The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  industrial engineering

  Big news. The Britannica has inspired me to change the way I load the dishwasher. The revolution began with a passage on mass production, where I learned the most important thing is to carefully divide the operation into specialized tasks. Namely, "simple, highly repetitive motion patterns and minimal handling or positioning of the workpiece. This permits the development of human motion patterns that are easily learned and rapidly performed with a minimum of unnecessary motion or mental readjustment."

  I realized--when I was in the kitchen later that day--that I was doing some serious unnecessary motion and mental readjustment while cleaning up after dinner. I used to scrape a dish, rinse it, put it in the dishwasher, scrape another dish, rinse it, put it in the dishwasher, and so on. Crazy, I know. No specialization, no division, pure chaos.

  Now, I've become a beautifully efficient poet of motion. Now, I scrape all the dishes using the same precise swipe of the fork. Only then do I rinse the stack. And after that, I load them all with an economy of motion.

  I love it. I am trying to live up to the example of those early 20th-century efficiency experts like Frank Gilbreth, who descended on factories with stopwatches and clipboards. (By the way, Gilbreth had twelve kids, and was the inspiration for the book Cheaper by the Dozen.)

  I'm telling you, my new system is faster. I may be wasting a year of my life reading the encyclopedia, but at least I'm shaving time off my daily tasks. Over a lifetime, this method may well save a full two to three minutes.

  inherited traits

  I've been reading a lot of intriguing theories about heredity recently. The ancients believed in something called "maternal impressions"--that the baby's personality is affected by experiences the woman undergoes while pregnant (this is why Eskimo mothers eat ducks' wings while carrying; they hope to make their babies good paddlers). Aristotle endorsed the theory of telegony, which says that an infant's inborn traits come not only from his biological father, but also from other males who mated with the mother in the distant past. My mom once dated the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, so if I become enormously fat and start supporting higher tariffs, we'll know whom to blame.

  But today, I got a close-up lesson in heredity. It happened over lunch with my dad. Since my dad and I both work in midtown, we occasionally meet at a deli for sandwiches.

  As soon as we're seated, I start in on him. "Let me see if I've learned enough legal stuff in the encyclopedia to help you with one of your cases."

  Dad looks very uncomfortable.

  "Just tell me one of your cases and I'll see if I can solve it," I say.

  "How about the case of the disappearing waiter. That's a good one to solve."

  I could have pushed him but I sensed this one was better left alone. There is that attorney-client privilege thing.

  "What about nonlegal questions?" I ask him. "You have any of those?"

  "How about 'What are you ordering?' "

  "No, like factual questions."

  Dad thinks about it for a few seconds, and comes up with one: "-What's the most southern state?"

  I pause. Is this a trick question? "Hawaii."

  "Yes. Most northern?"

  "Alaska."

  "Right. Most western."

  I try to picture the map of the United States. It's either Alaska or Hawaii.

  "Alaska is the most western."

  "Good. Most eastern?"

  "Maine."

  "Nope. The most eastern state is Alaska."

  What? That's crazy talk. I give him a disbelieving scowl.

  "A couple of the Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian. So it's officially the most eastern state."

  Huh. I hate to admit it, but that is pretty good.

  "Did you get that from the A section back when you read the Britannica?"

  "I'm not sure where I picked that up," says my dad.

  I'd never pressed him about his recollections of reading the 1974 Britannica. I know he says he didn't remember much, and the Alaska section may not have stuck with him, but there must be something he retained, right?

  "I remember most of the words started with A or B," he says.

  "Come on, really."

  "Not much. A little here and there."

  Shit. That doesn't bode well.

  "I actually remember more from the World Book set I had when I was a kid," my dad says. "I remember doing a big report on Australia. I really got into Australia, became obsessed with it. I wanted your grandfather to move the family to Australia, and he had to sit me down and explain that he was a lawyer in New York."

  This gives me a jolt. Back when I was a kid, I became obsessed with the very same island continent. I used to spend hours tracing maps of Australia with the manic single-mindedness of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters.

  "I loved Australia as a kid too."

  "Yes, I remember," says Dad.

  I'm not sure how I feel about this information. Could there possibly be a gene that specifies adoration of particular geographical locations? Or did my dad somehow subtly influence me to choose Australia as my beloved continent? Either way, it's left me frazzled. Along with being the smartest boy in the world, I also fancied myself completely unique. I wanted to be totally different from other humans, perhaps spontaneously generated like the primordial giant of Norse mythology formed from drops of water. Which is partly why I chose Australia--I was the only boy in my class who knew his didgeridoo from his dingo. And now, here's more evidence that I'm not different at all. I am practically a replica.

  intelligentsia

  I've got big weekend plans. After nearly a month of waiting, I will be attending the semiannual Greater New York Mensa Club Regional Gathering in Staten Island.

  I invited Julie, since spouses are welcome, but she had a previous engagement involving sitting on the couch and reading magazines. So stag it is. This will be my first Mensa convention, and I'm a bit nervous. Will they be impressed with my knowledge? Will they sense that I weaseled my way in on my measly SATs? Will they spend the whole time talking about bioethics? Will Geena Davis be there?

  I did attend one other Mensa event a couple of weeks back--the Fun Friday Dinner at a Chinese restaurant downtown--but it wasn't quite as fun as advertised. I ended up sitting in the corner and had trouble wedging myself into a conversation. The only highlight was watching one Mensan carefully arrange ice around the exterior of his bowl of won ton soup.

  "Can I ask what you are doing?" I said.

  "It's to cool the soup without having to water it down," he said.

  "Oh," I said.

  "At home, I use plastic ice balls."

  "Why don't you bring the ice balls here to the restaurant?" I said.

  "And where would I store them at work all day?"

  He was startlingly unimpressed with my intellect. He studied me, no doubt wondering when Mensa began accepting people who spent their childhood eating lead paint. But I had to give it to him: the ice trick was pretty smart.

  The convention--officially called "A New York State of Mind"--will be much better, providing me with lots more quality Mensa time. I get up early Saturday morning to try to catch the Staten Island ferry, but end up waiting in the pigeon-filled terminal for two hours. I'm not even leaving New York City, and the trip will take me at least three hours. This puts me in a dark mood. I've already skipped Friday night's activities and don't want to miss more. Who the hell has a convention in Staten Island? I think. That's not very smart. I chuckle to myself at my wit.

  I get to Staten Island Hotel just in time for the Mensa pizza luncheon. It's in the Harbor Room, a space with low ceilings, an alarmingly patterned rug, and at this moment, about forty geniuses consuming pepperoni and Almaden wine. No Geena Davis in sight.

  I sit down at a round table. My fellow luncheoners are busy rehashing last night's comedy show, which apparently didn't go so smoothly.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  "It was a disaster," says a woman wearing
a denim jacket and very large glasses. "There were hecklers."

  "Mensan hecklers?" I ask.

  "Yes," she admitted. "Drunken Mensans. They were not acting in a Mensan way."

  "What'd they say?"

  "They told the female comedienne that she had a nice ass. Instead of saying, 'Nice act,' they said, 'Nice ass.' "

  "Oh," I say. I'm annoyed that I have missed crass drunken Mensans. I would have liked to see that.

  "It just wasn't very wise," says my friend with the denim jacket and the glass lenses that could fill a submarine porthole. "It ruined the night. It was a nice evening till then."

  This wasn't the only controversy of the Mensa convention. I learned that one genius had brought two huge Bernese mountain dogs and one of them had taken a huge Bernese mountain dump outside of the game room, which the owner allegedly had neglected to clean up. So Mensans can be as immature and irresponsible as those with just average IQs. I take a bite of pizza and mull the implications of this.

  I notice my lunch mate's convention badge has a circular yellow sticker on it.

  "What's the yellow circle for?" I ask her.

  "A green circle means, 'Yes, I want a hug.' A yellow circle means, 'As'me before hugging.' "

  I look around the room. Everyone's badge but mine has the color-coded circles, which makes me feel a bit left out. I notice one man has a badge with no less than three green circles, which I assume means he wants a hug really fucking badly. He wants a hug like a crack addict wants a fix.

  "You don't like hugs?" I ask my friend.

  "I'm too small," she says. "I could get crushed. There are just too many fat Mensans."

  Well, I didn't want to mention it, but yes. It's true. This group may have big brains, but a shocking number of them also have enormous asses. For every IQ point, they're packing at least two, two and a half pounds. And while we're on the subject, it's worth noting that obesity isn't the only physical problem here. Remember Rene Descartes's fetish? Let's just say he'd be having a ball at the Mensa convention.

  After a few more slices of pizza and a couple of plastic glasses of Almaden, I've made several other observations.

  1. Mensans love puns. I heard about how the eating of frogs' legs makes the frogs hopping mad. A person who is interested in architecture has an edifice complex. When I met one Mensan who worked in a photo shop, he told me, "It gives me a very negative outlook on life."

  "I shudder to think," I responded, which simultaneously earned his respect and made me hate myself a lot.

  2. A Mensa convention is not the best place to network for a new job. Not counting the photo shop pun lover, an unusual number of the conventioneers seem to be without steady income. When asked their line of work, many responded in such vague phrases as "I work on projects" or "I do a little of this, a little of that." Eventually I learned that asking, "What do you do for a living" is bad Mensa etiquette, the equivalent of asking the average person, "How often do you masturbate?"

  3. Mensans love grand theories. One fiftyish woman explained to me her Bonsai Tree Theory of Human Nature. "Plato has his cave. I have my bonsai tree." I can't repeat her theory here since I have no idea what she was talking about, but it's apparently the equivalent of Einstein's E = mc2 for human behavior.

  I decide to continue my own study of human behavior in the Mensan game room, which is down the hall in something called the Verrazano Room. Here I find an impressive stack of games: Scrabble, Boggle, Taboo. You name it, they got it. I watch a game where a gray-haired man is trying to get his teammates to guess a word.

  "It's a space between two things," he says.

  "Interstitial!" shouts a woman.

  "No," he says. "A space between two things."

  "Interstices!" she tries again. "Interstitial! Interstices!"

  "No!" he says.

  Time's up. The word was "gap." This makes me happy for some reason. This woman is throwing out four-syllable Latinate words, and the answer is the beautifully simple "gap." Some people, I conclude, try way too hard to be smart.

  In another corner of the game room, two Mensans have taken a break from gaming to engage in what seems to be a fierce conversation. I drift over to eavesdrop. Now, I'm not out to reinforce stereotypes here, so I wish I could report that the argument was about post-Clintonian foreign policy or the relative merits of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. But the actual topic of their debate was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Specifically, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

  MENSAN ONE: I just don't understand why Picard is bald.MENSAN TWO: What's the problem?MENSAN ONE: Because wouldn't they have a cure for baldness by the twenty-second century?MENSAN TWO: Yes, they would.MENSAN ONE: So why is he bald?MENSAN TWO: Because it's a personal style choice. He chooses to be bald.MENSAN ONE: I still think it's strange.

  Since I'm not a Trekkie, and no one's inviting me to join their game, I wander back to the Harbor Room to see if I can score another pizza slice. I sit down at a table with two men, both of whom have unorthodox hair. The topic, I'm happy to hear, isn't Star Trek. It's calculators.

  They compare notes on what words you can spell if you punch in the right numbers and turn the calculators upside down--"Shell Oil", "hello", "hell", et cetera--before one of them takes it to the next level.

  "You know what I like to do?" says the guy with the mini pompadour. "I like to get a calculator and ask for the square root of negative one and see what the calculator does."

  "What happens?" asks the other guy, who has a beard that is creeping north of the cheekbones and heading for his forehead.

  "Depends on the calculator. If it's a good one--over twenty dollars--it'll say it's an error. If it's under twenty dollars, it has a nervous breakdown."

  The bearded guy is impressed. That's good calculator information. For the next twenty minutes, I sit quietly as the conversation turns to 20th-century physics. They talk confidently about quanta, wavicles, Max Planck, superstrings, alternate universes, quarks, the double slit experiment. I want to jump in--I know enough physics from my Britannica to keep up--but they never glance my way. I feel locked out.

  A brunette woman sits down next to me. Fresh meat. She has just come from the game room.

  "Ah, the Verrazano Room," I say. "Giovanni Verrazano."

  "Yup," she says.

  "You know, he discovered the Hudson River before Henry Hudson."

  "No, I didn't."

  "On top of that, Henry Hudson was a real bastard. He was so stingy, he took back a gift from a crew member, which led to an uprising. His crew mutinied him. Sent him off to die in a rowboat. So in my opinion, it should be called the Verrazano River, not the Hudson River."

  "I hadn't heard that before," says my table mate.

  Ha! I look over at the two calculator jocks, hoping they're hearing my knowledge. No acknowledgment. They're still nattering on about Neils Bohr. As for the woman, she's looking around for escape routes. I have succeeded in boring a Mensan.

  Lucky for her, someone's just announced that the trivia contest will be starting momentarily in Parlor 902. I'm there. Here, a perfect chance to show off my Britannica-earned knowledge.

  Parlor 902 is chock-full of Mensans sprawled on the couch, sitting on the floor, and passing around pencils and paper. "Does everyone have a pencil?" asks the emcee. He looks like he could be an up-and-coming orthodontist in Great Neck--but because job questions are taboo, I'll never know. "Everyone have a pencil?"

  Everyone does have a pencil. And so we begin. I'll say this for the Mensan quiz: it's damn hard. A sample question: "Whose last words were 'The world has lost a great artist'?" (Nero, I would learn later.) Another: "What is the meaning of the mnemonic 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me right now sweety'?" (The spectral class of stars.) I would be freaking out about my lack of intelligence if the rest of the geniuses weren't complaining so loudly. "Who the hell wrote these questions!" demanded a woman in the corner who looked to be about the size of a spectral star class K.

  If not for the Britannica, I would have gotten
maybe one question out of seventeen. But thanks to my diligent reading, I scored a respectable 4.5 out of seventeen, which I hoped might just be enough to give me the victory (the half point came from knowing that Ben Franklin endorsed the turkey as the national bird, though not knowing it was because he considered the eagle "cowardly").

  One of my proudest quiz moments was knowing the origin of the phrase "dog days of summer." (It derives from the ancient belief that the Dog Star, Sirius, gives off the heat of a second sun, so when it's rising it causes the weather to be particularly hot.) But I also knew the punishment inflicted on Abelard: castration.

  "I don't even know who Abelard was," says the emcee, as he reads the answer. The crowd murmurs and shakes their heads.

  "He was an 11th-century Christian theologian," I say. This should have been my big moment--giving a history lesson to a bunch of Mensans who know less than me. But for some reason--acoustics, my tendency to mumble, a combination--no one seemed to hear me.

  I say it again. "He was an 11th-century Christian theologian!" Again, nothing.

  The emcee is already on to the next question: "The original definition of pedagogue is--"

  "HE'S AN 11TH-CENTURY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN!" Not only is my timing off, but the Mensans can sense the anger and bitterness in my voice. They are frightened. The emcee pauses and makes a mental note to put me on the handle-with-care list, right next to the guy who didn't clean up the crap of his Bernese mountain dog. Then he continued.

  In the end, I lose to a guy who scored seven. He is a cocky dweeb with a haircut in the shape of a wedge and the posture of a proboscis monkey. He doesn't even acknowledge my respectable 4.5.

  Soon after, I find myself on the Staten Island ferry, returning to my life on Manhattan with non-Mensans. I am in a sour mood, and not just because I've lost the genius trivia contest. After a day of intensive Mensa, I feel annoyed at the club for being so elitist and self-congratulatory--and angry at myself for so desperately wanting to be a part of it. That feeling, in turn, is tempered by pity, seeing that many of these people are even more socially maladjusted than I am, and definitely more in need of career counseling. That is then colored by bitterness, since they'd probably pity me if they knew that I sneaked in on my SAT scores.