Usually, people think of the mentally challenged and geniuses as people occupying opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, and that may be true in terms of IQ. However, they share similarities that derive from being outside the norm. The mentally challenged and geniuses alike, struggle to understand. For the mentally challenged, the struggle is to grapple with cognitive challenges, involving simple abstract concepts that people of average intelligence transcend without difficulty. For geniuses the struggle to understand comes from the attempt to make sense of abstruse ideas that average people don’t address. For example, a mentally-challenged person may have difficulty reading the time from an analog clock, while an average person reads the time easily and applies it pragmatically. Meanwhile, the genius, like the mentally challenged, struggles with time–not its reading, but its concept, contemplating questions such as: Is time an illusion?, Can time be reversed? Is time travel possible? The mentally-challenged and the geniuses both struggle to understand, though the questions they address are different. Most average people regard the questions addressed by geniuses as irrelevant to life or unattainable, while geniuses wonder why most people don’t seem to reflect on these fundamental concepts.
There are also some social similarities between the mentally-challenged and geniuses. Those who are intellectually different from people of average intelligence tend to have different interests from the average that place them on the fringe or outside normal social groups. The mentally challenged, depending on their degree of intellectual impairment, are typically excluded from social groups. When a bunch of guys gather together for a tailgate party, they usually don’t invite a mentally-challenged person or a genius. (An intellectual snob might regard the tailgate group as mentally-challenged, but that’s a different issue.)
The long-running sitcom, *The Big Bang Theory*, caricatured the personality of the genius, in the character of theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper who perpetually struggled to understand how average people see the world. Though the characterization exaggerated, for humorous effect, the difference between geniuses and those of average intelligence, it portrayed the isolation that geniuses experience from the rest of the world. According to his biographers, Einstein felt lonely and isolated in his final years, acknowledging that, aside from colleague Kurt Gödel, most of his associates in later life were scientists hoping to gain from their association with the famous icon. Similarly, those who are significantly below average in intelligence experience a subtle social exclusion. The moral of the story seems to be that exceptionality at either end of the intellectual spectrum comes at a price.
