100/100: Caveat Lexor (is that Latin?)
Name: Mark Thompson #9
Date: 3:29 pm  Thu Aug 10, 1989

Here's a rather peculiar article from the June 89 "Psychology Today"
(Which as T. pointed out in //chat the other day, has gone downhill
quite a bit in the last few years.) Anyway...

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THE REAL REVENGE OF THE NERDS

"You know him. He stalks the halls of a thousand schools, pens and automatic 
pencils filling his breast-pocket protector, briefcase bulging with books, 
papers and floppy disks, eyes squinting behind thick lenses. Embarrassingly 
inept on the ballfield and in social banter, he has no peer at the computer 
keyboard. You know him; you may have shunned, picked on, exploited or 
befriended him. In any event, watch him: He will one day rule the world.

"He is the NERD, the NeuroEvolutionary Rostral Developer. According to a novel 
theory by New York psychiatrist David Forrest, NERDs represent a specialized 
subspecies of humanity, the type best adapted to our increasingly 
technological, information-based civilization.

"The distinguishing feature of the NERD is a brain more highly developed in 
its rostral - that is, frontward - region, the region responsible for verbal, 
intellectual and integrative functions. By comparison the more caudal, or 
backward, parts of the brain that are involved with basic perception, movement 
and emotional capacities are correspondingly less developed. This unique 
neurophysiological pattern accounts for many familiar NERDy traits.

"For example, NERDs are notoriously clumsy at athletics, which require skills 
mediated by the brain's more primitive perceptual-motor systems. Similarly, 
social adroitness may require a well-developed limbic system, the 
phylogenetically old brain network involved in emotion. By contrast, skills
that involve conceptualization, abstraction, verbalization, calculation and 
integration have their seat mainly in the brain's more advanced frontal lobes 
and perhaps the left hemisphere, accounting for the overall "braininess" of 
NERDs.

"NERDs are typically uninterested in the everyday preoccupations of hot looks, 
fast cars and big bucks, but rather have, according to Forrest, "an almost 
libidinal investment in or sexualization of the mental process and its 
productions." In other words, NERDs get off on ideas the way the rest of us do 
on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

"Hey, Four-Eyes!" Many a NERD has winced to that taunt. Although wearing 
glasses is by no means an exclusive NERD trait, NERDs' characteristic myopia, 
says Forrest, may lead to "an intense interest in minute irregularities of the 
close, touchable, topographically explorable" environment - a tendency to 
prefer looking at the world "up close".

"In fact, several recent studies suggest that nearsightedness and increased 
intelligence may indeed go together much like, say, towel snapping and jock 
itch. In one study, Israeli researchers Mordechai Rosner and Michael Belkin 
analysed the incidence of myopia in more than 150,000 male military recruits 
and compared this with their IQ and level of schooling. They found that more 
intelligent and better educated groups of subjects also had greater numbers of 
myopes.

"In a subsequent study, psychologists Sanford and Catherine Cohn and Arthur 
Jensen compared myopia rates of gifted junior high school students and their 
more intellectually ordinary siblings. Sure enough, the brainier siblings 
turned out to have a higher rate of nearsightedness. Is this because 
gifted students cram themselves bleary-eyed with compulsive studying? 
Apparently not. The researchers point out that there's no direct evidence that
myopia is caused by close work. Myopia appears to be a genuine innate trait 
of more intelligent people.

....
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There's more to the article, but I only have one page available here...
I thought this kind of tied into the themes of myopia, the hereditary or
acquired nature of human behaviors, and the other topic of insanity and 
creativity. It may even have some bearing on the eroticism of intellect...