Back when I first discovered the internet around the turn of the millennium, one of the first people I noticed on-line was Mega Society member Christopher Michael Langan, who was busy obliterating a platoon of atheists in an internet debate. Given the fact that atheists typically have much higher IQ’s than theists, this anomalously brilliant theist caught my attention. But what really caught my attention was that when the debate died down, and people started discussing more casual topics like buying motorcycle helmets, Chris mentioned that he couldn’t do so because his head was too big.
I immediately jumped into the conversation with a bunch of geeky statistical calculations which showed that according to the Gaussian curve (a statistical abstraction that is seldom perfectly observed) Chris’ head circumference was about as much of an outlier as his IQ. This indicated that Chris’ stratospheric test score was a physiologically based phenomenon. His superhuman intelligence was perfectly paralleled and likely largely caused by his super-normal brain size. I loved the symmetry of that! It was aesthetically very pleasing to me.
A little while later, I had heard that Chris’ phenomenal Mega Test score was being recognized by Esquire magazine which had crowned him “The Smartest Man in America“. I immediately rushed to the store to buy a copy. I opened it up to read the following:
A great minotaur of a man with a basso profundo voice, Chris is six feet tall and weighs 275 pounds. A former cowboy, Construction worker, and Park Service firefighter, he has a fifty-two-inch chest, twenty-two-inch biceps, a cranial circumference of twenty-five and a half inches–a colossal head, more than three standard deviations above the norm.
Actually it’s a lot more than three standard deviations above the mean. 25.5 inches equals 647.7 mm. In 1995, 5012 active duty males in the U.S. army had their head circumference measured. The mean was 568.2 mm with a standard deviation of 15.8 mm. Assuming this sample is representative of American men, Chris is 5.03 SD above the mean. Assuming a normal distribution, less than one in 3 million American men has a head circumference that big!
Of course head circumference is only a crude proxy for brain size but it’s fascinating nonetheless. Here’s a cool video of Chris talking about his colossal cranium. I just wish he’d give me some credit for the discovery. 🙂
Brain Size 
I’m a 179 cm tall male with a a cranial circumference of 60 cm, which would place me at the upper end of this spectrum. My income is highly correlated to the percentile figure, though in general I don’t feel particularly bright. I’ve always wondered what percent of my “egg head” might be skull thickness.
It’s interesting that you should mention your income because one of my next posts is going to be about someone with both a really big head and a really big income. I’ve been obsessed with both brain size and income since I was a really little child because they’re perhaps the most concrete and Darwinian of the IQ correlates. Nothing fascinates me more than seeing someone with a really big head living in a really big house because it’s the PHYSICAL manifestation of IQ. The big brain is often the physical cause of the high IQ and the big house is often the physical effect. See IQ and income:
If I ever reach my goal of becoming horror’s first billionaire, I am going to build the biggest house imaginable and fly in a really big private jet.:-) Of course I have a long way to go since I’m not even anywhere close to being even a millionaire, so how dare I even compare myself to a billionaire.
As far as your large head being a product of skull thickness…it depends when you first noticed it was big. If it’s been big since you were a baby, then you have/had a big brain. But if only got big in adolescence/adulthood, then it’s probably just a thick skull. The correlation between head size and brain size is much higher in babies than adults. As we get older the skull thickens and the brain shrinks. At least we think it shrinks though we don’t know because the shrinking brain could be a cohort effect, not an age effect. Though I’m positive it does indeed shrink in very old age. And in autistic people, the brain starts shrinking in adolescence.
.
Thanks for replying. I did read your previous post about income and it has been on my mind.
My head has been very big since I was born. The doctor thought I might be mildly hydrocephalic, though fortunately that wasn’t the case. Both my father and son have really high foreheads with big skulls. Also, I’d probably be diagnosed with Aspergers if I went in to get officially evaluated. Same with my father. However, but my parents and grandparents incomes (on both sides) would all be considered middle-class.
Regarding the external symbols, I really find social attention uncomfortable and have shied away from any display of wealth – especially after getting married. Our house would be considered on the edge of upper-middle-class for the area. You seem to be talking about the lifestyle of the .01% or so though, where that level of spending would really have minimal impact on total assets. Whereas I’m only in the top 4% (1% by age group) and only spend ~2% of net worth/year with the intention of living a forever sustainable and debt-free middle-class lifestyle.
I don’t know whether you have aspergers or not, obviously. But from your self-description, you sound like a K genotype. K genotypes tend to have large brains, high IQ, and they avoid social attention (including gratuitous displays of wealth) because they evolved to mate with only one partner and thus don’t crave the social status required to attract numerous mates. Now because the definition of autism has become so inclusive, I think society has trouble telling the difference between a K genotype and a mildly autistic person (sometimes called aspergers).
In my very humble opinion, an autistic person is just a K genotype (nerd) who is low in a certain part of intelligence called Executive Function and a schizophrenic is just an r genotype (cool person) who is also low in Executive Function. As you may know, I elaborated on this theory here:
However my knowledge of psychiatry is extremely primitive so I could be completely wrong.
Now in my very humble opinion, the struggles Chris Langan discusses in the youtube video were caused by the fact that he is a K genotype IQ, trapped in an r genotype personality, body and social class. This is great if you want to go into politics (Bill Clinton has a similar profile) or start your own religion, but Chris wanted to go into academia. Academia is run by K geneotypes who are genetically programmed to hate r genotypes like Chris, and vice versa, because the advancement of one, threatens the other’s inclusive fitness. The K genotypes would have been especially hostile towards an r genotype with such ferociously high intelligence, because we are programmed to view potentially powerful members of opposing tribes as huge threats.
Had Chris been a scrawny quiet nerd instead of a confident muscular bouncer type, the academics would have taken him under their wing and mentored him to success.
I hadn’t seen that post, but it is very interesting! I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of r/K genotype differences or executive function disorder. I could be labeled as a stereotypical K with some degree of executive function disorder (chronically late, terribly disorganized, annoying memory problems).
Thank you! Your posts and replies have been very helpful.
Your posts and replies have been very helpful.
Thank you!
Hi, even though it’s been already 2 years, I have found the discussion interesting and I had one question about something that has particularly striked me, about the fact that autistic brains start shrinking so early, and it made me wondered if that could be the case with Asperger’s, which are included in the autistic spectrum
I have looked up the study(if it is the same)and it is based particularly on HFA, which even though they have by definition IQs above 70 they were all around 85, which still shows some kind of handicap.
All that makes me think that Asperger’s shouldn’t necessarily follow the same development pattern as they are well known to have normal IQs compared to the population(and therefore some of them in the very high IQ range as well) and in fact MRI Scans have shown that they have different brains from the HFAs.
So in my opinion people like Andre himself would have no reason to worry about a priori
@P – You may be interested by this
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/conceptual-notes-on-brain-size-and.html
Correction – the article is at:
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/conceptual-notes-on-brain-size-and.html
@P “I think a 1 SD decline in g should have caused the collapse of society UNLESS it’s been negated by huge gains in important non-g abilities.”
I am not sure about this. My belief is that we used to be ultra high in intelligence, and are continuing to live off capital from that era. To subside from an average IQ of – what? – 120 down to where we are now is a very different thing than subsiding from 100 to 80.
(But the real question is perhaps more about the ‘smart fraction’ of rulers and innovators.)
It is much, much, much more difficult to make breakthrough inventions and discoveries than to use them. And more difficult to make and repair technology than to use it. We have stopped making major innovations, and are perhaps making some important things less rather than more functional with time – another watershed will be crossed when we cannot renew or repair the stuff we have inherited. (This is the situation wrt Western technology in much of the world and among most of the people.)
But (according to Gregory Clark) it was the rapidity of breakthroughs that enabled the industrial revolution – and unless these are sustained (which they are not being) then the population will continue to expand and will induce a Malthusian collapse – which will probably sweep away most of the productivity gains.
Plus, the mutation accumulation problem, which means that we do not return to where we began, but to a lower cognitive (and fitness) level. .
But we *are* collapsing, and there is objective evidence of this in terms of declining power of Western nations to attain unchosen and necessary tasks; and a pseudo-sophisticated ideology which explains-away this objective decline in terms of us having higher morals and having transcended the childishness and (racist, sexist, class-ist) evils of a few decades ago – and having now more important things to do (like abolishing sexuality, and committing various forms of personal and group suicide in the name of Gaia, or equality, or reparations – or something) .
I am not sure about this. My belief is that we used to be ultra high in intelligence, and are continuing to live off capital from that era. To subside from an average IQ of – what? – 120 down to where we are now is a very different thing than subsiding from 100 to 80
Yes, it’s possible that the Victorians were so intelligent that they created such powerful momentum and cultural frameworks that even much less intelligent generations that followed them could still make cultural progress, just more slowly.
Scientists seem to make the distinction between genetic evolution and cultural evolution, so the former can be racing backwards while the latter is still inching forward, but there’s likely to be a tipping point where the genetic declines overwhelm the cultural progress and the culture itself declines. Indeed, in this post, you suggest that our cultural capabilities started declining sometime after we went to the moon:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2010/06/human-capability-peaked-about-1975-and.html
Perhaps that’s sufficient to explain it, and I am violating Occam’s razor by invoking additional factors like genetic declines being masked by nutritional gains. But nutrition has increased brain size (perhaps dramatically) since the 19th century, and all that extra brain mass must be having some effect. If it is having an effect, it’s likely boosting our non-verbal intelligence (which is most sensitive to prenatal nutrition), and by extension, certain technological skills. However verbal-numerical skills are much less sensitive to prenatal nutrition, so that would explain why the genetic decline is much more visible in our critical thinking and writing skills than it is in technology.
However that’s just a subjective impression on my part, and our failure to return to the moon may imply technological declines are occurring too, but perhaps not as rapidly as the verbal declines.
Pingback: The brain size of the World’s most successful woman | Brain Size
Pingback: If Oprah’s so smart, why does she promote “irrational” ideas? | Brain Size
Pingback: IQ & weight/height ratio | Brain Size
Pingback: Was Ted Kaczinsky too smart to be successful? Estimating his SAT score. | Pumpkin Person
Pingback: The confusion & delusion of HBD deniers | Pumpkin Person
Pingback: Oprah & Chris Langan have so much in common | Pumpkin Person
As he points out though – he is a very small sample. I’d love to hear about a study that examines the brain size of a bigger sample of very high IQ individuals.
Hi, even though it’s been already 2 years, I have found the discussion interesting and I had one question about something that has particularly striked me, about the fact that autistic brains start shrinking so early, and it made me wondered if that could be the case with Asperger’s, which are included in the autistic spectrum
I have looked up the study(if it is the same)and it is based particularly on HFA, which even though they have by definition IQs above 70 they were all around 85, which still shows some kind of handicap.
All that makes me think that Asperger’s shouldn’t necessarily follow the same development pattern as they are well known to have normal IQs compared to the population(and therefore some of them in the very high IQ range as well) and in fact MRI Scans have shown that they have different brains from the HFAs.
So in my opinion people like Andre himself would have no reason to worry about a priori
“Assuming a normal distribution, less than one in 3 million American men has a head circumference that big!”
True, but distributions are rarely normal at such an extreme distance from the mean. According to Chebyshev’s inequality, a head circumference greater than or equal to Chris’ could be about as common as 1 in 50, in principle. Obviously, it wouldn’t really be that common, but 1 in 3 million is unlikely, especially considering the existence of pathological macrocephaly.
Incidentally, I’m less than half an inch short of Chris by this measure, although I still think he’s tremendously smarter than I am!
I re-measured my head circumference with a more flexible tape measure than the one I previously used. Result: 25.7″.
Hi guys, this is a very interesting discussion! Have you ever posted on post-mortem studies of brain convolutions? I bring this up because Stephen Jay Gould has a good chapter about crainology in his book The Mismeasure of Man (well worth a read). On page 93 of my paperback edition, Gould makes the point that, although K.F. Gauss’s brain was only slightly more massive than average at 1492 grams, it was far more richly convoluted than that of a Papuan. Hence, brain convolutions might correlate more highly with intelligence than simple size or mass. The catch is we can only look at these by removing the skull cap, so this is typically only done post-mortem (unless there is new imaging technology I don’t know about). This is not my area of expertise, and I realize that the main subject here is brain size. However, I thought it worth mentioning.
There is issue with making comments on Gauss’ brain prior to 2013. Prior to 2013, someone else’ brain was confused for Gauss’ brain so those comments would be about some other guy. Possibly an anatomist or a physician of all people.
I had no idea! This is something I will have to look into. Thanks for letting me know.