Gorilla Smart

Gorilla Smart, i.e., guerrilla smart (intentional misspelling, which is something that the gorilla smart person might do, making a joke that we don’t get).

We all know that dogs can hear things we can’t. So we know that sounds exist that we can’t measure with our senses, although we can make machines to measure it.
We know that our vision is limited, some more than others, as I can attest to. For me, can I truly say that something off in the distance is really fuzzy, or is it my vision that can’t get good focus?
My brain tells me it is my eyes that are wrong.

We measure intelligence with tests. We know that we have given tests to people that are smarter than we are, but have we given test to people that are smarter than the people that made the tests?
Could you be too smart to want to be a part of MENSA?
Could you be so smart that you deliberately camouflaged yourself so that you don’t get singled out? (think about the kids in middle school that go from straight A to D-F students)
Me, I think I’m just smart enough to spot these people sometimes, like the kid in movie, Sixth Sense was able to see ghosts.



I think, just as Lance Armstrong, with his superior physical abilities, can ride up a mountain at 30 mph, while I can barely maintain 15mph in flat Florida for 2 hours, there are people with substantially better minds. I don’t mean geniuses. I mean smart enough not to cooperate with the people testing IQ’s. People smart enough to make themselves appear ordinary to those of us that can’t spot them.


Now, the fun part. If there are people that smart, what are they doing with their lives? Where are they? We know that they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. Now the guys I have written about before, the Hummer-driving computer guys, are not part of this group. They are several rungs down the intellectual ladder, the people that don’t brag, but are using their superior intellect to gain material things. They show up on the radar of normal folk and would probably be aware of the ‘gorilla smart’ people if they cared to look around. The Hummer-driving guys have the intellect, but the ego didn’t quite match up, so the need to be ostentatious shows.


We know that they, for the most part, aren’t presidents, CEO’s or just about anybody that you might read about in the paper. The whole idea of being famous or notable would be something they would avoid. What makes this not a conspiracy theory, is that I don’t believe they have a club or sit around making decisions for the world any more than Shaq goes to club meetings for the Extremely Big Men Society. I believe that these people are doing altruistic things, volunteering, reading a lot, and mainly seeing the world whole, instead of that narrow tunnel of getting up, going to work, and going home at the end of the day. Maybe they are involved in church groups, or maybe they stay as far away from them as possible, but I’m pretty sure that they are always in a situation where they are helping others that are less fortunate.


I tried this theory out on a young man that I thought fit the profile. Surprisingly, he went right to it. He said, “Yes, I want people to think I’m some dumb redneck. I want people to underestimate me. It gives me an advantage.”

Sometimes I wonder just how many of these people are out there and are there even smarter ones that I can’t spot?

Is it possible that what we sometimes see as a decline in intelligence in our world is actually that the really smart ones have gone underground?