Intelligence and memory

Last year I was deeply disillusioned with intellectual approaches to life, as you could see from this blog which was restricted to sports and socializing. To turn a new page in my life I went to Mensa test, thinking "Let's face it - I'm not smart. My life outcome is thoroughly mediocre. I'm much better off with stupid approaches like sports and surfacial skills. After math high school, I haven't had success in anything intellectual."

To my surprise I passed the test with the same score as BB-Esa A. I also joined the club because it supports my New Year's goal of getting a more active social life. Within one month, I have done the following:

• Seen the movie 2012 and talked about it.
• Listened to how a Tampere city planner lectured about developing public transit and city center.
• Went to a Pink Floyd cover concert by Pulse and talked about the music (a person in The Club recommended the gig).
• Went to the monthly bar evening and talked with two cute girls who are a few years younger than me, among other members.

The Club has 300 members in Pirkanmaa. However, I've seen only 20 of them in any event, so mostly the club doesn't appeal even to its members. However, it fits perfectly to my current life situation, where improving social skills is a proprity. The people are in the same wavelength in some subtle manner - I'm not an introvert in their events.

To summarize, The Club is an organization of well-rounded slackers. The events are versatile. The age of the active members varies from 20 to 70. Occupations are also versatile - a sheep farmer gets regular publicity in the "members in the news" page. In the same way as my past fraternity Luuppi brought out The Drunkard and go club brings out The Nerd Intellectual, Mensa events bring out The Well-Rounded.

Now people who have followed the human biodiversity debate may want to know how the folks inside Mensa talk about it. Overall, they don't. Instead, they cultivate self-depracting humor, which is otherwise just like metodinen alemuudentunto, but more restricted:

Tuuli: When I was young, I had a Rubik's cube and I couldn't solve it.
Kari: So your intelligence emerged only after you joined the club?
Tuuli: I'm still waiting for it to emerge.

Naturally, taking the test doesn't change anything in me. I still have 10 years of life experience as an independent adult to show that I'm nothing special in intellectual pursuits. High IQ is not so much an unfair advantage as it is a bargain with the devil - and the price I pay is that my memory is wiped clean every 5 years from stuff which has not been used recently.

The Scientist wrote about general knowledge of facts as well as reading.

When I was younger I used to read quite a bit, things like Enid Blyton (Viisikko, Seikkailujen sarja) and The Girl Detective. The funny thing is that I remember absolutely nothing from them. The same is true for all children's books. Not a single plot has stuck to my mind, while many people remember even details. (Earth Search is one of the almost forgotten ones.)

About 5 years ago I tried to civilize myself by reading about each European state, and ended up finishing about 10 books. The traces are pretty non-existent.

But there is one type of knowledge which does stick - information linked to skills. Maybe the best examples are programming skill which I started to exercise at young age and math high school where I went as a teenager. Both are skills to be trained rather than knowledge to be assimilated. They do involve lots of details, but remembering those is not a problem.

I remember so little facts from books that for me it is primarily language practise. Nowadays I hardly read at all, as Finnish and English don't need extra practise and Chinese is still on the verge of usefulness.

The only question about Ridge Forrester which I could answer is "In which TV series there is a character named Ridge Forrester?" All I know about Rocky is that it is a wrestling movie which made "Eye of the Tiger" a hit song.

Update: The post was completely rewritten.