Today, I spent some time with some boffins. Not just clever people, but serious, proper, fine-line-between-insanity-and-genius hardcore boffins. This was a work event, I've been out to the land of Academia to meet some wizards. The proper kind. Ones that have grey beards and ill-fitting suit jackets that might have been fashionable in 1980. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I felt literally like a prehistoric precursor to the monkey. The point of the exercise was that we were looking to do some work with people who have expertise in areas other than our own, so had set some difficult challenges that we had no idea how to solve, just to see how they approached it. My brain rapidly overheated as soon as they started talking passionately about polysomething correlating deviant delta gnomes or something. The intelligence in that room was like nothing I've ever witnessed before in my life. I now understand where the legends of wizard's powers comes from. To a layman, their free flowing stream of big words spoken with great passion and over exaggerated hand gestures, immediately before suddenly solving a seemingly impossible problem, wouldn't need much exaggeration to become tales of sorcery. As my brain went into meltdown as I made my valiant but entirely futile effort to understand them, there was one thing that really stood out. Something I've never noticed before. Forget the beards. Forget the 1980s suits and jam jar glasses. There's one thing seriously clever people seem to have in common. Have you ever noticed how wide they hold their eyes open.
My brain was a bit fried, but I thought I'd remembered there names, and I don't remember one called Earnest. Although, as is always the case, there was a Dave.
That "wild-eyed stare" scared the living daylights out of some of the students I served with. Others, thought it was a rubber-stamp of the lecturers "intellect". Me? I just thought: behave!
I've mixed with quite a lot of 'geniuses', be they scientific or arts based, and they all sound unintelligible when talking about their speciality or interests. Outside of that they tend be just as loopy as the rest of us! The wide eyed bit seems to be related to their intensity. Otherwise, they are, sort of, normal.
To be fair though, from what I could gather, their heads were about the same size as mine or anyone else's, yet they'd somehow managed to pack more extreme knowledge in. To have that level of advanced knowledge and still have capacity for common sense, their heads would need to be impractically huge. Simple rules of nature wouldn't allow it. To carry such a huge head they'd need much stronger muscles and bones, and would need to eat around 10,000 kcal per day just to maintain themselves in a resting state. This would require constant grazing, and they wouldn't then have time to become genius. Nature is full of trade-offs like this. So nature came up with another solution. Much like the rest of us have to give up physical strength in favour of agility, a genius must give up common sense in favour of big words and funny squiggly symbols. Their heads are simply not large enough. There is not enough room for both.
Interesting clue; I have a larger than average cranium, average common sense but am extremely IQ challenged. I seem to have split the 2 camps down the middle... Jenny
Having a high IQ only means that you are good at doing IQ tests. That's not a witty statement but a true observation of a small sampling of the population.
