In a phone conversation with Daughter Tuesday, we were talking about abilities, and how you can think of them as forming a sine wave, in that you are high in some areas and lower in others. The higher your IQ, the greater the amplitude. And since standard IQ tests measure only certain abilities, if the IQ score is low, either the line is closer to flat (dull, but happy) or the highs occur between the tested abilities (the person has "other" abilities). In any case, the greater your abilities, the more likely you are to have serious deficits, and you have to use your excess abilities to compensate for your deficits.
The greater the amplitude (the positive and negative variation from zero) the more likely one is to notice and be distressed by the deficits, especially because IQ tests stress analysis and synthesis. Genius, analyze thyself. That's why so many "high IQ" people have low self-esteem. They may walk around bragging about their scores, but in their private moments, they are painfully aware of what they lack. (I'm allowed to say this. I'm a Mensan. I score above the 99.5%ile, and Daughter's untimed! score is 10 points higher. But you won't see more stupidity than in a room full of Mensans. Their individual "lows" are abysmal, and painfully obvious.)
I am aware of some of my lows. I have difficulty differentiating between left and right, especially if I think about it. If I don't think about it, it can be an advantage - if I don't notice right off that printing is backward, I can read it instantly, as easily as left to right. I have great difficulty remembering proper nouns. It happens all the time, the extreme example being the time I called the school to tell them I would be picking up Daughter early, and I couldn't remember her name, or when I flat out could never remember the name of the street one door up from our house in St. Louis. I own about 5,000 books, I read a lot, all classifications, but I feel stupid because I can't discuss my reading because I can't remember the names of books or the authors, or quotations, and I get the plots all mixed up. I frequently don't respond to social cues. I can't remember formulae. I can't cook. Etc., etc.,etc. Sigh. I've got a lot of deficits.
But I do have some surprising and seemingly isolated abilities, too.
If I know the general layout of the land (relationship between mountains, rivers, highways, populated areas) I never get majorly lost. I can find my way out of woods, I can find my way around in large unfamiliar cities. When Daughter and I went college-shopping, I found every school right off, no fumbling, no address, no information other than the town name. The University of Scranton was an impulse stop on the way to Bucknell, and I went straight to it. I have no idea how I do that. (And yet, if you ask me to put in order a list of major businesses on route 9 between Poughkeepsie and Fishkill, I couldn't do it.)
I am very fast at Freecell. Every so often, when I need a boost, I go to a computer store and play Freecell on the demos, and people will actually stop to watch me. I can gather a crowd. I'm pretty good at Super Boggle, too.
The first time I heard that casinos hate card-counters, I turned to Ex#2, and said "How do you NOT count cards?" He looked at me like I was crazy. I'm serious. How do you avoid it? I mean, there're right there. You know what exists, and you know what has shown, so how do you NOT know what's left? And when you see how the cards go into the stack, and how they are shuffled, then you know generally where certain cards are likely to be within the stack. How can you not know? How do you not count cards? It's not even an active thing - it's just there. Isn't it?
Well, I had a "bingo" moment the other night. Somebody was counting cards on a cop show, and the smart cop said "It's pattern recognition." Bingo! Pattern recognition! That's what I'm good at! It's probably pattern recognition that made me such a good code and hardware tester, too! Wow! Here was this HUGE pattern, and I didn't recognize it for what it was....
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