High normal is, I think, 110-116 (correct me if I am wrong).
I recently added this bit to the end of my piece Why You Do Not Want to Be a Genius. That piece is highly misinterpreted. I am not bitching, whining or complaining about what a loser I am. I am only saying that accusing someone of bragging about their IQ score is ridiculous. You can only brag about things that are valued by other people, and a high IQ is not one of those things. Most people think a high IQ is either worthless or they actually resent or dislike bright people. If people disrespect your achievement, you aren’t bragging, period!
The article is only saying that being a genius is not such a wonderful thing. It seems there are folks who wish they were brighter (though that feeling is not common) but I think they might be misguided. Being a brain is not all it is cracked up to be. Sure, there are rewards and I am very happy that God made me a genius. Life has been pretty fun and if anything else, my brains make me not want to kill myself. Why not? I could not learn all those wonderful things anymore! No fun!
There are not a lot of objective benefits to having a high IQ. Sure, it can land you a nice degree and a good, high paying and possibly interesting job, but past a certain point, your IQ is so high that it really starts getting in the way of all sorts of things, most important of which is social interaction. Brains does not attract many women, although at my age (56) I am finding that I am finally attracting some women due to my brains. This has been going on for a while now actually.
But really most of those women were attracted to my looks first, the brains came second. Young women and girls in particular place little value on brains. I spent quite a bit of time on dating sites and I remarked on the brains stuff a bit on the profile, just noting that if you aren’t bright, it won’t work out because you won’t understand what I am talking about. I found that many to most women were apparently more turned off by the brains stuff than turned on by it. It was basically a massive, humungous Chick Repellant. Sure, there were a few who were attracted to the brains stuff, but they seemed to be hugely overwhelmed by others who could either care less or were turned off by it.
In the article, I said that most people with an IQ of 116 or below seem like idiots to me. That is not exactly true, as I note below. But once you start getting down near the 100 IQ average, I start running into a lot of problems. Now mind you, my one BFF forever, who I met when I was 9 years old, probably has a 100 IQ. We were inseparable for many years. However, there were some problems in the relationship. Another of my main BFF’s was a guy who may have had an IQ in the 100-110 range.
My mother always thought he was more like 115 because she said of all of my friends who came to the house, he was the only one who ever picked up a Time Magazine to read it. In fact, that was one of the first things that he did. He is one of the funniest people I have ever met, a great personality and can be a great person and good friend. He has also screwed about a battalion of women, often pretty to beautiful ones, over the years. On the other hand, he really is not an intellectual by any means.
So sure, I can get along with lower IQ folks, but there are some issues in the friendship.
I recently befriended a fellow who was frankly a gangbanger or gang associate. He hung out over here as a place to smoke pot as he lived with his Mom and could not smoke it over there. I would not be surprised if his IQ was in the 80-85 range. He was funny as Hell and for sure, we could talk about a few things. Mostly we joked and laughed our asses off. But the IQ differential massively got in the way all right.
It is probably true that with an IQ over 140, average folks with average IQ’s of 100 to seem sort of stupid. That is more painful than anything else, as I do not want to see them as stupid, and a part of me wants to be a regular, average, working class guy who hangs out with the guys chucking down beers and talking about pussy. I know that salt of the Earth types are not stupid (100 IQ is not stupid) but my brain keeps telling me that they are. I talk to them, and as they say stuff, my brain keeps saying, “You idiot! You moron!” I try to tell my brain to shut up but it won’t. This whole thing is a rather painful experience for me as I want to connect really well with these folks but I just can’t.
I will say that I can actually communicate pretty well with folks at the higher end of that range. I have known folks with IQ’s of 113 (2 of them), 115, 116 (2 of them) and 117, and I could communicate very well with all of them, and none of them seemed stupid. In fact, sometimes I wonder if the 117 IQ guy isn’t smarter than I am, and the 116 guy was very, very smart. That is because both of them had filled their brains up with many things. People in this range may seem fairly average at first, but the truth is that many of them are just not having their brains stimulated. Once you stimulate their brains a bit, it is often amazing how smart they seem. They just need a little prodding.
I have also known a few folks with rather average IQ’s. One has an IQ of 106 and the other has an IQ of 97. The 97 guy also has a learning disability, and I wonder if that affects his score. The 97 guy, amazingly enough, is shockingly intelligent, so much that you start to doubt his IQ. But he is in his 50′s, and I think he has just been packing his brain full of stuff for decades, and it shows. The 106 guy, a friend, at first said he could hardly understand what I was even writing about, but I urged him to keep reading the site. I kept talking to him, and I tried to stimulate his brain. I also urged him to stimulate his brain as much as possible. The truth is that now he seems quite bright, and sometimes he even seems brilliant or ingenious. He just needed to stimulate his brain is all!
