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The Trouble with High IQ

neurosciencenews.com

1–10 of 63 posts

Re: The Trouble with High IQ

#4
Overexcitability is a known concept in the gifted education community but it does not usually imply disorders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability

A critical analysis of the research used in the article is worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...

Re: The Trouble with High IQ

#6
Mensa members are a small subpopulation of Americans with high IQ, so it's a stretch to conclude that high IQ is the problem. To me it's more plausible that someone seeking to boost self-esteem and social status by joining a weird organization tends to be a more troubled person than intelligent people in general.

Re: The Trouble with High IQ

#7
How valid is studying Mensa to get a representative cross section of intelligent people? I would wager many on this site are intelligent enough to qualify for Mensa, but why would they join? Most will be sufficiently surrounded by intelligent people in their day-to-day life to be stimulated. I wouldn’t be surprised if the membership of a selective club for clever people is most sought after by people missing something from their lives.

Re: The Trouble with High IQ

#8
Neuroskeptic is, unsurprisingly, skeptical: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/in...

Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people. 6.5 million Americans fall in the top 2% of IQ, and only 55,000 of them are members of American Mensa.

In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.

The ‘national average’ comparison data, however, were taken from nationally representative American samples. The age, gender, and ethnic demographics of the Mensa respondants differ considerably from the national average.

Even if we take the results of this study at face value, the ‘hyper-brain/hyper-body’ theory is rather horribly simplistic. It reminds me of ancient Greek humorism, or 19th century neurology’s talk of ‘nervous excitement’. The brain is not a gland that just pumps excitement when aroused.

Re: The Trouble with High IQ

#10
> Each was asked to self-report their experiences of both diagnosed and/or suspected [...] disorders

So who else sees a problem with the methodology here. I mean, it sounds as if the data was collected in a different way than the data it was compared to.

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