Denver Post, The (CO)

Smarter than
99.9% of the rest of us
Composing a symphony or memorizing pi's endless digits, Triple Nine Society minds are always working overtime

In his early 20s, a time when many young men busy themselves playing video games, David Garrett borrowed books on musical composition and, in his spare time, wrote a symphony.

"He spent every night for months working on it," remembers his wife, Lori.



The 16-page, fully instrumented work, "Overture in D Minor," was "certainly not Beethoven or Mozart," Garrett observes. But a composition professor he showed it to deemed it "pretty impressive" for a first try.



Not bad for a guy who had no formal training in the field and was working at the time as a health insurance claims processor.

Learning on the fly almost is routine for highly gifted people like Garrett, who's a member of the Triple Nine Society, so named because it has just one criterion for membership: intelligence test scores in the 99.9th percentile (Mensa, best-known of the high-IQ groups, requires "only" the 98th percentile).

Like many in what he calls "high IQ land," the Aurora resident seems to suffer from what his friend and fellow triple-niner Maco Stewart describes half-seriously as "TMA Syndrome," for Too Many Aptitudes.



"People like me tend to be really good at a lot of things, but master of none. It's one hobby after another," Garrett says. "It's frustrating sometimes. I'm not happy unless I can learn everything about whatever I'm interested in at the moment."

In leading a life that may appear both scattered and focused, Garrett exemplifies a key trait of the super-smart: a boundless curiosity, bolstered by an intellect so powerful it makes learning easy and fun.



"Things come easier for you in many domains, and if things come easier, you're more likely to enjoy learning," explains Linda Gottfredson, a University of Delaware expert on human intelligence.



Now 35 and a first lieutenant in the Air Force, Garrett - whose intelligence quotient tops 150 (the norm is 100) - has explored an array of interests over the past several years.

Eastern philosophy. Classical guitar. Chess. Reality theory. Freehand drawing. The origins of the U.S. Constitution.

A father of three, he knows Japanese and Spanish, writes short horror stories (a throwback to a juvenile fascination with "Dungeons and Dragons") and teaches martial arts, a pursuit that has left him with a scar under his eye from a no-holds-barred encounter with two Marines and a beer bottle.

For a person who leans more toward the center of the bell curve, just being around him - watching his mind work and feeling his intensity and inexhaustible energy - can be a bit fatiguing, like running to keep up with a world-class race-walker.

Super-smart adults often exhibit such other hallmarks of giftedness as amazing verbal ability, a tendency toward perfectionism, a sophisticated sense of humor, and an acute sensitivity toward injustice.



They also tend to be introspective, sometimes socially inept and inclined to feel isolated from the rest of society. In a word, they're "outsiders," as the late Grady Towers dubbed them in an essay that many high-IQ people say is an accurate depiction of their "condition." (Go to prometheussoc



iety.org/articles/Outsiders.html.)



But it is their voracious appetite for knowledge, often satisfied through forays into multiple fields, that may be most noticeable to folks of lesser intelligence.



Ironically, accomplishments like writing a symphony can subject brainy adults to taunts from the less gifted, aimed mainly at their failure to pick a single career path or hew to conventional measures of success.



If you're so smart, the critics wonder, why aren't you rich?

Gifted men, especially, are "plagued by people calling them underachievers," says Linda Kreger Silverman, founder of the Gifted Development Center, a Denver-based focus of research and counseling regarding giftedness in both children and adults.

She says it's typical for the gifted to be interested in "immersing oneself totally in the process of learning, not in the process of achieving and producing."



The journey, in short, is more important than the destination. Or, as triple-niner Alex Wagner of Denver puts it, "It isn't all about becoming a billionaire. It's your life, and it's given to you to enjoy."



Wagner, a 33-year-old late bloomer, says he discovered how unusual the gifted mindset can appear when he asked a friend, "If you could live to be 500, would you want to?"



"Probably not," his companion responded, intimidated by the prospect of even living to be 100.



Wagner, who's taking college classes while working full-time as a computer programmer, was flabbergasted.



"Why wouldn't you want to live as long as you possibly could?" he demanded. "Think of all you could learn!"



Scientists aren't sure what enables super-genius types to soak up knowledge so readily, but the reason doesn't seem to be that they have bigger brains; otherwise, men would totally dominate the high-IQ rolls, because they tend to have bigger brains in general.

The latest research suggests, instead, that ultra-smart people process complex information more quickly and efficiently, perhaps because they have larger working memories or their neural transmitters run faster, or both.



This certainly appears to be the case with Derek Buzasi, a 40-year-old astrophysicist at the Air Force Academy, who says he reads so fast he finishes the average novel in 45 minutes.

This kind of talent - like the ability to run a 4-minute mile - is largely inherited, but its deeper origin is a mystery, says Delaware's Gottfredson, who has written widely on the science and measurement of intelligence.



Many evolutionary psychologists, she says, theorize that ancient humans developed intelligence out of a need to outwit their natural enemies or display their fitness to prospective mates.

"I'm pursuing the notion that it helped people avoid dying in accidents, which have been a major cause of death in all societies," Gottfredson says.



Whatever higher-level thinking skills they possess - symbol recognition, abstract reasoning, critical analysis - the denizens of high-IQ land generally regard them as a gift, not something they strived to attain.



"At least half of what people call 'intelligence' is really just having an excellent memory for detail. The rest is being able to see patterns," asserts Loren Cobb, 56, a Louisville-based consultant who runs leadership seminars for emerging officials and politicians in Latin America, and has taught Ph.D. students in several disciplines.



"I don't have a clue how or why ideas occur to me," says Cobb, a mathematician and sociologist by training, "but they flow in an endless stream, day and night, whether I want them to or not. I just hang on for the ride."



Some super-smart individuals actually take menial jobs so they can allow their minds to wander at will, as astrophysicist Heather Preston of Colorado Springs did when she worked as a janitor the summer before she entered MIT, "sweeping floors and memorizing digits of pi."



The gifted often are stereotyped as geeks or misfits, but researchers say that while some have problems with authority figures, most are probably just as well adjusted in their personal lives as Americans in general.



Cobb, for example, has been married to "a wonderful woman" for nearly 30 years, and they have a child in college. Preston and Buzasi, who met each other while doing doctoral research at the Kitt Peak observatory in Arizona, are married with a 6-year-old son.



There's good evidence, however, that many gifted adults - even some who were enrolled in accelerated programs as schoolchildren - may not be fully cognizant of their abilities.



"The idea that you could be gifted and an adult and not be an achiever is beyond most people's comprehension, and giftedness in women is particularly hidden," says Silverman, who is writing a book on this subject with the tentative title "I'm Not Gifted, I'm Just Busy."



"Women have been socialized as girls to hide their abilities," she says, "so you get an awful lot of women coming into adult life with no conception that they're smart - just that they're lonely."



Whatever their life experience, people with IQs three or four standard deviations above the norm say they join clubs like TNS, which meets monthly, not to assert their intelligence or feel elitist, but simply to connect with others who operate at their level - or at least can understand their jokes.

Typically, their witticisms are rich in irony and wordplay, like the comment one TNSer made at a party of ordinary folks when he sat down to play "Happy Birthday" and told the group, "The piano is not really my forte..." - thereby eliciting not even a chuckle. ("Pianoforte" is another word for "piano.")



"It's nice for me to associate with other highly intelligent people. It's companionship," says Esther Cook, a Denver insurance analyst who learned about TNS in a puzzle book and found she was eligible through her scores on the Graduate Record Examinations.

Some high-IQers belong to as many as 10 or 20 such groups, ranging from the International High IQ Society (highiqsociety.org), which accepts individuals with IQ scores in the top 5 percent, or 1 out of 20, to the Prometheus Society (prometheus.org), which takes one out of 30,000 and has only about 100 members worldwide.

"For me it's been a social thing. But for some people, it becomes an obsession," says Ed Schreiber, 62, a Croatian-born computer scientist-musician-politician who spearheads the Colorado TNS chapter (triplenine.org).



"I've met a guy who claims to be the smartest person in the United States," Schreiber of Denver says. "He was working as a bouncer in a bar, but on the side, he was writing a theory of everything."



Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.



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High-IQ groups' criteria



The following are entrance criteria for a sampling of high-IQ societies:



Mensa (98th percentile): GRE score of 1,250 (verbal plus quantitative) for tests taken before May 1994, 1875 (analytical score added) for later; SAT score of 1,250 (verbal and math combined) for tests taken 1974-94, 1,300 for earlier; Stanford-Binet IQ score of 132.



Intertel (99th percentile): GRE of 1,300, SAT of 1,375 (prior to 1993 only), Stanford-Binet of 136.



Colloquy (99.5 percentile): GRE of 1,490, SAT of 1,360 before 4/95 or 1,420 later, Stanford-Binet of 141.



Cerebrals Society (99.7): Stanford-Binet of 144.

Triple Nine Society (99.9): GRE of 1,460 through 5/94 or 2,180 (V-Q-A) after, SAT of 1,450 to 5/95 or 1,520 after, Stanford-Binet of 149.



Ultranet (99.997): GRE of 1,610 before 9/81, SAT of 1,560 before 4/95, Stanford-Binet of 164.



Mega Society (99.9999): Stanford-Binet of 176.

Source: IQ comparison website maintained by Rodrigo de la Jara, at members.shaw.ca/delajara.