THE BRIGHT STUFF

Miami Herald, The (FL)
January 27, 1985
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald staff writer

On the second day of 1985, in Coral Gables, in the afternoon, the smartest man in Miami walked into the public library. A huge man, he was otherwise unnoteworthy, and no one heeded his presence. He had taken only two steps into the lobby when something caught his eye.

"Tibet!" he said. "All right! Neat!"

There was an exhibit. A sign announced something about a bunch of genuine Tibetan artwork. Obscure, exotic, colorful prints lay enclosed in glass case. The smartest man in Miami stared for a moment. He fingered his beard. Then he frowned. When the smartest man in Miami frowns, wisdom soon follows.

"That," he said authoritatively, "is not Tibetan."

And of course, he was right. This stuff was psuedo-Tibetan. The real Tibetan art was in the next room.

Alex McIntire, the smartest man in Miami, is 40. He is the leader of the Miami chapter of Mensa, a club that is often called "the genius society." To join there is but one requirement: score higher than 98 percent of the population on a standardized IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test.

McIntire, the Mensans generally agree, is the brainiest member of the club. "He's our local smart person," says treasurer Claire Shulman. "When he talks, he always says all this good stuff." But that's not the reason McIntire is the smartest man in Miami. There is a level above Mensa. It is called Intertel. Nothing less than an IQ score higher than 99 percent of the population will do. At Mensa conventions the Intertel types will rent a side chamber and at first chance abandon the rabble.

McIntire qualifies for Intertel. But that, too, is not the reason he's the smartest man in Miami. There is something beyond Intertel. It is called the Triple Nine Society. To join, one must have an IQ superior to 99.9 percent of the population. During Mensa conventions the few Triple Niners sneak away from the moronic, puerile boobs in the Intertel chamber and converge in a small hotel suite, and talk.

McIntire has Triple Nine on his resume. Still, that's not why he's the smartest man in Miami. Beyond Triple Nine, there is still a higher level. It is called ISPE -- the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (they use the impressive British spelling). To join, one must score better than 99.9 percent of the population on an IQ test and then take the highly-secret ISPE verbal acuity test, which is designed to weed out the people who think like calculators and talk like robots.

There are fewer than 400 ISPE members on earth. Only one resides in Dade County.

But despite the credentials, Alex McIntire doesn't really believe he's the smartest man in Miami.

He's smart enough to know that there's no such thing.

"There is a man who fixes my car," McIntire says, "and I think he has more intuitive intelligence than I have."

There is a problem of definition here. It would be stupid to talk about intelligence as though we knew what we were talking about. Let us leave it to the Encyclopedia Brittanica to shed fog on the subject: "Intelligence is a hypothetical construct used to describe individual differences in an assumed latent variable that is, by any direct means, unobservable and unmeasureable."

In other words, intelligence is about as easy to pin down as the existence of God. No one knows what makes Alex McIntire so smart.

Still, with the usual human stubbornness, we try to isolate, measure and quantify what we can't understand: the very power of understanding itself. It's like trying to use a scale to determine its own weight.

The fact is, intelligence is a phenomenon for which we have a measurement and little else. The operational definition for intelligence has long been: the capacity measured by intelligence tests. The problem, says University of Miami psychologist Paul Blaney, is that "there is no clear-cut phenomenon to measure."

Yet standing against all the scientific cautions is the simple insistence of intuition. Some people are smarter than others.

Einstein, for example, seemed very smart. In 1905, at the age of 26, he published three scholarly papers so revolutionary in thought that they spawned three separate disciplines within the field of physics. When he died, his brain was removed with great expectation. Surely, here was one heck of an organ. They put the great man's gray matter under a microscope, prodded, poked, sliced and diced. In the end, they must have looked up from their oscilloscopes and eyepieces a bit sheepishly. For all the world it looked like an average, regular-guy type brain.

Indeed, you can't judge a brain by its cortex. There was a weird case reported five years ago in Science magazine by Dr. John Lorber, a professor at England's Sheffield University. He wrote that a university doctor had noticed that one of the honors students in mathematics--a student with an above-average IQ of 126 and a normal social life--had an unusually large head. A brain scan revealed that he had only a 1-millimeter thick mantle of brain tissue surrounding a cavity of cerebrospinal fluid.

Concluded Lorber, "the boy has virtually no brain."

So intelligence cannot be measured with a #2 pencil or a scalpel.

But still we try. Most of those efforts ignore a mental function that is arguably more important than intelligence: creativity. Scientists are trying to develop creativity tests, without much success. Great artists and musicians can bomb out on standard IQ tests. "The common statement," says UM's Blaney, "is that there is no relationship between creativity and intelligence." Ask the smartest man in town: "Being smart is like being the pianist who can play anything with technical perfection," says Alex McIntire. "Everyone says, 'He's a great technician, but . . .' What's beyond the 'but' is creativity."

McIntire says he is often dismayed by the creative efforts of his Mensan peers in their club journals.

"It's embarrassing because it's not smart. It's dumb writing by smart people. The Mensa Bulletin publishes poetry. It's god-awful poetry. It's doggerel."

The cruel might choose as an example a poem called Fellowship from the ISPE journal, Telicom. The writer, it should be remembered, has an IQ higher than 99.9 percent of the rest of the population.

We are so very close, but also very far

That I could love you to life's end, you may not comprehend

That you could reach my plateau, you may never know

To make the commitment I demand, you may never understand

I will care and I will share, can you get here from there?

I blend well with the background, but by my being I am around.

Who am I?

The answer, if we believe the IQ tests, is a genius.

When it comes right down to it, being the smartest man in Miami is a lot like being the 10th smartest. Or the 170,000th. You still have to get your car fixed.

And you still battle bulging waistlines, impertinent questions, and boredom. Alex McIntire works in a small, nondescript office in the Graduate School of International Studies. The surrounding building is equally nondescript, unless the description ugly is employed. One day in December McIntire sat at his cluttered desk, grading term papers. Being the smartest man in Miami does not excuse him from tedium.

"I'm reading a paper on 'Development and Public Financial Assistance As They Relate to Rural Health in Brazil,' " he explained, ruffling papers on his cluttered desk. "It's really an edge-of-the-seat kind of experience, let me tell you."

McIntire has been coming down from the rigors of writing a doctoral dissertation. He had desperately wanted a Ph.D. before he turned 40. He barely made it. He is now an Adjunct Professor of International Studies and Associate Director of the North- South Center at the University of Miami. He teaches classes on Latin American politics. He edits academic publications. He serves on panels. All that equates to a fairly modest professional status. He has authored no books. He has gained no fame. When he went to his 20th high school reunion in 1982, most of his friends were bankers and lawyers and were making a lot more money. Some might have wondered if McIntire was an underachiever--a genius who flopped.

That would not be unusual. Brilliant people, as a rule, struggle in life. They are often miserable failures in their careers. A high score on an IQ test can predict how well a student will do in school, but it is nearly useless for predicting a person's success in life.

McIntire tossed a copy of his resume across his desk. Honors. Awards. Fellowships. Mensa. ISPE. Triple Nine. And he's been all over the world. He's had teaching jobs in Montana, in Ecuador, in Pakistan, in Nepal. In the '60s he marched for civil rights. He speaks Hindi and Urdu. He makes no apology for his history.

"I haven't gone in a straight line. I've zig-zagged," he said. "I should be 30 and doing this, instead of 40 -- if I had gone in a straight line. So in a way it has cost me 10 years. But, by golly, they were such a good 10 years.

"I would say I'm a dilettante in some ways . . . I'm interested in everything."

His mind is a black hole. He feels driven to know everything.

"I can't get in and out of a library in less than an hour, because there's no shelf in the library that I'm not interested in," he said. "It's torture, in a way."

In talking to McIntire it becomes clear that he has a streak of insecurity. He answers questions hesitantly; he is not so much nervous as cagey. He doesn't like to talk about his personal life. He's even defensive about his intelligence. He refuses to reveal his IQ test scores. He elliptically mentioned that his lowest score was in the high 160s--still genius level. One afternoon at Howard Johnson's, a favorite haunt, he bristled when asked to fill out a very short list of IQ test questions. "That's dumb," he said. Later, driving down the shady streets of Coral Gables toward the public library, he picked up the form. He couldn't resist.

The first question asked "Which letter is odd man out?" The choice was E, T, A, W, H and X.

"It's 'T'," he said, "because that's the only one that can't be used to make a vowel sound."

He was using a complex reasoning that involved foreign words, for example, "cwm," which he said is Welsh. But he had overintellectualized the question. The answer was "W." Only "W," explains the test creator, can be written without picking up the pen or doubling back.

Which is not to say that McIntire isn't the smartest man in Miami. Or even wrong. "Alex is levels above most smart people," said his former roommate, David Tank, himself a Mensa member who has decided to abandon insurance adjusting to go to law school. "Alex is a great person. I'm smart. He's brilliant. He also has the gift that a lot of brilliant people don't have, of being down to earth."

Carmela McIntire, who married Alex in May, remembers a recent party where Alex displayed the breadth of his knowledge. An older man was there, and no one had engaged him in conversation. Alex asked him what he did. The man said he specialized in the chemical treatment of drinking water. Alex, of course, conversed intelligently and at length on the subject.

He knows stuff like that because he's driven to know everything. He's a Factmonger. On a recent afternoon he was confronted with the Mega Test--possibly the hardest intelligence test ever designed--and gave a definition of "Myrmidon" right off the cuff. He completed word analogies with words like "eponymous," and "estivate."

When McIntire was in junior high school he abruptly realized that although he talked like the other Greensboro, N.C. kids, he was different. He couldn't stop reading. He studied the words on the back of cereal boxes. He tried to intimidate his teachers by asking arcane questions. In junior high school he would cart home as many library books as he could carry, burrowing through 12 or 14 books a week, alarming his parents, who thought he should have been doing something more conventional like riding bikes or playing baseball or causing red ants to fight with black ants.

"It was almost a desperation to learn as much as I could," he said. "If you're smart you grow up with an awareness of yourself as an aberration.... The message from my parents was, 'It's nice you're smart--but be nice.' It was an extremely valuable lesson, because there are people who use their intelligence as an excuse for rudeness, for boorishness."

McIntire got into Mensa in the early 1970s. He has since learned that Mensa is primarily a social group -- despite the fact that many members are, in McIntire's words, "social zeroes."

"Mensa has only one criteria for membership, one little hoop of fire that you've got to jump through," he said. "So you get every possible personality type. You get some of the funniest, most verbal people who love conversation and jokes and games, and side by side with that you find people who have very little to offer in the way of social graces . . . Mensa, in an almost charitable fashion, treats them as family. Quite honestly, there are people in Mensa who never had any normal social outlet."

At HoJos on a Saturday morning, Alex McIntire glanced at a Jumble on The Herald crossword page. The Jumble said PLEEO. He pointed to the second blank space. "You look at this and you know it's going to be a vowel or the second letter of a digraph," he said. Except that most people never think it out that far: They let a deeper region of the brain unscramble the Jumble. The brain spontaneously tries PEELO. Not a word. POLEE. Nuh-uh. LEPEO. Not close.

A computer could get the answer with raw computing power -- using all the combinations and then matching them against an electronic dictionary. But the human way is magical -- no brain power wasted on dumb combinations like EOEPL and LPOEE. So far the artificial intelligence wizards can't get a computer to do it like a human. A human, to use another example, can easily recognize a caricature. We see a sketch of Ronald Reagan by a political cartoonist, and we recognize it, translating the few spare lines and exaggerated features into the face of the president. Subcognition gives us the answer. What we do unconsciously, computers can't do at all.

Switch on the brain, and bingo: ELOPE.

McIntire was wrong: The second letter was neither a vowel nor a digraph.

McIntire didn't want to look at the other Jumbles. He wasn't in the mood to prove himself. Nor did he feel like romanticizing intelligence.

"I think the brain is just a processing mechanism," he said. "If there's any difference between mine and yours it's just a matter of speed and accuracy of processing information."

At some point, McIntire said, those processes become impossible to measure. His opinion had a trace of self-defense in it: McIntire knew that there are people who claim to have brains even speedier and more accurate than his.

Beyond Mensa, beyond Intertel, beyond the Triple Nine Society, beyond the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, there is -- or at least, was, until it disbanded -- a club even higher and greater and smarter. The Xenophon Society. To join you had to be smarter than 99.99 percent of the population.

Not even Alex McIntire was ever a member of the Xenophon Society.

"There's a point," McIntire said, "where it all becomes meaningless. What are they trying to do this for, what are they trying to accomplish?"

And that's not even the final level. When Xenophon died, it was replaced by a new group--smaller, tougher, brainier. The Prometheus Society. To join the Prometheus Society, one must have an IQ higher than 99.997 percent of the population. Better than ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety seven hundred-thousandths of the population.

"That's dumb," McIntire protested.

But when it comes to intelligence, there is always, always someone who wants to be a little bit smarter. And so, predictably, the Prometheus Society is not the final reduction. A couple of years ago a man named Ronald Hoeflin concieved and then ascended the Everest of the genius clubs. It is the Mega Society. To get into his group you have to be smarter than 99.9999 percent of the population.

That is so smart, a perfect score on an IQ test is not enough. You have to take several. And do perfectly every time. You have to be one in a million. Tropic phoned the group's "recruitment officer."

"As you might predict," said Johan Veldhuis, a 35-year-old Virginia endocrinologist and one of only 20 members, "it's a very small group."

He made no apology for his club. He said he thinks the Mega Society serves a useful function--more or less separating the wheat from the chaff. A perfect score of 1600 on a Scholastic Aptitude Test, for example, is very "respectible," he said. "But if you have 100 people who get a perfect SAT score, you can't tell them apart."

Which seemed to disturb him.

It was a sunny day, and McIntire had just pulled into the International Studies parking lot. He seemed in a particularly assured mood. He's met people smarter than himself, he said. But they were only smarter "in a limited sense." He said he didn't have any significant mental weaknesses. Sure, he can't sing very well, and he isn't as artistic as he'd like to be. He used to write poetry, it was technically proficient, but not inspired. Still, he doesn't see those as mental weaknesses. He has no gripes with his brain. Feels no flaws.

"I'm not overawed by anyone," he said. "I can hold my own."

Then he walked into his office, returning to social science.

Half an hour later, Tropic got a phone call. It was Alex.

"Chess," he said.

There was a moment of ambiguous silence.

"Chess. I can't play chess. Trust me, I'm embarrassingly bad."

A mental weakness. It had just slipped his mind.

Section: TROPIC Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald