I SHOW UP FOR THE MONTHLY ST. LOUIS AREA MENSA HAPPY HOUR (this one’s at Pi) and scan each arrival’s face. Then I laugh at my absurdity. What am I looking for—egg-shaped heads? Thus far, I’ve reached only a few sloppily unscientific generalizations: Mensans tend not to be trendy. Strongly opinionated, they formulate theories about the world. They make puns and goofy jokes. They read a lot, and they talk a lot. Even the most painfully introverted talk a lot, once they’re in their comfort zone.
They talk fast, too—have to, one guy told me, or you get interrupted. Above all, they think fast. They qualify and draw distinctions. They like questions they have to ponder, puzzles and problems that are hard to solve. They think abstractly, and for some that means fluidly, sliding all over the game board. Others shine a single laser beam, brilliant in their field and clueless about the rest of the world.
Most people who qualify for Mensa (you have to score in the top 2 percent on one of the club’s carefully selected tests) don’t join. But for members, it’s an identity, a validation of their intelligence, a way to meet other bright people. Or a résumé padder. Or something to never, ever mention on a résumé. Employers get intimidated, members explained to me. They decide you’re too smart for the job, you’ll get bored, you’ll move on. In other words, they’re scared they’re not smart enough to keep up with you. I start to ask a mild-looking sixtyish woman if she’s here for the Mensa meeting and stop short. One, I’m not sure she’ll take it as a compliment. Two, I’m afraid she’ll say, “Huh?”
These people hear a lot of “Huh?”s.
WHEN SCOTT AND LAURA DEWEESE walk into Pi, Laura recognizes me first. Notepad, lost look—not exactly a brilliant deduction; we’ll give her half a point. Next comes Jack Lippold, an engineer with a quiet, quirky sense of humor. “Tell Jack your birth date,” somebody urges, so I do. He blinks once and says that would have been a Sunday.
He’s right.
Scott orders a beer; he has a mock theory about drinking being good for your brain, because the cells you’re killing off are the weak ones. He moved to St. Louis for a computer-programming job and joined Mensa because he wanted to meet people, and—his theory aside—he hates bars. And sports. And making small talk with strangers.
“Are you going to admit that you were really looking for the Mustang club?” Laura inquires, one eyebrow arched.
“I had a classic Mustang, and I was looking through the phone book for a club,” Scott admits. “I didn’t find Mustang, but I found Mensa, and in junior high, I’d taken an IQ test that got me into a gifted program, so I thought it was worth a shot.”
Scott and Laura noticed each other in July 1992 and flirted a little. She caught him under the mistletoe that December, and they began dating, but he was so scared of divorce, it took him six years to propose. Now they have a 3-year-old daughter, Julia, and a 6-year-old son, Kevin. Already a Mensa member, Kevin spent this summer learning about chemistry and genetics at a camp for gifted kids.
I try to envision that camp. Would they clone their s’mores? Seeing my face, Kevin’s mom quickly points out that brains don’t guarantee success. They only guarantee you’ll feel weird if you fail. “One hard thing about being bright,” she says, “is that when I don’t do really well, I feel like, ‘Why on Earth can’t I do that?’”
Now a full-time homemaker, Laura says she “didn’t have a really stellar career. Eighteen years as a computer programmer.” She gives an amused shrug. “A lot of Mensans ask themselves, ‘If I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich? I think somewhere along the line I got discouraged. I had a bad habit during school of not trying as hard as I should have. I would use my intelligence to do less work. They’d tell me to write, ‘I will not talk in class,’ and I’d line up three pencils and write three lines at a time.”
We talk a bit about soul-killing boredom. Then Scott leans forward. “Not implying in any way, shape, or form that intelligent people would necessarily have the right answer, what frustrates me is that more intelligent people don’t make better use of their intelligence.”
Stung, Laura looks up. “Sounds like you’re talking about me,” she says lightly, trying to laugh it off.
“Specifically, what I’m talking about is Mensa itself,” he corrects her.
“Oh. You mean why aren’t we out there solving the world’s problems?”
“Yeah. I’d love for us to get to the point where Mensa is known not just as ‘Oh, that’s that group for those nerds,’ but ‘Oh, that’s that group that tutors adults…’”
“Or that think tank the politicians go to,” she adds, nodding.
MENSA WAS FORMED IN ENGLAND the year after World War II. The name came from the Latin for “table,” and this table was to be round, with room for smart folk of any race, creed, nationality, age, or class. The society’s goals were to identify and foster intelligence, encourage research into its nature and uses, and promote stimulating intellectual and soc-ial opportunities for its members.
The St. Louis club, founded in 1973, skews social, although some members would like to see a little more idealism back in the mix. “Making a definite difference for good, that’s what Mensans need to do,” says Mary Hall. “When I was program chair, I brought in a fencing master and a puzzlemaker, but I also brought in scientists, the ACLU director, experts in gang intelligence from the police force…” Alas, those social programs didn’t draw nearly as many members as the restaurant nights do. People don’t join Mensa to save the world; they figure you’d never get all the members to agree on how to do it.
LITTLE-GRAY-CELL COUNT
You qualify for Mensa automatically if you score…
• 132 IQ
• 29 on the ACT before 1989*
• 1250 on the SAT between September 30, 1974, and January 31, 1994*
• 1300 on the SAT before 1974
* Later tests measure achievement more than aptitude. Mensa cares about the ability to think, not what’s been learned.
Local Mensans include a bartender at O’Connell’s, a pizza-delivery guy, a nuclear physicist, a fire battalion chief, a truck driver, a deli owner, a couple of shrinks, tons of information-technology types, teachers, writers, and the head of a crime lab. Politics vary sharply. Interests run deep but seldom overlap.
“The stereotype would be that we’re always talking about big, heavy things like quantum mechanics,” says the chapter president, Jackie Boyce, a retired math teacher. “Well, that phrase is as much as I can say about quantum mechanics! We talk about movies, plays, travel, food… We go out to eat a lot!”
So why insist on dinner companions with high IQs?
“You like to tell jokes to people that get them,” Lippold explains. “Like when people do karaoke, I’ll ask if there’s anything a cappella.” An electrical engineer by day, he reviews restaurants for the Mensa newsletter (his column’s called—brace yourself—“From the Course’s Mouth”). After a prix fixe dinner at Liluma, he wrote, “Rochelle was delighted that the calamari included some tentacles… The panna cotta reminded us of a scaled-down version of the blancmange alien on Monty Python.”
The newsletter also has brainteasers and—I turn the page sideways, then upside down, then flip it over—no answers.
WHEN I SPOKE WITH BOYCE, SHE WAS just back from the national Mensa “annual gathering,” in Philadelphia. Sessions included “Exceptional IQ and Happiness,” “Dumb Things Smart People Do,” “Worm Quartet Concert,” “Nanotech Intermediate,” “Illusion Knitting,” “Subprime Lending,” “Qwirkle,” “Metal Knitting: Chain Mail 101,” “Origin of Solar Systems,” “Theory of Everything,” and “How I Lost 85 Pounds.” There were tweets like “I’m torn. Should I go to the conference on social media, or the introduction to Mandarin Chinese? #ag09,” “High Tea was great again. Now, I guess, we’ll do prime numbers. #ag09,” and “Did not get to build an alien! Off to M-Atheists again. #ag09.”
So what is intelligence, anyway?
A century ago, a man was considered brilliant if he could spout the classics, introduce arcane facts into dinner conversation, conduct scientific experiments, dabble in the arts, and calculate his net assets. (A woman…wasn’t considered brilliant.) Today, we all use calculators, and there’s no need to memorize, because we can look everything up on a handheld device. Renaissance types fall flat on their well-rounded bottoms when they enter the job market. What’s desirable is no longer a command of facts, but the resourcefulness to find whatever new fact you need in seconds. That means being able to think abstractly and manipulate technology—which is probably why so many modern-day Mensans are computer experts.
IT consultant Barbara Kryvko, a local Mensa member, defines intelligence as “the ability to get it. To learn fast, pick up on things, see them from a lot of different angles at once. It’s the difference between looking at a picture of the Earth and picking up a globe and holding it in your hands.”
A high IQ—the kind of intelligence Mensa measures—means you’re adept at “making connections between things, problem-solving in a particular area,” says Scott DeWeese. “Things that seem obvious to me are not at all obvious to someone else.” He hesitates. “This is where it can sound condescending. But somebody with a lower IQ doesn’t make those connections as fast.”
Ah, but is speed everything? It’s impressive, certainly—great for parlor tricks and banter—but the older I get, the more I appreciate minds that, unlike my slapdash one, build at a measured pace, deliberately and systematically, refusing to be rushed. Agile minds make the leaps, but others, like spotters behind gymnasts, stay on the ground, ready to catch what’s missed.
Barbara’s husband, Gary Kryvko (like the DeWeeses, they met in Mensa), is quick to acknowledge that. He says he’s not even sure he’s all that smart: “What Mensa tests, and I think I have, is the ability to see patterns.”
“It’s pattern recognition,” agrees Jim Tuller. “And the requirement really is speed.”
“On one side, you’re a regular guy. You go to work, you do your job, you exchange pleasantries. On the other side, you come home and you begin doing equations in your head.”
FROM A 1999 ESQUIRE INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER LANGAN, IQ 195, A FORMER BOUNCER WHO NOW LIVES ON A HORSE RANCH IN NORTHWESTERN MISSOURI
MARY HALL'S BEEN AHEAD OF THE GAME her entire life. She grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood near Comiskey Park. Her mom finished seventh grade; her dad made it to sophomore year of high school, then went to work in a steel mill. At 8, Hall announced that she wanted to become a psychiatrist and help people straighten out their thinking. Her mother replied, “What good would it do? You’ll just get married!”
Hall studied anyway. “I often felt I knew more than my teachers did,” she admits. “Nuns taught me, and we never got science, because they didn’t know science. When I asked if we could learn about the stock market or calculus, I was told to mind my own business and go back to my multiplication tables.”
At the start of eighth grade, she and a friend were cleaning the classroom after school (nuns always put the smart girls to work), and her friend saw the achievement-test scores on Sister’s desk. Hall’s IQ was 147.
“I read voraciously, and that’s what broadened my world,” she says. “I think bright people often see the big picture; we grasp a lot more about the ramifications and consequences of events. But as I grow older, I see how many different kinds of intelligence there are. Michael Jackson could have been in the top 2 percent for kinesthetic.”
She’s talking about bodily movement, one of the seven types of intelligence listed by education theorist Howard Gardner. The others are linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Gardner broke open the old categories—verbal, mathematical, analytical—and his theory keeps Mensans humble.
“My intelligence is logic,” Boyce says cheerfully. “My memory’s not so good, and I can copy but not create. I envy those who are creative. I’m smart in math, but you put me in English, and I’m a bummer!”
“So what does Mensa membership prove?” Tuller asks, then grins. “It proves that we are very good at taking standardized tests.”
TULLER'S FATHER WAS THE GENERAL secretary of the American Baptist Convention, and everybody in the family was smart. Tuller went to Brown University, majored in applied mathematics, then switched to German. In 1972, still hungry for travel, he became one of the first male flight attendants hired by TWA.
Thirty-seven years later, he’s still a flight attendant. He helps his union, translating legal jargon and compiling databases of complicated statistics—but those are skills our society usually rewards with rolled eyes and yawns. “We honor and glorify the athlete, and we worship beauty,” Tuller says. “Intelligence gets mocked or feared.”
Ah, but suddenly, geeks are hip. They know code; they have slang. Just look around: Trivia nights. Bill Gates. Vast bookstores, packed with comic books and science fiction. Malcolm in the Middle, The Big Bang Theory, The Mentalist, Numb3rs. The TED symposia. Even the new president’s a bit of a nerd.
“It’s cool to be smart now,” Barbara Kryvko says happily.
FROM THE MENSA MINI-TEST
1. What is the four-digit number in which the first digit is one-fifth the last, and the second and third digits are the last digit multiplied by 3?
(Hint: The sum of all digits is 12.)
2. Jane went to visit Jill. Jill is Jane’s only husband’s mother-in-law’s only husband’s only daughter’s only daughter. What relation is Jill to Jane?
3. Which of the words below is least like the others? The difference has nothing to do with vowels, consonants or syllables.
MORE, PARIS, ETCHERS, ZIPPER
The answers—and other sample questions from the Mensa mini-test, courtesy of Dr. Abbie F. Salny—are online at stlmag.com
WHAT MENSANS LOVE MOST ABOUT other Mensans is that a) they get each other’s jokes and b) they can talk intelligently about virtually anything. “From politics to religion to math theory to crime, most of us would have some type of cogent response to offer,” Hall says. “We can talk about five subjects in 10 minutes and be fine with that.”
Games are big, too: The annual convention was riddled with cribbage, sudoko, puzzles, Scrabble, chess, poker, euchre, pinochle, trivia, spelling bees, and vocabulary quizzes. The St. Louis Mensa chapter has a games SIG (Special Interest Group) that usually plays Trivial Pursuit in two teams. “The fun part,” chuckles Tuller, “is listening to the other team talk themselves out of the right answer because it’s too obvious.”
Wait—that’s it. High IQ’s biggest danger: overthinking. “I drive people crazy,” Tuller admits, “because in a situation, I will need to lay out all the possibilities, and only then do I assign probabilities.” Asked if he’s ever regretted being smart, he sighs. “Yes. Watching Forrest Gump. I sat there and thought, ‘If only I could have the simplicity to see life the way he does, pure and simple.’”
Gary Kryvko says, “Sometimes it’s really easy to get paralyzed. You are looking for the perfect extrapolation, when in reality there ain’t no such thing. You can get overloaded with information and bits of trivia.”
Brilliance carries other risks, too: It’s hard to fall asleep at night when your brain’s racing. Public policy can be maddening. (Boyce still can’t understand why St. Louis didn’t run a MetroLink track alongside Highway 40 during construction.) And small talk is hell.
“If I have a good reason to be talking, it’s OK,” Scott DeWeese says, “but just chitchat…” He shudders.
Boyce methodically taught herself social skills, imitating the opening gambits of skilled small-talkers. Both of her parents were inordinately bright, but with no confidence. Her father was a mortician, her mother a clerk. “She had one friend,” Boyce says. “She never wanted to go out and meet people. And I didn’t want to become like that.”
“We have millions of Einsteins, we have millions of Voltaires, who are doing virtually nothing with their abilities, and I am not surprised. I think motivation plays a far greater part than most people realize.”
MARILYN VOS SAVANT, WHO WAS BORN IN SOUTH ST. LOUIS IN 1946.
FOR YEARS, SHE HAD THE HIGHEST RECORDED IQ IN THE WORLD.
Barbara Kryvko, on the other hand, was “the ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia’ type, involved in everything,” she says, rattling off sports, offices, and the trimming of the Homecoming float. Routine bores her senseless: “That’s probably why I’m in the business I’m in—it requires you to be quick on your feet, figuring out all the angles—and working as a consultant, meeting all sorts of people.”
It could be worse, I tell her, noting that people in the very highest IQ percentile often withdraw from the world altogether, because it’s so hard to communicate.
“I’m in one of those 99.999 groups,” she says ruefully. “And it’s true: a lot of people get superfocused on one thing. They have nothing else. But I’m kind of an anomaly.
“I often wish I did have some specific focus,” she confides. “Why am I not the person writing the super physics books? I often get up and say, ‘Well, I didn’t save the world—’”
Suddenly I realize she’s crying. “I’m sorry,” she says quickly, composing herself. “It’s just, there’s so much out there that needs to be done, and I’m not doing it. I have the brainpower, but I don’t have that focus.”
She’s not alone.
“Probably one reason you may not see as many CEOs joining Mensa is, a CEO is very focused on one thing,” says Tuller, “and for a lot of us in Mensa, that’s a deterrent, because there are so many other interesting things to think about!”
Scott DeWeese flunked a required course three times and spent 12 years getting his bachelor’s. “But what I really enjoy is learning stuff. I’ll get on one particular topic and just start reading anything I can find about it.”
Gary Kryvko got a job as a bank teller after high school—and spent the next 20 years in banking without ever being terribly interested in it. Then he went to college, earning a bachelor’s in history and education. Now he runs an educational program for Junior Achievement, and he finally loves his work.
OBVIOUSLY, NOT ALL MENSANS HAVE the high-powered careers you’d expect. Sometimes their ambitions aren’t worldly; other times, their agile minds pull them in too many directions at once. Or school came so easily, they never developed what psychologists now call “grit”: the ability to pin down a long-term goal and do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Or they went to a small, mediocre school and their braininess cut them off from the other kids, so they never developed standard social skills.
In a classic essay titled “The Outsiders”—published in 1987 by the Prometheus Society, whose members fall in the top thirty-thousandth on an approved test—the late Grady M. Towers outlined three possible paths for gifted kids. The lucky ones have gifted parents, relatives, or friends, and they attend top universities and dive into prestigious professions. They’re not likely to be active Mensa members, and they can’t fathom how being smart could ever make life harder.
The unlucky kids have a parent who’s exceptionally smart—and exceptionally maladjusted. Those kids tend to burn out or withdraw. And the kids in the middle have brains that mystify their average, down-to-earth families. Often they go to work right out of high school, taking any old job, and while they’re able to make friends, “neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention,” Towers wrote, “so they resort to leading a double life,” doing what’s expected at work and then coming home to all sorts of private fascinations and pursuits.
According to Towers, IQ affects everything from our media preferences and choice of marital partner to our supermarket shopping ability. In another essay, “Theories of Multiple Intelligence,” he suggested that people with high IQs are more likely to be tolerant, creative, and emotionally sensitive; less likely to be dogmatic, delinquent, or racially prejudiced. They also tend to be high achievers—but only up to a certain level.
Past, say, a 170 IQ, achievement gets less and less likely. It’s hard to sustain focused effort, because such minds fly everywhere—and rarely land. Some geniuses even become bitterly misanthropic, Towers wrote; they do not suffer fools, and by comparison to them, nearly everyone is a fool. And so they wind up isolated and lonely, not by choice, but because nobody speaks their language.
Even for your average Mensan, with an IQ maybe in the 140s, it can be frustrating trying to communicate with people whose minds plod forward. There’s a 32-point difference between Mensa’s minimum IQ and the average 100 IQ. That’s the same span that divides “average” from what we’d label “disabled.”
Even with the same IQ, communication depends on where the intelligence overlaps. Asked if he ever feels surrounded by idiots, Tuller—who’s a sweet and kind man, not the least bit misanthropic—jokes, “Yeah, and sometimes that’s during a Mensa meeting.”
Those meetings, though, serve a higher purpose. They may not be solving all the world’s problems, but they validate intelligence, for those who’ve never been quite convinced of their abilities, and they ease the loneliness of living inside one’s own very efficient head. A few puns, a little brainy banter, some references to science fiction or classical music, and you have camaraderie, friendship, even marriage.
A true meeting of the minds.
St. Louis–born Mensan Ron Hoeflin, who reports an IQ of 190, now lives in New York. He founded seven high-IQ societies far more exclusive than Mensa and wrote what’s been dubbed the world’s toughest IQ test. Visit stlmag.com to read about his hypersensitivity and drifting career, his theory of almost everything, his ritual daily meal at the Wendy’s in Hell’s Kitchen, and his love affair with one of Picasso’s illegitimate children.
Jeannette Cooperman / Illustration by Danny Elchert
