Can't stand the mystery of my brain anymore!

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Well, perhaps you should not worry about what you are good at and just do what you enjoy. I dont have the knd of mind to operate a high-tech macro camera, I just use a very simple digital camera, but I do photography for the sheer love of it though I know i will not reach the sheer heights of technical genius some might. Also I love dancing in a nightclub or party, but I am not a good dancer.. I am a clumsy painter...I think you need to stop worryng about IQ tests and other tests.

For me....that's far easier said than done.

In any case....thanks to the bone-crushing depression i'm dealing with at the moment, I can't truly say I enjoy ANYTHING right now. Alleviating, if not entirely overcoming, this depression is the first thing I need to do. I start a new medication tomorrow, one which I haven't tried before (Celexa). Still...my "depression" is largely circumstantial after forty years of little else but misery, failure, poverty, etc....

There are times i've felt better in spite of it all though. And no matter what....I need recapture those times(if not even transcend them) before I decide to go back to college in January or not. Regardless of whatever learning/memory problems I have or don't have, I can hardly envision even attempting a fraction of what college entails right now when even getting out of bed seems like a Herculean task.



That being said....I don't want to say much more right now. All this incessant worrying about intelligence, memory, college, math, my brain and just everything under the sun is making me very weary. I need to escape from it all for awhile and go watch the idiot box or something.

My little guy has a good solid IQ but nothing to do cartwheels over. His achievement scores, which are a better measure of academic performance, are off the hook. He's 3-5 grade levels ahead and in the profoundly gifted range (on par with an IQ of 150+ despite the fact that his IQ measures in the 120s).

The IQ test measures convergent thought, which is just one way of thinking. In convergent thought you learn the way to get to the right answer quickly. In divergent thought you look at all the different ways to get to the same answer, sort of like thinking backwards to what most people do.

There are other ways to describe how people learn. For instance there is this idea of different intelligences. There are visual learners, natural learners, kinetic learners and so on. There are about 8 or 9 styles depending on how you choose to see it (one of the styles is religious and some people don't count it). The IQ test does a poor job of testing several of these styles, not intentionally, some styles just can't be measured on paper so well.

The IQ test is useful but it only predicts a very narrow kind of intelligence. If you have strengths it can't measure it won't reflect your true ability or potential.

Another of my children has an extremely high IQ. He's doing well in school, but he's a plodder. He does what he's told more easily and more quickly than most of the other children nearly all of the time (as long as there isn't a lot of chaos going on. He doesn't handle chaos well). He has a grand Aspie interest (sharks) and knows a great deal about that, but he doesn't generally take the initiative to delve more deeply than needed. My child with a much lower IQ is insatiable. He wants to know everything about everything, and the more complicated it is, the better. He started doing simple calculus for FUN at age 7. He found some problem somewhere and had a blast figuring it out. High IQ boy would never bother.