose. In
1995, the issue became so bothersome to Herb Weiner, a software engineer in
Portland, Oregon, that he set up a website called Marilyn is Wrong! Weiner says that
he aims to redress errors in her column and ensure that Savant‘s daunting IQ does
not mean that she goes unquestioned. But what really seems to nag him is that she
writes the column at all. ―Look at Barack Obama, look at how he is applying his
intelligence,‖ he told me. ―It just sort of seems strange to me that instead of dealing
with more complex problems, a lot of what she does is just answer riddles or simple
research things, things that anybody could go to a library and look up the answer to.‖
Weiner‘s complaint is oddly deferential. As his website notes: ―Marilyn is more
intelligent than I am, as measured by standard intelligence tests.‖ But for many
people, the story of Savant and ―Ask Marilyn‖ are just two more pieces of evidence in
a larger, decades-long argument about the accuracy and objectivity of intelligence
testing. Even Guinness has succumbed. In 1990, two years after inducting Savant into
its Hall of Fame, the publisher, in its parlance, ―rested‖ its high IQ category
altogether, saying it was no longer satisfied that intelligence tests were either uniform
or reliable enough to produce a single record holder. Depending on how you look at
it, Savant will either never be beaten, or was not worth beating in the first place.
...
Humans have been measuring each other‘s intelligence for a long time. In China
during the Xi Zhou dynasty (1046 to 771BC), candidates for official positions were
formally tested on a range of criteria including the ―six skills‖: arithmetic, archery,
horsemanship, music, writing and the performance of rituals and ceremonies. The
notion of a universal, objective scale of intelligence, however, did not take shape until
the 19th century and the arrival of Darwinism. If Charles Darwin is the father of
modern biology, then the father of modern intelligence testing is his cousin, Francis
Galton – statistician, polymath and founder of eugenics. In 1884, he set up an
―anthropometric laboratory‖ at the International Health Exhibition in London, and
measured, among other things, the reaction times, eyesight, colour sensitivity and
steadiness of hand of more than 9,000 men and women as he looked for links
between their physical and mental characteristics.
Searching for genius, Galton failed to develop a working intelligence test. That was
left to a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, and his student, Victor Henri. Binet was
commissioned to study the large numbers of poor children in the city‘s asylums and
to find out whether they were mentally incapacitated or simply untaught. His
resulting 1904 test of 30 indicators – from the eye being able to follow a lit match, to
memory and vocabulary questions – provided the basis of modern intelligence
testing. In 1916, Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University,
revised and expanded the test, creating the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which is still used
today. Although more moderate than many of his contemporaries, Terman adhered
to the social Darwinism of his time – in 1930, 24 US states had sterilisation laws –
and he had hopes for the social potential of his work. ―This,‖ he wrote in 1919, ―will
ultimately result in the curtailing of the reproduction of feeble-mindedness.‖
Intelligence testing has proved contentious ever since. In the US, where more than
nine million men underwent various forms of IQ and ability tests during the second
world war, the enthusiasm for testing has been matched only by the ferocity of
arguments over what exactly it proves. IQ tests for children, the SAT Reasoning Test
for college applicants and psychometric testing by companies may have been
designed with the goal of identifying individual talent, but often their larger
consequence has been to highlight differences already inherent in society. Variations
between the sexes and ethnic groups have led to toxic arguments about bias and
inequality and power: who gets to define intelligence? Who designs the tests? In its
various iterations, the debate about IQ testing in the US normally returns to the
persistent, albeit shrinking, lag between results for white and black populations.
The last time the debate flowered in full was in 1994, on the publication of The Bell
Curve by the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the conservative political scientist,
Charles Murray. They argued that intelligence test scores were both a good indicator
of social success and strongly determined by our genes. The implication, that an
unequal society was inevitable and fair, and that a black, inner city ―cognitive
underclass‖ was having too many children, made it seem as though eugenics had
never gone away. ―Mr Murray can protest all he wants,‖ wrote Bob Herbert, a
columnist for The New York Times, ―his book is just a genteel way of calling
somebody a nigger.‖
Underlying the heated politics – making the arguments even harder to resolve – is an
incomplete science. After The Bell Curve controversy, the American Psychological
Association convened a task force, which concluded that children‘s IQ scores could
predict about 25 per cent of the variation in future academic performance. They were,
in other words, on the cusp of being statistically reliable, better than nothing.
...
There is an almighty gap between what IQ tests can measure and what we want to
them to show. ―If you tell anyone their IQ at any age they will remember it for the rest
of their life,‖ says Professor John Rust, the director of the Psychometrics Centre at
the University of Cambridge. ―It‘s like an astrological chart.‖ Rust reminded me of the
contrast between the quasi-spiritual idea of intelligence rooted in western language
and culture – the notion of a single, overarching quality comparable to, say, a saint‘s
halo – and what we can learn from our response to a series of logical problems. Yet in
the absence of anything better than IQ tests, whose questions still underpin many
modern ―ability‖ tests, people continue to see something in these IQ scores that, while
not meaningless, do not hold ―the answer‖.
The fault, in the end, lies on both sides: in us, the credulous patients, who see too
much in our results, and the doctors, who have also been furiously theorising and
extrapolating. ―Tests of IQ have never simply been about our ability to solve
problems,‖ said Rust. ―There has always been the idea that people with high IQs are
actually more advanced, more evolved, closer to the human destiny, if you believe
that sort of thing, closer to God. But in fact all you have really got is answers to
questions.‖
The world of high IQ societies certainly does not suggest the existence of a higher
evolutionary plane. Although the best known, Mensa, was set up in the UK in 1946
with utopian goals – it was envisioned by its founder, Roland Berrill, as a panel of
brilliant minds that would improve society – such groups are often a refuge for
people who have trouble fitting in elsewhere. ―High cognitive ability is very often a
mixed blessing,‖ Patrick O‘Shea, the president of one such society, the International
Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the
mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. ―If you have an IQ of 160 or
higher,‖ O‘Shea explained, ―you‘re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per
cent of the population.‖ Among the 600 or so members of the ISPE, whose IQs are all
around 150 or higher, O‘Shea described a ―common experience of being socially
marginalised‖ and the challenge of finding suitable outlets for their gifts. ―It‘s good to
be smart, it‘s good to get ahead, but past a certain threshold, you can‘t be trusted:
you‘re a nerd, you‘re a geek,‖ he said. ―You have somehow a tremendous social
deficit.‖
...
Ron Hoeflin, who says that his IQ of 190 has
given him the confidence and recognition that
he was denied by mainstream education, in
which he struggled
In between conversations with Marilyn vos Savant, I also spent time in New York
with a man called Ron Hoeflin. Hoeflin is two years older than Savant, also from St
Louis, and also has a remarkable IQ score – 190 – yet has frustratingly little to show
for it. He lives only a few blocks from Savant‘s penthouse, above a café/Laundromat,
and describes himself as self-employed. I met Hoeflin in the local Wendy‘s, a
hamburger place where he spends every afternoon working on the final volume of a
self-published philosophical treatise called The Encyclopaedia of Categories: A
Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy With Over 1,000
Examples.
We slowly went back to Hoeflin‘s apartment – he is almost blind due to repeatedly
detached retinas – and I asked him what his IQ and intelligence testing had done for
him. Hoeflin, who devised a series of well-respected tests in the 1980s, said that it has
provided him with a degree of confidence and recognition that he had been denied by
mainstream education, in which he struggled. Hoeflin believes the objectivity of IQ
tests makes them more reliable than the subjective evaluations of teachers and
professors. ―I don‘t want to have some ruthless creep mess me up,‖ he said.
A fan of psychometric testing in general, Hoeflin also showed me the results of a
personality test he once took. Lines of Xs march across the page, showing the extent
of his various personality traits, from the ―vigilant‖ to the ―leisurely‖. In one column,
for the ―dramatic‖, there were no Xs at all. ―Zero,‖ said Hoeflin, evenly. ―This is why I
don‘t write novels because on the dramatic level I‘m zero.‖ When I objected, saying
that surely our personalities are too complex, too cosmic, to be captured in a
questionnaire, Hoeflin suggested politely that maybe I was incurious, or afraid, or
both. ―Why do you think a personality can‘t be measured?‖ He asked me. ―Just
because it‘s complicated doesn‘t mean we shouldn‘t try and figure it out. It‘s patterns.
Even our personalities are just patterns, right? Like waves on the ocean. You can do a
study in hydrodynamics and figure out how waves rise and collapse. It‘s the same for
human beings.‖ In an e-mail a few days later, Hoeflin explained his interest in
psychometrics another way: ―Being this shy makes one wonder what is going on.‖
Knowing all this makes high IQs and the story of Marilyn vos Savant seem rather
different. Has her IQ been a burden as much as a blessing? According to John Rust,
at Cambridge, to produce an extraordinary IQ score a mind must have two unusual
qualities. The first is ―mechanical facility‖ – useful but sometimes harmful in extreme
cases, hence the preponderance of people with Asperger‘s syndrome who have high
IQs. And you must also excel at a wide variety of tasks. Intelligence tests measure a
range of mental abilities, whereas most people naturally, and happily, concentrate on
just a few. Abnormally high IQ scores, by their nature, often speak of a brain too
general to be of much use. ―Effectively,‖ said Rust, ―you are mastering far too many
things.‖
Broadness, though, is what Savant craves. ―Reading all about these subjects,‖ she says
of her work, ―I am becoming amazingly informed to a superficial extent.‖ One
afternoon we met in her office, 50 floors up among the foggy, snowbound towers of
Manhattan, and she showed me her desk. Three computer screens and an old word
processor looked out, north-west, over a thousand roofs towards the Hudson River. It
is from this vantage point that she answers the 200 or 300 e-mails a day that come in
for her column in Parade magazine: questions on every subject, from the personal to
the algebraic, that are bothering those down below. ―I‘m hearing from everyone, I
told you, this vast range,‖ she said. ―And I really enjoy that view. It‘s hard to express.
It‘s like being at a scenic outlook point. I feel like I am gaining so much insight about
people, and there is a particular joy in that.‖
It has taken her a long time to get there. Savant was born Marilyn Mach in south
central St Louis in 1946. Her parents, Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant, were
immigrants, German and Italian respectively, and ran a bar and grill in a blue-collar
part of town. Savant describes her childhood, the first half of her life in fact, at a kind
of ironic distance. She laughed when she told me about how her parents tried to raise
her and her two older brothers as Americans. ―All I heard around the house was this
fractured, lame, ungrammatical English for I don‘t know how long. It was really very
funny. You know, this was their best effort.‖ And she gently warned me off reading
too much into her past. ―It‘s funny how these background things mean so much to
people,‖ said Savant. ―It feels strange, a bit, to me because it seems like the dark ages
or another time, or another persona, which I guess I was.‖
In school she was quickly identified as gifted, getting maximum scores on IQ tests at
the ages of seven, eight and nine. And when Savant got full marks on the adult
Stanford-Binet at the age of 10, a psychologist from the local school board said he had
never seen anything like it. Savant, however, recalls no surprise. ―That didn‘t seem
like news,‖ she said. ―It just seemed perfectly normal.‖ Her principal, however, was
sufficiently impressed to pull Savant out of several classes and put her to work in his
office, so beginning an odd phase in her life in which she was one of the only people
in the school with access to the other pupils‘ IQ scores. Her hobby became matching
her fellow students to their results. ―I would make my best guess after talking to them
for a while and then I would go and see how accurate my guess was,‖ she recalled. ―I
got to be very good at it.‖
By the age of 16, however, Savant‘s precocious schoolgirl was no more. She married,
as her mother had done at her age, and was drawn into the family business, which by
this time was a chain of dry cleaners. ―It was a long time. It was a long time,‖ she said
when I asked her when she realised that this life was not for her. ―You have to
understand the level of control. I was not aware of things outside.‖ Apart from a few
audited classes at the city‘s Washington University, Savant‘s formal education ended
in her late teens when she had her two children. She divorced in her twenties and
married again, all the while working with her brothers and father to expand the
business to about 40 dry cleaners and a firm that sold dry cleaning equipment. She
joined Mensa, she says, to help her educate her children, but most of the time Savant
was busy keeping the family accounts. ―I was the trustworthy one,‖ she said. ―I was
the one that everyone could turn to for an unbiased decision.‖
It was only after her second marriage ended, when she was 35, that Savant began to
think about leaving St Louis. She decided to become a playwright. She saved some
money and started spending time in New York, even renting an apartment in
Manhattan. When her father died, she permanently moved away.
...
Savant is elliptical about her early years in New York – the crucial period from 1983
to 1985 in which she went from being a dry cleaner to the cleverest person in the
world. ―It was just a confluence of things,‖ she says. But contemporaries, such as Ron
Hoeflin, recall her as a member of the various high IQ societies in the city. ―She
wanted to be a writer, I know that,‖ he said. Savant now distances herself from the
world of high IQ, but at the time she was willing to see how it could help her
prospects. She says she can no longer recall how her childhood scores were submitted
to Guinness, but Andrew Egendorf, a lawyer from Boston, says the idea came up over
a dinner in 1983. Egendorf, who wanted to write a book about high IQ societies, says
he remembers proposing a couple of book ideas to Savant, and suggesting that they
send her IQ results to Guinness as a way of making her famous. ―She was just another
person trying to make it in New York,‖ he told me. ―The fact that she had this
credential just gave her something different and I remember thinking, ‗How can we
cash in on it?‘ It didn‘t matter what it was. She could have been green, the only green
person in the world.‖ Egendorf first wrote to Guinness on Savant‘s behalf on July 25
1983. In 1985, the IQ record was hers, 31 points higher than the two previous holders.
The next year, she was writing for Parade.
And since then it has been questions, questions, questions. Walter Anderson, at
Parade, remembers how at cocktail parties in the 1980s people would throw Savant
riddles and mathematical puzzles. It was hard to persuade her not to reply. ―From the
time she was a little girl, she was asked questions all the time,‖ he explained. Not that
these logical problems seem to faze Savant. Rather, they have been the scene of her
greatest triumphs [ The ―Monty Hall dilemma‖ ], and Anderson still gets excited, after
all these years, about what conundrum Savant will answer next. He is convinced, for
instance, that she understands the financial crisis in ways that most of us do not.
―You know for the last quarter of a century, people have written stone bullshit about
Marilyn,‖ he said at the end of our interview. ―Writers want to come and show off how
clever they are. But the real question is: what should we be asking her? We should
take her seriously.‖
There is only one question that seems the wrong thing to ask Savant, and that is what
else she is supposed to have done with her life, with her glimmering brain. To ask it is
to miss the point. I told her when we met that I had always imagined intelligence to
be nothing more than a tool. On that foggy afternoon, before we said goodbye, she
wanted to correct me. ―I suppose it could be and it should be,‖ she said. ―But it also
seems to be an attribute or a quality or an aspect of one‘s humanity that one need not
use to get something that you want … It can just simply be part of you. And I think
that‘s fine too.‖
Sam Knight is a regular contributor to FT Weekend Magazine.
Do you have a question for the world’s cleverest person? E-mail your questions
toAskMarilyn@ft.com – the pick of them will be put to Marilyn vos Savant and
featured with her answers in a future issue.
.......................
The “Monty Hall dilemma”
Marilyn vos Savant‘s column gained national notoriety in the early 1990s, thanks to
her response to the ―Monty Hall dilemma‖: the make-or-break decision facing
contestants on the game show Let‘s Make a Deal that was then hosted by Hall. The
question was posed by Craig Whitaker, of Columbia, Marinaland, on September 9
1990. ―Dear Marilyn,‖ wrote Whitaker. ―Suppose you‘re on a game show, and you‘re
given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats.
You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what‘s behind the doors, opens
another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: ‗Do you want to pick door
#2?‘ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?‖
Savant‘s answer, that it was better to switch doors, provoked an extraordinary
response: thousands of letters of complaint, many of them from science teachers and
academics. ―There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don‘t
need the world‘s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!‖ wrote one reader from the
University of Florida. ―You are the goat!‖ said another. ―You made a mistake, but look
at the positive side,‖ wrote Everett Harman, of the US Army Research Institute. ―If all
those PhDs were wrong, the country would be in some very serious trouble.‖
But Savant had not made a mistake. In the end it took her four columns, hundreds of
newspaper stories and a challenge to children to test the options in classroom
experiments, to convince her readers that she was right. ―Oh, that was so much fun. I
just enjoyed these nasty letters I got,‖ she said. ―The audacity of people! I just loved
them.‖
The key to the solution lies in the role of the host, who will always pick a door which
does not have a prize behind it. Statistics from the game show, in which those who
switched won about twice as often as those who did not, bear out Savant‘s
explanation from her third column: ―When you first choose door #1 from three,
there‘s a 1/3 chance that the prize is behind that one and a 2/3 chance that it‘s behind
one of the others. But then the host steps in and gives you a clue. If the prize is behind
#2, the host shows you #3, and if the prize is behind #3, the host shows you #2. So
when you switch, you win if the prize is behind #2 or #3. You win either way! But if
you don‘t switch, you win only if the prize is behind door #1.‖
High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought
(37)
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IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied
the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the
relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay
Gould‘s Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ,
there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and
academic achievement, there has been fewer than one about self-discipline. Even so, the small
body of research on self-discipline suggests that it has a significant impact on achievement.
Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds‘ ability to delay gratification
(for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was
predictive of academic achievement a decade later. Others have found links between personality
and college grades, and self-discipline and Phi Beta Kappa awards. Still, most research on self-
discipline has achieved inconsistent results, possibly due to the difficulty of measuring self-
discipline. Could a more robust measure of self-discipline demonstrate that it‘s more relevant to
academic performance than IQ?
To address this question, Duckworth and Seligman conducted a two-year study of eighth graders,
combining several measures of self-discipline for a more reliable measure, and also assessing
IQ, achievement test scores, grades, and several other measures of academic performance.
Using this better measure of self-discipline, they found that self-discipline was a significantly
better predictor of academic performance 7 months later than IQ.
How did they arrive at this result? They studied a group of 8th-graders at the beginning of the
school year. They used five different measures of self-discipline: the Eysenck Junior
Impulsiveness scale (a 23-question survey about impulsive behavior), the Brief Self-Control Scale
(13 questions measuring thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance), two questionnaires in
which parents and teachers rated the student‘s self-discipline, and a version of Mischel‘s delay of
gratification task. Students were given an envelope containing $1, and were told they could spend
it immediately or bring it back in a week for a $2 reward. The students were also given an IQ test
(OLSAT7, level G).
At the end of the school year, students were surveyed again and several measures of academic
performance were taken. The data included final GPA (grade point average), a spring
achievement test, whether they had been admitted to the high school of their choice, and number
of hours they spent on homework. All except two measures correlated more strongly to self-
discipline than to IQ. Scores on spring achievement tests were correlated both to self-discipline
and IQ, but there wasn‘t a significant difference. Duckworth and Seligman suggest that this could
be partially due to the fact that achievement tests are similar in format to IQ tests. The other area
where there was no significant difference was in school absenses.
Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA,
compared to a .32 correlation for IQ. This graph dramatically shows the difference between the
two measures:
Both IQ and self-discipline are correlated with GPA, but self-discipline is a much more important
contributor: those with low self-discipline have substantially lower grades than those with low IQs,
and high-discipline students have much better grades than high-IQ students. Even after adjusting
for the student‘s grades during the first marking period of the year, students with higher self-
discipline still had higher grades at the end of the year. The same could not be said for IQ.
Further, the study found no correlation between IQ and self-discipline—these two traits varied
independently.
This is not to say this study will end the debate on IQ and heredity. The study says nothing about
whether self-discipline is heritable. Further, the self-discipline might be correlated differently with
achievement for different populations; this study covered only eighth graders in a relatively
privileged school. Perhaps self-discipline has a different role at other ages, or in more diverse
populations (though the study group was quite ethnically diverse—52% White, 31% Black, 12%
Asian, and 4% Latino). Perhaps the most important question which remains is how best to teach
children self-discipline—or whether it can be taught at all.
"Many gifted and talented children (and adults) are being mis-
diagnosed by psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and
other health care professionals. The most common mis-
diagnoses are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (OD), Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder (OCD), and Mood Disorders such as Cyclothymic
Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Depression, and Bi-Polar
Disorder. These common mis-diagnoses stem from an
ignorance among professionals about specific social and
emotional characteristics of gifted children which are then
mistakenly assumed by these professionals to be signs of
pathology.
Types Of Problems
Enjoys problem-solving;
able to
Resists routine
conceptualize,questions
practice;
teaching procedures.
abstract, synthesize.
Independent; prefers
May reject
individualized work;
parent or peer
reliant input;
on self.
nonconformity.
Diverse interests and May appear
abilities; versatility disorganized or
scattered;
frustrated over
lack of time.
Uneven Development
Motor skills, especially fine-motor, often lag behind cognitive
conceptual abilities, particularly in preschool gifted children
(Webb & Kleine, 1993). These children may see in their "mind's
eye" what they want to do, construct, or draw; however, motor
skills do not allow them to achieve the goal. Intense frustration
and emotional outbursts may result.
Peer Relations
As preschoolers and in primary grades, gifted children
(particularly highly gifted) attempt to organize people and
things. Their search for consistency emphasizes "rules," which
they attempt to apply to others. They invent complex games
and try to organize their playmates, often prompting resentment
in their peers.
Excessive Self-Criticism
The ability to see possibilities and alternatives may imply that
youngsters see idealistic images of what they might be, and
simultaneously berate themselves because they see how they
are falling short of an ideal (Adderholt-Elliott, 1989; Powell &
Haden, 1984; Whitmore, 1980).
Perfectionism
The ability to see how one might ideally perform, combined with
emotional intensity, leads many gifted children to unrealistically
high expectations of themselves. In high ability children,
perhaps 15-20% may be hindered significantly by perfectionism
at some point in their academic careers, and even later in life.
Avoidance of Risk-Taking
In the same way the gifted youngsters see the possibilities, they
also see potential problems in undertaking those activities.
Avoidance of potential problems can mean avoidance of risk-
taking, and may result in underachievement (Whitmore, 1980).
Multipotentiality
Gifted children often have several advanced capabilities and
may be involved in diverse activities to an almost frantic degree.
Though seldom a problem for the child, this may create
problems for the family, as well as quandaries when decisions
must be about career selection (Kerr, 1985; 1991).
Preventing Problems
Optimal IQ
I've seen this myself. I've met many people who don't
appear to be particularly bookish or intellectual, but are
very successful in what they do. Then again, I've
known lots of academic types who have scored
extremely high on an IQ test but lack the "people
skills," personal motivation, or whatever it takes to
translate their abilities into outward signs of success –
a college degree, a rewarding career, a fulfilling family
life.
Emotional Sensitivity
Friendships
Self Esteem
Depression
School
For example:
It's also true that the denser and more efficient neural
connections that some believe are related to gifted
children's emotional sensitivity and other issues can
also help them in social relationships. Many of the same
characteristics that seem to create problems for some
gifted children can lead to positive outcomes in others –
and many of the possible drawbacks associated with
giftedness can also be viewed as potential advantages.
In this article:
Abstract
Who are these students?
Definitions
o Definitions of learning disabilities
o Definitions of giftedness
o Conclusion
Identification
o Evidence of an outstanding talent or ability
o Evidence of an aptitude - achievement discrepancy
o Evidence of a processing deficit
o Conclusion
Intervention
o Individualized education programs
o Special classes for gifted students with learning disabilities
o Using and/or adapting existing services
o Teaching strategies and adaptive techniques
o Counseling
o Conclusion
Discussion and recommendations
About the authors
References
This article explores the current policies and practices with regard to defining, identifying,
and educating this population. Recommendations are included that would help ensure
that students who are gifted and have learning disabilities receive the intervention
needed to help them achieve their full potential.
When educators first began describing children who showed evidence of having a
learning disability (LD) yet also appeared to be gifted, many viewed this as contradictory.
The stereotype that had prevailed since Terman's (1925) time was that gifted children
score uniformly high on intelligence tests and perform well in school. How could a child
be considered gifted who has serious enough learning problems to be characterized as
having a learning disability?
In 1981, a colloquium held at The Johns Hopkins University convened experts from the
fields of both learning disabilities and giftedness to consider this issue. At the time,
interest in meeting the needs of gifted and talented students, as well as students with
learning disabilities, was evident on many levels, but students who exhibited the
characteristics of both exceptionalities had received scant notice. The participants agreed
that students who are gifted and also have learning disabilities do, in fact, exist but are
often overlooked when students are assessed for either giftedness or learning disabilities.
The colloquium did much to establish students who are gifted but also have learning
disabilities as a population with special characteristics and needs (Fox, Brody, & Tobin,
1983).
In recent years, the concept of giftedness and learning disabilities occurring
concomitantly in the same individual has become commonly accepted. Several books
have been written on the subject, numerous articles have appeared in journals, and most
educational conferences focusing on either learning disabilities or giftedness include at
least one presentation on the dual exceptionality. We appear to have reached an
understanding that high ability and learning problems can both be present in the same
individual. Nonetheless, empirical research on the characteristics and needs of this
population has been limited, and relatively few students with LD who are gifted are
identified as such or given special services. In this review, we examine some of the
theoretical arguments, regulations, and educational practices that affect students with LD
who are gifted.
Conclusion
The lack of a clear description of gifted students with learning disabilities has resulted in
few of these students being identified. The following points seem to be evident: (a) There
is a rationale for thinking about these students as a separate subgroup; (b) students with
LD who are gifted represent a heterogeneous group with many different types of
gifts/talents and disabilities; (c) a performance discrepancy is essential for identifying
gifted students with learning disabilities; and (d) for appropriate intervention to take
place, it is necessary to establish causal factors for the learning problems, or at least to
rule out other causal factors that could lead to very different interventions. A complete
assessment battery is needed to identify and plan interventions for gifted students with
learning disabilities, including an individual intelligence test, an achievement battery,
indicators of cognitive processing, and behavioral observations.
Ideally, early identification and appropriate intervention are recommended to help
prevent the development of the accompanying social and behavioral problems that often
result when the needs of a gifted child with learning disabilities are overlooked
(Whitmore, 1980). In addition, the identification of talents and learning problems should
continue as an ongoing process throughout the school years. Children's abilities and
needs, as well as available services, change over time so that continuous reevaluation is
necessary. In particular, one should beware of rigid cutoff scores for program
participation that discriminate against students with the atypical profiles that characterize
gifted children with learning disabilities.
Intervention
The lack of a clear definition that recognizes the unique characteristics and needs of
gifted students with learning disabilities and of a protocol for identification has resulted in
few specific programs being developed in school systems for this population. For
example, a survey in one state found that the majority of school systems reported having
no gifted children with learning disabilities in their district and no special programming
(Boodoo et al., 1989). It has also been noted that some state policies impede the
development of services for gifted children with learning disabilities because they do not
permit school districts to be reimbursed twice for the same student, inadvertently
implying that one cannot simultaneously have two exceptionalities (Baum, 1994).
Although the need for studies on effective treatments for gifted students with learning
disabilities was cited in a 1987 report to Congress (Interagency Committee on Learning
Disabilities, 1987), program development and evaluation with regard to this population
has been weak (Vaughn,1989). Recent promising developments, however, include a
commitment by the Maryland Task Force on Gifted and Talented Education (1994) to
meeting the needs of gifted students with learning disabilities, and the funding of several
projects to develop programs for this population under the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and
Talented Education disabilities.
Counseling
The drive to achieve perfection, common in many gifted children, generates much
psychological conflict in academically talented children who have difficulty achieving
(Olenchak, 1994). One survey of gifted students with learning disabilities found them to
be emotionally upset and generally unhappy because of their frustrations; in particular,
"virtually all had some idea that they could not make their brain, body, or both do what
they wanted it to do" (Schiff et al., 1981, p. 403).
Gifted students with learning disabilities may also experience conflict between their
desire for independence and the feelings of dependence that result from the learning
disability, as well as between their high aspirations and the low expectations others may
have for them (Whitmore & Maker, 1985). Low self-concept is a common problem among
gifted students with learning disabilities who have difficulty coping with the discrepancies
in their abilities (Fox, Brody, & Tobin, 1983; Hishinuma, 1993; Olenchak, 1994;
Whitmore, 1980) . Frustration, anger, and resentment can result, influencing behavior as
well as relations with peers and family members (Mendaglio, 1993). In fact, parents of
gifted students with learning disabilities are quick to emphasize the importance of
addressing the social and emotional needs of their children (Hishinuma, 1993).
In planning interventions for students with LD who are gifted, one should not overlook
the importance of providing counseling for these students to address their social and
emotional needs (BrownMizuno, 1990; Hishinuma, 1993; Mendaglio, 1993; Olenchak,
1994; Suter & Wolf, 1987). The benefits of both group and individual counseling have
been identified by researchers (Baum, 1994; Mendaglio,1993; Olenchak,1994). For
example, group counseling can let students see that others experience problems similar
to their own. However, some students may require the attention to their unique problems
and needs that is more likely to occur in one-on-one individual counseling. The
counseling role can sometimes be undertaken by teachers who understand the needs of
gifted students with learning disabilities (Baum et al., 1991; Daniels, 1983; Hishinuma,
1993). Parents also need counseling to help them understand the characteristics and
needs of their gifted children with learning disabilities (Bricklin, 1983; BrownMizuno,
1990; Daniels, 1983).
In addition to addressing the social and emotional needs of gifted students with learning
disabilities, counselors advise students on appropriate course-taking, particularly during
the secondary school years, on opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities
and other learning experiences outside of school, and on postsecondary options. As gifted
students with learning disabilities approach the college years, they need help in
identifying colleges that will accommodate their special needs.
Conclusion
Clearly, students with LD who are gifted have needs that differ considerably from those
of gifted students without disabilities, students without exceptional abilities who have
learning disabilities, and average students whose abilities are more even. Individualized
instruction is optimal for all students so that pace, level, and content can be geared to
ability, interests, and learning style, but it is essential for students whose abilities are
clearly discrepant. Ideally, a continuum of alternative placement options should be
available, so that teachers can develop a plan that builds heavily on students' strengths
but also provides remediation and support for social and emotional needs.
This paper postulates that there is a strong positive correlation between traits
associated with creativity and traits associated with psychoses. Indeed, some of
the relevant traits are shared. There are several traits that go hand in hand with
creativity. It will be shown that two of these "creative" traits, latent inhibition and
fantasy proneness, also have a strong positive correlation with certain psychoses.
As intelligence and creativity are often linked, we will also discuss intelligence as it
relates to creativity. Thus it will be shown how latent inhibition, intelligence, and
fantasy proneness all factor into a theory of how creativity and psychoses are
intertwined.
This article postulates that those who are gifted with a high level of creativity, are
also predisposed to certain forms of psychoses. Indeed, even some of the traits
long since considered to be associated with certain forms of mental illness are
shared by those who are inherently creative. What follows will be a breakdown of
creativity, intelligence and psychoses, and how they all are interrelated.
First we will explore some examples that are relatively well known, and
demonstrate how they show a positive correlation between creativity and
psychoses. Then we will break down creativity to define what traits are associated
with creativeness. As intelligence is often associated with those who are creative,
we will break down what constitutes intelligence and show the similarities and
differences between the definitions of intellect and the definitions of creativity. To
wrap up we will discuss the theory of latent inhibition (Carson, Peterson, &
Higgins, 2003), the personality trait known as fantasy proneness, and then show the
correlation between specific types of psychoses and creativity.
Kaufman and Baer (2002) further propose that those with mental illnesses are more
likely to be drawn to poetry rather than to other forms of prose due to the personal
nature of poetry. Kaufman and Baer (2002) conclude by stating, "The adage that
creativity and 'madness' are linked together is by and large supported by the
existing research" (p. 282).
The problem that we have with determining whether or not a person is either
fantasy prone or suffers from a mental disorder is the fact that many of the
symptoms displayed by fantasy proneness and psychopathy are the same. This
speaks directly to the matter at heart, if a person sees UFOs does that mean they are
"mad", or do they just have an overactive imagination? Typically our society
associates auditory and visual hallucinations as symptoms of mental illnesses, but
fantasy prone people experience such hallucinations many times. Does this make
them psychotic, or does it mean that they are overly creative? Sometimes it is hard
to tell due to the strong connection between the two traits.
Creativity: How Do We Define It?
Shalley (1991) proposes a three factor model of creativity. She proposes that for
creativity to be present, three conditions are required; ability, intrinsic motivation,
and cognitive activities.
"The cognitive activities that are necessary in order to be creative are problem
definition, environmental scanning, data gathering, unconscious mental activity on
the problem, insight to the problem solution, evaluation of the solution, and finally,
implementation of the solution" (Shalley, 1991, p. 180). Shalley (1991) postulates
that these three criteria are necessary for creativity to occur. However, her model is
not the only model with a theory on creativity.
The notion of creativity was largely understudied until Gulliford stated in a 1950
APA presidential address that the topic was not receiving the attention it deserved.
Simonton (2000) attempts in his article to categorize and solidify the studies done
on creativity since that address. Simonton (2000) suggests that research on
creativity has taken place in four key areas: "the cognitive processes involved in the
creative act, the distinctive characteristics of the creative person, the development
and manifestation of creativity across the individual life span, and the social
environments most strongly associated with creative activity" (Simonton, 2000, p.
151).
At this moment, Simonton (2000) states that there are two dominating theories of
creativity. One theory, being an economic model, examines a person's willingness
to invest in human capital. The other theory being an evolutionary one, where it
explains the creative process, person, and product. Shalley's (1991) theory of
creativity follows this second model. The article describes the various strides made
in the defining of creativity, but goes on to conclude that although there has been
considerable progress since the 1950 Gulliford address, there is much more that
still needs to be researched if a definitive model of creativity is to be reached.
Intelligence: How Does It Relate to Creativity?
To understand how intelligence relates to creativity, we must first delve into the
definitions of intelligence. Like creativity, White (2000) states that cognitive
neuroscience has not yet come to a consensus about what "intelligence" actually
is. A word used in the 19th century to denote some unspecified mental property
that promotes evolution. The late 1800s gave rise to the development of testing
for high levels of intelligence.
At first intelligence testing was not geared towards testing the general populace,
rather finding diamonds of genius in the rough, and weeding out the feebleminded.
Now IQ testing is performed on anyone who wishes to take the test. IQ testing
attempts to get away from all culture bias so that anyone in the world should be
able to take the test and generate a score close to a score of a person of equal
intelligence somewhere else.
White (2000) describes in his article the notion of genius. While the term
"intelligent" is almost always a positive term, the term "genius" can either have a
positive or negative connotation depending on the context. Although White (2000)
says in his article that it is unfortunate that geniuses often get stuck with the stigma
of being pathological, he admits that one can not totally discount the correlation
between genius and psychopathology.
"Creative activity does involve very regular, cognitive processes" (Bink & Marsh,
2001, p. 60). The article by Bink and Marsh (2001) explains in detail the cognitive
processes behind creative thinking. It uses the evidence that people use information
the same way whether or not they are creating a novel idea or merely
accomplishing a non-creative task. They discuss the Geneplore model of creativity
to devise how cognitive thinking contributes to the production of a novel idea.
"According to the model, creative activity is the process of generating, refining, and
then regenerating mental representations in service of task demands and goals"
(Bink & Marsh, 2001, p. 61). This model shows where cognitive thinking fits into
the role of the creative process.
While intelligence tests contain a range of problems, when one goes beyond the
range of conventionality in the tests, one starts to tap in to individual differences
that are measured very little, or not measured at all by conventional tests
(Sternberg, 1999). Sternberg's (1999) theory on successful intelligence suggests
that creative intelligence can be better measured by problems that assess a person's
ability to cope with relative novelty.
One example of such a test is people were presented with the following scenario:
"[There are] four kinds of people on the planet Kyron: blens, who are born young
and die young; kwefs, who are born old and die old; balts, who are born young and
die old; and prosses, who are born old and die young" (Sternberg, 1999, p. 304).
The subjects are then instructed to predict future states from past states. A test such
as this would measure more the creative side of intelligence than the cognitive
aspect of intelligence.
Sternberg (1999) found that the definition of creative intelligence goes beyond of
the realm of cognitive intelligence and that individual and developmental
differences have a large effect upon the results of creativity, much more than the
effect they have upon the results of cognitive thinking.
Sternberg (2001) goes on in another article to further explain creativity with regards
to intelligence and wisdom. He says that creativity refers to the potential to create a
novel product that is both task appropriate and high in quality. He proposes that
creativity has a dialectical relationship with intelligence, the while intelligence is
often for the advancement of social agendas, creativity hampers or creates entirely
new ones.
Sternberg (2001) suggests that creativity, like intelligence, is a trait that is naturally
hard to define, but can be linked by the common idea that things that are creative
are both novel and high in quality, while things that are intelligent are not novel but
merely high in quality. He uses this basis to suggest that creativity in some ways
seems to go beyond normal intelligence. It can be seen from the above articles that
while intelligence plays an important part in the role of creativity, it is not the be all
and the end all of what makes a person creative. Creativity has been shown to have
most links with genius, yet creativity still seems to exist in ways that go above
cognitive thinking skills.
A person with high levels of LI will tend to always see things the same way as
before. "If an item was irrelevant before, it will be irrelevant again," is something
that goes through the subconscious mind of a person with high levels of LI.
Regardless of a person's IQ, if a person has a high LI score; they tend to do poorly
on creativity testing. This is logical because a person who always sees things with
the same stigma can hardly be expected to improve upon said object, regardless of
how intelligent they are.
A person with low levels of LI on the other hand will not dismiss something as
irrelevant based on past experiences. They re-analyze the object or situation again
before coming to any conclusions about it. Here is where we see a big jump
between the differences in IQ, those with a moderate IQ scored slightly higher than
those with high levels of inhibition, but those with high IQ scored much better in
creativity tests than their less intelligent test subjects. This also makes sense if you
think about it, a more intelligent, more intuitive person who re-analyzes things will
notice more, and extrapolate further compared to one who is less intelligent.
During the course of their study, they found that 67% of students who are fantasy
prone met the criteria for either a past or present Axis I diagnosis, compared to only
31% of student who were not fantasy prone. That's more than two times the
amount, a very powerful and persuasive figure. However even more amazing is the
fact that 50% of the fantasy prone students reported a past episode of clinical
depression, as well as meeting the criteria for 23 Axis I disorders (2 disorders per
student average). "We found that 29% of fantasizers received a current DSM-III-R
diagnosis. This statistic is consistent with Lynn and Rhue's (1988) estimate that
20% to 35% of the fantasy-prone population exhibits maladjustment,
psychopathology, or deviant ideation" (Rauschenberger & Lynn, 1995, p. 378).
In the study by Lynn and Rhue (1988) mentioned above, they examine fantasy
prone students and contrast them with students who are not fantasy prone. The
differences between fantasy prone students and non fantasy prone students are
separated into several characteristics such as; hypnotizability, imagination, waking
suggestibility, hallucinatory ability, creativity, psychopathology, and childhood
experiences.
While the rest of the article discusses in detail all of the above characteristics, the
characteristics of creativity and psychopathology are of the most interest to this
topic. It was shown through testing that the students who were more fantasy prone
had higher levels of creativity and a higher degree of psychopathology than those
students who showed low fantasy proneness. It was found that most (70%)
fantasizers, while displaying some signs of psychoses, were able to maintain a
normal life.
However, 5 out of the 13 people tested scored more than 2 standard deviations
above the mean for schizotypy or hypothetical psychosis proneness, and an
amazing 20-35% of all the subjects with fantasy proneness exhibited "significant
signs of maladjustment, psychopathology, or deviant ideation. And perhaps a
smaller proportion of fantasizers can be aptly characterized as schizotypal or
borderline personalities" (Lynn & Rhue, 1988, p. 42). It can be derived from this
that at least some degree of overlap exists between healthy creative tendencies and
pathological ideational processes.
So where do we draw the line? How do we determine who is psychotic and who is
a creative genius? Obviously more work and research needs to be done in this field,
genetic and psychiatric tests should be run in order to further discover the
interesting link between creativity and psychoses. As a society we define the
difference between someone who is psychotic and someone who is not is based
upon a person's actions towards society's accepted norms.
One has to wonder, if Beethoven were born today, would he be making music? Or
would he be sitting in a psychiatric ward, with no one but the walls to listen to his
symphonies?
High IQ Linked To Reduced Risk Of Death
Mar. 13, 2009 — A study of one million Swedish men has revealed a strong
link between cognitive ability and the risk of death, suggesting that
government initiatives to increase education opportunities may also have
health benefits.
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Dr David Batty, a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit
in Glasgow, and colleagues, found that a lower IQ was strongly associated with a higher risk of death
from causes such as accidents, coronary heart disease and suicide.
The researchers studied data from one million Swedish men conscripted to the army at the age of 18.
After they had taken into account whether a person had grown up in a safer, more affluent
environment, they found that only education had an influence on the relationship between IQ and
death.
The researchers say the link between IQ and mortality could be partially attributed to the healthier
behaviours displayed by those who score higher on IQ tests.
"People with higher IQ test scores tend to be less likely to smoke or drink alcohol heavily, they eat
better diets, and they are more physically active. So they have a range of better behaviours that may
partly explain their lower mortality risk," says Dr Batty.
Previous studies have suggested that preschool education programmes and better nourishment can
raise IQ scores. The study suggests this may also have previously unforeseen health benefits, further
validating government efforts to improve living conditions and education.
Dr Batty suggests there may also be benefits from simplifying health information for the public.
"If you believe the association between IQ and mortality is at least partially explained by people with a
lower IQ having worse behaviours - which is plausible - then it might be that the messages used to
change health behaviours are too complicated," he says.
"Messages about diet, including how much or what type of alcohol is beneficial, aren't simple, and the
array of strategies available for quitting smoking are diverse and actually quite complicated. If you
clarify the options available to people who want to, say, quit smoking, in the short term that may have
an effect."
A second study, also co-authored by Dr Batty, used data from more than 4000 US soldiers and
followed them for 15 years. The study found the same relationship between IQ scores and mortality,
as well as a significant association between higher neuroticism and increased mortality risk.
The new work suggests that there is an evolutionary link between our tendency to worry
and ourintelligence, regarded as our most important evolutionary advancement.
"We think normally of worry as being disabling," said psychiatrist Jeremy Coplan, lead
author of a study published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. That means it's a
"maladaptive trait" that should have inhibited our adaptation to a changing environment,
Coplan said in a telephone interview.
"So we found this strange juxtaposition of something that was supposedly disabling
being linked positively with something (intelligence) that was very adaptive," he added.
The study, involving 26 patients with a disabling anxiety disorder and 18 healthy
volunteers, was conducted by seven scientists at five institutions. Among the "normal"
volunteers, those with the highest intelligence were the least likely to be excessive
worriers. But the result was just the opposite among the patients. Those with higher
intelligence and an anxiety disorder were likely to worry far more than those with a lower
IQ score.
Thus there is a link between high intelligence and anxiety, the study says.
Coplan, who is with the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center, noted
that worry is not in itself a bad thing. We do have real issues in our lives, and it's natural
for us to worry about the possible outcome.
Even in the earliest days of human history, our ancestors worried about real threats, and
they learned to avoid unsafe areas, thus surviving long enough to pass along their
genes.
There's a flip side to that coin, of course. Scientists at Purdue University found that
chronic worrying can kill you because it leads to unhealthy behavior, like smoking and
consuming large quantities of alcohol. It can also lead to depression and neuroticism.
So when does worry become a bad thing? When does it become pathological?
"The cutoff, by definition, has to be arbitrary," Coplan said. There's no scale on which a
score of 50 points means normal worry has become an anxiety disorder.
"Sometimes they may be able to hold down their job, and they may be able to fulfill their
family obligations, but they just have no quality of life because they are worrying all the
time," he said.
While the intensity may be hard to determine, there's no doubt that we all worry. After all,
mental illness is primarily a matter of degree in that we all have traces of some
pathologies, like anxiety, but when it becomes crippling it is time to seek professional
help, Coplan said.
And anxiety is the most common human psychological experience, according to the
journal Psychology Today.
Research published in that journal over the last few years has shown that we aren't
particularly good at self-analyzing. Most of us think we worry more than the average
person, for example.
But that's probably because we know we worry, but we don't know how much the other
person worries. I know I worry a lot, but I'm not sure about you.
You‘ve got two schools of thought. The first insists that smarts, like any other positive attribute, can
only raise a man‘s dating market value because women are hypergamous and appreciate a smarter
man than themselves. The other school says that women are put off by men who are too much
smarter than themselves, and that experience shows women fall for lunkhead jerks all the time,
perhaps because these types of men are less introspective and more unthinkingly assertive about
hitting on women.
The science I‘ve read on this subject has been all over the place, but the consensus seems to be that
having some smarts is a net plus to a man‘s desirability.
Where do I come down on this perennial issue? I stick by the Dating Market Value Test for Men at the
top of this blog. A better-than-average IQ is beneficial, but the benefits to picking up women begin to
dissipate past a certain degree of brainpower, because very high IQ seems to be associated with a
lack of social savviness and other off-putting personality quirks.
I agree with Roissy to a point. My perspective is that intelligence is a major plus in two circumstances.
First, it is a huge DHV when dealing with women who place value on intelligence. These tend to be
educated women in the 1 SD+ category; it's easy to spot them because they will mention a) their
academic credentials, or b) how smart they are, within the first five minutes of meeting someone new.
There is nothing that turns them on faster than being corrected or seeing a man intellectually humiliate
someone. Second, it can be a very useful tool for both social and sexual dominance.
That being said, one should never confuse the tool for the consequence of its use and that is the
problem that most smart guys face. Most smart men think that displaying their intelligence, usually in
some hopelessly dorky manner, will make them more attractive to women. This is not the case.
Whereas women are attracted to muscles and strong bodies for their own sake, and not merely
because they can indicate social and sexual dominance, the first group aside, they are not attracted to
intelligence for its own sake, only when it is used to dominate others.
For example, if the science geek takes an arrogant attitude and openly disrespects less intelligent men
as barely evolved chimpanzees, women will be attracted to him. Of course, he has to be able to back it
up and few science geeks can. That's why men who are balanced, who honor the Greek ideal of
developing mind, body, and soul, will tend to clean up with women, because there are few things that
women find more attractive than a man who can dominate them and others both physically and
mentally. However, mental dominance isn't as readily apparent as physical dominance, which is why
this takes us back to the "chicks dig jerks" theme. A smart asshole doesn't hesitate to exert his mental
dominance, whereas the average smart nice guy will do everything in his power to refrain from
demonstrating it in any way. Needless to say, women will be attracted to the former, not the latter.
Think of the "apples" scene in Good Will Hunting. That is a clear demonstration of mental dominance
driving attraction; it may not be as much of a turn-on as a physical beat-down, but make no mistake,
it's a beat-down and it's going to turn on most woman who witness it, especially if they happen to have
any brains of their own.
It's not that women are any more interested in football games and motorcycles than physics and
philosophy, it's just that they usually can't understand the latter.
I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in,
whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example. ~ Daniel Goleman
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is one of the measures for calculating a person's intellectual capability.
This term was coined in 1912 by a German psychologist, William Stern to analyze one's
intelligence. According to the Webster dictionary, intelligence quotient is defined as - "a measure of
a person's intelligence as indicated by an intelligence test; the ratio of a person's mental age to
their chronological age (multiplied by 100)". The average score is 100 and, above 130 is a superior
high score and those who score 130+ are considered to be intellectually gifted.
In this section, I am going to provide you with some tips that you can make use of to increase you
intelligence levels. They are as follows:
Play Games
Playing games such as tennis, basketball, table tennis, badminton, etc., stimulates mental
acuteness and sharpness. Rapid movements while playing enhances blood flow to the brain and
focused eye-hand coordination helps to improve concentration. Playing chess improves your IQ
level by making you a logical thinker and an intellect. It makes you stay concentrated for a longer
period of time and shapes you to become a good problem solver.
VAK technique
It is a teaching method that combines sensory components such as vision, hearing (auditory) and
kinesthesis. Reading and writing practice and tests through graphical representations and
illustrations are given to those who prefer to learn by visual methods. In auditory method, the
learner takes up information through conversations and by listening to lectures through audio
tapes. Kinesthetic learners are taught through writing practice and motion involved activities.
Image Streaming
Image streaming is a modern technique that helps to build up a person's creative thinking. By
visualizing certain problems, you can get a solution. This technique was developed by Win Wenger,
and he describes this technique as an intelligent factor of the famous scientist, Albert Einstein. This
technique combines both 'visual and verbal' thinking, which is a cause for increase in intelligence.
Image streaming restores the memory in our subconscious mind.
There are also techniques such as Pseudo Telekinesis, PTMR, Mental Rotation, Brain Harmonics,
Dualist Mental Expansion, etc., that can increase you IQ level to a certain extent. Some people
believe that it is determined by genes of a person, but it is not completely true. In addition to
genetic factors, environmental factors and a person's effort to improve IQ, also plays an important
role in determining a person's intelligence. Remember that, not only your high IQ level will give
you success, but also, your personality and good-natured behavior with others will determine your
success.
Apply your intelligence in a good way and learn to understand things rather than aiming only for
the high IQ score. For your reference, here is an IQ chart to help you determine your intelligence
level. Follow the steps I have mentioned in this article, and you are sure to become an intellect.
Read more at Buzzle: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/tips-to-raise-your-iq.html
Introduction
In addition it is known
that I.Q. has the greatest
significance to real-life
functioning (and the
highest correlation with
"g", the common factor
shared by all mental
ability tests) at its lowest
ranges, and becomes
less important as one
goes higher; the more
you have of it, the less
important it gets, just as
with money. It is
unknown whether I.Q.'s
beyond about 140 have
any extra significance.
5 9 10 14 15 16
130
20- 35- 0- 80- 0- 0- 110- 120- 0- 0- 0- 170-
<20 70-79 - 180-...
34 49 6 89 9 10 119 129 14 15 16 179
139
9 9 9 9 9 9
Usually multi-
handicapped with
obvious physical
deformities and short life
expectancy. Heavily
dependent on others.
Can learn no or only the
very simplest tasks.
20-34 - Severely retarded
90-99 - Average
130-139 - "Gifted"
140-149 - Intelligent
Capable of rational
communication and
scientific work. From this
range on, only specific
high-range tests should
be considered. Important
scientific discoveries and
advancement are
possible from the upper
part of this range on.
We do not know if
intelligence from about
this range on is simply
the extreme end of a
normal distribution
centered at 100 and
largely formed by
heredity, or if high
intelligence in some
cases has other causes
(non-inherited or non-
genetic) which make it
deviate from the normal
curve centered at 100
and form a "bump" in the
far right tail, similar to
the bump in the retarded
range (which has non-
inherited and non-
genetic causes). And
since we possess no
physical, absolute scale
of intelligence, these
questions are hitherto
meaningless altogether.
Colophon