Saturday, January 25, 2014

200+?

   Yeaaah, I know they balance these things out to have the mean be 100 (and maybe the median and probably the mode, though obviously not the range.) Let's use the above-given IQ score of 115, which may or may not have been my own as tested once. Fifteen points above 100. One standard deviation from the mean. Fifteen points below 100, or 85, is one standard deviation below the mean. The standard deviation for IQ, you see, is 15 points: A 130 IQ represents two standard deviations from mean, with its corresponding below-mean IQ being 70-- 30 points above and below, and so on. I'm not sure if it's possible to have a negative IQ (just sucking the intelligence out of everything around it without soaking any up for itself, I guess,) but if and only if it were, then it would be possible to have an IQ that exceeded 200.

Intelligence is determined not by the size of the brain, but by its shape. It's not, the bigger the better, it's, the more folded the better. The less folded the brain, the less intelligent. So what would an almost perfectly smooth brain look like? There is a rare congenital brain condition called lissencephaly (smooth brain,) which leads to IQs as low as 20, but under that it's impossible to test so for all intents and purposes, 20 is the lowest IQ can go. If the mean IQ is set at 100, still, even this relatively rare phenomenon might have to be at least somewhat less rare than IQs above the opposite-end-of-the-scale counterpart IQ of 180, unless they're making up for it with just a lot of average scores (most likely.) IQ is ranked on an ordinal scale, meaning the rank is more important than the actual number- one IQ point separating two IQs at one place in the chart is not the same as another point at another place in the chart. Still, the ratios of the IQs themselves are accurate.

   It's possible for like little children and stuff to have IQs of 200, because IQ tests for children are generally measured as status ratios, meaning intelligence is gauged by comparing against peers: an IQ of 200 would just mean the child is operating at a brain capacity of the average person twice their age, which is much more common. I think there was a group of like Ukrainian students who all got their IQs tested when they came into America and their average IQ was like 160 or 170. I'd be more specific if I could find a source for that, but something like this was definitively documented to have happened; I just don't know if all of those details are correct, so don't quote me on it. I was using that for illustrative purposes only. Either way, the average was quite above average. There were possible explanations for that, like these, given, but I don't think I'd be able to tell you those either.

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