Head to Head With Mensans? That Smarts!
Can you name the six original members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? How about the three people Romeo killed in “Romeo and Juliet”? The name for the astronomical study of the moon?
If so, you may be a genius.
On the other hand, if you’ve never heard of Monty Python, Romeo or the moon . . . well, you probably aren’t.
Those questions come from past versions of CultureQuest, a trademark competition from Mensa, the national organization of high-IQ people.
On April 29, five Orange County members of the local Mensa group will team up in a national competition against brainy people from around the country. The top 20 teams--probably out of 80 or so--will win scholarship money for local students.
Like me, you may tend to think of Mensa members as not worrying about pop-culture trivia. Not with treatises from Ptolemy to pore over.
However, after joining a dozen local Mensa members Thursday at a ribs joint in Costa Mesa (and let me publicly apologize here for forgetting to pay for my sodas), I learned several things about them.
They don’t claim to know everything. What may separate them from the rest of us is that they’re smart enough to know what they don’t know.
Member Norrma Samuels says there’s an old Mensa joke about the guy who wanted to join so he could meet smart women--only to find out “they were all too smart to go out with him.”
The Mensans get together weekly for lunch, because “we like to eat and we don’t like to eat alone,” jokes Costi Baramki of Huntington Beach. Probably more to the point is that they like the company of people who know what it’s like to be in the upper 2% of the population in intelligence.
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“The perception is that it’s really an elite, egghead group that would be hard for people to talk to,” says Lynne Bianco. “It’s not that way. All the regular human things that go on with regular-IQ people [happen with them].”
Bianco later confides that, although she’s been hanging out with Mensans for five years, she fell two points short on her entry test. Technically, she’s not a Mensan.
Do you resent her presence, I ask Baramki, who’s sitting across the table from her.
“I resent it very much,” he says, deadpan.
OK, they’re funny. But isn’t this kind of lowbrow for Mensans?
“The real answer is, you’re mistaken,” says Russ Bakke, a computer software engineer from Orange who was on last year’s team that barely missed the top 20. “We are just like other people, except we process a little faster. We have the same weird collection of interests.”
What would a Mensan bring to a pop-culture competition? “It’s about retaining [the information] and being able to call it up again,” Bakke says. “How fast can you think, how fast can this computer we call a mind go through the extensive database and pull up this obscure fact?”
For example, one of last year’s questions, Bakke says, was to name all the B vitamins. He couldn’t.
Team member Linda Kapiloff admits to a little tension as the competition approaches. “We only have 90 minutes and it’s like 160 questions and many are multiple answers,” she says. “Last year, there was a question where we had eight little tropical islands and you had to match them with their eight monetary units with names that you’d never even seen in a Scrabble game.”
Teams from around the country take the test at the same time and operate on the honor system. “If you cheat and win, it would be meaningless,” Bakke says.
Kapiloff says the Orange County chapter has 812 members. The Mensans at lunch said the out-migration in recent years of aerospace workers cost the group a sizable chunk of its membership. The flip side is that lots of high-IQ people are out there who haven’t tried for Mensa membership.
If they only realized that these big-brain people are just regular folks, with perhaps a little twist.
Call it the common bond of brilliance.
“You know you’re with a Mensan,” Samuels says, “when someone says, ‘Hey, how about those Rams?’ and they say, ‘Battering or ewe?’ ”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.