2 Predictable downsides of a high verbal IQ
Monday, October 30, 2023. It’s helpful to understand a little more deeply how your genetics interplay with your life experience. This is for 2.0 Power Couple MG & BH, whose verbal skills are breathtaking.
It’s fascinating how in the infinite variety of human brains, there are some with a very high Verbal IQ
What’s a high Verbal IQ?
A high Verbal IQ is another way of describing verbal intelligence, that is to say, an above average skill in being able to reason and comprehend, using language to frame concepts artfully to achieve pre-determined goals.
Am I talking about those poor hapless souls trapped in soul-deadening sales, finance, and admin jobs? Most likely.
The 2 predictable downside of verbal gifts…
I’m one of those souls who was gifted a high verbal intelligence. Thanks mom!
I was reading at a high school level in the third grade. In high school I taught myself to speed read, and was editor of my High School yearbook in 1971. My job at the Mattapan Branch Library kept me current in the stream of ideas populating mass culture in the early 70’s.
LOL… I was so anxious.. I fu*king read everything!
For most of my early life, I blamed it on my Developmental Trauma, but this research indicates that higher anxiety is found in humans who enjoy a higher verbal IQ, on average, research finds.
Another dark tendency rang home for me… studies also show that while all humans tend to ruminate from time to time, but humans with high verbal intelligence ruminate much more frequently.
Just to be clear about defining our terms, rumination is the word defined in this study as the tendency to focus on depressing, negative cognition. In other words, stinkin’ thinkin’ …requiring a check up from the neck up…
Rumination is also a common precursor of depression.
A possible explanation for the mixed blessing of high verbal intelligence…
In our relatively comfortable modern era, we tend to perceive a tendency to fret as neurotic. But humans who worry more display more situational awareness… more often.
Humans with high verbal intelligence can better envision the downside of a course of action. It seems that humans commingled verbal intelligence and anxiety in an evolutionary adaptation.
Neuroscientists explain that this commingling of high verbal intelligence with anxiety promoted and expanded superior abstract thinking, problem-solving and critical thinking among humans.
How the study was conducted
The researchers had a cohort of 126 humans They administered tests for depression, anxiety and verbal intelligence.
The study clearly revealed that the humans with enhanced verbal intelligence had more prolonged struggles with intrusive, negative thoughts.
The researchers put it this way:
“It is possible that more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry.
Individuals with high non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters.”
The study also factored in the fact that anxious people often perform worse on standardized tests — including intelligence tests.
The authors write:
“…symptoms of acute depression might decrease an individual’s ability to perform optimally on an intelligence test,
and that the individual may not have lower intelligence.”
Anxiety isn’t the exclusive purview of the smartypants who walk among us…
We live in an age in which we are marinated in epic anxiety. God willing, we’ll rediscover our humanity in time.
While I don’t dispute the findings (especially as they mirror my own life experience so profoundly), I find myself asking, how do we learn to run our nervous systems with more intentionality and care?
I also must remind my gentle readers that earlier research has also shown that humans who are lower than average in intelligence also tend to fret and worry — possibly because they are keenly aware of their vulnerability, and invisibility.
Here’s the consolation for the rest of humanity. Folks gifted with an average intelligence show less of a link with anxiety and rumination than the humans at either end of the verbal intelligence spectrum.
IMHO, intelligence of all sorts is culturally overvalued. We need less cunning, and more kindness, instead.
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Alexander M. Penney, Victoria C. Miedema, Dwight Mazmanian, Intelligence and emotional disorders: Is the worrying and ruminating mind a more intelligent mind?, Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 74, 2015, Pages 90-93, ISSN 0191-8869, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.10.005.
