So it turns out, according to Psychology Today, that kids with high IQ’s drink more as adults, even controlling for income and education and all that.
The article claims to be testing the hypothesis that “intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in (drinking,)” but it seems to me this says something a little more depressing than that. It doesn’t say that smarter people drink more; even putting aside that the IQ test only measures one kind of intelligence, IQs can change significantly throughout your life. It says that, in the US and UK at least, kids who score well on an IQ test drink more when they grow up.
So let’s say that smart kids do want to escape their consciousness. They want to make themselves stop being smart, if only for a moment. Says Andrew Sullivan, “When you have constantly charging brain, you need to shut it off sometimes in order to breathe and live.”
But why is that? That seems like a terrible truth, if it is one. Might it have more to do with the way kids with a certain type of intelligence are treated by their peers and mentors? Couldn’t it also be that “smart” kids get picked on? That they tend to be less popular, at least if the American high school experience has anything to do with it? That they are ostracized socially? Wouldn’t that be more likely to drive people to drink than the fact that they scored well on a test?
