Mensa: only for the very intelligent

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33777, 25 February 1975, Page 12

Mensa: only for the very intelligent

You may he an uiidiscovered genius. You may find your local; butcher, grocer, dustman, and meter-reader I are too. Their intelli-l gence quotient, and yours, may lie within! the country’s top two per cent. If so, you will be eligible to join Mensa, a group for the “intelligent” whose membership is drawn from that top two per cent of any country. In New Zealand 60,000 people would qualify. Mensa is an international | social organisation with a membership of 25,000. In I New Zealand 300 belong to !it. A New Zealander, Mr I. Palmer, of Christchurch, is Mensa’s general secretary. In Christchurch on Thursday Mr Palmer said that the in- ! telligent were not found. only in the ‘professions and ivory towers. BELLY DANCERS One did not have to be vague and wander round bumping into things to be a

1 member of Mensa. Members included belly dancers, mail order clerks, housewives, actors, school teachers, postmen, school boys and civil servants. • The group existed to discover and foster human intelligence and facilitate communication between intelligent people. Their interests ranged over any significant or intriguing topic, meaningful or meaningless. Usually discussions had no practical outcome, but they were stimulating. Perhaps unusually, conversations among Mensa members rarely touched the subject of I.Q.’s, Mr Palmer said. Like millionaires who did not quibble over the differences in their fortunes simply because they were all millionaires, Mensa members found comparison of I.Q.’s an unnecessary procedure. TESTS Mensa will send people interested in joining an I.Q. test to take at their own home. This will be processed by Mensa psychologists. Or the applicant can submit his intelligence quotient as it was measured in a

standard test, and if the test is acceptable to Mensa, and the rating high enough to place him in the country’s top 2 per cent, the candidate Will be granted membership. Those who sit the Cattel test, which is one of the most widely used, must exceed a rating of 148. The average I.Q. is 100. ABILITY FACTORS Until recently, psychologists treated intelligence as an entity in itself; something a person either had or did not have, said Mr Palmer. Now it was realised that intelligence was made up of ability factors. A person could have artistic ability, yet be hopeless at mathematics and still have a very high I.Q. A person very clever at maths, but with merely average verbal skill could also have a very high I.Q. Persons with a strongly practical bent — “good with their hands” — tended to be found less in that two per cent intelligence bracket 1 than people who were good at logical problems. Intelligence was measured! in terms of verbal skill,'

speed and ability to handle I spatial concepts, logic, and mathematics, said Mr Palmer. Any test could be weighted in any one of these areas. An applicant keen to enter Mensa could find the test that rated his intelligence higher than another. Children with high I.Q.’s could find education tedious and as adults gravitate to a job that did not extend them in any way, Mr Palmer said. Mensa provided them the opportunity to mix at a level that stimulated them. Educational systems which did not take into account the exceptional child, could cause the child to subconsciously suppress his ability. He would learn that it was not a popular thing to always have the right answer, he might lose favour with his peer group; and it was not done to correct the teacher, Mr Palmer said. One of Mensa’s aims is to design activities to extend 1 children of exceptional intelligence, and introduce [them to subjects they would I not meet in a school curriculum.