Rowlii writes:
Thanks for your answer. Is there a “High IQ” behaviour?
Sort of, but not really. My mother and and all of my siblings have very high IQ’s (140+), and we are all quite different. However, three of us are quite shy and are probably introverts. The other one is more introverted than he lets on.
It is hard for me to answer this question because I have not known the IQ’s of most of the people I have known in my life. I know the IQ’s of my family members, but I never learned the IQ’s of many of my friends or even the vast majority of my girlfriends. This is not to mention the more casual acquaintances I have run into. So I have only really known maybe ~13 people in my whole life who had very high IQ’s. Obviously I have run into a lot more high IQ people than that, but in the course of life, you usually never learn the IQ’s of most of the people you meet and hang out with.
Of those 13 people, they were sometimes a bit different from each other. I wish I could say that there was something stringing them together, but I cannot.
It also depends on what you mean by high IQ. Very high IQ is usually defined as 140+ (top 1%). High IQ might be defined as 130+ (top 3.5%) or maybe even lower. It depends on where you set the bar.
Some of us are a lot more extroverted than others. I am shocked at how extroverted many very high IQ women are. Very high IQ men tend not to be so extroverted, but some of them are quite capable extroverts. Many seem quite normal, even shockingly normal. One of the sanest men I have ever met had an IQ of 160. He is also the highest IQ person that I have ever known. On the other hand, there also seems to be a tendency towards mental illness, in particular depression and manic depression. Somehow there is a connection between very high IQ and mood disorders.
I do not know any very high IQ people who have Aspergers. This is largely a myth. We are a lot better at socializing than you might think. I don’t know any very high IQ people who are social retards. I know some who are assholes, but social retards, no. Social skills and figuring your way around human interaction is an intellectual skill, and it can be learned. Most of the very high IQ people I have known seem to have learned that skill quite well.
There are a lot of questions along these lines on Quora under the IQ topic, and a lot of very high IQ people are answering those questions. The questions are along the lines of “What is it like to have an IQ of 140/150?”, etc. Then a lot of very high IQ people answer the questions. People who are interested in the topic may want to head over there are read what those people say. There are of very smart, interesting, wise and eloquent people writing over there, and you can learn quite a few things from the handy to the esoteric.
One of the answers that you see over and over is that very high IQ people say they see patterns everywhere. Many say that they are always observing all the time and looking for underlying patterns in everything they see and everywhere they go. They’re always trying to put it all together, see the big picture, or view the world in a holistic way.
To answer a question in a holistic way is to see things in a larger pattern of the whole question, so to speak, taking into account everything. It’s another way of saying seeing the whole picture. We try not see the trees and miss the forest, if you catch my drift. Sure, we look at individual trees and groups of trees and even try to figure out what they mean or relationships between them, but at the end of the day, we still want to put all of those individual trees together into some sort of a forest.
I would say that very high IQ people are a lot smarter than you think they are. You might think that they are out to lunch, but most of them are very much on the ball. I had a girlfriend with an IQ of 140, and she immediately got all of my jokes and funny little comments. It was like instantly, bam! Also I did not have to explain many things to her. She just got most things BOOM like that as fast as you could blink your eyes.
I got to know a woman with a 156 IQ recently, and she was fast as lightning. She understood everything you said and was also very curious. If she didn’t understand anything you were saying, she would ask you to explain it. Then I would explain it to her and even if it was something that she did not know much about, and when I explained it to her, she caught on very fast.
There was none of this, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” One thing that amazed me about her was how I could be talking about a subject that she obviously knew little about, and she would ask me to explain the concept. And she would pick up this previously unknown concept very quickly, faster than almost anyone I have met. When I was talking with her it was just BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM like that.
I like to play games with speech and toss in esoteric comments, analogies, references to movies, books, songs, famous people and events, sayings, famous lines and riddles. A lot of these might be odd little puns of worldplay. If you have ever read James Joyce, I am doing something like that, just playing games with language and also with knowledge. A lot of the time people don’t have the faintest idea what I am doing, so I try not to do this too much, but when I am on the ball, I can do this like crazy.
Most people think I am insane or very weird but some smart people can catch all the little jokes and references. I am not crazy at all. I am talking like that on purpose.
Sometimes I speak on multiple levels. I might say something easily understandable to anyone, but if you listen closely I am also throwing in things on a higher level so the message really has two levels, a simple lower level with the basic meaning and a higher level where I am often playing games.
I will throw in some line out of a book, a reference to an actor or a band or this or that in there. Most people don’t get the weird little word games, but it doesn’t matter because there is a basic message on the lower level in there that can be easily read and comprehended and the word games don’t mean anything anyway as I am just playing games with language and knowledge. It all depends on which levels you want to read the speech on.
Some very high IQ people are very fast. I have been told that I am fast too. Some people say that sometimes I have these funny little micro-movements around my face, mostly around my eyes but sometimes in my mouth too. One person called them micro-emotions or micro-reactions. They say it doesn’t really look nervous but instead it almost looks there’s a fast computer in back of my face and all those little movements are the thing processing data.
A lot of the time I answer a question almost as soon as it has been asked. Sometimes I even start to answer it or I start nodding my head halfway through the sentence because I already know what the person is going to say in the rest of the sentence. Sometimes I finish people’s sentences for them.
Nothing much gets past me. I hear everything you say, and I am probably watching everything you do. I’m usually not confused. Life is not very confusing. This can work well for social skills because if you get that supercomputer working socially, you can respond to all of the little subtle changes in the conversation as it slowly changes as you are engaging in it.
Conversations are changing all the time, and you are supposed to be reacting to most everything the other person is saying or doing. They make a little movement, and you try to interpret and make some movement back. You respond emotionally to their remarks and even to their little micro-emotional changes. In a good, on the ball conservation there might be maybe 10 or more reactions and counter-reactions in a minute.
I am not sure if this is really a good thing because instead of seeing me as some with-it super smart social genius or saying,”Wow look at that guy, he seems like he has a Cray computer in back of his face – he’s so fast,” instead most people seem to think that I am weird. I am not sure why that is. Sometimes I think they are on a different wavelength than I am. I think they just don’t get it. They don’t get me.
A lot of very high IQ people will tell you that they feel that they are misunderstood. People misjudge them, misunderstand what they are saying, and either don’t understand them or read their comments in a completely different way than how they were intended. They read funny and sometimes false motives into our speech and behaviors that we did not intend to put out. This is because they are not understanding what we are trying to convey with our speech and behaviors. Once again, I think most people are just on some other wavelength than people like me and that’s why they seem to misunderstand us so much.
Very high IQ people will often say that they are good at making decisions and that they tend to make intelligent decisions because they weigh all of the possible answers to the question very carefully. On the other hand, I know some very high IQ people who live their lives idiotically and make the stupidest decisions. But that’s not because they are stupid, that’s more because of personality issues, in particularly massive psychological defenses that get in the way of rational behavior.
Just because you have a very high IQ is not guarantee against being crazy or building crazy, disordered and excessive defense systems that lead to characterological problems. Most of the poor life decisions I see very high IQ people making are not due to doing dumb things but instead there is some mental disorder going on there that is messing up their behavior. Very high IQ people can definitely have characterological problems where their defensive structures have gotten so bizarre and excessive that they start to cause a lot of crazy and irrational behaviors.
I am not sure about people from 130-139 (high IQ or near genius), but I think they function better than a lot of us very high IQ types. With us very high IQ types, our IQ’s are so high that they are starting to get in the way of our lives, and they might even be making us strange or mentally disordered. The high IQ type is very, very smart, but an IQ in the 130’s is not going to have that correlation with mental illness and weirdness that you start seeing in some people above 140.
I have seen people in the 130’s who were very smart, and they were also superb social actors, very extroverted, etc. I spent a lot of time with two men. One had an IQ of 139, and another had a 135 IQ. It would be quite hard to say that I was smarter than either of them, and they were both whip-fast sharp, especially the 139 IQ guy, who is a relative. He is just BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM. He has also been an alcoholic for decades which has wrecked his life, but he is still whip-fast smart despite the decades of booze.
Once you get into the high IQ range (130-150), I don’t see a lot of differences between me and someone with an IQ of say 129-139. They seem like they are about as smart as I am. Past a certain point, I do not think the scores mean all that much. You end up with really smart people and there’s probably not a lot of observable difference between really smart people even if one is smarter than the other. You’re probably not going to be able to see how the higher IQ person is smarter because the differences all seem to wash out at high IQ levels.
Frankly I do not think that most of you want to be as smart as I am. Yes, there is huge upside, but there is also a massive downside at least for me. The downside is probably avoidable, but you still might get it. Sometimes I think it is better not to be this smart. I am so smart that it almost gets in the way of life, and most of you might not want to live like that.
