Is it possible to be too intelligent?

In conversations with acquaintances about my super-intelligent 6-year-old nephew, I have rediscovered the popular mythology about high intelligence. The myth's most common version is something like: "genius, a blessing and a curse". The idea of the "tormented genius" remains in the popular consciousness: composers like Beethoven and Schumann, scientists like Newton, philosophers like Wittgenstein and Russell, poets such as Shelley and Blake and Chatterton, writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O'Neil, the latter four all alcoholics.

But for every one of these examples many counterexamples could be given. With composers, Haydn and Bach; with scientists, van Leeuvenhoek (discoverer of bacteria) or Einstein or many others; with philosophers, Spinoza or Epicurus or Plotinus; the list could go on and on.

Intelligence is like money: it does bring with it a set of problems which its absence does not, but given the choice, most people would rather be rich than poor, intelligent than stupid. Intelligence and money are virtues in the original sense of the word: they are powers. They both confer greater control over the world.

High IQ is positively correlated with monetary income, with low rates of social pathologies such as crime, being on the dole, and divorce, with low rates of suicide. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to avoid accidents, be in better health, and live longer. Who would not wish for those things?

Is there a downside to high intelligence? The obvious one is a true lack of peers. The genius will almost inevitably find those around him uninteresting. But these days, with the internet and with the efficiency which our society is able to channel the highly capable into higher education and important jobs (this is one of the main points of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve), one is no longer limited to those in physical proximity for a peer group.

One adverse effect of high intelligence might be boredom. My nephew had to be withdrawn from school when it became obvious that not only were they not teaching him according to his potential, but that he was bored to death, unwilling to pay attention to what was happening in the classroom. Even now, his parents have trouble getting him to study "easy" things; he likes the challenge of difficult problems in learning. But boredom need not be an insuperable problem; infinite resources are available (and here I am talking not just about a gifted child, but any intelligent person), one merely has to find them.