Yeah, that's my usual routine. But 25% of the time, I go more than one day without food.

Sometimes when I'm really hungover (and I mean REALLY hungover) I won't eat the next day I'll just drink a bit of water. Then the next day comes around and I have nasal drainage in my stomach and that nauseates me further so I don't eat, usually by that night I can tell I need to eat cause I literally feel really weak and I'm extremely tired.
I try not to do that, but you know sometimes parties are bigger than you expected, and then when they are over and you are just getting back to your house you see some other friends that arent' half as drunk as you and they convince you to keep drinking with them.
Sometimes there is even a 3rd tier to this, in fact it just happened to me Saturday night/Sunday Morning.

But anyway what does this have to do with the IQ test this thread was about?

Lol, we've gone way off topic.

Seems to me I went there several years ago Nic and took their test and flunked! Which shows to go... On the principle that I never want to be limited by some one else's definition of what constitues intelligence, I do my best to only answer those IQ questions which I already have expertise in. Which explains why I'm a "dull normal". LOL

A high school graduate has a "normal" intelligence quotient anywhere between 90 and 110.
A University Graduate will "normally" register an IQ of 140.

On the other hand, having done an arduous four day testing marathon in the mid sixties at McGill University (no cheating there) the results flabbergasted even the testers. My IQ registered, to my chagrin, at 192.

I say to my chagrin because it meant to me that I could no longer "play dumb" and then was cursed forever with having to actually take responsibility for my life! And what 20 yr. old wants to do that!!! I wasn't impressed. I'm still not impressed.

Went through gazilion more testing - one has to be careful because the more one takes tests of these sorts the more addicted to playing the game it becomes and the better one gets at it - with equally depressing results. Joined Mensa and promptly resigned my membership a year later on the premise that being a member of such an elitist group was indicative of nothing much more than snobbery. And I ain't no snob.

I was one of those people about whom it was said: "You can be anything you want to be." Oh God, no! That's a terrible thing to say to any young person. There are more massive failures amongst the geniuses in this world than there are drops in the ocean. I say to you, in all sincerity, if and when you have children, never ever tell them "You can be anything you want to be." Heavy words to hang on anyone. So please!

Far more significant is the measure of one's EQ - emotional quotient. Therein lies the rub. For what is a high intelligence rating if one is an emotional cripple? Do tell.

Take it from one who has been there. :-)

Wow, well said Crybabytek. I think that is also true about people's EQ. How can you be intelligent if you are emotionally unstable?

That is some great advice. I commend you for making such a well worth reading post.

It was a nice post.

But I wouldn't mind seeing some evidence of those figures.... I am not entirely convinced....

Those are very wise words Crybabytek, and I have to say that I agree with your assertion. Truth is, it is impossible to accurately measure one's intelligence.

The one thing that is certain, is that pressure stiffles creativity, and performance. Living up to others expectations can be very hard indeed.

I have always found that I do best when others expect me to do poorly. This is because all the pressure has gone and there are no high expectations to live up to.

Pressure causes the mind to lose it's focus and with this comes failure. Maybe that's why I prefer to remain in the background, working quietly away, and stepping in only when required.

As you said, it's not just IQ that counts, but EQ also (among other things). If someone has no desire to learn a skill, then no amount of study will make them skillful.

We all have hidden talents, and skills that are above the norm in one thing or another, and we should realise this and not be concerned about artificial scores on IQ tests. I've met some people that are quick thinkers, with IQs that are higher than mine, and yet they were unable to solve some problems in which I have succeeded. I also have my fair quota of failures, but I bounce right back again.

IQ tests show only that you were good with those specific questions, at that specific point in time, and do not measure intelligence. This is quite obvious as if they did measure intelligence, then the results would be consistent and identical in any set of questions regardless of what was asked.

This test is only meant to be some harmless fun, and not to be taken seriously. The types of users that tend to visit places like techspot, tend to be pretty intelligent as far as I can see, and thats one reason why they tend to be a well mannered and helpful lot.

Hope you enjoy your time here and stick around Crybabytek.

For a certain type of person, yes that is true.

But some other people find that, in the midst of stress and pressure, they are their most brilliant and most inventive.

Some people thrive under pressure, and even come to be addicted to it.

Well said Phant. I was actually doing some research on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) today and one part of the article talked about how stress effects some peoples performance but helps others. It just really depends on the person and how their brain reacts to pressure. This was also described as one of the very many symptoms of ADD. Though it IS normal for people to experience this. You wouldn't be human if you didn't experience a certain style of performance gain or loss due to pressure.

I discussed that stress / performance relationship with my biology and anatomy teacher long ago and it happens the graphic is almost the same as a gaussian distribution, that is to say

No stress > low performance

Max stress > low performance

Mid stress > max performance

Lots and lots of things follow Gauss

like, an odor................i'm a legend in my own mind

Well I think I tend to study the best under stress, not normal stress, stress that I know I have to do it. I do agree with DA on the mid stress = best performance, I've seen it in real life and in text books just this summer semister in my management classes.

Crybabytek, that 192, I am a bit skeptical about that, I mean thats uber-1337 you probably wouldn't be as "laid back" posting here if you had that high of one. Take the emode one and see how you do, we have apparently established that that one scores a bit high.
Crybabytek - I am also abit skeptical on your 140 for the average college grad, maybe if you purely look at population percentages of college grads MAYBE, but real life expierence from a darn good undergrad engineering school I know very few who I could honestly say have an IQ that high, I'd guess most range in the 120s.

Its sometimes, when I am under the most stress, and my back is against the wall, that I am my most brilliant....

....Or most dangerous....

yeh thats what I said, I simply cannot modivate myself to study for a test if I know I have time to delay, even in graduate school. But I bet I learn more in those hours before the test that I study than most of the regular students do in their hours studying.
People are different, does it make one "smarter" than another, not necessarly, people just adapt to what works best for them.

My IQ is over ten

OK folks, I guess I should have been clearer. When I said that stress lowers performance, what I mean't was bad stress (like when something bad will happen if you fail), not the stress that gives you a buzz (like jumping out of a plane).

Stress is both a blessing and a curse...

Some of my best work has been done around 4 am in the morning when the project has to be deliviered by 8 am... But then again, some of my worst work has been around 4 am when the project has to be delivered by 8 am...

For me it has everything to do with motivation... Ie. when I wrote a short paper on why give away free heroin to the most serious addicts (please, if you want to discuss that, do it in a new thread), I got excellent feedback from those who read it... It was written in one night, though I'd researched it for about a week beforehand, and I was really motivated...

Though another paper written in one night (researched for 3 weeks) about how different philosophers through time has looked upon a persons soul, it became quite thin... I wasn't really too motivated, as the research wasn't easy (hard to find anything about that topic when you're an undergrad....), and I felt the problem was too narrow...
And I couldn't expand it, since I had (stupid me) waited until the last night to write it... (To my own defense, I had written 2 other papers the same week which were quite good)

My point is that unless you're motivated, stress is (at least for me) the biggest enemy... I postpone the project as long as I can, in hopes of finding some aspect/view that will give me the needed motivation, but when that doesn't appear, I find myself doing it the last night...
The papers then usually contains quite a lot of "fill words", and I work the entire night without "finding my way"...

Thus I've learnt that things I'm not motivated to do, I start doing as soons as I can, but things I'm really interested in, I can spend more time in research...
It doesn't allways work, but has improved the average quality of my papers...




Over to "you can be anything that you want"...

I too has gotten that info, and not only from my parents, but teachers, study advisers etc.... And yes, it can be a curse... But it depends on how one looks upon it...

The pessimistic way is thinking that whatever you choose to study/do, you have to be good at it... Thus you're under a lot of pressure, might not be motivated, and drop out...

The optimistic way of looking at it, is that you can try several different things, and then take the way that suits you the most... "Think outside the box" as one adviser told me...

That you have the possibility to do what you want to do,is good as long as you don't make it into an expectation to do it extremely good...

This. again, depends a lot on how friends and family understand/mean "you can be anything you want to be"...
For a parent, it is better to say "Whatever you choose to do, we will stand behind you", as that is a much more positiv way of saying it ..

For friends, it all depends on how the person says it to them... If you say "I'm so good I can be anything I want", then you've got the pressure coming, but if you say something along the lines of "The adviser told me I had a lot of potential, but we couldn't quite figure out what classes/whatever was right for me, so I'll just have to look around" there shouldn't be much (if any) pressure...

My point here is that if you've got the potentail, it's all about how you use it, and how you let others percieve it...


Lastly, EQ...

How do you define EQ?
Is it how well you get along with others? How well you can tell if someone of the opposite (or same if that's what you fancy) is attracted to you?
Does it say anything about how good you are to work as a team, instead of alone?
And how do you meassure it?

The reason I ask these Q's are that whereas I like the idea of EQ, I have a trouble with how you quantify it...
And IQ test will tell you how good you are at solving certain tests, and to a certain extent how likely you are to learn certain things better than others...
But an EQ test is based on things that imo isn't quantifiable... Ok, so I get along easily with some people, that doesn't mean I'll get a long just as easy with others... It depends on the chemistry (let's call it chemistry, though afaik it hasn't been proven) between the you and the other people... And so if you've got good chemistry with some, that doesn't mean you'll have good chemistry with everyone...

My point is that's it's a good idea, but quite useless...
You can't test it with a paper, so it'll have to be a practical test... And you can't test with people the person knows, as that'll offsett the scales.. But testing with people the person have never met might also throw the scales... There is simply too many variables, that the answer will be extremly thin at best and you might end up changing how the person behaves, because of the test, at worst...



I hope this made some sense...

EQ refers to motivation, and how much drive you have to want to succeed (i.e. how you feel about something and how much it means to you). Something you've already said is important (MrG).

Update: I didn't actually say anything about stress in my post. In fact, what I said was that 'pressure' is what can lead to failure. Pressure is 'bad stress', as opposed to 'good stress', which is something that gives us the drive to succeed. It seems someone misunderstood my original message, and confused 'stress' with 'pressure'. They are not the same.

I read quite a lot about EQ several years ago (when it was supposed to be the end to IQ tests), and from what I read then, it was supposed to tell how well you'd get along with others/work with others & motivation etc.

So that's why I asked the questions about EQ that I did... If you're really going to try to quantify it, how would you go about it?

If someone came up to me and said they had an EQ over 100, I'd most likely go "how nice for you", since it doesn't tell me anything....

Thus I don't really see how EQ will be tested/used, as, imo, there are way too many variables we know nothing about, that might have radical changes from one person to the next...