What is considered high? I have an above average intelligence, but I also have ADHD.

I have a fantastic memory, but I can’t always choose what I remember. I’m great at facts and trivia but I can’t remember things that are actually important in my life.

I didn’t have to study in school. I could glance over the material minutes before a test and pass without trying. Then, I got to college and I didn’t know how to study as I’d never done that before. I failed out.

I'm struggling to take a lot of these answers seriously. You really think that way about yourself?

I don't know.

its awesom

honest reaction: https://youtu.be/JXnGC6O5tOE

Being told all through school that I'm not 'working up to my potential'. Frustration at dumb jobs.

Instead of being bad at everything I'm good at a few things

It's a mixed bag.

Growing up was made difficult because school is so slow that I'd rather be getting into trouble than sitting in class. By the start of middle school I'd already read the entire high school honors reading list, I had to walk to the high school from my middle school in 7th grade to take math classes. I rarely had regular school work in high school, nearly all of my academic teachers designed a different curriculum for me, which was nice but probably mostly to keep me from acting up in class. I never studied or did a shred of homework, but got good grades.

Social interactions were tough, I'm not much of an empath, not that I don't experience empathy but emotions just aren't intuitive, actually they often are the opposite of what you'd expect to be helpful, especially among young people. I had to concentrate to read people's faces and mannerisms to understand the emotional and social subtexts of most interactions. I self medicated with alcohol a lot in high school.

All of my academic classes in high school were honors, and my final 2 years were all AP, while lettering in 3 varsity sports (4 total, but you can only play 3 each academic year). It wasn't until my second year in uni that I ran into a class for which I actually had to study (nuclear chemistry), and boy was that an awful surprise. A handful of classes were like this for me, most I just showed up 3 times and got a good grade: the first day of class so I wouldn't get dropped, the midterm, and the final.

I read quickly, think systematically, and information just sticks in my head. It was very difficult to understand why this wasn't how most people were. Everything I do I analyze for improvement, and remember to do it better the next time. My wife calls me a skill collector because people seem to think I'm super good at everything, but to me it's just logical that if you're going to take time do something you might as well do it as well as possible.

After uni things started getting easier. Being forced to closely analyze social interactions and systematically give the "right" reactions is extremely useful in professional life. I wear this mask in all my interactions with all but my closest friends. It's a bit psychopathic, but I don't do it to anyone's detriment, it's mostly to get along and fit in.

I've self selected for highly intelligent friends, and I'm exhilarated to meet new people who can communicate with the kind of bandwidth that our brains run at, if that makes sense. I'm still close with most of my friends from high school, who have had varying levels of success, but I still have to be guarded when it comes to activities or conversation to make sure I don't stick out too much.

In general I have a very pessimistic view of people and the world. The average person isn't very sharp, and half of all people are dumber than that. However many smart people do evil things, most of the time for no reason at all. It's exhausting to keep up with it all, so I just focus on my path and my family, and do what I can to directly improve my community.

It would be nice to fit in a little easier, but I wouldn't trade my experience for anything else.

It's tough having a high IQ. Most people don't understand the world and the flaws of humans, at least at the level I do. As such, I find it hard to connect to other people. Most people are morons. I feel deep sorrow in knowing the direction the world is going and that the inhabitants of the world are mostly idiots.

...

Why do so many people (in this thread) unironically feel this way? "Intelligence" is a socially constructed and often useless idea that includes and excludes many things seemingly at random. For example, chess is often thought of as something that's very intelligent, but skill at chess is (just like nearly anything else) based on practice & experience. Just because you're good at chess and did well in school doesn't mean that you alone can understand the problems in the world at a deeper level than an average Jo.

Everyone should read "What Is Intelligence, Anyway?", a short excerpt from Isaac Asimov.

I'll paste the part I think is most important, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

You don't feel smart, but everyone else appears extremely dumb

You wouldn't understand

Jk, I'm dum af

I had my IQ tested when I was 12 and it was high, but alas, not high enough to understand Rick and Morty

Jokes aside, I've been told that I catch onto things quicker and I'm good at solving things in creative ways!

Thanks for asking this question. I have enjoyed reading the answers people gave you.

Frustrating.

The rate at which I absorb information is disgusting. Yes please finish your sentence I already have a response why are you taking so long. How did I learn that? I picked up the manual and did it. Developing new skills? Learning Rust right now and its going well, failed out of highschool because I learned too easily and didn't need the homework to learn (so it didn't get done).

It comes with imposter syndrome: I knew the problem, I had the pattern figured out, why did I still fuck everything up (plot twist I probably didn't).

It comes with a superiority complex: I learned this in 10 minutes from looking at a Sci Journal, why has it been hours and yallvstill don't get it? 🙄

It comes with accidentally hurting people: frequently I say things thinking something hould be obvious when it is not, while unintended, it often hurts my partner who is usually in the line of fire when I let some dumb shit outta my mouth and insult someone's intelligence.

Anyway I hate it I'd rather be dumbsauce ignorance is bliss

The details of my life are quite inconsequential, but since you asked…

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

Very depressing. We're social animals, and being highly literate and informed while also socially apt, you really realize just how far apart you are from others, which is alienating, frustrating, and tiresome.

It's very tiring having to start off every conversation by letting people know that I'm more intelligent than them, but it is necessary.

Probably the thing it's get a little mad because you need to explain multiple times things you think are really easy or stop hearing some people when start explaining things because you know you can catch what they are saying anytime. It's really shitty, I dont whant to be this way. Also people treat you different because "you can so it better", no I can't.

Depends on what you mean by "high." I have scored between 130-140 on IQ tests I've taken of various quality, which is considered high by most. Idk how it would be different from anyone else's experience of the world. I did extremely well in school and I work as a chemical engineer with a focus on machine learning implementations and capital expansion. I don't know if I would consider myself "smarter" than the average person, just better at certain types of tasks. I also grew up in a stable two parent upper middle class household that valued education and academic success, which is a huge leg up that can't be ignored.

I'm 128, it's up to you to decide whether it's high enough or not.

Generally, I am successful in my studies and pursue career in science. I am not a high earner, and doing mental work still drains me heavily. I take a few hours of dumb physical work every week to reset. I am more or less satisfied with my life, I do have a romantic partner and generally find it easy to navigate social situations, but I'm introverted and need to recharge. So, you can say I have a high burst productivity all-round, but I'm not good at a long game.

This is just me though, and one thing to remember is that there is no objective metric for intelligence, and it can be divided in many different ways. Some people are great at solving math problems, but are dead stupid in social situations. Some go vice versa. Some have a gift for certain areas of knowledge or skills where they are way above average, while having underwhelming performance with the rest.

For example, I excel at disciplines that require me to connect many diverse data points (my area of interest is microbiology), but I'm not that good at following logic through many layers of calculations and linking it back to source (as in physics/math; I'm still able to carry out calculations I need for my work, but it's exhausting). I acquire language skills quite readily, and have good auditory perception overall, but have high reaction time and struggle driving or doing competitive sports/gaming (no, higher intelligence doesn't mean faster reaction).

Overall, I'm just a normal human, fairly smart, fairly capable, but nothing supernatural and sometimes straight up underwhelming.

It vastly depends on everything else.

You can be a dude with a normal life, who just makes conclusions faster and you've learned that everyone likes how smart you are and you enjoy this.

You can be a restless mess, because you've known all your life that there's nothing to compete with and it's difficult enough to find someone to even have a somewhat decent conversation on your level with. These people come with or without the arrogance you're thinking of right now. Some are just genuinely kind and thoughtful, but always a step ahead without even really appreciating their ability much.

You can be an absolute underachiever, because being smart was never rewarded in your life. Maybe you even learned that "You're not special" so much so, that you punished others for not being able to draw the same conclusions as you in the same time, because you always thought they were just being lazy on purpose.

You can be entirely unaware and may say funny things like "I don't think we're all that many really smart people in $techplacewithclearlysmartpeople. I talked to most of them and I don't struggle at all".

Source: High IQ myself, working with other people who increasingly talk to me openly about this and their overall situation. So much of who we become is about what our parents do to us and if there's understanding and love and support on that end.

Obviously there's the whole spectrum thing as well. I don't think a higher IQ means "more autism", as someone suggested. I think it increases your chances of struggling with a regular (neurotypical) kind of life, for example because you are supposed to be interested in 1 subject (to make a career), but - similar to people with ADHD - may care for all the subjects.
If you think about what is neurotypical though, you can classify people with a particularly high IQ or people with particularly high sensitivity as neurodiverse in just the same way you do that for people with Autism or ADHD. Now if you think about humanity as a whole, we may all to some degree be diverging from the norm in any or all of these ways, but still be more or less free of struggle, because it's not by much, while for the more extreme cases, they stand out for better or worse.

It’s being like you

I have a high IQ as well as ADHD and Autism.

Out of context, scoring as high as I did really meant next to nothing. In the context of the diagnoses I received later in life, definitely made sense, and helped color a picture painted in two solid days with a psychologist.

Somehow, I think it's important that the IQ test I took was not called an IQ test to me until after. Like, I knew I was in for tests, but more broadly told what things were about.

As a student, I had a science teacher who had been teaching many years, tell my mother he had never seen a student think in the manner I did. I was doing exceptionally well in class, but did not exceed in the fashion that would get me into an ivy league school, which at the time was supposed to be a goal. My father graduated MIT.

There are times when it's great. When I can focus on something, I can learn a lot and get very good at it. However, I spent decades with two obstacles I could never get myself past: the inability to keep that focus or control it, and the inability to even understand other people enough to try to get along with them long-term.

The result is I am just now, at 41, starting to figure out what I want to do with my life after way too long in a profession I should never have entered, and burned out of twice. And by burn out I do not mean tired and sad, I mean hospitalization.

In summary, it can be pretty great, but in my case it's fraught with difficulty as well.

Episodes of Rick and Morty really hit close to home in a way that normies couldn't possibly fathom. It's a blessing and a curse.

I have a high IQ and diagnosed as "gifted" by psy at nearly 40.

I won't argue about IQ and Giftedness having scientific base or not. All I can do is a professional clinical psy told me I am gifted. And what I'll say is just my way of thinking.

I have a systemic brain. I have very poor memory concerning names, date, etc... but I can remember complex system (basically, what cause create which consequence) really easily. I also understand problem, and find solutions much faster than most of peoples, I have strong Intuition of things, but I have difficulties explaining how I've found the solution. Scientists think it may be related to Myelin. That stuff increase connection speed between neurons, so it makes you think "faster", but sometime faster than you conscience.

I also wants to give meaning to anything. If I take a nap and hear the wind in the trees, I immediately imagine air molecules traveling and hitting leaves, sound wave propagating and hitting my ears. Wind also blowing the small layer of hotter air near my skin, explaining why it feel cold, etc...

I see object through their functioning, not their usefulness. When I see any new machine, I don't really care what it does, but more how it does it.

I'm constantly flooded by information, and I'm constantly analyzing everything. Being in a crowed area is exhausting for me, because there are too many stimulus. I'm not going to faint or something, but I think being in a crowd for me is like being in a kindergarten class full of screaming children.

I don't talk a lot because I'm easily bored by small-talks. I don't see the point of speaking about what I've done this week end, or the weather, or anything. I prefer staying in my own bubble speaking to myself.

I don't feel part of this world, I more feel like an observer watching some weird TV show. I don't understand most of human reaction.

If you are French speaking, I strongly encourage you to read the comics Comme oiseau dans bocal. It's based on serious research and is a very good popular science story about IQ, giftedness, etc...

IQ is skull measuring nonsense. how good you are at taking a standardised test is in fact not a remotely good "measure of intelligence". if you care about education you should discard the notion of IQ.

I think it would be hard to isolate exactly how much of our daily lives we experience as a direct consequence of our IQ and how much is a consequence of other things such as personality, emotional predisposition, environment, and luck.

My IQ is pretty average (around 115 I think? I tested ages ago and I can't even say the test was reliable). Some people insist I must be somewhat higher than that but I don't know. I feel dumber every day.

My father though, he does have a higher IQ (I think 135 iirc) and it's obvious to anyone that he's a brains guy. Always top student in his youth and later a decent researcher, engineer and programmer. And yet he still makes dumb mistakes like everyone else, and his temper and personality will often turn a mediocre day into a bad one. He has a tendency to overcomplicate things unnecessarily, and sets high standards for others around him- you'd think being smarter would mean he wouldn't do this, but as I said, intelligence doesn't work isolated. I remember asking him how it feels like being smarter than most of his peers and his answer is always "bah!".

So I don't know if this answers your question, but there's my two cents for you.