It’s being like you
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I have a high IQ as well as ADHD and Autism.
Out of context, scoring as high as I did really meant next to nothing. In the context of the diagnoses I received later in life, definitely made sense, and helped color a picture painted in two solid days with a psychologist.
Somehow, I think it’s important that the IQ test I took was not called an IQ test to me until after. Like, I knew I was in for tests, but more broadly told what things were about.
As a student, I had a science teacher who had been teaching many years, tell my mother he had never seen a student think in the manner I did. I was doing exceptionally well in class, but did not exceed in the fashion that would get me into an ivy league school, which at the time was supposed to be a goal. My father graduated MIT.
There are times when it’s great. When I can focus on something, I can learn a lot and get very good at it. However, I spent decades with two obstacles I could never get myself past: the inability to keep that focus or control it, and the inability to even understand other people enough to try to get along with them long-term.
The result is I am just now, at 41, starting to figure out what I want to do with my life after way too long in a profession I should never have entered, and burned out of twice. And by burn out I do not mean tired and sad, I mean hospitalization.
In summary, it can be pretty great, but in my case it’s fraught with difficulty as well.
Thanks for your response.
It’s interesting to see your story in relation to other stories I’ve heard or people I’ve met.
Before I describe them, it’s important to say that you don’t strike me as unkind. I wouldn’t want you to compare yourself to the people I’ll mention and conclude that you’re somehow bad. I’m taking the time to say this because I don’t know if the difficulties you’ve mentioned are a sore spot.
Alright. The people I’ve met. I’ve met people whose identity was tied to their IQ and it became painful for me to wonder what I meant to them. For sure I was not close to their IQ; they needed to take multiple tests because they were off the charts. But I always wondered if they liked me as a person, based on my values and how I did things.
I’ve also met very relaxed and kind people who went on to study at the schools that were supposed to be a goal, people who made me realize it’s possible to be wicked smart and simultaneously kind.
When you mention that it was important that you weren’t told that the test you took was an IQ test, I think about teenage me. Back then, I learned that people could judge me based on my IQ. I made the mistake of reading white supremacist bigotry, and read that they evaluated whether people were worthy of living based on things like IQ. I knew the whole white supremacy discourse was pseudoscience and bigotry, but I was scared of bigots in power evaluating my existence. I became terrified. I became very distrustful of people who I should’ve trusted, wonderful people who would’ve never had such narrow and mistaken views. That has changed, now that I have a clearer sense of self and more perspective. But I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if I wouldn’t have mistrusted wonderful people. I guess the discourse around IQ can really change the way you look at the world and what you do.
Is it too nosy to ask a couple of follow up questions? If not, here they are: you mentioned ADHD and the obstacle you could never get yourself past, the inability to keep your focus and control it. Is the diagnosis recent? Could medication help? Could any treatment help with the ADHD? As to difficulties understanding other people, do you know about relational frame theory, the self component of ACT, and the PEAK and AIM programs?
As far as medication, I have not decided yet. This is all recent, within the last year. Therapy has been helping a lot for my current state, but ADHD isn’t the focus. Recovering from burnout is.
I haven’t looked into anything you’ve mentioned.
I have been described as, and willing describe myself as, a good person with a capacity for kindness. I am not nice in much of what that means.
I think my political stances sometimes highlight that. I will willingly punch nazis given the chance. No, that’s not hyperbole. I have no tolerance for bigotry. I lost a good friend who became a cop, and then said some questionable but not outright hateful things in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
A flawed but not altogether useless analogy is I am not the guy who waves someone on at a stop sign when it is that person who is supposed to yield. I have no patience for it, nor do I have patience for it happening the other way around.
When I recognized that a now good friend wasn’t so harsh to me out of spite or hate but out of personal struggle, I wanted to know more, and now we not only became good friends, but we are to each other among the very few people we talk openly with about therapy and how it’s really going. We both understand and respect the need to break down the stigma of seeking help with mental health. We had both peered into the void.
But in public, I wind up ignoring a lot of people simply from wearing headphones and wanting nothing to do with any of it.
“How does this (dress, shirt, whatever) look on me?” My wife gets the truth, like it or not.
I could go on, and am willing to try to answer any questions.
Episodes of Rick and Morty really hit close to home in a way that normies couldn’t possibly fathom. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Genuine curiosity: I’ve seen piles of “my superior intellect” and “normies would never understand”, so I wanted to ask if your answer was sarcastic. If it isn’t, are you saying that you identify with Rick? Or something different?
I was being sarcastic, lol. It’s a play on the “you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” gag.
I think it’s sarcasm.
I’m neither a Rick nor a Morty, but I think you can look at the biographies of historical figures who’ve been considered “geniuses” and deduce that R&M isn’t too far off base. It may be a sort of survivor bias: it may be that only genius and successful people have had difficulties; or, maybe idiots have just as much depression only they don’t get famous. All we have are examples like DJT for the dumb-but-successful-and-not-struggling-with-depression category.
I really should have a statistic to back this up, but it seems common for “high IQ” people to have issues. My personnel theory is that we’re all on the spectrum: that humans have a band in which we can function normally, socially, but the higher you climb on the “intelligence” scale, the more you edge into what we’d diagnose as autism and start to struggle with issues resulting from either being unable to integrate with society, or being persecuted by it.
I have absolutely no evidence for this theory, of course. It’s just a theory formed after reading biographies of so many notable geniuses who’ve struggled with drug abuse and depression. Depression is the big one; it must get awfully tiresome being surrounded by (relative) idiots.
I don’t take the theory very seriously; however, among my high school close friend group, the unquestioned smartest one, who went on to get a doctorate in math, checked himself out with a shotgun in his early 30’s. He’s the only suicide we’ve had, and I’ve often wondered how much his intelligence factored into it.
Finally, I’ll end with this quote I one read, for which I can no longer find a source and which I have no reason for believing is based at all on any evidence; but which I’ve always found funny:
Philosophers look outside themselves for truth.
Mathematicians look inside themselves for truth.
Psychologists say philosophers tend to be more happy than mathematicians.The topics of the show tend to deal with fairly high level concepts. Mixed in the chaos of interpersonal relationships.
The show to me has been a more twisted version of the superman paradox. A god living amongst mortals.
I have a high IQ and diagnosed as “gifted” by psy at nearly 40.
I won’t argue about IQ and Giftedness having scientific base or not. All I can do is a professional clinical psy told me I am gifted. And what I’ll say is just my way of thinking.
I have a systemic brain. I have very poor memory concerning names, date, etc… but I can remember complex system (basically, what cause create which consequence) really easily. I also understand problem, and find solutions much faster than most of peoples, I have strong Intuition of things, but I have difficulties explaining how I’ve found the solution. Scientists think it may be related to Myelin. That stuff increase connection speed between neurons, so it makes you think “faster”, but sometime faster than you conscience.
I also wants to give meaning to anything. If I take a nap and hear the wind in the trees, I immediately imagine air molecules traveling and hitting leaves, sound wave propagating and hitting my ears. Wind also blowing the small layer of hotter air near my skin, explaining why it feel cold, etc…
I see object through their functioning, not their usefulness. When I see any new machine, I don’t really care what it does, but more how it does it.
I’m constantly flooded by information, and I’m constantly analyzing everything. Being in a crowed area is exhausting for me, because there are too many stimulus. I’m not going to faint or something, but I think being in a crowd for me is like being in a kindergarten class full of screaming children.
I don’t talk a lot because I’m easily bored by small-talks. I don’t see the point of speaking about what I’ve done this week end, or the weather, or anything. I prefer staying in my own bubble speaking to myself.
I don’t feel part of this world, I more feel like an observer watching some weird TV show. I don’t understand most of human reaction.
If you are French speaking, I strongly encourage you to read the comics Comme oiseau dans bocal. It’s based on serious research and is a very good popular science story about IQ, giftedness, etc…
Since you’ve been to a psychologist for your assessment (is that what you mean by “psy”?) have you asked or considered the possibility of neurodivergence? I have suspected autism in myself for a while, and I resonate with much of what you said in regards to stimulus overwhelm, staying in your bubble, disdain for small talk etc. That’s pretty common in many autistic people.
Just wanted to say wow, so much of that sounds familiar!
IQ is skull measuring nonsense. how good you are at taking a standardised test is in fact not a remotely good “measure of intelligence”. if you care about education you should discard the notion of IQ.
how good you are at taking a standardised test
Not even that, how good you are at taking a standardised test on a given day. We also know people who are traumatised by poverty or individual adverse life events have lower success rates on these tests, making them even more useless at best and vicious at worst.
Scores are stable over time. This can be determined by statistics. It’s called test-retest reliability.
I think it would be hard to isolate exactly how much of our daily lives we experience as a direct consequence of our IQ and how much is a consequence of other things such as personality, emotional predisposition, environment, and luck.
My IQ is pretty average (around 115 I think? I tested ages ago and I can’t even say the test was reliable). Some people insist I must be somewhat higher than that but I don’t know. I feel dumber every day.
My father though, he does have a higher IQ (I think 135 iirc) and it’s obvious to anyone that he’s a brains guy. Always top student in his youth and later a decent researcher, engineer and programmer. And yet he still makes dumb mistakes like everyone else, and his temper and personality will often turn a mediocre day into a bad one. He has a tendency to overcomplicate things unnecessarily, and sets high standards for others around him- you’d think being smarter would mean he wouldn’t do this, but as I said, intelligence doesn’t work isolated. I remember asking him how it feels like being smarter than most of his peers and his answer is always “bah!”.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
115 is not “average” lmao
It’s within a standard deviation, it’s not like it’s getting him into Mensa.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
It does! This is precisely the kind of stuff that I’m interested in! I agree with you, in that it’s possible to think wrong thoughts even with a higher IQ. I see IQ as the speed of thought, and you can very quickly arrive at wrong conclusions. Similarly, if there’s a thought that your skill tree hasn’t unlocked, then you’re left with thoughts that are maybe not ideal for a particular situation, thoughts that could make someone “overcomplicate things unnecessarily” or “make dumb mistakes”, as your dad or anyone on planet Earth would.
I think it’s especially hard to isolate IQ when there are many thoughts or behaviors that we don’t typically associate with high IQ. “Ah yes, the violin is a sensible instrument for a learned man” or whatever people may think. That’s partly why I asked my question. If someone leads a life not typically associated with a high IQ and yet have a high enough IQ that manifested in their life, how did that look like? Of course, I’m not looking for wild stories. I’m looking for genuine stories, and I’m glad that I got an interesting answers like yours!
My situation is I have an ability to recall a lot of really old information and some of it seemingly mundane. I can also synthesize all this together to make a good decision quickly.
This is basically what learning is, but it’s a broader base I can pull from and the process is just faster.
I don’t do well with forcing specific information to be cataloged. This means I wasn’t a great student in classes where you needed to just remember things (eg history).
The other thing I’ve got going for me is being able to visually see things in my head. It might be memories, but it’s also things for solving problems like this https://www.intelligencetest.com/questions/visualization/medium/3/8.html
You get to impress the worst people in the world by giving them a number which generally indicates the quality of your education. Other than that, it’s pretty useless.
I’m comfortably above average but comfortably below genius, not entirely sure whether that fits your personal definition of high so it felt worth clarifying.
In school, it meant that learning was something I could do with no actual effort. Without studying and without doing homework aside from what I did at my desk to pass the time before class started, I had as strong a grasp on the subject as the students who did and comfortable grades. Then when I started college, that passivity suddenly didn’t work anymore and I had no idea how to cope with it. I never actually learned how to learn, formally speaking.
Emotionally speaking, that whole thing was awful. It sucked when it was easy because I was so bored, it sucked when it was hard because I was so frustrated. I actually failed out of high school due to low attendance at the very end, then tested into the local college without a diploma because I still knew the material even with the problematic attendance, then got suspended from college due to now-for-the-opposite-reason low attendance and never went back. There was also unrelated shit going on, to be clear, but this that I’m describing was not a small part of my overall psychological state.
As an adult, it doesn’t mean much of anything. While it’s a bit easier for me to learn things than it is for the average person, the ease with which I learn things doesn’t matter anymore because it’s largely happening without other people’s direct involvement or on any kind of schedule. On the occasion there needs to be an actual work training lesson I attend, it’s something that only happens for a day and enduring a single day of tedious education is so very achievable compared to it being my entire life.
The biggest impact these days is that it makes me hate Aaron Sorkin.
If you believe psychology and IQ are nonsense, here’s a comment I copied over from another thread:
IQ means intelligence quotient. A bunch of people take a test and they’re compared to each other. Your result is your intelligence quotient.
Its origins were noble, because it was designed to identify students who needed extra help in school. The creator of the test knew that people could change their results with good instruction.
However, that noble origin story was besmirched by what happened later. Eventually, IQ tests were used as a way to classify people in more brutal and rigid ways. The USA military used it as a cutoff for aspiring cadets. USA colleges use tests that effectively are IQ tests to let people in or not. The worst part is that bigots around the world injected pseudoscience into IQ and used it to decide who they think are worthy of life and who aren’t. It’s as awful as it sounds.
You may notice that helping struggling students sounds wonderful, and you may think that we should go back to that.
However, some people are deeply marked by the dark history of IQ. They have developed beliefs that protect them from the dangers of bigotry and IQ reductionism. They believe that tests aren’t useful at all to tell us something about anything. They believe IQ tests should be banished and never used.
Others people believe IQ tests are a snapshot of how a person answered the questions to a test in a given day. Take the same test days, months, or years after a great education, and the result will be higher. Additionally, these people notice that, in research, IQ scores are robustly associated with other things, such as quality of relationships, happiness, income, and other measures. They contend that learning about the world, about ourselves, and how to think critically and solve problems has massive domino effects in peoples’ lives. Once again, these people believe that a test result one day doesn’t doom you for life and doesn’t define you. A bad test result shows the gap that a good education would fill. These people know that a good education makes the mind curious, nimble, and open.
Its origins were noble
No they most certainly were not. It’s origins is in eugenics and white supremacist nonsense.
In my perspective IQ only has so many consequences, due to the limitations of the method. Nowadays we know to separate different forms of intelligence and also that transferring skills between those forms can have an impact on overall ‘performance’ . That being said, it can be a good indicator for stuff but as you point out, it’s often misused as divider instead of an accelerator.
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If I were smarter I could likely answer this question. I never tested for it but for anyone younger out there since its a general test and it normalizes for age I think the younger you take it the better for a high result but its good to do it while your still studying general things. So like in the US like the summer after two years of college as your courses are going to get to specialized at that point. Maybe after the first year or if you don’t go to college just after high school.
It’s like having all the correct opinions
My highest IQ I scored was 135, the lowest 115.
Do I get to part of it?
The IQ tests themselves are not great tools of measuring intelligence but it’s the best we’ve got. And I’m glad people here realize that.Well…I currently feel like I’m the dumbest one among friends. I’ve got ADD, so I lose concentration a lot and my friends don’t seem to have that, while they have high IQ as well.
It’s also good to see that you know that IQ is speed of measuring thoughts, because I don’t think the current physicists have got it correct at all and fail even on a basic level of natural philosophy/science, but they certainly can whip up complex equations faster than either of us can.
