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The National Enquirer, May 14, 1996, reporting on Oprah’s stratospheric head size
My head is so big I have to wear TWO wigs
– Oprah Winfrey, 1996
I’ve been told that when one talks about intelligence, there are so many different parts to it. It’s pattern recognition, memorization, verbal ability, spatial ability, numerical ability, social comprehension, musical talents, self-awareness, lateral thinking, logic, intuition, and so much, much more. But if one wants a single umbrella to cover ALL of intelligence, then some say it’s the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage. The adaptative value of intelligence is demonstrated by the fact that brain size nearly tripled in just the last 4 million years, from 500 cm3 in Australopithecenes to 800 cm3 in Homo habilis to 1000 cm3 in Homo erectus to about 1350 cm3 in modern Homo sapiens (higher in the developed world where nutrition is good).
So the reason humans are considered the most intelligent animal is that despite having so many disadvantages (we lack fur, strength, speed, claws, sharp teeth, wings) we were able to adapt the world to our advantage. We didn’t have fur, so we created fur coats. We didn’t have claws, so we created knives. We couldn’t run fast, so we created cars. We didn’t have wings, so we invented airplanes etc. We were able to use plants to our advantage (agriculture) and animals to our advantage (domestication) and subdue and capture animals like gorillas who are many times our size and strength. So despite being such a weak disadvantaged animal, our freakishly large brains allowed us to become the most powerful and prosperous animal on the planet.
Analogously, Oprah had almost every disadvantage. She was born a poor dark skinned black female in Jim Crow rural Mississippi (the lynching capital of the world). She was illegitimate, sexually abused, became overweight, and was not considered pretty. Yet she was able to adapt all these disadvantages to her advantage. She used her weight problems to bond with millions of Americans. She shared her sexual abuse to help lead millions of abuse victims to recovery. She very skillfully used her race to become America’s black best friend. She used her poor upbringing to gain sympathy. Pretty soon, Forbes magazine was ranking her as the richest self-made woman in America, and some years, arguably the world.
But Oprah didn’t just achieve wealth (economic capital), she also achieved status (social capital). Time magazine ranks her as the most influential woman on the planet. When millions of Americans voted in 2005 to elect the Greatest American in history, Oprah was the only female to make the top 10, making her at that moment, the most worshiped woman ever within the world’s sole superpower, and perhaps as a corollary, the most powerful woman in the world. A woman so powerful that when she was disrespected by a clerk in Switzerland, the country officially apologized. Books she recommended would become colossal bestsellers, and some economists credit her with almost single-handedly putting a black man in the white house.
New York Times columnist columnist Maureen Dowd stated:
She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president. Other successful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, had to be publicly slapped down before they could move forward. Even Condi has had to play the protegé with Bush. None of this happened to Oprah – she is a straight ahead success story.
And Bill O’Reilly said:
this is a woman that came from nothing to rise up to be the most powerful woman, I think, in the world. I think Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the world, not just in America. That’s – anybody who goes on her program immediately benefits through the roof. I mean, she has a loyal following; she has credibility; she has talent; and she’s done it on her own to become fabulously wealthy and fabulously powerful.
So just as humans overcame adversity to become the world’s most prosperous and powerful animal, Oprah overcame adversity, to become the world’s most powerful and prosperous woman. Just as humans were able to outdistance all other animals because we’re the world’s biggest brained animal (relative to body size), arguably Oprah was able to outdistance all other women, because she’s arguably the world’s biggest brained woman.
The world’s biggest brained woman?
I have heard Oprah state on her show that she has to have her hats custom made because her head measures 25.25 inches around, a cranium so large that two wigs had to be sewn together to fit her for her Oscar nominated performance in The Color Purple. This equates to 641.4 mm. According to the U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey Database, by Claire C. Gordon (Final Report, October 1996), in 1995, a sample of 3,482 active duty females in the U.S. army had their heads measured. The mean circumference was 546.6 mm and the standard deviation (SD) was 15.1. Assuming this sample is roughly representative of adult female U.S. crania, Oprah’s head perimeter is 6.3 SD above the mean of American women. Assuming a Gaussian distribution, fewer than one in five billion women in America should have cranium that large. There are of course, not five billion women in America or even the world, let alone the developed world where nutrition is optimum for brain growth; thus Oprah has arguably the world’s largest female cranium (excluding female hydrocephalics, where head enlargement reflects cerebrospinal fluid not brain mass, and autistic females, where enlargement reflects a brain that was super-sized in childhood, before shrinking in adolescence).
Of course head circumference is just a crude proxy for brain size. Some formulas very crudely attempt to make the conversion. For example the late Professor J. Phillipe Rushton argued that a simple conversion would be to use the formula for calculating the volume of a hemisphere (V = circumfence3/118.4). Plugging Oprah’s 64.14 cm head circumference into this equation gives a cranial capacity of 2,229 cm3, a truly unimaginable figure. However Rushton only validated this formula in young Asian children; he never approved it for adults or all races. One reason why it might give exaggerated results in adults is that it does not subtract the fat and skin around the skull which is thicker in adults than in children and probably adds 200 cm3. Subtracting those 200 cm3 brings Oprah down to 2,029 cm3.
The biggest brained member of both her race AND her gender?
If it weren’t astonishing enough that Oprah is arguably the world’s biggest brained woman (or at least arguabley was in her youth when her brain size was maximized and the world population was lesser), she is/was also arguably the world’s biggest brained black. Professor Rushton found that a sample of 2,676 African-American Army personnel measured in 1988, had a mean cranial capacity of 1,362 cm3 (SD = 95). Assuming this sample is representative of black people reared in the developed world, Oprah’s estimated cranial capacity of 2,029 cm3 would be 7 SD above their mean, implying a normalized rarity of less than one in 190 billion! Of course this is not a perfectly apples to apples comparison since the brain sizes of the black Army personnel were estimated from head length, head breadth and head height, while I have estimated Oprah’s brain size from circumference, and differences in head shape can give different estimates of cranial capacity. But it’s also worth noting that if adjustments for fat-free body weight were made, Oprah’s cranium would be even more impressive, because in mixed-sex comparisons that are not adjusted for body size, women are penalized because head size correlates moderately with fat-free mass of which women have much less.
The World’s only black billionaire?
If it weren’t astonishing enough that Oprah is arguably the world’s most powerful and prosperous woman (or at least was at the peak of her and America’s power), she is/was also arguably the world’s most successful black. She is almost always the only African American on Forbes annual list of the 400 richest Americans and her estimated net worth of $2.9 billion makes her the richest African American of all time.
From 2004-2006, she was one of only three blacks on Forbes annual list of all the billionaires in the world (not just America). However the other two black billionaires may not have been of predominantly black ancestry. One was Saudi Arabian Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al Amoudi, whose father is from Yemen (a population that is typically Middle Eastern, not black). While his mother is from the black nation of Ethiopia, geneticist Cavalli-Sforza estimated that nearly half of that country’s genes originated in West Asia rather than black Africa. Given both parents, it’s very possible that Al Amoudi is of predominantly Caucasoid ancestry.
The other black billionaire was Canada’s Michael Lee-Chin, who has two Jamaican grandparents, and two East Asian grandparents. Seeing as Jamaicans are not of purely black origin (there is non-trivial white admixture) and two of his grandparents are from cold East Asia (the opposite of sub-Saharan Africa), it’s likely that Lee-Chin is also less than 50% black at the genetic level. Perhaps because of the racial ambiguity of the two men, Oprah was for several years regarded as the only black billionaire in the world, not just in America, though in recent years, a few other unambiguously black billionaires have emerged in Africa.
Child of the Corn
Oprah’s Hairstyles. N.d. Photograph. Oprah.com. Web. 16 Oct. 2012
At least in America, self-made billionaires tend to be brilliant. Ultra-big brained people tend also to be brilliant. Since Oprah is both a very self-made billionaire and likely an ultra-big brained person, statistically she is likely to be especially brilliant. Though Oprah has made billions off her populist image as an average woman, and seems brutally honest about her cognitive shortcomings, evidence of exceptional intelligence can be found in her childhood. During her formative years, she was raised by her grandmother, Miss Hattie Maie (a maid) in rural Mississippi, where Oprah was reading and reciting Bible verses by age three. Oprah fondly recalls how the women at the all black church where Oprah would give recitations would turn to her grandmother and say: Miss Hattie Maie, that child sure can talk. That child’s gifted. That child’s gonna talk her way out of Mississippi.
Jealous of her talents and resentful of her messiah complex, the other kids would later derisively nickname her “the preacher”, a la Stephen King’s Children of the Corn and attempt to beat her up, but the adaptable young Oprah would always talk her way out of it.
At age six, she recalls writing her Kindergarten teacher a note that said:
Dear Miss Newe,
I do not belong here because I can read and I know a lot of big words: Elephant, hippopotamus.
She was quickly moved to first grade, and would go on to skip the second grade too.
[Addendum, July 8, 2014: this post is a revision of an article I published many years ago]
Brain Size 
Oprah did us a great service by doing in the odious Phil Donohue. But then she did the very un-bright thing of making her show a political forum for Obama, something she had meticulously avoided in the past, and losing a lot of viewers. Then the Obamas dumped her. So even bright people have brain cramps.
Oprah did lose some viewers by endorsing Obama, but she remained far and away the highest rated syndicated talk show in America until she retired in May 2011 with her final show drawing a record 16.4 million viewers:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/oprahs-last-show-draws-164-196516
It may seem stupid to have alienated many people by endorsing Obama, but by that point Oprah had already made billions of dollars & proven herself as a popular entertainer. It was now time to think about her historical legacy. Did she simply want to be remembered as a very popular talk show host who made a lot of money, or did she want to be remembered as a truly transformative figure who helped changed the course of history for black people by advancing a black couple to the white house; something that was unimaginable just a few decades ago. For the first time in perhaps the history of the planet, a black person (President Obama) is the most powerful person on Earth and Oprah has been given a big chunk of the credit. Losing a few hundred thousand viewers she no longer needs is a small price to pay for that kind of historical significance,
Remember during the civil rights movement many black people gave their lives so that Oprah could have the opportunity to become perhaps the most powerful woman in the world, so she arguably had a moral obligation to give back to the black people by advancing one of them to the white house. To have neglected that obligation would have been arguably an act of racial treason, a betrayal of very gene-pool.
Rushton’s research shows that we are genetically programmed to sacrifice ourselves for our co-ethnics because they share copies of our genes. So for Oprah to have sacrificed a few hundred thousand viewers to help Obama become the most powerful black of all time and give dignity, status, and inspiration to the entire black race (not to mention life saving healthcare to African Americans), was arguably a brilliant trade-off (though it’s been looking less brilliant lately as his presidency struggles).
As Oprah said years ago, power and fame mean nothing unless you have the courage to stand up for what you believe in. Power and fame mean nothing unless you can use them to have a lasting influence. Yes, it may cost you popularity, but you show me someone who no one hates and I’ll show you someone who has no relevance.
And yes I’m aware that Edward Klein claimed the Obamas disrespected Oprah in his 2012 book “The Amateur” and repeats the claims in his current book “Blood Feud”, both time using anonymous sources who somehow always manage to get the most detailed and intimate quotes that sound made-up (i.e. the first lady doesn’t want “fat” Oprah waddling through the White House) and he’s made other outrageously sensational claims like that Chelsea Clinton was conceived when, according to Klein, Bill raped Hillary.
In my humble opinion Klein is a brilliant propagandist who is extremely shrewd about getting publicity for his books, but not at all a reliable journalist. Claiming that there’s some behind the scenes feud between the Obamas and Oprah was a brilliant way to sell a lot of books and serves his anti-Obama agenda because it gets Oprah fans to dislike the Obamas, however no other journalist of any stature has ever independently confirmed his sensational claims and all the public evidence contradicts them, such as Obama giving Oprah the Kennedy Centre Honor, praising her acting in “The Butler” last summer, recently giving her the presidential medal of freedom, the first lady vacationing at Oprahs house earlier this year etc.
So I think Klein is very skilled at entertaining his target audience., but does a poor job reporting history. Indeed he does write books about Obama he admits are fiction too, like the novel “The Obama Identity”
This is why serious journalists, even relatively conservative ones like Bill O’reilly do not invite him on their show. Even more sensational conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are starting to question his outrageous claims:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/06/23/the_obamas_vs_the_clintons_really
.
she is indeed a fascinating outlier in more ways than one – usually eyes that far apart indicate fetal alcohol syndrome – sorry! – there is of course, variability in eye distance & she is simply very high on that measurement – as she is on some others:)
she is clearly brilliant, plus the pull of her positive personality/charismatic persona creates an interaction effect with her high intelligence.
brilliant people with “smaller than life” personalities could not do what she did. non-brilliant people with “personality-plus” could not do what she did. in fact, almost all brilliant people with “larger than life” personalities do not do what she does.
her brilliance with the added bump of her personality allowed her to rise above her environment. clarence thomas rose above his environment with brilliance only. but an engaging personality combined with a low IQ won’t launch a person far from their environment – unless they sing (!) but, as with all skills, singing/pitch correlates with IQ — tho scatterplot-wise, a single individual may be high on X & low on Y, tho there is a positive correlation for the group.
oprah makes me wonder if there is a relationship between eye distance & head circumference (i guess there would have to be) – & therefore a relationship between eye distance & IQ (assuming bigger heads have farther apart eyes) then eye distance would correlate modestly with IQ (as long as the sample wasn’t restricted in range) with a slight attenuation of the correlation due to FAS folks with wide eye distance & low IQ).
make of that what you will! 🙂
Yes, her eyes are far apart. That’s observant of you notice. In fact she has stated that in her early days on TV, when she was a news anchor, an assistant news director told her that they thought her hair was too thick, her eyes too far apart, and her nose too wide and they sent her to a salon to get a makeover.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20122091,00.html
Though one of her biographers disputes this story so who knows..
I’ve always assumed that her eye distance was further confirmation of her large head, because I, like you, think there would have to be a correlation between eye distance and head size. There’s no evidence of her mother being a heavy drinker.
Eye distance probably does correlate with IQ but the correlation is probably too small to detect, except in huge samples, because eye distance would probably be only loosely correlated with head circumference, which itself only weakly correlates with IQ.
And yes, she can be unbelievably charismatic when she wants to be:
I think her charisma is mostly a mix of high general intelligence, high social intelligence, and certain personality traits, though I’m not sure which ones. She once took some personality quiz on her show and people were surprised to learn she was an introvert given the hyper-social nature of her profession. But she does show some introverted traits such as her passionate love for reading, and in the final years of her show she admitted that she’s actually not a people person.
Clarence Thomas is an interesting person too. Some liberals consider him unintelligent, citing the fact that he’s the one supreme court justice who never speaks, though I think liberals can be quite racist against black conservatives. In general studies suggest that conservatives are less intelligent than liberals (at least when you control for income?) but this is usually only studied in whites. Black conservatives might be especially unintelligent (relative to other blacks of the same income) because conservatism is rare in blacks, or they might be very bright because black conservatives question the group-think of their culture.
@P – This is certainly a very interesting post which made me think.
Clearly OW is very able, shrewd, street smart, charismatic etc – but I would be surprised if her IQ was above the 110-119 category – about that of a typical High School Teacher and many politicians (including, almost certainly, the First Lady).
I don’t see any specific evidence in her achievements for an especially high IQ.
Indeed, her powerful personality is evidence against her having an especially high IQ in the sense that when you have that much oomph you don’t need an exceptionally high IQ.
In explaining her success, some other things have to be factored in. Firstly she was attractive and confident at self-presentation enough when young to win a beauty pageant. Attractive women with big personalities have always been able to go a long way in any society – for example the Empress Theodora (wife of Byzantine Emperor Justinian) began as a dancing girl/ prostitute and there are many other examples.
Secondly, affirmative action has been demonstrated to add at least a standard deviation to any academic related achievements – so an IQ of 115 becomes functionally 130plus with affirmative action – so that someone qualified for a normal State college and law school will instead go to Princeton and Harvard (ahem ahem).
So, overall, I would say that OW tends to support Michael Woodley’s idea – and perhaps yours as well – that larger head/ brain size (if it is not pathological) usually goes with enhanced specialized non-g abilities – enlargement of some specific brain regions and cognitive functions rather than an increase in general processing efficiency which might underly g.
This would mean that Oprah was a different case from Christopher Michael Langan – who has a big head and big g. But probably men and women ought to be considered separately anyway.
The cases of women with confirmed very high g would, I think, show women with some fairly strong masculine traits (even when they are feminine overall – this applies to all the very high IQ women I have encountered including philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe who was reputed to be the most intelligent person in Oxford – who looked manly and had many obvious masculine traits – despite having *seven* children (she was a devout Roman Catholic who used no contraception)-
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/day-i-met-elizabeth-gem-anscombe.html
) – while Oprah seems very strongly feminine in almost every respect.
@P – This is certainly a very interesting post which made me think.
Clearly OW is very able, shrewd, street smart, charismatic etc – but I would be surprised if her IQ was above the 110-119 category – about that of a typical High School Teacher and many politicians (including, almost certainly, the First Lady).
And incidentally Oprah was so inspired by her 4th grade teacher Mrs Duncan that she dreamed of being a 4th grade teacher too & often says that’s what she would have been one had she not gone into media, and often referred to her talk show as the world’s biggest classroom.
While people who reach the pinnacle of wealth and power through their own efforts (i.e. self-made billionaires, self-made U.S. presidents) seem to average extremely high IQ’s (about 130 by my estimates), there is enormous variability, with some being above 150 and others being below 110, so Oprah could easily be around IQ 115 or less.
In future posts, I will argue that she’s brilliant, but there’s evidence to the contrary. For example Oprah claims to be a terrible writer and has also claimed to be technologically inept and admits that she can’t read a balance sheet, however some of these claims might be exaggerated for populist or comic effect. It was advantageous for people to underestimate her intelligence, otherwise they would have seen her as a calculating cunning business woman, rather than a sincere trustworthy woman who speaks from the heart.
Indeed, her powerful personality is evidence against her having an especially high IQ in the sense that when you have that much oomph you don’t need an exceptionally high IQ.
This is a good point, and it’s interesting that of the dozens and dozens of daytime talk show hosts who had tried to challenge her in the ratings over the years, the only one who was briefly able to beat her was Jerry Springer, who I suspect has an extremely high IQ because he succeeded in entertainment despite a weak personality. He’s a very calm, meek, nerdy, pensive Askenazi Jewish lawyer who looks and sounds more like a stereotypical professor than an entertainer, but he was able to compensate for his lack of personality with a very quick wit, articulate thoughtfulness, and by exploiting very sleazy sensational topics that Oprah could no longer indulge in because she had become too respected.
Oprah’s powerful personality might be compensating for a mediocre IQ. On the other hand there’s evidence that the personality she displays on TV is partly just a character she plays; a persona she very skillfully and creatively crafted over the years, in which case it might be evidence of extremely high IQ, or at least extremely high Social IQ.
In explaining her success, some other things have to be factored in. Firstly she was attractive and confident at self-presentation enough when young to win a beauty pageant.
Although, Oprah and others have stated that she wasn’t considered beautiful, but won beauty contests because she would blow everyone away in the talent section where she recited poetry. She would then apologize to all the prettier girls for beating them. Of course beauty is subjective.
Secondly, affirmative action has been demonstrated to add at least a standard deviation to any academic related achievements – so an IQ of 115 becomes functionally 130plus with affirmative action – so that someone qualified for a normal State college and law school will instead go to Princeton and Harvard (ahem ahem).
Affirmative action is very important in terms of obtaining academic credentials which open doors for some people, however Oprah did not benefit from credentials. She attended a very modest historically black college in the South, and did not want to attend college at all because while still in high school she landed a job on a local black radio station. Affirmative action arguably helped her enter the television industry in the first place, because for the first time doors were opening up for women and African Americans, however once hired she was not given much special treatment. On the contrary, she was demoted from one of her first jobs as a news reader and they stuck her on some low budget morning talk show to run out her contract. But to everyone’s surprise, she helped deliver huge viewership for that talk show & kept moving to bigger & bigger markets as her popularity with the public increased.
Affirmative action plays a huge role in academic success (where blacks are well represented) but a smaller role in financial success. For example, the book “The Bell Curve” showed that when you equate for IQ, blacks and whites make the same wages, though blacks are still much more likely to live in poverty. And despite affirmative action, blacks are severely underrepresented among the super rich. For example blacks are 12% of America but only 0.25% of the 400 richest Americans. By, contrast Ashkenazi Jews are 2% of America, but perhaps 36% of the 400 richest Americans.
http://isteve.blogspot.ca/2012/07/forbes-400-by-ethnicity.html
So, overall, I would say that OW tends to support Michael Woodley’s idea – and perhaps yours as well – that larger head/ brain size (if it is not pathological) usually goes with enhanced specialized non-g abilities – enlargement of some specific brain regions and cognitive functions rather than an increase in general processing efficiency which might underly g.
Well only about 16% to 30% of the variation in brain size is related to g, which means that the great majority of variation is related to other factors. And of course, this would not just be true of big brains. Someone can have an extremely small brain for mostly non-g reasons too. In fact the relationship between brain size and IQ appears to be linear at least in the range of brain sizes typically measured:
http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/viewreport.php?reportid=27661
This would mean that Oprah was a different case from Christopher Michael Langan – who has a big head and big g.
Langan is a fascinating case in that his stratospheric IQ almost perfectly parallels his stratospheric cranium. But I agree that he’s the exception, not the rule, otherwise the correlation between IQ and brain size would be nearly perfect, which it’s far from.
The cases of women with confirmed very high g would, I think, show women with some fairly strong masculine traits (even when they are feminine overall – this applies to all the very high IQ women I have encountered including philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe who was reputed to be the most intelligent person in Oxford – who looked manly and had many obvious masculine traits – despite having *seven* children (she was a devout Roman Catholic who used no contraception)-
Interesting theory. I think it might also depend on the type of intellectual ability they excel in. For example I’ve read that there’s an optimum level of testosterone for spatial ability, so men who are too masculine & women who are too feminine lack spatial talent. I don’t know if the same holds for other talents or for g.
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You missed this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim
And he’s a PhD in electrical engineering who made his fortune in communications.
But perhaps he’s technically an Arab.
He wasn’t a billionaire until after 2006. Oprah was the only black billionaire from 2004-2006 if you define black as more than 50% sub-Saharan ancestry.
Not a very good definition. Ibrahim looks black to Americans but he’s from the “Arab” part of Sudan which is in the Sahara not sub-Saharan. He’s not light skinned from European genes but from N African genes.
It’s not a good common definition but it’s a good HBD definition.
I wonder what % of height gains are due to heterosis.
And if it can produce height gains then why not IQ gains too?
The nutrition explanation doesn’t work if the rich have also gotten taller, unless perhaps childhood diseases can stunt growth.
Why can’t the rich be getting better nutrition too? And yes childhood diseases are included in the nutrition hypothesis because their effect is to prevent the body from using nutrients.
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this is a great post. sounds initially foolish to think that brain size can relate to IQ, sounds like phrenology etc, but scientists are slowly realizing that physical traits can be clues to other human traits.
http://akinokure.blogspot.it/2013/10/smug-dismissal-of-pseudoscience-what.html
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/sexuality-your-telltale-fingertips
Rivsdiary,
It used to be common knowledge in science that cranial capacity was related to intelligence, but because such ideas became associated with nazis & other evil, the literature became taboo for half a century. Only since the 1990s with the rise of MRI brain scans have scientists been free to research brain size again
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Her head circumference is 64 cm because of the hair. I mean, the measurement was made to use the wig, and was made over the hair. In fact, the black hair is quite bulky. Look at her! Compare it with other people in the pictures, compare with men, and you realize that she does not have a head so big. In my daily life I see people with their heads bigger than her. . Including people with shaved hair, which becomes more apparent size of the head. Seriously, there’s no way she is above 7 sd of the mean.
Others are measured with hair too so that’s factored into the head size distribution. Also, in her early 20s, her hair fell out and no one at the TV station could find a wig big enough to fit her head so she had to wear scarves
But the black hair tend to be bulkier, and the army measurements are made with mostly white.
“her early 20s, her hair fell out”. Pictures?
Look at she with Tom Hanks: http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2007/news/071126/oprah_winfrey320.jpg
Her head looks smaller than that of Tom, at least in the photo angle.
Look without the wig:
Rsss… No way that’s 7 sd head!
Her head is huge. Look how much longer and higher it is than this woman’s:
And here:
Even much bigger than President Obama’s:
Sure, it is above average. But my point is that it’s not a size “1 in 1 billion.” In my daily life I see people with bigger heads. In the photo of the president, it is the hair that makes the head seem so huge. The images in which the two are facing the camera, it is clear that the forehead of the Obama is wider.
In my daily life I see people with bigger heads.
There are people with bigger heads than Oprah, but they’re almost always men who have far greater fat-free body weight or people whose head is enlarged for pathological reasons. Among biologically normal people, and adjusted for fat free body-weight, heads larger than Oprah’s are freakishly rare.
Obama might have a slightly wider head, but Oprah has a much much LONGER head.
Extrapolating from the female data in this study (which is more accurate than the Rushton’s study, as the data are from black women) http://docsdrive.com/pdfs/ansinet/jas/2011/2662-2665.pdf
I find 1848 cc to Oprah
“IF” the 64.14 cm is not hair.
The women in the study you cite have hair too.
How did you extrapolate from the female data?
The women in the study have a mean circumference of 57 cm. Oprah 64.14. Then the linear measurements of Oprah head are 64.14 / 57 bigger than the women in the study. Oprah head: L ~= 1.125*183.53=206.5 mm ; B ~= 1.125*135.47= 152.4 mm; H ~= 1.125*141.29 = 159 mm .
Applying the Lee-Pearson formula: 0.0004*(206.5-11)*(152.5-11)*(159-11)+206.6 ~= 1844 cc
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FWIW, my head circumference is 25.375″ – 25.5″. I’m 6′ tall, 235 lb. I’ve been a cryptographer by trade for 30+ years. Unlike Langan, I don’t claim to be the smartest man in the world, not even the smartest person in the room.
I too can’t wear off-the-shelf hats. When I last bought a motorcycle helmet, I ordered a size 8 3/8 (IIRC), the biggest Bell made, then to make it fit, I had to crush the styrofoam across the brow with a ball-peen hammer.
My head was notably big at birth. IIRC my parents’ stories, my head circumference at birth was 16″ (Z=2.8, not 5.0).