The Starting Post

Rider: I’m not qualified medically, I’m trying to sort out my mentation now I know why it’s unusual.

Between 1963 and 1967, I was studied by the Tavistock Clinic during the creation of the baseline reference group used in IQ testing of children. Although they didn’t disclose much, what they did disclose corroborates later findings, namely that at age 8y6m I had the general knowledge of a 14 year old, built since I learned to read aged 5y6m.

In 2015, with a decent share of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize under my belt, Harley Street caught up with me, panel-testing me with an IQ of 153-4 aged 60, indicating mid-160s at peak. Side-dishes of the diagnosis include mild high-functioning Aspergers and hyperperception. The latter is jargon for what I experience as a seer-medium, as a typical incident happened in full view of the panel. I anticipated a major strategic question by 6 months, which came my way unasked, and during the incident itself Found the ideal person to execute the solution. As a result, the study was extended to include an MRI scan, which showed a normal brain lit up like a Christmas tree, and then a 24-hour EEG, which revealed only vestigial beta-phase sleep, and an at-rest activity level of 30%, running to near 100%. I’m processing my experience live, rather than overnight, making me far faster on the uptake. A neurotypical uses 10-11%.

Since then, I’ve sought academic elucidation, futilely. I have therefore started to study myself, as the longest journey begins at home.

My first elaboration was to correlate my IQ with other data. I’m off the top as I age, but what was the top? Well, I’m somewhere in the Binet baseline set, anonymised, but with “mid-160s” on the table, it’s simple. There are only a couple of scores in that bracket, both on 163. It crosschecks with the pre-Binet calculation, 14/8.5 = 165%. There is every reason to impute I may have reinforced the top bar on IQs.

My second elaboration brings in military studies of sleep deprivation. A neurotypical overloads after 2 days, meaning they use up to half the 10% on average for short-term experiential memory, the feedstock of beta-phase sleep. The contrast explains my communication issues: it’s not me, but my audience, who can’t cope. I have around 70% of my brain available, they have 5%. I can develop far larger models than they can, and have to perform a 20:1 précis for them to even begin to understand the broader picture. And that’s before going into the detail. I typify it with the following mind-model: I have two identical PCs, one with an up-to-date Operating System which can use all the memory installed, the other with an out-of-date one which can handle only 10% of the memory, and most of that’s buffering. Which needs an upgrade because it’s dysfunctional? So how come the gold-star one with full functionality is termed Disordered?

Therefore, my first question, still unanswered, was, “What do you mean?”, to which I got no answer. Examining the history of diagnosis revealed a shocking tale of abuse second only to how the Roman Catholic Church treated (and possibly still treats) children born out of wedlock. Starting with Hans Asperger’s original diagnosis, which sent his subjects to the Nazi Concentration Camp gas chambers, it was quietly forgotten about until the 1970s, when a study of disruptive children in education gave rise to a number of hypotheses derived from Dabrowsky’s “over-excitability” concept. It never occurred to them that they may be under-powered. Among these hypotheses (which included ADHD, now mostly discredited) was Aspergers. Two types were recognised, high-functioning and low-functioning, based on similar behavioural symptoms, without any deeper investigation of the portmanteau grab-bag involved. Both melt down, and can be disruptive. What then happened was low-functioning Aspergers was recognised as the lower slopes of autism, which was broadened to become Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and currently Attwood and associates are engaged in the following logic, in the development of DSM-6: we know nothing about high-performance Aspergers, so we’ll dispense with that category, leaving simply Aspergers, which is part of ASD and so can be dispensed with. Suddenly I’m considered intellectually-challenged despite having a top gong and one of the top IQs on record? I’ll tell you who’s intellectually challenged, and it’s not me. Diagnosticians who shift the goalposts!

So, my objective here is to speak for myself. I’ve lived with my condition 24/7 for 66 years, rather than occasionally getting a view of it from the foothills. Hopefully others can do the same in building a less subjective view of the subject. But I must begin somewhere, and nuance it.

One corollary of the Tavistock work was a serious breach of my privacy. They appeared in my life at the start of the Childrens’ IQ extension, firstly setting my entire school a huge General Knowledge test, then an IQ test, followed by another for the outliers, and finally an individual test, this time at their new Belsize Park offices. After that one, I was asked to wait while it was scored, and their head honcho came down to congratulate me – what for, nobody ever said. Whether anyone else was told, I never knew. My father insisted I was normal, although the evidence to the contrary was growing fast: what 11 year old gets to learn the ground rules of the security services? I’d spotted my first KGB operative, bodyguard to Akademician Ivanov at the start of the Fiat 125 theft. What 11 year old could recognise the title? What normal 14 year old deals with Richard Attenborough on his first outing as a director and takes the salute from the cream of British acting as a result? I’d found the uniforms he needed for Oh! What a Lovely War, and was detailed to take the salute from the cast at the start of the PR buildup before filming. It’s only in hindsight I realised I delivered a subtler message, that in 1969 14 year olds were in uniform, no differently from fifty years earlier. That we were singing the same songs, that we were “the baby boy scouts”, passed us by: I was on the way to an unsolicited job offer from the best of the best, the SAS. That came to nothing because the High Command failed my due diligence test. But the reason I was on that stream at all was the fruit of serious indiscretion by the Tavistock. In confirming the School had passed the GK profiling test, and was being accepted into the baseline group, they added the phrase, “and particular congratulations go to Jeremy Main, who has the General Knowledge of a 14 year old”. It was read out in School Assembly, and you could have heard a pin drop as a Lord of the Flies reaction set in. Kill the geek! By the time reality was discovered when I finally broke in class three years later, complex trauma had been created, which I only shed a couple of weeks back. I was in protective measures, under the eye of the School Sergeant, and tracked into the military as I rose to the top of the CCF Battalion.

Although I’d made some significant contributions in my early teens (ABC musical notation, which was the foundation for MIDI, and getting my surname into the heart of almost all computer coding, a jest which made a lot of sense) it was in my Uni days that I really started to shine. Part of the team which launched Mike Oldfield and Kraftwerk – that created Virgin. Host Stage Manager to Queen the Saturday Bohemian Rhapsody hit. Learning from Mal Wild and Alwyn Wall, the Beatles roadies, on the edge of Simon Rattle’s circle, while also learning applied economics from Eddie George and Mervyn King, junior managers in the Bank of England’s Birmingham branch. My undergraduate thesis in counterpurchase earned me an MI5 viva, because I’d used a superforecasting technique to predict the fall of the Iron Curtain: I’d spotted a pattern to the exceptions to the normal pattern, which indicated covert abstraction by the USSR from the economies of the Warsaw Pact satellites of a size sufficient to become economically devastating on a 10-11 year timescale. They were effectively paying for the Cold War.

ALthough my military career aborted, I soon found myself taking a serious initiative at the outbreak of the Falklands War which drew me to the eye of Peter Carrington, the Foreign Secretary. I basically stripped the Company’s stores (Cadbury Schweppes) of chocolates and soft drinks, the sale of the year, meeting with Peter’s full approval – he was a non-exec Main Board member. The only thing they didn’t run out of, several Argentine units surrendered to a hail of Coke cans, stretching the grenades considerably! A year later, I was outside the Libyan embassy at the very start of the siege, my eyewitness observations were very helpful. Again, MI5: to have an intelligencer observer just before it kicked off was useful.

More significantly, I found myself accurately intercepting a crisis in a local church, raising the question how. The result was another coercive testing, this timebat the hands of the Principal of the CofE Church Army Seminary. Secure in the knowledge I’d been spot on in the first, and faced with a superficially impossible question, I passed the ball upwards, while cleansing my channels and diving for cover in meditative fugue. Something spoke through me, accurately, which was not me. I now know it was an initiation into a seer skill. After building foundation experience rolling the Dial-a-Ride service out, I found myself courting WEU’s chief sherpa wrangler, the PA to the Head of Council Secretariat, who was astonished I already knew the body: I’d read its study papers while in protective care, aged 13-14. The next step was semi-official, Christmas Lunch, Nov 1978, we’re at the SG’s table. So I take myself to him on his own terms, explaining the Iron Curtain was about to collapse. When it did, our stars were in the ascendant, and although we were at first reticent to ride them, our hands were forced, Jonahed into a setting which wouls see the completion of Gandhi’s work, and the next step in the guardianship of the Eternal. I didn’t move straight into that, of course, my competence was built by degrees. The path had been prepared long before I was a twinkle in my parents’ eye: one facet goes back to the 1880s.

So, with time to recover from the normal medical issues 60 years brings, and reassessing my psychology, certain truths can be said:

• The fact I can communicate at all means I don’t think differently, but more: the constraint of logic enjoins me to that.
• However, that’s left brain, and my right brain also has a say. I’m Gifted, test as a Reiki Master, and have some notable musical achievements to my name. I’m currently investigating High Sensitivity in a male setting, ticking many boxes.
• Nor, for that matter, should we fail to note the limbic, the heart of meditation, and the basal ganglia, reflex.
• However, subject to more developments in meridian physiology, I’m stopping there. No polyvagal theory for me. It makes no sense.