“I’d love to go back (in time) and hit myself!” One of the less pleasant effects. Overall it is worth it, though!

A question from Quora again. I cannot answer it in its current form: “What does it feel like to transition from having a low IQ to having a high IQ?” The ingress also specifies that the IQ should increase by at least 40, and either be obvious or measured by official IQ tests. I doubt this has ever happened, and may never happen unless there is some new dramatic breakthrough in medicine. It is hard to imagine what that would be: Even if you cure a condition that causes mental retardation, you have to do so early in life, or the damage is already done. At that point, IQ tests are not very precise, if possible at all, and people’s memories will be hazy at best.

The brain follows a fairly specific path of development. It is true that there is plasticity, and that parts of the brain can continue to develop through life. But there are severe limits on what can develop and in what order, after the first months of life. It is not like a supermarket where you can come back and buy what you forgot, or pick things in any order you like. What is not done at a certain stage of development cannot simply be inserted. (We are talking about the hardware here mostly. For software there is some more leeway.)

Therefore, if you want an example of a person getting a noticeably higher IQ, you would look for someone who developed slowly but continued to develop for longer. As it happens, this is me. Or at least to some degree.

I come from a highly intelligent family, but one with a long natural lifespan and slow maturation. In primary school and middle school, I was always smaller and weaker and less mature than my classmates, and indeed the class below me as well. I got along the best with the class below there again. When I ended middle school, I was just getting past puberty. My voice was still high and I was not near my adult height. And my grades were not particularly impressive. I don’t have them around, but they were largely just above average.

Over the course of high school, my body and brain continued to grow at a brisk clip. Those of my fellow students slowed down. From just above average, I became a top student without really trying. At the time, I was most interested in learning the Truth from the Christian Church. I read their books and transcripts of their speeches, and just skimmed the school books. My ever rising grades I attributed to wisdom from God. This is not necessarily wrong: Software certainly plays a role, and having a good framework for thinking and good values and habits can make a big difference. Studying books of timeless wisdom is certainly better for your academic progress than alcohol, weed, and days and nights spent in pursuit of random sexual experiences.

But looking back across the great expanse of time, I realize that my brain also continued to develop after most others stopped, because my internal clock was slower than those around me. If I had been compared to those of the same physical development as me, or even the same height and body weight, I would have been smart all the time. But because I was constantly running two years behind my classmates, I barely managed to keep up mentally, and not at all physically and socially. Now that I caught up with them, I became a genius.

So how did it feel? It felt amazing. It felt miraculous. I had moved away from home when I was 15, as there was no high school nearby. I lived with my aunt and her husband and daughter, who did not really know me well enough to realize what was happening. The only way I could conceive of what was happening to me was in religious terms, which was my reference point in the world at the time. With all due respect for my aunt and her family, I was increasingly “alone with Jesus” (as the actual members of that particular church lived several towns away). So to me, it was a miracle. God had given me wisdom, as he promised, so that I now could see things that other men could not. The scripture was fulfilled which said: “I have more insight than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation.” (Psalm 119, 99.)

Looking back, I realize that “wisdom” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but then it is for most adults, alas. But it was true that I now felt more on a par with teachers than with fellow students, and it continued that way for the duration of my education. Only when I started looking for work, did I gradually begin to realize that I wasn’t as awesome as I had begun to feel. I could not understand that I was rejected for two hundred jobs in a row despite having top grades or nearly so all over the place. (This was before grade inflation – top grades was for geniuses.) I was not intelligent (or wise) enough to realize that many of those rejections might be because of those grades rather than despite them.

But the transition itself was glorious, apart from the confusion that comes with being a teen. To go from being at the bottom of the pecking order to being a natural winner? It was like going from larva to butterfly. I suppose I ought to write a novel about it, if I live long enough. But then, it was only the first of several changes in my life, and there are things more important than raw IQ. It took me years of running against the brick wall to learn that. Still, genius is certainly a wonderful gift or heritage and reason for gratitude.

I hold within this body infinite potential – and you’ll never get me to admit otherwise!

What I write now may be hard for some to believe, but I can only assure you that to the best of my conscience I do not lie, exaggerate or embellish this:

If I had a thousand bodies, each living for a thousand years, I would still not have time for all the things that interest me, and which are easily within my reach to do. To read all the books I would like to read, to learn the languages I would like to learn, to learn higher maths and physics and chemistry and the other sciences, to learn and master drawing and painting and gardening and woodcarving, to become proficient with various musical instruments and various musical styles, to write all the facts and fiction I would like to write, to play all the games I would like to play, to pay attention to the interesting people in this world.

I am not even thinking of the things that would be outside my reach today for financial reasons or health reasons, like traveling to exotic locales or owning a large estate, things that I suppose could have been possible if I had lived an alternate life starting in my younger days.

Far less am I thinking of things that are outside my biological range, like having an IQ of 180 or the strength of a top athlete, never mind wings and breasts. No, right here, right now, this life has such an overflowing abundance of interesting things, easily within my grasp as I am today, except for this one thing: Time.

I remember boredom, I remember loneliness, I even remember envy; but dimly, as something that happened a long time ago, just slightly more real than something read in a favorite childhood book.

I have been told that there are adults, even in the rich world, who have a reasonably healthy body and mind and do not feel this overwhelming anti-boredom, this love for life, a gratitude for being allowed to live, for being born into this world, this time. But I believe this is the human birthright. We may have to go some distance to claim it, but if it was given to me, then surely any normal person can also have it.

You may think of my feelings and attitude as the polar opposite of a suicidal person. It is an irony that if you hate life, you can easily end it; but no matter how much you love life, you cannot live forever in this world. Oh, if only those who do not want their lives could give them to me! But that is not how the world works. Well, I suppose they could donate their organs, but peculiarly this seems to be the thing least on their minds when they choose the time and place of their exit.

***

 It is a wonderful life, but it is also kind of useless from a higher perspective. I mean, even if I had all those bodies and could do all those things, it would still mostly be for my own enjoyment, and in the end there is nothing left of that, like a stone that slowly sinks into a clear pond and is gone, barely even making a ripple as it passes. Or like a star burning out in the void far from any eye that might have seen it. No matter how bright, it is still passing away in nothingness.

A better man than me – though some feminists may disagree – listed a number of impressive things one could do, and then added: “… but if I don’t have love, I am nothing.” Specifically we here mean the love that gives. The problem was not receiving love, but giving it. No matter how brightly we burn, it still comes down to this in the end.

To enjoy life is great, and I am grateful for it. But it is not my ultimate goal or highest aspiration.

Yes, there was a time in my life when I felt like shouting “Now the world is mine!” when I had bought a new computer or some other desired item. This tended to not be good for my Januaries though.

Today is payday. Actually, when the 12th falls on a weekend, payday is the Friday before, but I didn’t notice. This arrangement is sure to be a good thing for those who have spent all their money before payday. Once upon a time, I was one of them. Even though I have more money now, I would probably still have been in that situation if I had not changed in my mind as well. There needs to be a lot of money before money stops being a limit. Scientists say that in the USA, the magic line is around $75000 a year. Most Norwegians – not to say Norwegian households – earn more than that, but I don’t. I think. I stopped keeping track some years ago, but I probably don’t.

Back in the days when I had a ridiculously cheap rent and still managed to burn through my money, January was the worst of months. I did not buy a lot of Christmas presents on credit card, so it must have been even worse for those who did. But I noticed that creditors – bank, utility, phone company etc – somehow all managed to have a bill in January, even those that did not bill monthly. (I have later arranged to get all such bills monthly, but I don’t even think that was possible at the time, and certainly not on my mind the months where there were no bills.)

I realized that the various businesses all hit you with bills in January because it was the month you were most likely to be broke. If you ran out of money before you ran out of bills (or, you know, need to buy food too), the natural reaction is to put the least urgent bills aside for next month. This costs the creditor from a few cents to a couple dollars in lost interest, but it allows them to slap a late fee on you that recoups that money ten to a hundred times over. So that is a nice way for them to add to their bottom line. And at the same time, they get a psychological upper hand on you. All good for them, all bad for you. So, don’t buy Christmas gifts next year. Yes, that will be easy! ^_^

Well, this is not a problem for me anymore, since I have more money and less expensive habits. So they have to do something more drastic. Netcom Norway, the Swedish-owned second-largest mobile phone company in Norway, did that. (The number two mobile company in Sweden is Norwegian, by the way. Brother kingdoms and all that.) Now, I am not saying they did this because they are Swedish or anything, but one month they did not send me an invoice. I know this because I have electronic invoice contract with them, so it can’t get lost in the mail or on the kitchen counter. If I had paid it, the receipt would show. If I had received it and not paid it, it would show up as due. (I know this with certainty since I have an invoice for 0.00 from the utility company for a year and a half now.) So, no invoice. The next month they sent me a “reminder” and slapped on a late fee. Free money for them. Almost needless to say, I bought my most recent mobile from a competitor of theirs.

But I don’t sweat the small things. Not having to break out in cold sweat all the time is one of the benefits of living in a rich country and having some small degree of discipline of the mind, although there could certainly be more of that. The time will come when even Norway won’t be able to stand against the coming storm. At that time, it will likely be a good thing to have an uncomplicated relationship with money.

It is fun creating something with someone else. Arguably that may be my best memories.

Back when the Internet was still just beginning to become international, before the World Wide Web, I signed up for an email account and a handful of newsgroups at the Manhattan BBS (bulletin board service, the height of communication technology before the Internet – although the selling point of this one was that it did in fact interface with the Internet, still a rarity those days). Ironically, despite its name it was located in rural Norway. That did not matter – I was finally able to meet people with similar interests (well, some of them) from around the world.

One of my interests was a thick book of epic fantasy that I had recently bought, called “The Eye of the World”, by Robert Jordan. It was the beginning of a series called the Wheel of Time. I was delighted to find that there was a newsgroup dedicated to it, rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan. It was by pure coincidence / hand of fate that I stumbled into a group of people who were roughly as unconventional as I.

Over the next few years we gave the Wheel of Time more thought, probably, than the author had ever done. Accurate predictions and loony theories flew back and forth. But there is only so much you can get out of a book, and so we ended up discussing the real world (or in the case of socialists, a reasonable facsimile thereof) with much the same mindset. The friends, for lack of a better word, that I met in that invisible realm are still near the top of my “relevant” list according to Google. (Although they have been bypassed by the occasional erotica author. Long story.)

It has been many years. I long ago stopped frequenting the newsgroup. Most of us moved on to LiveJournal, and lately we have more or less regrouped in Google+, where we have a couple communities that preserve much of the atmosphere from back then.

A lot of other things have also happened over the years. Several of the regular have gotten married, notably some to one another. And there are Warders, a concept that appears throughout the books but is sadly absent in most other people’s minds, signifying a strong spiritual bond usually but not always between a woman and a man (or, in the case of the Green Ajah, a few men). This bond is intimate but not sexual, something that is evidently difficult for people in our culture to grasp. But among the people steeped in the lore of the Wheel of Time, it has turned out a very useful concept.

And now, nearly a generation later, the Wheel of Time series is completed. Years before that, looking at a picture of the author, a voice in my heart told me without hesitation that he was going to die before the series was complete. I believed for a long time that this revelation was by the divine Presence in my heart, but thinking back on it, it may have been the voice of reason. Be that as it may, it not only came true: The series was 3 books from its conclusion when the man best known as Robert Jordan left this world.

Luckily he had relented on his original plan to have his wife delete his notes and the already written final scene in case of his sudden demise. (It wasn’t entirely sudden, either.) Despite predictions from some of us, the series was not completed by Piers Anthony, but Brandon Sanderson. I suppose it could have been worse. I stopped reading the series a couple books before Jordan died, actually, and haven’t read the two first by Sanderson either. But that doesn’t mean I am not curious as to the legendary Final Scene. And today the last book is out.

Spoilers indicate that Jordan’s climactic scene – which was supposedly written at the same time as the first book – is indeed all that and then some. I may just buy the book when it comes out as e-book later this year … if I haven’t already gorged on spoilers so much that I more or less have read it already through middlemen.

The book is called A Memory of Light. But whether or not I eventually read it, I already have many memories of light brought about by Robert Jordan’s books. And to me, the way he helped bring people together will always be his greatest work.