Are there any true geniuses here? (IQ over 155)

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I've heard that people with giftedness tend to think in a qualitatively different way--instead of memorizing "2+2=4", they learn the concept of addition and derive 2+2 from that. The problem is that schools are made for people who are not gifted, and don't start out trying to learn the general concepts and connect everything to everything else; the schools are made for people who memorize things and eventually learn to apply them. If you're gifted, you might end up having to understand everything before you can learn it; and that means that it might take you a while to understand algebra completely, while your classmates are simply memorizing procedures. It also means you use more effort, and that means giftedness+ADHD can be an even bigger problem than ADHD without giftedness: You get bored more easily, and you have to put out more effort than most people because your style is to learn things more completely. No wonder there are so many ADHD underachievers out there! On the other hand, that generalized learning style can really be used to great effect, because it's the style that's the most likely to come up with new ideas, new connections between ideas, or new applications of old ideas.

^ i love your posts Callista. they are always so crisp.

tantybi...It is very important fro us here on WP to start trying to create a cultrue or positivity in relation to autism. Autism is hard, very very hard. it is particularly hard for us because we live in a world poorly designed for us. BUT it is great too.

SOme days i feel so disheartened, but i hang onto this one thing....I have in me a way of looking at things that does not need to be dulled down or drugged down anymore with SSRI's. I have a perception that is extraordinary. I have the full view. I home in on details but many, many. a photo of a person is not about the person. it is about the pattern behind the person, the wall, the entirety of things given equal weight and value. everything is studied. Everything is of equal worth. That being the case, autism can be a magnificently freeing and egalitarian way to be.

It is the gift and domain of THE FREE THINKER.
that is in fact what we all are.

I hope i can inspire younger autists to start buildig on their strengths rather than focusing on the diffiuclties. the difficulties do need expessing. I am not saying that. I would just love to see more young people branching out into feeling good about who they are and how they are.

I'm in total agreement with that. I think my problem was that before I knew I had aspergers, I thought there wasn't really anything wrong with me except that I was different, and there was something wrong with everyone else. My mentality was on changing, or curing, the world around me long before myself. Also at that point in my life, I rarely got depressed. I had a problem with social skills in the military, and my shirt at one point was determined that I was suicidal because he just wanted to mess with me more so than truly feeling that way. Either way, he had me escorted to "life skills" where the psychologist just flat out asked me if I was suicidal. I said I'm not. He just kept asking. So finally, I said, "look, I have problems like everyone else, except that I'm aware none of my problems are with myself, they are with everyone else, so I will be homicidal long before I'd be suicidal." Then he dropped it.

Either way, when I realized that kind of thinking is very irrational, especially when I learned about Aspergers, I kinda started to think maybe I should just cave in to the people around me. I kinda lost faith in myself in that process. What was worse, after my husband got out of the military, we moved back to my home. That's when all the criticism started. I swear it's because I'm a mom now. I'm starting to think it's a NT ritual to discriminate against the moms. Then, women who had abortions turn around and say the world is judging them. Hah, as if. No, having the kids, the judgment is worse, it's daily, and it's not about the one thing you did years ago but what you are doing wtih your life, every aspect, from how you clean your house to how you wipe your baby's butt. No matter what you do, it's wrong. And it's precisely why I'd rather talk to strangers on the forum than my family and friends at home. To be honest, for sake of those relationships, I compromised who I was on many occasions just to get along. It's one thing to work on my monologues for sake of the people in my life, but it's another thing to adapt my whole lifestyle to their mentality. But now, my problem is the same it's been. The more I'm stubborn about being me, the more people I love tell me I sit on my "high horse." But, I figure they don't like the way I do something because they don't like the results. So if I can yield the results they are looking for by doing things my way as opposed to their way, maybe the criticism will stop. I hate always knowing how the movie ends. I realize that's not going to make it stop. I think the problem is on their end with their egos, their life, and their role in the world around them. I guess I'll be waiting on all them to grow up. My mother finally started growing up about that recently with me. So, soon, everyone else will follow suit I guess.

I guess it's like people assume growing up is moving out of the house and paying your own bills. But there's a lot more to maturity than that. It's about the way you look at the world and deal with it. I guess at some point in your life, you face a problem and solve it. You grow up when you know what problems don't really need to be solved.

To tie it back to the thread. Maybe intelligence is being a knowledge puppet, and wisdom is taking knowledge and intuition, and doing something useful with it.

Edited to add: I apologize for going on about women who had abortions. It's just that I was in a heavy debate a couple weeks back on Pro Life vs Pro Choice, and I was just apalled by the mentality some women have. It will stick in my mind for a very long time. No wonder women are reducing themselves to being equal to men now a days.

It takes more than just autism to make life really rough. There needs to be a combination of variables present contributing to the overall quality of life. Just like everyone, autistics thrive in certain environments, whither in others.

There is some true genius here, which intelligence is only a part of.

We have what we have to work with, and standards are lacking, but some with little do so much, some with much so little.

A better test as an indicator of performance would have a minus side, life events that are of low potential, and plus side. In between is personality, and some unknown element that causes some to use the world to their advantage, and others to get hit by parked cars.

It has not been autism that was the problem, but me doing things, my wish, my way, and people coming and saying you can't do that. I imagine the Wright Brothers had the same problem.

"He who subdues or surpasses mankind must look down upon their wrath." Alexander the Great

While I am called a ret*d, they have to demand that I tell them what I am doing.

Being yourself does not fit well with most people, who are being something they were told, or infered, and perhaps I just bring up what they have given up.

Being ourselves is easy, fun, productive, till we try that in a troop of unhappy apes.

So there is a background factor, same events, with or without apes, very different.

It is hard and useless to win an ugly contest with apes who have lost.

WE get compared to cheerleaders with rich dads, football team captians going to Divinity school, but we get to live with dropouts on parole.

I hermit well.

I had my IQ tested when I was 6. I came up with a 130.

Right. And the truth is that IQ does not make one a "genius".

Statistics are a pitfall for many people. A statistic based on incomplete, fallacious data, or a faulty testing method can be misleading at best. Your skepticism of my IQ is kind of a celebrity complex in which a status is doubted simply because it is rare. Rarities and the uncommon do occur my friend. I can assure you of that. You also have to consider the vast majority of the population that may never take an IQ test. Then you have to consider how western-centric the IQ test would be when testing people from non-westernized countries.



You are completely right. IQ does NOT make a genius. It is only a test of one type of intelligence. There are people with low IQs that are very talented individuals.

Explain it to us, then. Because I'm pretty sure statistics do make it very unlikely that more than about twenty people exist with a characteristic that can be found in only one in a billion.

The kind of test you used does make a difference. A 190 on one scale could be one in ten million; on another scale it could be one in a hundred million. A mainstream test won't measure a 190 with any sort of accuracy, anyway, so if you hit the ceiling (answered all the questions in more than three subsections) on the WAIS, for example, you'd end up just being able to say "I have an IQ somewhere above my measured IQ". The figure I heard here is that the WAIS isn't accurate above 140 or so.

I guess that it really doesn't make much difference in the long run how smart a person is or what their IQ is since there is a limit to what a human being can perceive to begin with and then we jst hit a wall of some kind. maybe this is a deliberate design element of the universe. I wrote about this once in the PPR section in another IQ thread but interestingly there is an article in the latest edition of Scientific American (March 2009) that discusses this very issue.
Perhaps part of the problem with a thread like this is the word 'Genius'. Maybe it does not accurately describe the type of somewhat unusual intelligence that some of us might posesses. 'Savantism' does not describe it to well either. Both of these term ten to focus in on a special and narrow type of intelligence that is quite different from what many psycharitrists call 'intuitive knowing' that can go far beyond the reasoning level of a typical gifted persons (genuis) capability.

I believe the plural should be genii.

I only have an IQ of 80 so forgive my lack of knowledge.

IQ isn't actually normally distributed. I think it's supposed to be, and that it actually is for the middle range, but there are too many people at both the top and bottom of the range. This might be due to inadequate floors and ceilings (not a big enough range, so people pile up at either end). Or it could be due to something else completely. According to Hans Eysenck (who had an opinion on everything ), biologists don't see perfectly normal distributions in nature, but think they're real because mathematicians say so, while mathematicians think the opposite - that they're real because biologists see them.

At any rate, real life is usually messier than those tidy equations they teach us in school. You know - complexity theory rather than all that Newtonian and algebraic stuff.

Aha! A bump in the distribution at "supergenius", analagous to the slight increase at the "profound MR" range, makes sense.

(The increase in the profound range, 1-20, is due to MR associated with physical and congenital illness or severe injury. Maybe there is a corresponding, equally rare, condition responsible for human super-genius, in the 180-200+ range, for people whose brains specialize in the types of puzzles often found on IQ tests. That would make them not so rare--but also not much more capable than the average 150+, except for the purpose of IQ tests and IQ-test-like problems. Makes sense with Marilyn vos Savant anyway; she seems fascinated with brainteasers and writing about brainteasers!)

You're still thinking conventionally, almost old-fashioned about things with respect to this situation.

Do you think the people in the very high IQ range have simply hit the physical limits of what can be done with a human brain?