12-Nov-2006: What about this IQ stuff?
I'm pretty smart. Many people recognize that when they first meet me, and often make remarks like, "You're a bright guy." That sort of thing.
But what does it mean?
To some, reading the above paragraph, it means that I am "conceited," have a "swelled-head," and "You don't know as much as you think you do."
I've heard it all before, especially from my birth family where I apparently stuck out like a foundling. They are all now dead or not speaking to me,
so I am not constantly being irritated by those who think my "brain-power" is some sort of self-inflicted psychiatric condition that needs to be
treated by "cutting you down to size," "punching your lights out," or "sticking an ice-pick in that swollen head of yours." Such sweet loving folks, eh?
I could say that it never bothered me, but that would be a lie. Go through childhood being treated by your family as some sort of freak and you never,
really, get over it.
Now I never intended to be smart. When the grade one teacher told us that children needed ten hours of sleep a night, I told my mother about it
and argued that that meant I did not have to go to bed until 10:00 pm, as we got up in the morning at 8:00 am. "What are you talking about?"
she demanded. "It's 10 hours between 8:00 pm and 8:00 am." She might have had other reasons for wanting me in bed at 8:00 pm, but, instead
she told me something that I knew not to be true. The more I insisted that 8:00 pm to 8:00 am was 12 hours, the angrier she got. When I demanded
she count the hours on a clock, she slapped me. I was "getting too big for my britches." (Is there a connection between those sorts of incidents and
my feeling during the 1960's that I could not trust any adults?)
Another brief example. I hated spelling classes. The rules we were taught didn't make sense (because there were so many "exceptions") and I
could never remember them in any case. In grade 8, after receiving another of my typical marks on a spelling test (somewhere near zero), my
teacher burst out with: "You have the highest IQ in the history of this school, and you can't pass a simple spelling test! What's the matter with you?"
See? Another example of a link between my intelligence and something being wrong with me.
I never really wanted to be anything other than "normal."
Angry and bitter, I preferred to live apart from my family in the slums of east end Toronto. At least the gangs saw my intelligence as an asset
to be exploited, rather than be made fun of. And they never minded that I wanted to play the violin.
At the age of 16 I wound up in a psychiatric hospital after a botched and amateurish suicide attempt. Of course they gave me batteries
of tests. One of the other patients told me he saw my IQ test on my doctor's desk with 147 written in large letters and circled. (It was a Sandford-Binet test.)
Finally, I had something I could hang my identity on: the number 147. That was me. Nothing wrong with it, it was a good number. Then all I had
to do was figure out what that meant; it certainly did explain the feeling that I was not part of the human race. And it meant that my dreams of going to
university and conversing with other intelligent humans did have a solid basis. So, I did that—and loved every minute of it, until I got bored.
Life goes on. You have to perform, not just sit around basking in your intelligence. So, I taught secondary school—and eventually got bored and feeling
very isolated. How to get out of the trap of teaching English in an isolated French-speaking and aboriginal community? Reach out to the outside world.
I joined Mensa Canada with the intention of finding a new direction. Boy was I surprised when I met my wife-to-be and made friends with
people who had life stories that echoed my own (some are still close friends twenty-five years later). My story might be a bit extreme, but has many
elements in common with the stories of other Mensa members. Rather than a blessing, intelligence, for the most part, had been a cross.
So what is it that sets my brain apart from the general population? Simple: my brain is wired to recognize patterns slightly faster than most people's. Instantly seeing the
pattern in a sequences like:
45872 58724 87245
6 9 4 7
and to be able to quickly find a word in common with both "plank" and "food" is something my brain can
do. (The answers are: 72458, 2, and "board.") It does not mean I know anything or that I am superior to any other human.
Case in point: about 15 or 20 years ago the mass media raised a fuss about a woman in New York with a reputed IQ of 220. "Smartest person in the world" the headlines
screamed. Reporters lined up to ask her the "big" questions, such as how to achieve world peace. She's smart, right, ought to know something the rest
of don't know. Her answers: "We should all learn to get along with each if we want world peace." were about as deep as she got and
reporters eventually stopped harassing her. But think about it: why should this woman of average education have answers to questions outside of her
field of expertise (whatever that was) that are any different from any other reasonably educated lay person?
Several years ago a local newspaper interviewed Ann and me to find out what it was like to be "smart." A photo of us with our three young boys appeared
on the front page under the heading, "Family of Geniuses!" I tried patiently to explain to the reporter that having a high IQ means only that one is good at
performing certain tasks. I tried to compare it to a gifted athlete. A predilection to be able to run quickly does not mean: the person enjoys running, wants a career
in running, or should be in the Olympic games. A predilection is just that, nothing more.
My brain gets pleasure from finding new ways to do things (and writing IQ tests). If that means that everyone with an IQ above the
IQ of the top 3% of the population wants only to find new ways of doing the same old things, then the world would be over-run with such people. 3% of the population is a lot
of people—and that is a lot of people who can excel at writing a certain kind of test. Nothing more.
By the way, my sons are all comfortable with their inherited brains. Ann and I taught them from the beginning that they have certain abilities
that other people will be suspicious and jealous of—and that these abilities do not in any way make them special or superior—just different.
As for spelling, I like to think that spell-checking programs were written especially for me.