We often get the question of why we joined Mensa or if it’s worth joining. The question frequently contains the accusation that we use our membership to prove to others how smart we are and that we all sit around congratulating each other on our intellectual superiority. Some posts are innocent and in good faith, many are not.
We had a recent post along these lines that was getting some really good responses as to the “what and why” of Mensa but OP deleted it. I would like to preserve those responses and potentially make this a pinned post on the sub that can be referred to when the question inevitably gets asked again (and again, and again).
Please reply to this post with your explanation of why you joined Mensa and what you have gained from it. There’s also value in replying (constructively) if you regret joining, why you let your membership lapse (or will no longer renew it), and also if you are not a member but are interested then why you are interested and what you hope or expect to get out of it.
No responding to what others have written please. This is not a discussion, just a collection of statements and opinions. (Please don’t make me have to manually lock every comment thread to prevent this).
No comment on the nature of high IQ societies please. Comparisons of Mensa to other high IQ societies is fine but this is specifically the Mensa sub so bear that in mind and stay on topic.
It's mandatory to read and abide by the rules. Obvious disregard do risk a permanent ban.
We have a wiki where some common questions are answered. The rules in the right hand side have a drop-down infoid where the rationale is summarized in a few words.
Every subreddit has its own rules, guidelines, culture and accepted behaviour. It goes without saying that bannable offences aren't limited to our four rules.
This sub is a discussion forum where Mensa members and non-members can interface and socialize. It is not a help-desk, so if your question can be answered by mensa.org or google it might be removed.
We hope that both members and curious people will gravitate here for questions and discussions relating to the Mensa society and living with a so-called gifted mind.
This sub is in no way part of Mensa the organization. It's a personal initiative by Mensa members to meet with people and to bring members and non-members together to converse.
People who come here expecting this to be an official group, or to peek into how things are "on the inside" will be disappointed. This is still yet another reddit sub, and is inhabited mostly by non-members. Trolls abound, and users like to take a guess when they haven't got the actual facts straight. Just like everywhere else on reddit.
However it's a good first step to get to know the organization and to meet and talk to members!
And a post scriptum: If it wasn't clear by now this sub will be rife with criticism, trolling, questions asked a million times before, leaked intelligence tests and off-topic posts. That's par for the course and expected. If you're dissatisfied with the "quality" of the sub I bid you farewell. Go use our multitudinous facebook groups or fora if you're a member. This is a sub for the people, with all its flaws and shenanigans.
PPS: My last post scriptum doesn't mean we allow that behavior. We expect it, and we remove it.
So last year, I took the in person Mensa test in the UK, this was mainly to have a baseline before I began brain training to improve my working memory.
I took the in person test without any practice, these were my scores, they sort of confirmed my suspicions, my score on the culture fair test was quite low (it is mainly pattern recognition), I have struggled with such tasks throughout my life (like maybe struggle is exaggerating it a bit but quite avg mathematical ability), I just wanted to understand what these scores mean, as I don't really feel smart usually and yet ended up getting in -
Cattell III B scale: 150 (Top 2%) Culture Fair scale: 104 (Top 40%)
I'm pursuing entrepreneurship and was wondering if mensa is worth joining for networking with other startup founders. I got an offer but not sure it's worth investing my time or does everyone just have too big of an ego?
Years ago, in 1975, when I was 5½ years old, my school district ran some tests on me and placed me in normal classes anyway. A year into high school, after numerous absences — excused, of course, by me and my friends at the attendance office window — I was transferred to an alternative high school. Before I left, the principal reviewed my test scores and said, “I can see why you’re bored with school. They misplaced you when you were young, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”
Years later, I contacted the school district and received the following results: a Primary Mental Abilities (PMA) test administered at age 5, kindergarten/1st grade — Verbal-Reasoning: 107, Perception: 137, Number: 101. No score was recorded for Space, and Reasoning was never administered, so no composite/total was ever calculated.
I know that being in my mid-50s, this probably looks like ego or vanity to some. But after nearly 25 years of schooling altogether, collecting degrees and academic honors along the way, I’m genuinely just curious what’s actually there.
I submitted those scores to Mensa’s Director of Membership, who reviewed the file and explained that the PMA is broken down into five categories — Space, Number, Reasoning, Perception, and Verbal-Reasoning. Since my file only had three of the five, and no total score, they weren’t able to accept it for admission. As he put it, it’s not uncommon for schools to only administer part of a test, or to stop once a child clears the threshold for gifted placement — which may be exactly what happened here.
I joined Mensa when I was 11, and I've always been drawn to things like chess, puzzles and problem solving. Recently, through a fondness of the game when I was a child, and a bit of spare time, I built a Sokoban game called Boxxy, and one of the unexpected things I've found most interesting is watching how differently people cope with exactly the same problem.
If you've never played Sokoban, the rules are almost absurdly simple. You walk around a maze and push boxes onto targets. You can't pull them. That's essentially it. Boxxy is this, it's essentially based on Sokoban, a cult 1982 Japanse game. "Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper".
The more I've worked with it, the more I've started thinking of Sokoban a little like chess. Not because the games are particularly similar, but because both have an extremely small set of rules from which an enormous amount of complexity emerges.
I also think both have that strange quality where a position can look completely obvious to one person and almost impenetrable to another. How a 300 elo puzzle can baffle one, while a 2000 elo can be solved simply by another who recognises a pattern.
I've now made several level packs by hand, and creating them has made this much more apparent to me. Some levels that I consider extremely easy have surprisingly poor completion rates. I've seen puzzles where roughly half the people who start them don't finish them. For example this puzzle:
Daily Boxxy #3 people found extremely hard.
What's particularly interesting is that it doesn't always seem to correlate with whether somebody would normally describe themselves as "good at puzzles".
Some people appear to look several moves ahead almost automatically. Some seem very good at recognising that pushing a box into a particular square will make the entire puzzle impossible long before it actually happens. Others repeatedly make the locally obvious move and only discover the consequence afterwards.
There's also spatial memory, planning, restraint and perhaps something resembling the pattern recognition you get in chess. It has made me wonder what we're actually measuring when we say somebody is good at problem solving.
Is Sokoban ability likely to correlate strongly with general intelligence? Spatial reasoning? Working memory? Chess ability? Experience with similar puzzles? Or is there a fairly specific mental skill being exercised here that somebody can be unusually good or bad at regardless of conventional measures of intelligence?
I'd be especially interested to hear from people here who play chess or do a lot of formal puzzle solving.
One other thing I've become fairly evangelical about is keeping Boxxy pure. There are countless modern versions with switches, portals, different coloured boxes, special tiles and so on, but I increasingly think the original rules are perfect. In the same way that millions of chess variants exist but ordinary chess remains endlessly interesting, Sokoban doesn't really need anything added to it.
The part I've enjoyed most wasn't actually programming Boxxy. It was making the levels. I spent about as long creating the first 50 levels by hand as I did building the game itself. I've since made several more themed packs, all manually, and there's something rather satisfying about trying to make a puzzle not just difficult but elegant and visually pleasing.
If anyone wants to try the thing that prompted all this, it's boxxy.io. It's free and there's nothing to install.
But I'm much more interested in the question than promoting the game:
What do you think is actually happening cognitively when one person can immediately “see” the solution to a spatial puzzle that another intelligent person genuinely cannot?
Hi everyone, I took an IQ test for the first time—the Matrix Recognition test—and got this result, which I think is very high (I’ve read that the test is fairly reliable).
How do I take the general test, like I’ve seen many of you do?
I live in Sweden and have been interacting with the local mental health institutions my entire life. First for autism diagnosis, then depression, then ocd, the autism undiagnosis etc, it was also here that I did IQ test and realized I was qualified as well as recommend by the personnel to join Mensa. But despite all this never believed any of the psychologist or psychiatrist to be understanding in the slightest, especially when dealing with depression or when I just needed to talk. It meet be that I’m just weird but it never quite feelt like they understood what I meant or could relate to my situations.
This problem has only become worse when I’m no longer interacting with the audhd part of the healthcare system but rather the ”normal” one. So does anybody know what to do? I really feel the need to talk and get advice, but when I search for that in my parents or friends they either don’t understand or just think I’m smug and cocky.
Sorry for a maybe incoherent post, but all help is appreciated.
I first asked over in r/askreddit and all I got was a bunch of normies calling me a pretentious asshole. Apologies if this has already been talked to death here, I'm new. Perhaps the reaction I received is more interesting than my question?
Quick ask: I am writing my master's thesis at WU Vienna, I am running low on participants, so I am asking here.
It is about work. What gifted people actually end up doing in their jobs, whether they like it, and what they are planning to do next. Lots of opinions out there, barely any data.
Five minutes. Fully anonymous, no name, no email, no IP logging. It sits on my university's own server, not some commercial survey tool. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to buy, no catch.
Only thing you need: you are currently working, in any capacity.
I am not telling you upfront what I expect to find, that would mess with your answers. Full explanation on the last page.
Our 2yo is checking all the boxes I keep reading about (memory, observation, language, etc), so we’d like to get her evaluated and get support on how to help her. I’ve been reading and getting a ton of great advice from this sub, such as plan for more challenging work not just more work so they don’t get bored in school.
Right now she’s getting hung up/stuttering on her first word because she’s trying to get out a full sentence with correct grammar/syntax. She’s getting frustrated and then just giving up and saying “nothing ”. We’re working to reassure her it’s ok, but it’s just wild she’s aware of her challenge getting her thoughts out.
If anyone has any experience on how to navigate super young kids, I’d welcome all input and comments.
I am a life member in Mensa. When I was 35 I was getting disability benefits and taking antipsychotic medication like John Nash in that movie Beautiful Mind and living with my mother in Montana. I am a veteran and UT Austin alumnus and have been living in West Texas since 2001. I would be interested in knowing if anyone had similar experiences . I had positive relationships with therapists in Teas
Hi.
I’m working on a doctorate in cognitive diversity and am currently doing a group project on highly gifted and creative.
I’m looking for adults who are working in the ‘real’ world to find out what you are doing, what roles you play and what type of work environments you are thriving in.
Please dm me if you are interested in participating.
TIA.
I’m not in mensa but I qualify. I’m wondering how many of you consider yourselves liberal vs conservative OR wealthy ruling class vs common folk? I think i know the answer, given leanings of higher educated folks, but I’m still curious and would like some discussion….
I'm 24, and it's looking like I'm going to be spending the next year or so of my life in a rural area in PA. For context, I went to a competitive high school in NYC, and since then have been in college and grad school, so I've pretty much always been surrounded by 'smart' people. Most of my evenings have been spent in complex debates or learning different random topics–– for instance most of my friends are engineering PhD students... and somehow we are all learning 2 languages and a musical instrument in our free time. Whenever I have left that bubble, I've felt pretty isolated pretty quickly––it just feels like no one wants to have in-depth, complex conversations, or is interested in anything... interesting. So I'm really worried about living in a place where I don't think it will be easy to find like-minded people. Does anyone have experience with this? How do you avoid feeling isolated? I definitely will still call my current friends and stuff, but it's not the same as living near them.
Edit: just to clarify because a lot of people are recommending sports-related stuff–– I'm not lacking in 'activities to keep busy'. I'm looking for the kind of deeply meaningful 'best friends for life' kind of relationships––the people you stay up talking to until 4am who just get you. And I definitely have had those friendships with people of any gender, but in some ways I think it's more common in more female-dominated environments, which seems to be the opposite of the kinds of sports and scouting etc activities that many people here are recommending.
