Lofty IQ Is No Cushion for Life’s Irritations
Jeff Ward remembers learning two-column addition in order to compute scores in a game he played before he was old enough for kindergarten. That’s the upside of a one-in-a-million IQ.
He also remembers the boredom and frustration of endlessly adding single-digit numbers through the first two years of elementary school. That’s the downside.
Ward, who is mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records for his high score on the Mega test, is the only San Diegan among the 26 international members of that ultra-high-IQ society.
His score of 43, roughly equivalent to 178 on the Stanford-Binet test, has since been surpassed by that of Marilyn Mach vos Savant of St. Louis. Ward and Vos Savant are the only people who belong to all seven high-IQ societies.
Ward can name every member of Congress, identify their districts and describe the issues that affect them. He predicts election results and claims a 97% success rate for his predictions this year.
He knows the names of all California legislators and most of the nation’s governors. He can also detail the history of the Cincinnati Reds, his favorite baseball team, since 1949. “I don’t have to study it,” Ward said. “Information just sticks.”
He said that, by the age of 7, he could draw a world map and fill in the names of all the countries and their capitals. He won spelling bees and math contests effortlessly, but sometimes “felt sheepish” and faked failure to fit in with his classmates.
Ward said he lost his zest for learning because he wasn’t challenged. The gap between Ward and his classmates closed through the years because “I didn’t make an effort. I couldn’t put up with continued frustration. Once in a while they’d give me an extra workbook,” but school officials decided not to advance him because he was already the shortest kid in his class.
For Ward, now in his early 40s, the excitement of intellectual challenges is still tempered by frustration with “the huge number of institutional obstacles to people with ability.”
The obstacles have been created intentionally to limit entry into competitive fields like medicine, law and academia, he said. Establishing credentials is “an endurance test” rather than a test of ability. Ward said that, with a few months of study, he could teach psychology, logic or politics at the university level, but would never be hired without the appropriate degree.
In 1968, he was hired out of graduate school at the University of Iowa--”another bonehead experience”--to teach geography at San Diego State University, but he soon lost interest in the subject. He wishes he had studied geology instead, but stuck with geography to safeguard his scholarship and maintain his student draft deferment during the Vietnam War.
After two years of teaching at SDSU, Ward worked as a Caltrans statistician and then as an information systems specialist with the San Diego Assn. of Governments.
With the rise in popularity of backgammon in the early 1980s, Ward began writing a syndicated column on the board game. For four years he lived on the proceeds of real estate investments and the column, which at one point was published in a dozen newspapers.
Disappointing sales of his first book on the strategy of the doubling cube caused him to abandon plans for volumes two and three, but backgammon presented a definite challenge.
“I could spend a lifetime on the doubling cube,” he said. Developing correct strategy is like peeling layers from an onion--except that for each layer removed, two more appear, he said.
As backgammon declined in popularity, most of the newspapers dropped the column, forcing Ward to look for steadier work. He has been writing computer manuals for NCR Corp. in Rancho Bernardo for three years.
Although backgammon and math provide challenges that he has never found in a job, Ward spends little time puzzling over abstract problems. “If there is no application to the real world, I’m not interested,” he said.
He has used his storehouse of political information to help conservation organizations target political races they might influence. He is also studying real estate in order to get back to investing.
Ward said he doesn’t look too far ahead, but would like to get into a position where he can have a positive impact on society. Attaining financial security is the first step, he said.
As for the high-IQ societies he belongs to, he said their main activity is their newsletters, through which members exchange information and opinions. Ward said topics include intelligence testing, math puzzles, health and fitness.
People in the most exclusive of the high-IQ societies tend to be more pragmatic, flexible and willing to change their views than those in the mid-level groups, he said. The newly formed Titan society, with 15 members, is still deciding how it can make a contribution to society. Ward said the society may have problems in getting its views accepted because people are sometimes suspicious that the super-intelligent may be manipulating them.
Like many other highly intelligent people, Ward is frustrated by the irrationality around him. He said of the other high-IQ people, “a fair number are reclusive or even misanthropic, with a common thread of frustration.” Faulty logic, TV commercials and traffic jams are especially irritating causes of frustration for him.
Separated from his wife earlier this year, Ward has begun dating but would like to socialize more. He lifts weights twice a week at Gold’s Gym, captains an NCR softball team and has camped at more than 100 sites in the national park system.
Although Ward thinks high intelligence can help solve some of life’s problems, new problems are always coming up.
Ward is pessimistic about American society and global problems. While America “does a better job than other societies, it isn’t structured to look ahead” and consequently hasn’t been able to resolve its problems.
However, solutions to society’s problems, which Ward has put into a four-stage hierarchy of importance, are apparent but not easily implemented, he said. Because social changes involve slow processes, “no extreme point of view makes sense,” he said.
