While IQ is surely important and it is the best measure of intelligence we have, I would say that honestly it is not the score itself that matters.
Instead, what matters is how smart you are!
There is a curious phenomenon of people with not particularly high scores who seem much more intelligent than their scores. In that case, what matters is not their unimpressive number but how intelligent they are.
I have known several people with IQ’s in the normal range. Scores were 94, 97, 106 and 107. You would think that is not very impressive. But all of these people were very smart! And I would say the latter three were pretty much on a level with me. And my number is three full standard deviations above theirs!
I talked with the 97 IQ guy many times. He is smart as Hell, and he knows a lot about all sorts of things. You name it, he knows about it. I think he has been filling his head up with information his whole life.
The 106 and 107 IQ guys were commenters on my site. One is still here. This guy is smart as Hell. He’s able to understand most everything I write about and I am amazed by his analysis. He does excellent analytical thinking. The other fellow used to comment on here and he understood most everything I write too. He also had superb analytical thinking skills.
The 94 IQ guy is a friend of mine. Sometimes I am a bit over his head, like with my Linguistics posts, but he’s hardly to blame for that. He has been filling his head up with information his whole life. He reads voraciously and in particular is an expert on the JFK assassination. His knowledge of the assassination itself and its greater context in the flow of US history is amazing.
People with higher numbers tend to value and respect intelligence more than people with lower numbers. That is because as the numbers go up, people’s brains work faster and faster. People with higher numbers are often sensual intellectuals, that is, they get off on learning and knowledge as if it were an actual activity of the senses. They often read a lot and know a lot about a lot of things.
Therefore, their conversational style is going to be a lot more intellectual because intellectualism is a value for them. It makes life interesting. These people will enjoy others with high intelligence too simply because they find them more interesting to talk to and deal with. They don’t usually hate people who are less bright. Instead they often just think they are boring. That’s pretty much my complaint. Such folks are often very nice and have equal value as human beings to me. Their lives and existence and contributions on this Earth are about equal to mine. But they’re just not that interesting to me. They don’t have much to say.
When I start talking, I have to explain things over and over because I keep getting these baffled “that does not compute” looks that show that they do not understand what I am talking about. So I can either quit talking to them or I sit there and explain things for the length of the conversation. It gets old having to explain things all the time, and when you tell people these new facts, they typically don’t have anything interesting to say or add about these new facts.
Higher IQ people are not snobs. Their brains are simply must faster than other people’s brains. In addition, they can store more information both long and short term and can they have better recall. So they have a lot more storage space in their brains (brains = hard drive) and they can call up that information much faster and more accurate (recall = memory sticks). It follows that faster brains with more storage space and better and faster recall are going to be better at analytical thinking, at putting it all together, at seeing the big picture.
