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Wow dude, that is a fascinating story. It really resonates with me. See today neurologists could have told your Dad that often this sort of superpowered intellect is accompanied by extraordinary emotional and mental sensitivity, so often the genius feels life's pain so much he can't cope with it.

Sounds like romantic nonsense, but there is hardcore evidence for it. Rapid and constant use of the intellect for many people becomes a sort of drug-like high, an addiction. This burns out your supplies of neurotrnasmitters (serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine etc) and puts the body under chronic high stress. Also found is cingulate inflammation in the brain and limbic hyperactivity leading to a host of neuroses and even psychoses.

Ever find after using your brain too much, like rapidly reading large technical books or philosophical works one after the other, you feel weird, compulsive and unfocussed? People with super-hi IQs do it all the time unless they learn not to and focus on one thing at a time.

The kid in the article seems to have got it down fine.

Hey, can you freepmail me on any info you have on the neuro thing? You have Freepmail.

My SAT's got me into Mensa, which I joined as a joke--just to show my friends the card, some 20 years ago. The night before, my buddies and I smoked dope and drank until 3 am.

(stopped that long ago, after I saw what it did to people long term)

For those that don't know, IQ is a Bell curve, with the average defined as 100. 132 (depending on the test) is roughly 3 standard deviations, which means (as I recall) 97.3%(?) of people fall below it. It is the cutoff for Mensa. Really high IQ's are very difficult to measure. 200 is over 9 standard deviations. Without my stats book & tables, I am not sure, but 6 standard deviations (six sigma) is, I believe, 3 in a million. 9 has to be close to 1 in a billion.

(Also, FYI, the SAT used to be acceptable as an IQ indicator, but a few years ago, when the average fell well below 1000, they made the test easier, so that everyone scored an average of 100 points higher. Today's 1200 SAT score would have been 1100 a few years ago)

BTW, yes my verbal was lower than my math--lol! Partially dyslexic, slightly autistic, beer swizzling, gun-owning, dog loving, union hating, free-market capitalist.