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High IQs
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Anonymous
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I'm 121. Wow, if people on this board are being truthful then yeah, the higher the IQ, the more social awkwardness. Because please, people who regularly contribute on this board have got some pretty serious issues, even if they are "functional". Self awareness is clearly hobbled by a high IQ. I was severly depressed when I took the test an IQ test at age 27--that may have subtracted as much as ten points. I am very empathetic and tend to over relate to the pain of others. I have had a career that has been muted in the last 10 years by child rearing--I am at 45, just starting to reconnect with my sense of confidence in my work. DH is 160 and is definitely an bit awkward and geeky, but can be very warm at times and infinitely patient. The patince part really seems to be personality driven. If you are truly brilliant and confident, you don't have to be so impatient with others.
Impatience comes from a lack of confidence, really. But I'm just a knuckle dragging 121. 
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Anonymous
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My IQ is only in the 98%tile. Do I belong here? Anyhow, I am completely social but seem to 'get' things faster than other people. I have many wide ranging interests and it is probably one of the reasons I have enjoyed being an SAHM so much. Being a mom can be very creative and I have also had time to pursue other creative interests as well. When I was in school or just younger, it was all numbers etc...but that is what pays! I am back in school studying numbers again so that I can make some money...oh well...
I am blessed to have this level of intelligence, I guess it gives me choices but it can also be a curse if as a child one is looked upon as too special...let kids be kids. Again no flames because I am not at 99.99999% TIA. |
Anonymous
Really? I am a new poster and don't actually know what my IQ is. Older child recently tested at 146 so I thought the thread was interesting. DH and I both gets things very quickly (although we tend to "get" different things). For me the patience thing is just that my mind immediately leaps to B from A. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it leaps from A to H because BCDEFG were obvious. So when it takes people several minutes to get there, it can be rather excruciating. Or sometimes they never get to H but stop at D. That's pretty hard too. But hopefully you eventually learn to filter it. As an adult, I am quite functional although admittedly I work at a major federal statistical agency, so I get to surround myself with other number geeks as a career.  But as a child I was probably pretty obnoxious until I learned that filter. And as we get older we can (to a great degree anyway) self select who we associate with and it makes things easier socially. Now some adults never learn that filter and that is truly painful to watch. I am trying to help my DD learn patience and tolerance around this as well because it is an issue for her at school.
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Anonymous
| I have a theory that at every age level those with higher IQ's and those who are truly gifted in different areas struggle. This is not to say that they are unhappy or are not capable of having normal relationships I just feel that life in general is a bit mundane for them. They are simply on a different level. I found that in the teenage and college years those ahead of the learning curve struggled a lot with self medicating and promiscuity. While the behavior has changed as we've transitioned into adulthood, there are still signs of substance abuse, compulsive behavior and depression. It's as though they have the midas touch. I think those that try the hardest to be like everyone else suffer the most. |
Anonymous
Bump. |
Anonymous
Read Prozac Nation to get a good description of this !!! Intense to say the least. |
Anonymous
I totally agree. (I'm the person who posted about this above.) Impatience is not the same as rudeness, although living in DC you'd think so! Not everyone expresses their impatience with eye-rolling or "come ON people!" I, for one, learned manners as a kid and use them to this day. I'm an adult and know that life can't be fun all the time, but it's still more fun for me to be interacting with people who can assert A, jump to H, and then have fun talking about all the possibilities and nuances through Z, looping back around through M and R a few times. I'm glad someone else mentioned enjoying being a SAHM and being able to pursue wide-ranging interests. I haven't worked a traditional job in a few years, and am now a parent, and I really love having my own time to structure around my own interests and pursue what's challenging for me. We do pretty well (collectively) at providing that sort of context for gifted kids, but as adults we're often expected to use our brains in high-status careers that are just as repetitive and unchallenging as school was. I'm glad to be lucky enough to be out of that framework! |
Anonymous
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I agree with many of the PPs who said it's not just about IQ -- it's also about personality and social skills (learned and innate). If you look at any of these pieces in isolation you get an incomplete picture.
FWIW, both DH and I are both well into in the upper percentiles. We were both singled out in school from an early age and given advanced classes/opportunities etc. However, we had different social experiences growing up, in part because of how we were raised. DH's parents always acknowledged and encouraged his huge intellectual talents. They also taught him to be empathetic, humble and kind to everyone. Maybe he would have been that way naturally, but I think they really modelled and encouraged it at home, too. Not surprisingly, he never had issues socially, even though he was clearly known as off-the-charts brilliant. As an adult, he has always (only?) worked with people at his high intellectual level, and it's been his kindness and social skills that truly set him apart. He's a wonderful, happy person and truly brilliant, too. So it's certainly possible!!
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Anonymous
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Depends on what you mean by normal. I have a high IQ (tested at 136) and I'm pretty socially adept, with a big circle of friends. Most of my friends are also smart. I haven't really felt that being much-smarter-than-average was any great advantage, other than not having to work as hard in school and doing well enough on standardized tests to get into good schools and get scholarships. I feel like I'm more analytical than I need to be about a lot of things; sometimes I think I'd prefer to be average. Plus sometimes you can get hung up in the gray areas of life. It might be easier to form black-and-white opinions for everything if I wasn't able to see a situation from so many angles. I personally think the sweet spot is somewhere around 120. At 120, you're smarter than most people, but not really an outlier.
(for the person who thinks 140 is "moderately smart", I was under the impression that 140 is the score at which you're considered a genius, at least by MENSA. 100 is average.) My husband is about ten points higher than me and he's a more typical "really smart" person - he's got the whole absent-minded professor thing going on, plus he can be condescending to people who he views as less intelligent, and this has occasionally caused problems for us. I think it's possible to be smarter than most people around you without acting like a d'bag. |
Anonymous
| I had my IQ tested in kindergarten and then in high school and was a 147 both times. I find this laughable. I'm no dummy, but I swear that there's no way that my IQ is that high. My parents always treated me like a genius, which became very frustrating when I didn't perform at genius level. My husband loves to give me a hard time about my IQ. He tested in the 130s but is one of the smartest, most analytical people I know. |
Anonymous
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I'm clearly the stupidest person here. I deserve some sort of acclaim for that.
Something I find interesting is that there have been many discussions on the private schools thread where people express amazement about how many posters claim to have children scoring in the 99th percentile on various tests. Yet judging from this thread, it seems that even greater numbers of parents reporting at that level. |
Anonymous
I wouldn't make that leap. You're talking about a self-selecting group of people who chose to report their IQs after clicking on a thread entitled "High IQs." I didn't count the responses but I'd guess it was maybe 20. That's far from a meaningful percentage of parents in the DC area. |
Anonymous
You are right. It's statistically unlikely, even by D.C. norms. Plus, you can tell that people took all sorts of tests. For example the WISC tops out at 160, so anyone who says they have 160+ either took the Stanford Binet or something like it, or is lying. There's nothing wrong with the Stanford Binet, but comparing it to another person's WISC score is apples and oranges unless you look at the percentiles. Similarly, the WISC III, which was in use until about 8 years ago, and the WISC IV have normed scores that are eight points apart. So a 140 on the WISC IV is equivalent to a 148 on the WISC III. |
Anonymous
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Drifting afield a bit...
I have a basic concern about IQ tests: How can someone create a test to measure the intelligence of someone smarter than the designer? |
Anonymous
| So, who's in MENSA? And why not? |