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Peter Edgerton
Malaga
Friday, 24 January 2025, 12:50
YoungHoon Kim might not be a name that's familiar to you - nor to me until this morning - but it's an interesting one because it belongs to a remarkable young Korean man who has an IQ of 276 - the highest ever recorded anywhere. As someone who can just about count up to 276 if there are no distractions, I find Kim's mental capacity quite mind-boggling.
Having said all of that, I remember a member of Mensa once telling me that people like him are just good at doing the tests which, he reckoned, most people would be if they practised them a lot and, significantly, that he was totally useless at putting shelves up and stuff like that. That's the thing about intelligence, there are a zillion different types of it and many of them are wildly contradictory.
Many years ago at university, I met various people with exceptional academic minds who were perfectly capable of presenting a brilliant thesis having put their underpants on backwards that morning and fallen face-first into a puddle on their way into school. Interestingly, at that time, I was also working on a farm every summer where many of the labourers were more than adept at reversing a tractor and trailer round a fiendish uphill bend while simultaneously reading the paper and eating a cheese sandwich but who wouldn't have had the faintest idea of what a thesis was even if it had fallen directly out of one of the fifty-six pound bags of spuds that they used to hurl around with such gay abandon.
That's the thing - both of these types of intelligence are equally important and necessary for society to function properly. Japan is, apparently, the country with the highest average IQ in the world but, I dare say, the whole population isn't sitting around working out what the next number is in the sequence 3,3,5,4,4... (answer at the end). No, lots of them are out and about mending complex cables and flooded drains and reversing tractors and trailers around fiendish uphill bends while simultaneously eating a sushi sandwich. Although these are undoubtedly all very difficult things to do, I doubt very much they'd get you into Mensa.
What might get you invited to join, however, would be working out the next number in the sequence above. Ready? Sure? OK, it's three - each of them corresponds to the number of letters in the numbers one to six in order.
To tell the truth, I think I'd rather be able to mend a complex cable. Or do the tractor and trailer thing.
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