Being Smart

It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school when I found out that I'm a particularly smart person. Sure, I was in advanced classes growing up, but I had no idea how advanced until I was only one of two freshman in the entirety of a considerably large high school taking Algebra 2/Trig. That seemed silly to me, because in eighth grade, there was a regular full class of students taking the same Geometry class as I was (I went to a different high school than the rest of them). At the time, I thought Geometry in eighth grade was normal, and that everyone else was behind instead of me being ahead. Apparently, our middle school was rather exceptional.

I honestly don't feel that smart: I make a lot of mistakes, or I forget things quite often. I have a hard time remembering names of new people I meet. I walk into a room wondering why I made my way there in the first place. I have a hard time concentrating on the words people say when they talk to me, so I'm not a particularly good listener. My brain wanders. But apparently there's things I can do that other people can't. One day after school I was telling my mom how cool my calculus class was and how elegant math is, and she looked at me square in the face. "You get it. You really understand it, don't you? Most people aren't like that. Most people hate math, and will never understand it. I never understood it, but I got good grades just because I memorized rules. But you really get it." So I just kind of stared at her like this.

Anyway, it was around this age that I started looking into finding out exactly how smart I was. My curiosity and competitive nature took over. I spent a considerable amount of time tracking down websites like Tickle that offered free IQ tests that kept telling me I'm some kind of a dual-sided-brain-using philosopher genius. It's kind of awkward being told you're so smart when you feel like a normal person, and you expect everyone else to be as normal as you, which ends up asking too much of the average person. It's unbelievable to think that if I of all people am in the 99.9th percentile on Lumosity, that literally 99.9% of the rest of the world is supposed to be dumber than I am.

Then again, they teach a logic class in college that I took because it was mandatory for graduation. During class as the professor was reading from the book some of the most mundanely common sense ideas, I would be looking around the classroom wondering if this was real life. I don't understand how some people need to actually learn logic and it is not just inherent in their being. I mean, isn't common sense supposed to be common sense?

Whenever I bring something like this up to my mom, she nods knowingly and brings up the "bell curve" which is a statistical representation of virtually all situations. People on either end of the bell curves do not understand each other, and that's true. One side says, "How can you possibly understand this?" and the other side says, "How can you possibly not?" where most other people are tucked away in the middle just getting by.

I'm not trying to be all high and mighty or anything: I'm genuinely concerned about the well being of the world. I keep thinking about that movie Idiocracy and how legitimate the idea is that society could head in that direction. Then I end up feeling like Joe, thinking that you're just a normal person with a normal brain capacity and you end up being somehow extraordinary in comparison. It's hard to believe and it's disconcerting.

This post was super difficult to write without sounding offensive, so I apologize to anyone if it was.