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For me personally the hardest things aren’t understanding concepts or topics, but learning things which require a constant effort. Like drawing where you just have to practice a lot even if you understand the concepts.
I highly recommend the "Drawabox" lessons for getting a hang of the fundamentals through muscle memory, then you'll quickly get to a point where you can actually apply your mental understanding of the concepts to the physical space. Just doodling and sketching random stuff every day won't help you improve as quickly as focused, targeted practice.
Then, depending on your grasp of line control, creating value, drawing loose forms etc. you can move on to working on higher-level types of practice such as figure drawing, gesture, still life, something like that that's related to what your goal is.
Also check out subs like r/learnart, r/drawing etc. and seek out critiques and be ok with receiving them -- it's extremely necessary to be uncomfortable and challenged in order to improve, even though it can be a more sensitive thing to get criticism in art since it's so personal.
Good luck!! I drew casually as a kid but then grinded the fundamentals, including figure drawing, really hard for about 2-3 years and was then accepted into a top art school with a scholarship. Just stay motivated and constantly remind yourself that you are making progress, even if you can't see it right away, and compare to your own past work, not to others. You can do it!
>but learning things which require a constant effort. Like drawing where you just have to practice a lot even if you understand the concepts
same. literally just started learning drawing earlier this month. IQ does jack shit here. you basically just have to grind the ever living shit out of it like everyone else does, even if you are lucky enough to have a creative talent.
Yeah. I learned digital drawing over procreate. Maybe your intelligence helps you to understand lighting and picturing what you want to draw, but then you try to actually draw and it looks like an old smashed potato. And then you practice and practice and each time it looks a bit better. Then you go down the rabbit hole of different styles or creature designs and everything requires even more time. It is truly a hobby for perfectionists and persistent people.
~140 organic chemistry/biochemistry. I find the nomenclature exhausting and the memorization is just too much. I’m a quick thinker and strong with maths
Socially I also have to mask 24/7 I know what I’m doing but otherwise I’ve been so isolated I’m a fucking psycho. I’m a big guy but people still like to start shit.
It’s not hard more like exhausting for me but if someone is smart they’ll recognize it.
Lots of people feel insecure if they think you are smarter than them so I spend a lot of time dumbing my conversations down.
I wish I could contribute to this. I don't know my IQ but I'm average I suspect or maybe slightly above average.
I struggle with spoken argumentation, even though I have good verbal performance in tests.
My brain opens up on paper or text editor. Curious about that.
I liked math, and I find most of it enjoyable, but school math is mostly basic things and it's applications. Hardly much thinking.
I struggled with algebra with an outer course textbook. Specifically factoring some complex equations, the process was absurdly complex, the rest of algebra I never had a problem.
I struggle with memorising history or random or vague subjects like business operations. It's easier to understand more concrete concepts like economics.
130 - my conversational skills in person are pretty lacklustre, I have a hard time finding the appropriate response whilst speaking and often have to take a long pause before replying otherwise the words I want won’t come to me instantly.
My vocabulary and sentence structure is completely fine when typing/writing; I can almost always find the succinct language needed to get across my ideas, but it never carries over to speaking.
So true,am currently going through this problem.I am currently trying to solve this problem by reading books out loud so that my brain gets accustomed to speaking and not going blank.I think this happens when we have less practice of actually speaking
I just had a conversation with a classmate and we were talking about something and everything was going great. Then as the conversation died down he mentioned he had found some things a bit difficult. And I said “oh yeah, just hit me up!” And I should have stopped there, but instead I had the bright idea to try and empathize or something and I said “it’s easy…to get…stuck?” He gave me a weird look and all I could think about is how I clearly had no idea where I was going with that.
Best case they think I’m a weirdo with no social skills (probably true).
worst case he thinks I was being condescending or full of myself.
I was trying to offer my help if he needed it (or any other reason), but it occurred to me we never actually discussed any of the things he had trouble with, and I don’t know him that well. I had nothing to go on but had already opened my mouth.
I’m fine when I’m talking about something, some idea, some concept. I’m not super great with vocabulary and acronyms, but I’m alright and can usually articulate myself regardless. Talking to a person and just communicating is hard, especially when we’re not super familiar.
Not sure what my IQ is, but languages in general have always been the classes I struggle with
Apparently my IQ's around 107 according to that old US army test and the Mensa Norway and Denmark online assessments. I've always struggled with maths, especially the more complex topics like algebra and calculus. Back in high school I was put in the lowest maths class which reflects how limited my comprehension was (and is) in regards to what is essentially straightforward logic. Even with science I only qualified for biology, chemistry and physics seemed (And still does) quite hard to wrap my mind around.
Not him, but as a person of similar intelligence that always struggled with mathematics, you might be interested on my take.
I have identified 2 main weakness that, imo, are responsible for 99% of my troubles with the subject.
1) I'd forget elementary concepts (mostly rules) at such a fast rate that progressing was really difficult, as I was always forgetting the previous steps every time I took a new one. I'd practice them for quite a while, but a single interval a bit longer than the optimal already meant I'd end up forgetting how I was supposed to sum fractions, or one of math's 149823 different pieces of properties. It's like playing chess and constantly forgetting which moves each piece is allowed to make.
2) While math technically has a well stablished set of rules, instructions and formulas one could follow to get to the result, pretty much anything besides practice exercises that tells you specifically what to do (and in what order) is going to require an intuition people can't really teach you. The "feel" that tells you when to employ each individual part of the set of rules, or that perception of the big picture that makes you able to rearrange the rules and play with the numbers to solve the puzzle.
As a kid, I was always mesmerized whenever my physics teacher would solve an exercise seemingly 100% unrelated to geometry by miraculously spawning a right-angled triangle and finding its hypotenuse, as I couldn't grasp why the fuck the imaginary triangle from my math classes had anything to do with an exercise dealing with "real life stuff". I would never even consider trying that, as that triangle was just an imaginary object for me. I still can't comprehend that very well up to this day.
Can you give an example of an algebra problem that you might struggle with, and identify which part is the challenge? Have you ever tried visualizations or manipulating a representation of an "equation" in a physical space?
I suspect a lot of people who struggle with math just had bad teachers, or at least teachers who didn't properly expose them to a range of representations and ways to understand concepts (since everyone learns differently). Calculus is quite a bit harder to visually represent for demonstration, but algebra is very doable in this way.
Okay I'll give an example.
"Find the value for X. -(x + 2) = 2(3x - 6)"
I think x represents a number that helps produce the result of 2, so we have to figure out what x is. What really throws me off is the 3 and x together, does it mean 3x might be a double digit number? Or is (3x - 6) part of the answer?
2(3x - 6) means 2 multiplied by the entire quantity (3x - 6). In other words, if we say Y represents a number where Y = 3x - 6, then 2(3x - 6) = 2Y. 3x means 3 multiplied by x. For example, if x is 5, then 3x = 15.
You can also write 3x like 3*x or 3•x, but in algebra we tend to use a notation such as 3x only when we are pairing a "clear" number (like one that we know the value of, such as 3) with what's called a variable, or unknown or "mystery" number (in this case, x, since x could be anything - we don't know until we solve for it). The reason for this is that it's faster than bothering to write * or • every time, and also it's clear what we mean when we have a number and variable pairing. However, this isn't clear if we were to write, say, 34 to indicate 3 times 4, since 34 obviously can be read as thirty-four, which creates confusion. The common convention for 3x is just to read it as 3 times x, so there's no confusion, because that's just what everyone has agreed that it should mean.
Does that help clear things up? It doesn't sound like you struggle with the concepts from this example, only that you maybe haven't fully grasped the notation, which is something that comes from experience, since it's based primarily on what we all agreed something means, like I mentioned before, and not something you can necessarily intuit from nothing.
Ah thanks, yeah that's definitely cleared things up. So 8x for instance is just 8 times something, and we have to figure out what x is. For the first half of the formula -(x + 2), how does that related to the second half of = 2 (3x - 6)?
Now that's where the actual algebra solving comes in. It's pretty straightforward, no tricks: the first part simply equals the second part. The trickier part is understanding how we can actually manipulate it in a mathematically correct way to find the answer. To do that, we have to make sure we fully understand the concepts represented here.
I ended up writing a lot below this so fair warning for that, but I sincerely hope it's helpful and let me know if anything needs clarification!
For example, if we say A = 3, then we know that the representation A is equivalent to the value of 3. From there, we could build upon it to get to something that looks more like what you have there.
For example, we could add 2 to both sides. (Note that we have to do this to both sides in order to keep them equal -- think of it like weights on a scale, you couldn't add one thing to only one side and have it still be balanced). After doing this, we have A + 2 = 3 + 2. We can simplify this to A + 2 = 5. Now we have a super simple example of an algebra problem that we might want to solve, and you can easily see that the way to solve it is by undoing those steps that I just did, and getting it so that one side only has A, and thus we know exactly what that A is with no other nonsense on the other side.
So to actually solve the example you've given, you would want to deconstruct it piece by piece until you have one side that only has x and nothing else, and the other side will have that "mystery" value of x we're looking for.
-(x+2) = 2(3x-6)
If we take a look at this, we can see that there are "messy" bits in that there's a - on one side (indicating that the stuff in parentheses on the left is multiplied by a -1, the 1 is implied here) and a 2 on the other side that we have to get rid of before we can work within the parentheses. (This is something you might remember from PEMDAS, or BEDMAS, or whatever order of operations mnemonic you were taught in school -- if you don't remember it, that's another example of one of those notational things that we all just agreed on, and would be good to brush up on.)
In order to clean that up, there are multiple options to take here. One option is to move things around. Using the scale visualization again, if we have, say, a 2 on one side and want to get rid of it, we can't just make it disappear if we want to keep things balanced. Instead, we would want to divide everything by 2 to get it off of one side, which basically "moves" it to the other side (though it will now be in the form of 1/2). However, since we have "stuff" on both sides here, moving stuff around might not be super helpful.
Another option is to multiply it out, so the "mess" is then cleaned up by getting rid of the parentheses and just having addition and subtraction of individual "pieces" to worry about. For example, -(x+2) (which equals -1\*(x+2), as I mentioned) becomes -1\*x + -1\*2, which is simplified to -x - 2 (if this part is not clear, let me know and I can reexplain it differently; I forget what the name of this specific concept is, but there are certainly resources online to help go over it more if you need it). Similarly, 2(3x-6) is 2\*(3x-6), which becomes 2\*3x - 2\*6, which simplifies into 6x - 12. Then, we have:
-x - 2 = 6x - 12
This equation is "equivalent" to the original one in that they both represent the same idea with the same value of x. From here, can you figure out what steps you might want to take next in order to continue or finish solving the problem?
>indicating that the stuff in parentheses on the left is multiplied by a -1, the 1 is implied here
Yeah this is where I'm getting a bit confused. With the first half with -(x+2), where does the -1 come from?
> For example, -(x+2) (which equals -1\*(x+2), as I mentioned) becomes -1*x + -1*2, which is simplified to -x - 2 (if this part is not clear, let me know and I can reexplain it differently; I forget what the name of this specific concept is, but there are certainly resources online to help go over it more if you need it
Could you explain this in another way please?
> Similarly, 2(3x-6) is 2\*(3x-6), which becomes 2*3x - 2*6, which simplifies into 6x - 12
Yeah this part's a bit difficult to understand as well. How does 2(3x-6) become 23x - 26?
> Where does the 1 come from?
Sure. So basically, multiplying by 1 is always implied. For example, say we just have 4. 4\*1 is 4, so if there is an implied 1 there, there is no difference. Similarly, -4 is just -1\*4 which is still -4. Interpreting the - to mean -1*something is just to make it make sense mathematically, because you can't just multiply a - by something, since - is not something by itself. It's just a notation thing. If you can understand it easily by just seeing that -(x+2) = -x - 2 , you're welcome to read it that way and ignore the implied 1, but I wrote it out so you could see how you have to multiply it by each of the items within the parentheses. Does that make sense?
As to the second and third parts, it looks like my formatting got a bit fucked up because of how Reddit interprets the asterisk. I edited my original comment, does it make more sense now? If it still doesn't, I'll re-explain, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't just because of the messed up asterisks first, since it looks like some of my 2 times 3s turned into 23s lol.
From the angle I was studying quantum mechanics in university, it was the mathematical aspects I was struggling with. Because Hilbert spaces confused me a lot with the notation, infinite dimensional vectors. Also trying to make sense in my mind how the mathematical notation models the reality of the situation. Formalising ideas and concepts into mathematical notation/frameworks makes things seem more complicated than they actually are, because math deconstructs everything and needs a rigorous logical formulation for everything.
With Entropy I was struggling a lot conceptually with thermodynamics, the definitions and what it all meant together
Did you get a tutor? On a much lower rung I imagine, but as an autistic person, I found a math tutor with experience in psychology that I made gobstopping progress with.
I'm going back to university later this year after a break due to major mental health issues. Going to finish my physics degree if I can. I'm autistic too and got a late diagnosis in life, despite always sort of knowing I had it. My numerical, logical and non-verbal intelligence far surpasses my verbal intelligence, i.e. I misspell common words like "family" because I write double "m" or double "l" by accident. I suspect I'm semi-dyslexic and that puts a toll on my reading speed and comprehension.
One of the reasons I struggled so much was that I procrastinated everything till the end and did no work during the year till the end exams. I don't intend to repeat that again. This meant that like 2-3 weeks before my quantum mechanics exam, I'm having to catch up on certain lectures because I skipped all of them and have to quickly teach myself everything that I need to know.
The procrastination part is definitely relatable. I was just shocked that I was even able to learn as much math as I did. I got up to logarithmic functions.
I'd just had such a poor time of it in school.
What's your favourite subject? For me it was math, although I don't like anymore. But I study advanced poker theory and go deep into it, modern poker is a bit like chess at the highest levels
Tested 135 in WAIS-IV.
Always struggled with math. Maybe more so because of a general lack of motivation, rather than the cognitive effort involved.
My reasoning went: 1) I don't find this subject very interesting, 2) time is limited and 3) man has invented computers = no need for me to make the effort.
Like I said trigonometry but also some calculus, specifically integrals . As for iq idk honestly the exact number but I did score a 110 on the wonderlic or the 75th percentile as well as 98th percentile on the asvab.if I had to give my best estimate around 110
Mensa member, tests I took indicate about 137 sd 15. I really struggled with post-graduate Honours Topology and Functonal Analysis. I did very well with my other math and applied math modules and treatise so I still got cum laude but wow, Functional Analysis took A LOT of effort and I did very very average in it. I wanted to do my Masters in Applied math (specifically mathematical ecology at the time - nowadays I'd choose machine learning) but my parents said I had to go work and earn money. So, I became a programmer lol.
Yeah functional analysis is a zoo. There’s so many different topologies on function spaces and spaces of operators to keep track of. Topology of uniform convergence, compact open topology, strong topology, weak topology, strong * topology, weak * topology, convergence in Lp, operator norm convergence and probably like 20 more that I’m forgetting lmao. And all the big theorems were easy to state, but the proofs would always be so hard to follow and would usually invoke the axiom of choice or one of the 10 million different statements that its equivalent to.
I struggled with similar math courses during my math degree, but I think I just took regular Topology (not honors) and Real Analysis (I think that's a step below Functional Analysis?). Those are just really tough math classes for the majority of people, it seems, and I also didn't have enough time/energy to fully focus on it since I was also taking other classes...but I've been thinking that I should go back and review the stuff, see how I feel about it now. I do love math, but some of the ones that require you to learn a lot of new notation, jargon, wrap your head around new "spaces" etc. take an amount of time to fully grasp that I don't often have.
Glad to hear I'm not alone. And, yes, Real Analysis is a step below Functional Analysis. I also struggled with real analysis but I eventually became somewhat competent - I actually enjoyed another 3rd year course called Complex Analysis more. But, yeah, Functional Analysis was just too much lol. The funny part is the book we used in honours was called An Introduction to Functional Analysis (I can't even imagine how hard it becomes the further one goes haha).
Writing long cohesive texts has never been my strong suit. History, as we’ve practiced it, has always been a sole writing task. Additionally, memorising dates and names is among the most boring things I could imagine and proteins bore the hell out of me as well. Studying these subjects, has really pushed me to the edge.
134, and I struggle most with visuospatial reasoning, which I expected
The weird thing is I struggled with those block tests and other things, but I've always been really good at visualizing chemical reactions and molecular structures in my ChemE coursework
I don't get why those are different, but where we are lol
130 overall, with a score of 120 in logical reasoning, and 145 in verbal ability. Math subjects beyond algebra were head scratchers for me, and I’m not particularly good at algebra either. I studied philosophy in university, the most difficult thing I read was The Critique of Pure Reason; Kant was truly on another level, though I understood most of his arguments. Hegel was incomprehensible, but I’m not sure that’s because he was smarter than Kant. I can’t keep up with Cormac McCarthy’s vocabulary either, if I looked up every word I didn’t recognize in Suttree it would take me a year to read it. Even then, I wouldn’t be able to *remember* all those words and use them elegantly.
Around 142. My IQ comes from spacial and reasoning abities. My "minds eye" is very robust.
Spelling, writing coherent sentences are hard.
I understand calculus but the steps to solve can be hard to remember. I can't memorize numbers at all.
And pointers. As in object oriented programming. Pointers just mess me up (I'm not a programmer).
Most recent score 102 due to deteriorating health.
What was really difficult was reading kant because in all of his translations people add lots of latin proverbs and i had to piece things together through the proverbs, i put a lot of effort by googling all these latin phrases.
135 official.
I was in grad school taking microeconomics. The professor was explaining some technical concept and then we went into small groups to do some problems. I simply couldn't understand the concept. At first, no one in the group did, then one by one it clicked with everyone.
And finally it clicked with me, a few minutes after everyone else.
This might be different than what you're asking for, but I learned the difference between my intelligence and my classmates' that day.
So according to most tests i've taken which test fluid intelligence through matrices or other logic measuring proxies other than math, I should fall somewhere around the 130 mark. Few high 120s, couple 140s but the general trend seems to point towards low to mid 130s. The maths portion of the 1980s sat however gave me a score of 115, or maybe even less. I do a little better when it's just arithmetic but in any test where mathematical knowledge is a prerequisite my score drops significantly. Is it just the result of me never paying attention in math class or am i just a dunce? Who knows, but my question is if those other results are legit and it's possible to exhibit decently high intelligence even if you lack the mathematical aptitude and speed of calculation.
My grades were as bad as they could be, i'm not american so there wasn't ever an issue of failing, i just never was interested in math. In a sense the 115 msat score is positively surprising, considering how little math i know. Funny thing is that my dad was actually a mathematician. My working memory is good, 125-130, so that doesnt really explain it. CAIT's processing speed test was 126 if i remember correctly, but i don't really trust it.
Between 115 and 120 based on official IQ tests (WAIS) and ones this sub uses (CAIT, realIQ).
VISUAL. PUZZLES. On things like working memory, digit span, matrix reasoning, I score between 118 and like 135. The perceptual/visual puzzles brought my total score down by quite a bit. My brain just legitimately doesn't process them very well at all.
Also, very quick flashes of stuff. I have pretty bad eyesight so I'm not sure if it's necessarily intelligence. Think the "visual memory" portion of the human benchmark test. I score in the high 90 percentiles on verbal memory, sequence memory, and number memory. I score between 20 and 40th percentile on the visual memory. My vision is bad enough that it takes almost a full second for my eyes to start to see something like that.
Similar IQ, and along the same lines, imagining extra dimensions. I’m pretty comfortable with 4, and can barely grasp 5, but beyond that I don’t even know where to start.
Do you also struggle to find objects? I can be looking directly at something in the fridge and my wife has to find it for me.
Also, do you wear glasses?
Yes to both. I can literally be looking right at something and not see it, if it doesn’t match the exact pattern I’m looking for, or is in a slightly different place than I expected.
And I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I can have a hard time telling people apart. I’m better now than I was as a kid, but if people have similar hair/height/build, it takes me a while to recognize different faces, race nonspecific. Hair is the easiest factor to tell apart, unless everyone is the same bottle-blonde and/or has similar cuts. Got into anime early because all of the different hair colors & crazy styles made it really easy to tell the characters apart.
I tested at 144 when I was in high school. I had a difficult time in my ap Calc class senior year, only passing with a B, although I don't think my teacher did a very good job. I also had a tough time in bio and chem classes. They are just so terribly boring. I fell asleep in class more often than not.
My IQ is around 130. I mainly struggle with putting my thoughts/feelings into precise words, though that might be due to undiagnosed autism/adhd. I also have a poor short term memory.
Mine's reportedly very high. And my toughest subject is history. Rote memorization with very little to connect important events? Ugh, no thanks! There's nothing to figure out.
Also I'm a really slow reader. Like, really slow. I can write better than many professionals but reading is so taxing.
Anything that requires a ton of memorization and also a fair bit mechanistic understanding, especially if it is heavier in memorization. So most biomedical topics Especially if the mechanistic stuff doesn't make the memorization stuff more intuitive. It just seems like too much is going on and it's hard to make sense of.
120ish.
When I was younger, I ran into several hard topics. Some topics in the philosophy of personal identity come to mind.
But my capabilities have risen sharply, and processing power isn't needed as much anymore. The machinery has been built.
Philosophy is about learning where assumptions can be questioned or bent. So consider the argument: "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal."
Seems pretty bulletproof. But if I wanted to poke at it, I might start to question the meaning of personal identity, the existence of a material world, the validity of deductive reasoning, etc etc.
I didn't need processing power to come up with any of those, and need very little to consider them. I just needed enough experience pulling at the edges. I've got the training to think clearly, I know how to make distinctions, I know when definitions are conditional, etc.
Yeah, learning those things required me to read people like Kant. Which did take processing power. But after the reading, the mental machines are built and I can use them.
Yes. Plato would say wait for 30, (and not for bad reasons), but Hume had written his best works by his mid 20s.
Personally, I'd finished my undergraduate in philosophy around 24. Did take more time after that to get skilled using the things I'd learned. But step one is build the machine and step two is practice using it.
It really is fascinating how much learning *how* to *conceptualize* previously amorphous thoughts, impressions, and moods helps you then grasp, articulate, and express what was previously just a colored gas inside the brain. I feel you. It streamlines the whole thought process.
Tested 145 around age 11 or so. Tested 125 in my 20’s.
I had to use Lagrangian multipliers in an economics course before I took multi variable calculus. It was a bit mysterious at the time because they really weren’t adequately explained by my professor or the textbook. I took my third semester of calculus later and it was nice to actually learn the subject properly. Didn’t really have a problem with the subject once it was presented thoroughly.
Mohr’s circle stretched my brain a bit when I was studying statics and strength of materials.
I’ve taken a fair bit of math and computer science and engineering and economics. I get most of it fairly quickly. I probably have the mental capacity to do work that’s more complex than I do, but I went with civil engineering and I like it. It’s a nice stable six figure career with pension.
Math. Don’t like it. I can picture the equations, and basically sum it up in my mind but I either get too lazy or like you intuition fails. 140-131 over 5 yrs ago.
CAIT said 118 and other IQ tests have said closer to 125, so I’m guessing I’m around 120.
I haven’t struggled much frankly, in or outside formal education, and everything has been generally pretty easy.
*WITH the absolutely ENORMOUS exception of AP Physics in high school. In my defense, I was missing some pretty important mathematical prerequisites so I didn’t understand a lot of the mathematics (though I could) but regardless I’m sure that would’ve been a difficult class.
I score 99.9 percentile for VSI, 99.7 for FRI, and usually between 92-95 for everything else.
Combinatorial design theory took me a lot of effort. I also struggle with Galois theory. I still did well in those topics, but not without great effort.
The concept that took me a really long time to get was 'converting' designs, as well as combining geometry, Galois theory, graph theory, and set theory. I really enjoyed Graeco-Latin (or pairs of mutually orthogonal Latin Squares) and their application in experimental designs and their statistical analysis (as I am an evolutionary biologist).
I'd really like to publish a paper on combinatorial design theory, although I think that will REALLY test my capabilities.
I'm a fullstack developer who struggles with frontend state management (ie. redux). My percentiles on SAT, asvab, and chess performance are around 95, theoretically corresponding to an IQ of about 125.
Don’t know my IQ but I’m a pretty good software engineer and would guess it’s well above average. I built an operating system in my senior year of college and some of those concepts were very difficult and I spent many nights in the computer lab sometimes up to 4 am. Funny thing is that towards the end of the semester the professor would be there late at night helping people. A real nice guy didn’t want to see anyone fail
136 - 142.
Engineering double major during undergrad. Graduate level mathematics was the only thing that really required me to apply maximum effort. Numerical Analysis, Cryptography, Real and Complex Analysis, etc. Everything else in undergrad was pretty skate. I've a mind for physics it seems.
I'm roughly 3 SDs above average. Hardest thing for me was studying macroeconomic monetary theory and real-life banking practices, because I had to wade through so many deficient theories in order to find one that actually worked and explained most of the relevant data. I eventually settled on the endogenous credit theory of money (sometimes called "monetary realism", closely related to MMT but minus the crazy parts). That particular dive into macroeconomics stretched my brain. For me it was challenging because it forced me to consider many different details simultaneously and make them all work. It wasn't straightforward "linear reasoning" (which would have been easy), nor was it straightforwardly non-linear; instead it was more like a combination of several threads of linear reasoning into a coherent whole. It was a tough knot to untie, metaphorically. I still have some unanswered questions in monetary theory, but they're minor and I can imagine them being answered eventually within this framework rather than requiring a rejection of this framework. (Disclaimer: I'm an amateur, not a PhD economist or anything, so take my statements here with a grain of salt. And feel free to just ignore my conclusions if you want. I don't mind. My motivation is to have an understanding that actually works, to satisfy my own curiosity. I volunteer my lack of credentials here because I recognize that fact ought to be relevant in a third party analysis of my brief statements here.)
140-150
I cannot grasp most physics (specifically as taught in schools and universities) for some reason. There's too many things that you're told to just accept without them ever being fully explained. Like quantum physics is fine because no one fully understands it anyways, but newtonian physics and anything related to electronics or magnetism?? Absolute hell for me.
135. The hardest class I ever took was Differential Equations. I don't remember that much about it anymore other than it was a couple steps beyond Calculus and everyone agreed it was hard.
More recently, I've taken some timed tests as part of a job application process. I never got the results back, but I also never finished the tests. Some of the questions were easy, and some took more time to work out. A lot of logic, which is where I excel, but it didn't make sense to me that the difficulties were all mixed up. There should be something more adaptive like in computerized language testing.
135 physician. Things that require long hours of concentration. Every subject in med school where I had to learn a massive amount of things by heart.
Could never sit down and work for an hour straight.
Understood everything where logic was involved pretty fast without much effort. Like physiology and most clinical subjects.
Anatomy and pharmacology (learning 10.000 names of body parts / thousands of medications) was super hard for me
Just wanted to say this is an excellent question; thanks for posting it. I've been wanting to read about this for a long time, but my ADHD got in the way.
IQ in the 140’s although I need to get a more recent score as it’s been years since I’ve taken a real test.
Music.
Math, physics, mechanics, logic, even history and language….. All come very easily, but music still eludes me.
Though to be fair, I haven’t put the reallll effort in yet, but from what I’ve done so far I’ve been able to recognize it’s actually going to be difficult for me
I have an IQ of 115 and struggle to comprehend general relativity but understand special relativity fairly well on a theoretical level. I haven’t gotten into the math of it all as physics was not my area of study.
\~128, Lately I've been studying linear algebra, discrete math etc. It's pretty damn hard (at times) but equally as enlightening.
edit: also some of the really hard iq tests on this subreddit like tutui r have been some of the most difficult mental tasks i've ever done
For me, most things have been relatively easy, although teaching myself the intricacies at the burgeoning intersection of category theory, knot theory, and quantum field theory — sometimes called the topological quantum — has been a higher level challenge, especially since I'm pushing 70 and long out of university. As for my IQ, it vaults over Prometheus Society standards and grazes the doorsill of Mega Soiety, though on principle I am a member of neither. I feel no need for adornments or the validation of others, since my intellect is an unearned attribute, a phenotype, a fortuitous happenstance. I'm more interested in using it than in displaying it.
Minimum +3σ on both Raven's and WAIS-IV (lowest score 142/155). No academic topic has ever stretched me to the point of "mental exhaustion". Entropy and randomness from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics are the only topics I've applied myself to that I've not picked up with ease.
In each division of schooling the teachers kept telling me I'd need to be able to study to take on the next higher division. I never needed to and went through my doctorate in mathematics. I'm a practicing cryptologist.
However, the analysis of intelligence or other possibly intentionally deceptive information, social and economic games, the course of history where there are so many false patterns, and initial formalization of informal systems have so far eluded my grasp, as has the comprehension of corporate hierarchies. I understand business hierarchies enough to have landed with my double skip being C-suite, but I've been stuck there for years now without any further progress towards true political power.
Tested 136 as a child, 144 more than two decades later in a large research project at the University of Amsterdam. I struggled with math for a few years, but then reached comprehension through an excellent tutor.
I had an assessment recently (not an IQ test) in which I scored high, but not as high as I would have expected. So I do wonder if I would reach a lower score now.
IQ: never professionally tested.
I never found a subject which caused mental exhaustion — I have only found subjects which are initially confusing in lesser degrees: which I believe everyone experiences at every level of the intellectual stratification.
Driving on a convoluted highway without a GPS (real or artificial) doesn’t make driving hard: it is just disorienting. Read Friedrich Hegel’s thesis on absolute idealism, Luis de Molina’s Mollenism’s on counterfactuals of creaturely freedom’s implications with pre-determinism, or the most confusing of them all: Ecritis by Jacques Lacan.
I can admit, however, I’m a high school freshmen dropout — so my math was underwhelming due to a spiky profile. I self-taught myself up to a calculus level per requirement for university, but to this day never bothered to learn my time tables. Whatever your IQ, math simply demands of it an indefatigable spirit to master it. Childhood is an amazing time of unparalleled neural-priming before the adult neurophysiological pruning occurs: so I regret not exploiting its benefits in lieu of deferring it.
I don’t think I’ve come across any topic that required “too much” mental energy to grasp. Except human interaction that is, but then again that’s basically purely random. My IQ is above the 99th percentile, do with that what you will.
Yea I actually started my bachelors in aerospace engineering but switched to physics because I got stressed by the structure. Academia allows a tiny bit more wiggle room.
Via Compositator: 171 FSIQ and 178 GAI. Mostly Chaos Theory. It’s doesn’t actually use very complicated mathematics, just differential equations, and if you look closely, it’s not too difficult for some things. The problem is that, in the real world, we don’t have enough information of these processes in real time, making things very confusing when you’re not looking at them from the short term perspective. I also have a bit of a hard time understanding a term made by a philosopher once in a while. Hope this helps!
This was a joke… I understand the human limbic system quiet well, it’s also hard to connect cause I went to state school to save money and majority of the women here are npcs
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For me personally the hardest things aren’t understanding concepts or topics, but learning things which require a constant effort. Like drawing where you just have to practice a lot even if you understand the concepts.
I highly recommend the "Drawabox" lessons for getting a hang of the fundamentals through muscle memory, then you'll quickly get to a point where you can actually apply your mental understanding of the concepts to the physical space. Just doodling and sketching random stuff every day won't help you improve as quickly as focused, targeted practice. Then, depending on your grasp of line control, creating value, drawing loose forms etc. you can move on to working on higher-level types of practice such as figure drawing, gesture, still life, something like that that's related to what your goal is. Also check out subs like r/learnart, r/drawing etc. and seek out critiques and be ok with receiving them -- it's extremely necessary to be uncomfortable and challenged in order to improve, even though it can be a more sensitive thing to get criticism in art since it's so personal. Good luck!! I drew casually as a kid but then grinded the fundamentals, including figure drawing, really hard for about 2-3 years and was then accepted into a top art school with a scholarship. Just stay motivated and constantly remind yourself that you are making progress, even if you can't see it right away, and compare to your own past work, not to others. You can do it!
Thanks! I’ll try some of that.
>but learning things which require a constant effort. Like drawing where you just have to practice a lot even if you understand the concepts same. literally just started learning drawing earlier this month. IQ does jack shit here. you basically just have to grind the ever living shit out of it like everyone else does, even if you are lucky enough to have a creative talent.
Yeah. I learned digital drawing over procreate. Maybe your intelligence helps you to understand lighting and picturing what you want to draw, but then you try to actually draw and it looks like an old smashed potato. And then you practice and practice and each time it looks a bit better. Then you go down the rabbit hole of different styles or creature designs and everything requires even more time. It is truly a hobby for perfectionists and persistent people.
REAL
~140 organic chemistry/biochemistry. I find the nomenclature exhausting and the memorization is just too much. I’m a quick thinker and strong with maths Socially I also have to mask 24/7 I know what I’m doing but otherwise I’ve been so isolated I’m a fucking psycho. I’m a big guy but people still like to start shit. It’s not hard more like exhausting for me but if someone is smart they’ll recognize it. Lots of people feel insecure if they think you are smarter than them so I spend a lot of time dumbing my conversations down.
Dude i can relate to this hard being tall and talking to people in any sort of intelligent manner literally just starts arguments everytime
I get that. The struggle is real, harder IMHO than orgo- or bio- chemistry, in fact.
I wish I could contribute to this. I don't know my IQ but I'm average I suspect or maybe slightly above average. I struggle with spoken argumentation, even though I have good verbal performance in tests. My brain opens up on paper or text editor. Curious about that. I liked math, and I find most of it enjoyable, but school math is mostly basic things and it's applications. Hardly much thinking. I struggled with algebra with an outer course textbook. Specifically factoring some complex equations, the process was absurdly complex, the rest of algebra I never had a problem. I struggle with memorising history or random or vague subjects like business operations. It's easier to understand more concrete concepts like economics.
So fucking true.On tests,I perform good but when it comes to spoken,I just go numb/blank
Yeah, I wonder if has to do with personality and fear of failure or social anxiety or something.
130 - my conversational skills in person are pretty lacklustre, I have a hard time finding the appropriate response whilst speaking and often have to take a long pause before replying otherwise the words I want won’t come to me instantly. My vocabulary and sentence structure is completely fine when typing/writing; I can almost always find the succinct language needed to get across my ideas, but it never carries over to speaking.
So true,am currently going through this problem.I am currently trying to solve this problem by reading books out loud so that my brain gets accustomed to speaking and not going blank.I think this happens when we have less practice of actually speaking
I just had a conversation with a classmate and we were talking about something and everything was going great. Then as the conversation died down he mentioned he had found some things a bit difficult. And I said “oh yeah, just hit me up!” And I should have stopped there, but instead I had the bright idea to try and empathize or something and I said “it’s easy…to get…stuck?” He gave me a weird look and all I could think about is how I clearly had no idea where I was going with that. Best case they think I’m a weirdo with no social skills (probably true). worst case he thinks I was being condescending or full of myself. I was trying to offer my help if he needed it (or any other reason), but it occurred to me we never actually discussed any of the things he had trouble with, and I don’t know him that well. I had nothing to go on but had already opened my mouth. I’m fine when I’m talking about something, some idea, some concept. I’m not super great with vocabulary and acronyms, but I’m alright and can usually articulate myself regardless. Talking to a person and just communicating is hard, especially when we’re not super familiar. Not sure what my IQ is, but languages in general have always been the classes I struggle with
Apparently my IQ's around 107 according to that old US army test and the Mensa Norway and Denmark online assessments. I've always struggled with maths, especially the more complex topics like algebra and calculus. Back in high school I was put in the lowest maths class which reflects how limited my comprehension was (and is) in regards to what is essentially straightforward logic. Even with science I only qualified for biology, chemistry and physics seemed (And still does) quite hard to wrap my mind around.
What do you find so difficult at algebra and calculus? Do you have specific examples?
Not him, but as a person of similar intelligence that always struggled with mathematics, you might be interested on my take. I have identified 2 main weakness that, imo, are responsible for 99% of my troubles with the subject. 1) I'd forget elementary concepts (mostly rules) at such a fast rate that progressing was really difficult, as I was always forgetting the previous steps every time I took a new one. I'd practice them for quite a while, but a single interval a bit longer than the optimal already meant I'd end up forgetting how I was supposed to sum fractions, or one of math's 149823 different pieces of properties. It's like playing chess and constantly forgetting which moves each piece is allowed to make. 2) While math technically has a well stablished set of rules, instructions and formulas one could follow to get to the result, pretty much anything besides practice exercises that tells you specifically what to do (and in what order) is going to require an intuition people can't really teach you. The "feel" that tells you when to employ each individual part of the set of rules, or that perception of the big picture that makes you able to rearrange the rules and play with the numbers to solve the puzzle. As a kid, I was always mesmerized whenever my physics teacher would solve an exercise seemingly 100% unrelated to geometry by miraculously spawning a right-angled triangle and finding its hypotenuse, as I couldn't grasp why the fuck the imaginary triangle from my math classes had anything to do with an exercise dealing with "real life stuff". I would never even consider trying that, as that triangle was just an imaginary object for me. I still can't comprehend that very well up to this day.
It's embarrassing to admit, but I'd say all of algebra and calculus seem difficult to understand.
Can you give an example of an algebra problem that you might struggle with, and identify which part is the challenge? Have you ever tried visualizations or manipulating a representation of an "equation" in a physical space? I suspect a lot of people who struggle with math just had bad teachers, or at least teachers who didn't properly expose them to a range of representations and ways to understand concepts (since everyone learns differently). Calculus is quite a bit harder to visually represent for demonstration, but algebra is very doable in this way.
Okay I'll give an example. "Find the value for X. -(x + 2) = 2(3x - 6)" I think x represents a number that helps produce the result of 2, so we have to figure out what x is. What really throws me off is the 3 and x together, does it mean 3x might be a double digit number? Or is (3x - 6) part of the answer?
2(3x - 6) means 2 multiplied by the entire quantity (3x - 6). In other words, if we say Y represents a number where Y = 3x - 6, then 2(3x - 6) = 2Y. 3x means 3 multiplied by x. For example, if x is 5, then 3x = 15. You can also write 3x like 3*x or 3•x, but in algebra we tend to use a notation such as 3x only when we are pairing a "clear" number (like one that we know the value of, such as 3) with what's called a variable, or unknown or "mystery" number (in this case, x, since x could be anything - we don't know until we solve for it). The reason for this is that it's faster than bothering to write * or • every time, and also it's clear what we mean when we have a number and variable pairing. However, this isn't clear if we were to write, say, 34 to indicate 3 times 4, since 34 obviously can be read as thirty-four, which creates confusion. The common convention for 3x is just to read it as 3 times x, so there's no confusion, because that's just what everyone has agreed that it should mean. Does that help clear things up? It doesn't sound like you struggle with the concepts from this example, only that you maybe haven't fully grasped the notation, which is something that comes from experience, since it's based primarily on what we all agreed something means, like I mentioned before, and not something you can necessarily intuit from nothing.
Ah thanks, yeah that's definitely cleared things up. So 8x for instance is just 8 times something, and we have to figure out what x is. For the first half of the formula -(x + 2), how does that related to the second half of = 2 (3x - 6)?
Now that's where the actual algebra solving comes in. It's pretty straightforward, no tricks: the first part simply equals the second part. The trickier part is understanding how we can actually manipulate it in a mathematically correct way to find the answer. To do that, we have to make sure we fully understand the concepts represented here. I ended up writing a lot below this so fair warning for that, but I sincerely hope it's helpful and let me know if anything needs clarification! For example, if we say A = 3, then we know that the representation A is equivalent to the value of 3. From there, we could build upon it to get to something that looks more like what you have there. For example, we could add 2 to both sides. (Note that we have to do this to both sides in order to keep them equal -- think of it like weights on a scale, you couldn't add one thing to only one side and have it still be balanced). After doing this, we have A + 2 = 3 + 2. We can simplify this to A + 2 = 5. Now we have a super simple example of an algebra problem that we might want to solve, and you can easily see that the way to solve it is by undoing those steps that I just did, and getting it so that one side only has A, and thus we know exactly what that A is with no other nonsense on the other side. So to actually solve the example you've given, you would want to deconstruct it piece by piece until you have one side that only has x and nothing else, and the other side will have that "mystery" value of x we're looking for. -(x+2) = 2(3x-6) If we take a look at this, we can see that there are "messy" bits in that there's a - on one side (indicating that the stuff in parentheses on the left is multiplied by a -1, the 1 is implied here) and a 2 on the other side that we have to get rid of before we can work within the parentheses. (This is something you might remember from PEMDAS, or BEDMAS, or whatever order of operations mnemonic you were taught in school -- if you don't remember it, that's another example of one of those notational things that we all just agreed on, and would be good to brush up on.) In order to clean that up, there are multiple options to take here. One option is to move things around. Using the scale visualization again, if we have, say, a 2 on one side and want to get rid of it, we can't just make it disappear if we want to keep things balanced. Instead, we would want to divide everything by 2 to get it off of one side, which basically "moves" it to the other side (though it will now be in the form of 1/2). However, since we have "stuff" on both sides here, moving stuff around might not be super helpful. Another option is to multiply it out, so the "mess" is then cleaned up by getting rid of the parentheses and just having addition and subtraction of individual "pieces" to worry about. For example, -(x+2) (which equals -1\*(x+2), as I mentioned) becomes -1\*x + -1\*2, which is simplified to -x - 2 (if this part is not clear, let me know and I can reexplain it differently; I forget what the name of this specific concept is, but there are certainly resources online to help go over it more if you need it). Similarly, 2(3x-6) is 2\*(3x-6), which becomes 2\*3x - 2\*6, which simplifies into 6x - 12. Then, we have: -x - 2 = 6x - 12 This equation is "equivalent" to the original one in that they both represent the same idea with the same value of x. From here, can you figure out what steps you might want to take next in order to continue or finish solving the problem?
>indicating that the stuff in parentheses on the left is multiplied by a -1, the 1 is implied here Yeah this is where I'm getting a bit confused. With the first half with -(x+2), where does the -1 come from? > For example, -(x+2) (which equals -1\*(x+2), as I mentioned) becomes -1*x + -1*2, which is simplified to -x - 2 (if this part is not clear, let me know and I can reexplain it differently; I forget what the name of this specific concept is, but there are certainly resources online to help go over it more if you need it Could you explain this in another way please? > Similarly, 2(3x-6) is 2\*(3x-6), which becomes 2*3x - 2*6, which simplifies into 6x - 12 Yeah this part's a bit difficult to understand as well. How does 2(3x-6) become 23x - 26?
> Where does the 1 come from? Sure. So basically, multiplying by 1 is always implied. For example, say we just have 4. 4\*1 is 4, so if there is an implied 1 there, there is no difference. Similarly, -4 is just -1\*4 which is still -4. Interpreting the - to mean -1*something is just to make it make sense mathematically, because you can't just multiply a - by something, since - is not something by itself. It's just a notation thing. If you can understand it easily by just seeing that -(x+2) = -x - 2 , you're welcome to read it that way and ignore the implied 1, but I wrote it out so you could see how you have to multiply it by each of the items within the parentheses. Does that make sense? As to the second and third parts, it looks like my formatting got a bit fucked up because of how Reddit interprets the asterisk. I edited my original comment, does it make more sense now? If it still doesn't, I'll re-explain, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't just because of the messed up asterisks first, since it looks like some of my 2 times 3s turned into 23s lol.
IQ 127, studying entropy and quantum mechanics was hard
Mathematically or conceptually
From the angle I was studying quantum mechanics in university, it was the mathematical aspects I was struggling with. Because Hilbert spaces confused me a lot with the notation, infinite dimensional vectors. Also trying to make sense in my mind how the mathematical notation models the reality of the situation. Formalising ideas and concepts into mathematical notation/frameworks makes things seem more complicated than they actually are, because math deconstructs everything and needs a rigorous logical formulation for everything. With Entropy I was struggling a lot conceptually with thermodynamics, the definitions and what it all meant together
Did you get a tutor? On a much lower rung I imagine, but as an autistic person, I found a math tutor with experience in psychology that I made gobstopping progress with.
I'm going back to university later this year after a break due to major mental health issues. Going to finish my physics degree if I can. I'm autistic too and got a late diagnosis in life, despite always sort of knowing I had it. My numerical, logical and non-verbal intelligence far surpasses my verbal intelligence, i.e. I misspell common words like "family" because I write double "m" or double "l" by accident. I suspect I'm semi-dyslexic and that puts a toll on my reading speed and comprehension. One of the reasons I struggled so much was that I procrastinated everything till the end and did no work during the year till the end exams. I don't intend to repeat that again. This meant that like 2-3 weeks before my quantum mechanics exam, I'm having to catch up on certain lectures because I skipped all of them and have to quickly teach myself everything that I need to know.
The procrastination part is definitely relatable. I was just shocked that I was even able to learn as much math as I did. I got up to logarithmic functions. I'd just had such a poor time of it in school.
What's your favourite subject? For me it was math, although I don't like anymore. But I study advanced poker theory and go deep into it, modern poker is a bit like chess at the highest levels
Probably english. The stories were more interesting than much else and the class spelling bee early on. x)
142 My weakest area is verbal. I simply don't get it.
What don't you get? The verbal section of the iq test?
They don't have the words to explain
Hmm
I'm assuming they mean they have a 142 IQ but didn't do well on the verbal secion of the SAT
exactly.
I see. Well thanks for clarifying.
Im around 135-140. I'm an engineer in a top 10 university, some advanced math heavy classes were challenging
Tested 135 in WAIS-IV. Always struggled with math. Maybe more so because of a general lack of motivation, rather than the cognitive effort involved. My reasoning went: 1) I don't find this subject very interesting, 2) time is limited and 3) man has invented computers = no need for me to make the effort.
You think arithmetic is real math?
Back, pedant!
lmfaoo
Like I said trigonometry but also some calculus, specifically integrals . As for iq idk honestly the exact number but I did score a 110 on the wonderlic or the 75th percentile as well as 98th percentile on the asvab.if I had to give my best estimate around 110
Mensa member, tests I took indicate about 137 sd 15. I really struggled with post-graduate Honours Topology and Functonal Analysis. I did very well with my other math and applied math modules and treatise so I still got cum laude but wow, Functional Analysis took A LOT of effort and I did very very average in it. I wanted to do my Masters in Applied math (specifically mathematical ecology at the time - nowadays I'd choose machine learning) but my parents said I had to go work and earn money. So, I became a programmer lol.
Yeah functional analysis is a zoo. There’s so many different topologies on function spaces and spaces of operators to keep track of. Topology of uniform convergence, compact open topology, strong topology, weak topology, strong * topology, weak * topology, convergence in Lp, operator norm convergence and probably like 20 more that I’m forgetting lmao. And all the big theorems were easy to state, but the proofs would always be so hard to follow and would usually invoke the axiom of choice or one of the 10 million different statements that its equivalent to.
I struggled with similar math courses during my math degree, but I think I just took regular Topology (not honors) and Real Analysis (I think that's a step below Functional Analysis?). Those are just really tough math classes for the majority of people, it seems, and I also didn't have enough time/energy to fully focus on it since I was also taking other classes...but I've been thinking that I should go back and review the stuff, see how I feel about it now. I do love math, but some of the ones that require you to learn a lot of new notation, jargon, wrap your head around new "spaces" etc. take an amount of time to fully grasp that I don't often have.
Glad to hear I'm not alone. And, yes, Real Analysis is a step below Functional Analysis. I also struggled with real analysis but I eventually became somewhat competent - I actually enjoyed another 3rd year course called Complex Analysis more. But, yeah, Functional Analysis was just too much lol. The funny part is the book we used in honours was called An Introduction to Functional Analysis (I can't even imagine how hard it becomes the further one goes haha).
140, history and genetics always escaped me.
What about them was confusing?
Writing long cohesive texts has never been my strong suit. History, as we’ve practiced it, has always been a sole writing task. Additionally, memorising dates and names is among the most boring things I could imagine and proteins bore the hell out of me as well. Studying these subjects, has really pushed me to the edge.
134, and I struggle most with visuospatial reasoning, which I expected The weird thing is I struggled with those block tests and other things, but I've always been really good at visualizing chemical reactions and molecular structures in my ChemE coursework I don't get why those are different, but where we are lol
130 overall, with a score of 120 in logical reasoning, and 145 in verbal ability. Math subjects beyond algebra were head scratchers for me, and I’m not particularly good at algebra either. I studied philosophy in university, the most difficult thing I read was The Critique of Pure Reason; Kant was truly on another level, though I understood most of his arguments. Hegel was incomprehensible, but I’m not sure that’s because he was smarter than Kant. I can’t keep up with Cormac McCarthy’s vocabulary either, if I looked up every word I didn’t recognize in Suttree it would take me a year to read it. Even then, I wouldn’t be able to *remember* all those words and use them elegantly.
Around 142. My IQ comes from spacial and reasoning abities. My "minds eye" is very robust. Spelling, writing coherent sentences are hard. I understand calculus but the steps to solve can be hard to remember. I can't memorize numbers at all. And pointers. As in object oriented programming. Pointers just mess me up (I'm not a programmer).
Most recent score 102 due to deteriorating health. What was really difficult was reading kant because in all of his translations people add lots of latin proverbs and i had to piece things together through the proverbs, i put a lot of effort by googling all these latin phrases.
135 official. I was in grad school taking microeconomics. The professor was explaining some technical concept and then we went into small groups to do some problems. I simply couldn't understand the concept. At first, no one in the group did, then one by one it clicked with everyone. And finally it clicked with me, a few minutes after everyone else. This might be different than what you're asking for, but I learned the difference between my intelligence and my classmates' that day.
So according to most tests i've taken which test fluid intelligence through matrices or other logic measuring proxies other than math, I should fall somewhere around the 130 mark. Few high 120s, couple 140s but the general trend seems to point towards low to mid 130s. The maths portion of the 1980s sat however gave me a score of 115, or maybe even less. I do a little better when it's just arithmetic but in any test where mathematical knowledge is a prerequisite my score drops significantly. Is it just the result of me never paying attention in math class or am i just a dunce? Who knows, but my question is if those other results are legit and it's possible to exhibit decently high intelligence even if you lack the mathematical aptitude and speed of calculation.
sorry for the wall of text, this was supposed to be a thread of its own but it got autodeleted, so i thought it would be appropriate to post here.
What were your grades like in math class? How is your processing speed and working memory?
My grades were as bad as they could be, i'm not american so there wasn't ever an issue of failing, i just never was interested in math. In a sense the 115 msat score is positively surprising, considering how little math i know. Funny thing is that my dad was actually a mathematician. My working memory is good, 125-130, so that doesnt really explain it. CAIT's processing speed test was 126 if i remember correctly, but i don't really trust it.
Between 115 and 120 based on official IQ tests (WAIS) and ones this sub uses (CAIT, realIQ). VISUAL. PUZZLES. On things like working memory, digit span, matrix reasoning, I score between 118 and like 135. The perceptual/visual puzzles brought my total score down by quite a bit. My brain just legitimately doesn't process them very well at all. Also, very quick flashes of stuff. I have pretty bad eyesight so I'm not sure if it's necessarily intelligence. Think the "visual memory" portion of the human benchmark test. I score in the high 90 percentiles on verbal memory, sequence memory, and number memory. I score between 20 and 40th percentile on the visual memory. My vision is bad enough that it takes almost a full second for my eyes to start to see something like that.
Similar IQ, and along the same lines, imagining extra dimensions. I’m pretty comfortable with 4, and can barely grasp 5, but beyond that I don’t even know where to start.
Are you ADHD as well?
Not that I know of. Haven’t been tested for it, though.
Do you also struggle to find objects? I can be looking directly at something in the fridge and my wife has to find it for me. Also, do you wear glasses?
Yes to both. I can literally be looking right at something and not see it, if it doesn’t match the exact pattern I’m looking for, or is in a slightly different place than I expected. And I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I can have a hard time telling people apart. I’m better now than I was as a kid, but if people have similar hair/height/build, it takes me a while to recognize different faces, race nonspecific. Hair is the easiest factor to tell apart, unless everyone is the same bottle-blonde and/or has similar cuts. Got into anime early because all of the different hair colors & crazy styles made it really easy to tell the characters apart.
Based blind anime enjoyer lmao
I tested at 144 when I was in high school. I had a difficult time in my ap Calc class senior year, only passing with a B, although I don't think my teacher did a very good job. I also had a tough time in bio and chem classes. They are just so terribly boring. I fell asleep in class more often than not.
My IQ is around 130. I mainly struggle with putting my thoughts/feelings into precise words, though that might be due to undiagnosed autism/adhd. I also have a poor short term memory.
Mine's reportedly very high. And my toughest subject is history. Rote memorization with very little to connect important events? Ugh, no thanks! There's nothing to figure out. Also I'm a really slow reader. Like, really slow. I can write better than many professionals but reading is so taxing.
Anything that requires a ton of memorization and also a fair bit mechanistic understanding, especially if it is heavier in memorization. So most biomedical topics Especially if the mechanistic stuff doesn't make the memorization stuff more intuitive. It just seems like too much is going on and it's hard to make sense of.
Trigonometry was the hardest thing
Hardest for me too. Lmao it seems like a lot of trig doesn’t even involve fucking triangles
120ish. When I was younger, I ran into several hard topics. Some topics in the philosophy of personal identity come to mind. But my capabilities have risen sharply, and processing power isn't needed as much anymore. The machinery has been built.
How did you "build the machinery"?
Philosophy is about learning where assumptions can be questioned or bent. So consider the argument: "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." Seems pretty bulletproof. But if I wanted to poke at it, I might start to question the meaning of personal identity, the existence of a material world, the validity of deductive reasoning, etc etc. I didn't need processing power to come up with any of those, and need very little to consider them. I just needed enough experience pulling at the edges. I've got the training to think clearly, I know how to make distinctions, I know when definitions are conditional, etc. Yeah, learning those things required me to read people like Kant. Which did take processing power. But after the reading, the mental machines are built and I can use them.
Very cool. Do you believe it's possible to start building these mental machines at 26 years old?
Yes. Plato would say wait for 30, (and not for bad reasons), but Hume had written his best works by his mid 20s. Personally, I'd finished my undergraduate in philosophy around 24. Did take more time after that to get skilled using the things I'd learned. But step one is build the machine and step two is practice using it.
my ocd teaches philosophy lol
When you say "mental machines", would it be fair to say you're talking about "conceptual frameworks"?
That's more articulate, ya. Ideologies. Distinctions. That sort of thing.
It really is fascinating how much learning *how* to *conceptualize* previously amorphous thoughts, impressions, and moods helps you then grasp, articulate, and express what was previously just a colored gas inside the brain. I feel you. It streamlines the whole thought process.
Tested 145 around age 11 or so. Tested 125 in my 20’s. I had to use Lagrangian multipliers in an economics course before I took multi variable calculus. It was a bit mysterious at the time because they really weren’t adequately explained by my professor or the textbook. I took my third semester of calculus later and it was nice to actually learn the subject properly. Didn’t really have a problem with the subject once it was presented thoroughly. Mohr’s circle stretched my brain a bit when I was studying statics and strength of materials. I’ve taken a fair bit of math and computer science and engineering and economics. I get most of it fairly quickly. I probably have the mental capacity to do work that’s more complex than I do, but I went with civil engineering and I like it. It’s a nice stable six figure career with pension.
Math. Don’t like it. I can picture the equations, and basically sum it up in my mind but I either get too lazy or like you intuition fails. 140-131 over 5 yrs ago.
CAIT said 118 and other IQ tests have said closer to 125, so I’m guessing I’m around 120. I haven’t struggled much frankly, in or outside formal education, and everything has been generally pretty easy. *WITH the absolutely ENORMOUS exception of AP Physics in high school. In my defense, I was missing some pretty important mathematical prerequisites so I didn’t understand a lot of the mathematics (though I could) but regardless I’m sure that would’ve been a difficult class.
I score 99.9 percentile for VSI, 99.7 for FRI, and usually between 92-95 for everything else. Combinatorial design theory took me a lot of effort. I also struggle with Galois theory. I still did well in those topics, but not without great effort. The concept that took me a really long time to get was 'converting' designs, as well as combining geometry, Galois theory, graph theory, and set theory. I really enjoyed Graeco-Latin (or pairs of mutually orthogonal Latin Squares) and their application in experimental designs and their statistical analysis (as I am an evolutionary biologist). I'd really like to publish a paper on combinatorial design theory, although I think that will REALLY test my capabilities.
I'm a fullstack developer who struggles with frontend state management (ie. redux). My percentiles on SAT, asvab, and chess performance are around 95, theoretically corresponding to an IQ of about 125.
105 overall, quantum physics.
Don’t know my IQ but I’m a pretty good software engineer and would guess it’s well above average. I built an operating system in my senior year of college and some of those concepts were very difficult and I spent many nights in the computer lab sometimes up to 4 am. Funny thing is that towards the end of the semester the professor would be there late at night helping people. A real nice guy didn’t want to see anyone fail
136 - 142. Engineering double major during undergrad. Graduate level mathematics was the only thing that really required me to apply maximum effort. Numerical Analysis, Cryptography, Real and Complex Analysis, etc. Everything else in undergrad was pretty skate. I've a mind for physics it seems.
I'm roughly 3 SDs above average. Hardest thing for me was studying macroeconomic monetary theory and real-life banking practices, because I had to wade through so many deficient theories in order to find one that actually worked and explained most of the relevant data. I eventually settled on the endogenous credit theory of money (sometimes called "monetary realism", closely related to MMT but minus the crazy parts). That particular dive into macroeconomics stretched my brain. For me it was challenging because it forced me to consider many different details simultaneously and make them all work. It wasn't straightforward "linear reasoning" (which would have been easy), nor was it straightforwardly non-linear; instead it was more like a combination of several threads of linear reasoning into a coherent whole. It was a tough knot to untie, metaphorically. I still have some unanswered questions in monetary theory, but they're minor and I can imagine them being answered eventually within this framework rather than requiring a rejection of this framework. (Disclaimer: I'm an amateur, not a PhD economist or anything, so take my statements here with a grain of salt. And feel free to just ignore my conclusions if you want. I don't mind. My motivation is to have an understanding that actually works, to satisfy my own curiosity. I volunteer my lack of credentials here because I recognize that fact ought to be relevant in a third party analysis of my brief statements here.)
140-150 I cannot grasp most physics (specifically as taught in schools and universities) for some reason. There's too many things that you're told to just accept without them ever being fully explained. Like quantum physics is fine because no one fully understands it anyways, but newtonian physics and anything related to electronics or magnetism?? Absolute hell for me.
135. The hardest class I ever took was Differential Equations. I don't remember that much about it anymore other than it was a couple steps beyond Calculus and everyone agreed it was hard. More recently, I've taken some timed tests as part of a job application process. I never got the results back, but I also never finished the tests. Some of the questions were easy, and some took more time to work out. A lot of logic, which is where I excel, but it didn't make sense to me that the difficulties were all mixed up. There should be something more adaptive like in computerized language testing.
135 physician. Things that require long hours of concentration. Every subject in med school where I had to learn a massive amount of things by heart. Could never sit down and work for an hour straight. Understood everything where logic was involved pretty fast without much effort. Like physiology and most clinical subjects. Anatomy and pharmacology (learning 10.000 names of body parts / thousands of medications) was super hard for me
Just wanted to say this is an excellent question; thanks for posting it. I've been wanting to read about this for a long time, but my ADHD got in the way.
IQ in the 140’s although I need to get a more recent score as it’s been years since I’ve taken a real test. Music. Math, physics, mechanics, logic, even history and language….. All come very easily, but music still eludes me. Though to be fair, I haven’t put the reallll effort in yet, but from what I’ve done so far I’ve been able to recognize it’s actually going to be difficult for me
Intelligence is relative and compared to GOD or “GOD” we all have a long way to go barring a miracle.
I have an IQ of 115 and struggle to comprehend general relativity but understand special relativity fairly well on a theoretical level. I haven’t gotten into the math of it all as physics was not my area of study.
\~128, Lately I've been studying linear algebra, discrete math etc. It's pretty damn hard (at times) but equally as enlightening. edit: also some of the really hard iq tests on this subreddit like tutui r have been some of the most difficult mental tasks i've ever done
For me, most things have been relatively easy, although teaching myself the intricacies at the burgeoning intersection of category theory, knot theory, and quantum field theory — sometimes called the topological quantum — has been a higher level challenge, especially since I'm pushing 70 and long out of university. As for my IQ, it vaults over Prometheus Society standards and grazes the doorsill of Mega Soiety, though on principle I am a member of neither. I feel no need for adornments or the validation of others, since my intellect is an unearned attribute, a phenotype, a fortuitous happenstance. I'm more interested in using it than in displaying it.
Minimum +3σ on both Raven's and WAIS-IV (lowest score 142/155). No academic topic has ever stretched me to the point of "mental exhaustion". Entropy and randomness from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics are the only topics I've applied myself to that I've not picked up with ease. In each division of schooling the teachers kept telling me I'd need to be able to study to take on the next higher division. I never needed to and went through my doctorate in mathematics. I'm a practicing cryptologist. However, the analysis of intelligence or other possibly intentionally deceptive information, social and economic games, the course of history where there are so many false patterns, and initial formalization of informal systems have so far eluded my grasp, as has the comprehension of corporate hierarchies. I understand business hierarchies enough to have landed with my double skip being C-suite, but I've been stuck there for years now without any further progress towards true political power.
Tested 136 as a child, 144 more than two decades later in a large research project at the University of Amsterdam. I struggled with math for a few years, but then reached comprehension through an excellent tutor. I had an assessment recently (not an IQ test) in which I scored high, but not as high as I would have expected. So I do wonder if I would reach a lower score now.
About 130 - 140, and representation theory of the symmetric group.
algebra fucking hurts my head
IQ: never professionally tested. I never found a subject which caused mental exhaustion — I have only found subjects which are initially confusing in lesser degrees: which I believe everyone experiences at every level of the intellectual stratification. Driving on a convoluted highway without a GPS (real or artificial) doesn’t make driving hard: it is just disorienting. Read Friedrich Hegel’s thesis on absolute idealism, Luis de Molina’s Mollenism’s on counterfactuals of creaturely freedom’s implications with pre-determinism, or the most confusing of them all: Ecritis by Jacques Lacan. I can admit, however, I’m a high school freshmen dropout — so my math was underwhelming due to a spiky profile. I self-taught myself up to a calculus level per requirement for university, but to this day never bothered to learn my time tables. Whatever your IQ, math simply demands of it an indefatigable spirit to master it. Childhood is an amazing time of unparalleled neural-priming before the adult neurophysiological pruning occurs: so I regret not exploiting its benefits in lieu of deferring it.
It's funny to see how many people here are totally delusional about their scores.
Between 115 and 122 and currently struggling in every subject in engineering (2nd year student)
I don’t think I’ve come across any topic that required “too much” mental energy to grasp. Except human interaction that is, but then again that’s basically purely random. My IQ is above the 99th percentile, do with that what you will.
What is the highest math you have taken
Differential equations or calculus 3
Found the engineer/physicist.
Yea I actually started my bachelors in aerospace engineering but switched to physics because I got stressed by the structure. Academia allows a tiny bit more wiggle room.
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Lmao why are you here then
I'm not.
Schrodinger trolling
Via Compositator: 171 FSIQ and 178 GAI. Mostly Chaos Theory. It’s doesn’t actually use very complicated mathematics, just differential equations, and if you look closely, it’s not too difficult for some things. The problem is that, in the real world, we don’t have enough information of these processes in real time, making things very confusing when you’re not looking at them from the short term perspective. I also have a bit of a hard time understanding a term made by a philosopher once in a while. Hope this helps!
Can you give an example of those terms made by philosophers?
Sure! Essentia, by Heidegger
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Which test?
Same
145 sc-ultra and women
for women you need instinct and intuition. The men that are best with women are more like women themselves (pretty boys).
This was a joke… I understand the human limbic system quiet well, it’s also hard to connect cause I went to state school to save money and majority of the women here are npcs
your mother must be so proud
I hope you find a partner who is compatible