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David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

What happens to the extremely intelligent? Do they go from success to success, powered by their natural brilliance? Or do they struggle in a world where they don’t fit in?

There are two ways to answer these questions. The first is the social science answer. Social science researchers give promising children intelligence tests, and then they check in on them over the ensuing decades to see how much the students’ early intelligence correlates with lifetime success.

I confess that I’d prefer to live in a world in which people’s lives were not powerfully shaped by some trait they happened to have inherited. But we don’t live in that world. The social science answer is that higher intelligence correlates strongly with positive educational and career outcomes.

The grandfather of these studies is Lewis Terman’s Genetic Study of Geniuses, which, starting in the 1920s, tracked 1,521 highly intelligent kids through life. By the 1950s, two-thirds of the Terman kids had become college graduates, a figure 10 times that of the general population. In 1954 the men in the Terman group who held white-collar jobs made $10,556 a year, on average. That was far higher than the $5,800 a year earned by American men in white-collar jobs overall.

More recent studies have produced similar results. For example, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth tracks students who scored in the top 1 percent of intelligence tests. This study enables us to move beyond the crude notion that there is only one thing called I.Q. and focus on three specific forms of intelligence: verbal, mathematical and spatial. (Spatial intelligence is the kind of object-oriented intelligence that helps you become a master carpenter, an engineer or an inventor.)

In a meta-analysis of a bunch of these more recent studies, Tarmo Strenze of the University of Tartu in Estonia found that superhigh intelligence correlates strongly with educational attainment and occupational success and moderately with higher incomes. The Center for Talented Youth is a program at Johns Hopkins for young people with very high scores on university entrance exams. Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Lady Gaga all went through that program.

So, no surprise, intelligence really matters. These studies also show that highly intelligent people don’t suffer from more mental health problems than anybody else. They are not more likely to be scrawny.

I used to assume that there was an intelligence threshold, that once you got above an I.Q. score of 120, it didn’t help much if your score was over 150. But the S.M.P.Y. study rebuts that. People who score in the top quarter of the top 1 percent do better than people who score in the bottom quarter of the top 1 percent. In other words, extraordinarily smart people do better than very smart people.

Some people want to get rid of magnet high schools and accelerated programs for these kinds of precocious kids. But these programs are necessary if we’re going to keep high-scoring students engaged and........

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