Posted: May 18, 08 7:57am

I was warned long before I even joined MySpace several years ago that I would end up hating social networking because of the combination of my high IQ, Asperger's Syndrome, and how I was raised. I have tried for a very long time, but they were right. Out of every one of these I've joined, I've found a core of maybe 10 to 15 people with whom I can talk, enjoy company, and have reasonably intelligent discourse. For a site like MySpace, that is an incredibly small number, and for a site like this, it is disappointingly few.

My friend Steve crunched some numbers a few years ago and came up with the notion that the odds of finding a group of people who think on the same level is proportionate to the percentage of people in the world with your same IQ. As I am in the 99.99 percentile, that doesn't leave much space. He said it wasn't necessarily that they have the same IQ, but that they think like you do, and therefore you would be comfortable with them. In my case, in the world there are 68 people, as the world population is just over 6.8 billion.

That's kind of small.

The interesting thing about including the autism spectrum range is that I've found it to be true that any friends I've made think outside the box in very non-neurotypical (non-NT) ways. It takes a little study to figure out how that works, especially with the number of adults in particular who have not been diagnosed and/or who have no clue what really makes up the world of autism. But it also is a factor in how the synapse of the brain works, the random deletion of genome order at birth, and accounts for the IQ of many people with Asperger's. Not everyone with Asperger's is incredibly intelligent, but it is interesting to note that many of the great minds of our time have IQs over the 99.9 percentile and have some form of mild autism/Asperger's.

Throw in the fact I've worked and associated with many cultures all over the world, trying to find people with an expansive worldview is equally difficult.

No wonder there are only 68 people who think like I do.

Unfortunately, if you did not have your IQ tested before the age of 12, you will never know your true IQ. After that age, it simply becomes a measure of your ability to retain knowledge, not your ability to learn.

If you know your IQ, do the math. If you don't know where it falls on the percentile, here's a ballpark chart. Mine is 167, which puts me at 99.99 on the chart.

65 - 01%

70 - 02%

75 - 05%

80 - 09%

85 - 16%

90 - 25%

95 - 37%

100 - 50%

105 - 63%

110 - 75%

115 - 84%

120 - 91%

125 - 95%

130 - 98%

135 - 99%

151 - 99.9%

167 - 99.99%

183 - 99.999%

In doing some calculations of my own, it shows that the lower the intelligence factor, the wider the group of people with which others can associate, or get along.

So when you wonder why you can't see eye-to-eye with most people and it seems so few people understand you, keep in mind that you are special in so many ways, and that specialness - which people in power with lower intelligence have tried for ages to eliminate - is worth cultivating in your awareness of the people around you.