This give new meaning to being too smart for your own good.

IQ at age 10 may be linked to adult alcohol use
Study: People with high scores as kids more likely to have drinking problem

NEW YORK - Contrary to expectations, higher intelligence scores at age 10 may be associated with higher levels of alcohol intake and alcohol-related drinking problems during adulthood, study findings suggest.

Moreover, these associations appear "markedly stronger among women than among men," Dr. G. David Batty, from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and colleagues report in the American Journal of Public Health.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27305471/

I won't tell you my IQ but it was damned high at that age.

I got into more trouble out of sheer boredom in school

Luckily, I burned up a bunch of those brain cells drinking for 20+ years :evilgrin:

our much wider and more important affective, intuitive nature? I don't drink or take any recreational drug (though I'd like to try lysergic acid under controlled conditions, as Aldous Huxley used to), but I believe drink and/or a drug can put us in closer touch with our more natural, truer (in the sense of more balanced) selves (in vino veritas). Unless you are a victim of alcoholism, where I think any benefit is all too brief, and soon the drink would be emphaticaly counter-productive

Unfortunately, they can also be addictive of course, and cause more harm than good, as this thread implies. Conversely, I think, it may be that, when ambitious parents push an academically-gifted child of theirs, it can send them off the rails by forcing them to starve the affective side of their nature. They may then, in reaction, take refuge in drink and/or drugs. Some children commit suicide under the pressure of exams and demanding parents, particularly in countries, such as Japan.

I know many times using hallucinogens I *thought* I was getting a deep insight but never carried it over into my real life. Instead, I'd take more drugs trying to 'recapture' the magic.

Getting sober and working the 12 step program gave me an 'in the moment' connection that lasts.

Interesting thought though and YMMV


:hi:

according to our normal usage of the term, behave like half-wits and crooks, I remain convinced that, as Huxley and, I believe, Bergson before him, suggested, the brain is actually a reducing valve for survival in time. Some of the worst people I have come across, quite blind and palpably evil, have had oustanding academic accreditations, while some of the nicest people have been as daft as a brush (particularly, politically, as might be expected, but seldom is, to our invariably puzzled disappointment!). For high-IQ, high achievers, we need look no further than the Neocon cabal. Though, of course, if you wanted to, there's always my staple paragon, Mengele. True intelligence, basing itself on wisdom/compassion, is a matter of our assumptions, which are, in fact, our life's work. Who, with an ounce of sense, ever stopped learning, most notably about good and evil, but really, across the board?

It also, imo, applies to taste. A lot of the nicest, kindest, most unselfish people are shockers for kitsch! And "good taste", of course, is no guarantee of human decency, either. In the wealthiest, upper reaches of society, the Fine Arts seem to be all but mistaken for a religion; whereas it seems to me that it's their way of saying - also with regard to their charity balls, maybe -"See! I may be obscenely rich in an ocean of economic poverty, but I'm a sensitive, even religious soul, or I wouldn't appreciate such beautiful things." But as my own Judaeo-Christian faith indicates, moral beauty is as high above physical beauty as the heavens are above the earth. Fortunately, there is no socio-economic group that doesn't have outstandingly good people, and for that matter outstandingly bad. But we have to generalise to some extent to make sense of the world.

Your experience with hallucinogens seems to me to confirm the truth of something I read a long time ago relating to the topic of drug-taking, to the effect that young people were trying to get Heaven into their heads, instead of their heads into Heaven. It can't work that way. On the other hand, I think all human-beings who ever think about such matters, have an instinctive understanding that if they are given mystical experiences, there will be a heavy personal price to pay for them, because they are only given them in order to strengthen them for such trials. And religion, itself, after all, is not a matter of conscious credence, still less of credulity, but a matter of personal commitment to compassion. And people understand that and baulk at external constraints. After all, many non-cradle Catholics, imo, understandably baulk at the kind of Pauline, literally parochial ethos of the traditional Christian Church, prefering Christ's own teachings, which are for all time and all situations. Imo that is healthy. Not that Christians are obliged by their faith to go to a particular parish church. Or indeed that I want to disrespect that great Apostle.

Remember, Christ commended people for their faith in him, because they believed him, though he was an impoverished, itinerant preacher "with nowhere to lay his head", whom the powerful theocratic Establishment religious had outlawed, and threatened the same to any people who "followed" him. Of course, many, many ostensibly ordinary people make heroic commitments in their lives from pure compassion, who don't consider themselves religious - at least in any formal sense. But I'm digressing. (Don't I always?)

so do sociopaths and egomaniacs

:hi:

assumption that worldy intelligence is a synonym for virtue, excellence, etc. But then the people who frame our discourse and its assumptions have a vested interested in that scenario; as with wealth and respectability. A bit like "good looks", too, although that tends to be on a more subliminal level.

Some of the smartest, most creative and interesting people
I've ever met are fellow alcoholics/addicts.

And I'm not just saying that--- :)

to fit in with normal people.
That or it numbs us down enough to put up with low iq people.

Thats my experience.YMMV.