Conversation with Kishan Harrysingh on Family Background, Academic Achievement in the Family, Depression, Odd Jobs, and Spiritual Pursuits: Member, World Genius Directory (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/22
Abstract
Kishan Harrysingh is a Member of the World Genius Directory. He discusses: some family background; academic achievement common in the family; the source of feeling depression, sadness; moments of what has been called “overexcitability”; the asynchrony; some odd jobs; some of the tests and the scores; and intelligence, and a life in the 20s spent on spiritual pursuits.
Keywords: depression, family, intelligence, IQ, Kishan Harrysingh, spirituality, World Genius Directory.
Conversation with Kishan Harrysingh on Family Background, Academic Achievement in the Family, Depression, Odd Jobs, and Spiritual Pursuits: Member, World Genius Directory (1)
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is some family background to provide a long-term context for some of your story?
Kishan Harrysingh[1],[2]*: I am from Trinidad and Tobago. My father is an engineer. My mother works in financial consulting. She has worked in that field for quite some time. Before, she was an accountant for many years. I have a lot of cousins in the medical field.
Jacobsen: Is this kind of academic achievement common in the family?
Harrysingh: Yes, absolutely, it is something that I try to deny to myself, because I was against academics for most of my life. I felt like it was something making people more arrogant than something adding depth and character. For that reason, I denied my own abilities and need for company. People who can understand me for many, many years. Until, I was in my 30s. So, only until a couple of years ago. This is only because of depression, anxiety, and other issues. I was able to start addressing and looking to the fact that I am not normal. Perhaps, I need to find more people like myself to get along with because I have always had really, really serious issues with the abilities of other people to communicate.
Jacobsen: When you’re feeling that way, what do you consider the source of feeling depression, sadness? Is it loneliness? Is it an innate factor? Or is it some existential question begging you?
Harrysingh: A combination of all of those. I have had those problems since I was a teenager. I never understood why my friends – no matter how much I explain it – never understand the concepts. It seemed natural to me. I was very much brainwashed into thinking everyone is exactly as intelligent as each other. It is only a matter of effort. There is some truth to that, obviously, because, I believe, neural pathways strengthen with practice. Also, there is a truth. People are born with certain gifts. For me, philosophical intellect and understanding existential questions, I am genetically gifted with it. I see this in my brother, when he was very young. The things that he would say, even adults had trouble understanding it. Maybe, it must be a genetic thing. It causes a lot of problems. My thinking is so different from the average person. My standards and ethics, and morality, and conduct, and my standards in personal life, are so high. Most people find it impossible to live up to them. It comes from the way in which I intellectualize, conceptualize, and understand the world.
Jacobsen: Can you recall any moments of what has been called “overexcitability” of the profoundly gifted in personal life? The profoundly gifted to experience emotions in the extreme.
Harrysingh: That’s definitely me. Also, I can detach because of many years of spiritual development, even completely. I definitely am a very emotional person. A lot of common problems with friends who are gifted and have had to find an outlet in things like power lifting, etc., where they can channel the emotions to physical things. Definitely, I have always been very, very emotional volatile person. It affected learning. If a teacher is not engaging enough and not interesting enough, or not presenting the work in a properly explained fashion, I would lose interest. So, that emotional side probably affected me more than the average person. I went from failing a class to the top of a class in a class 2 years older than me with very little effort. It had to do with emotion. I started to realize. It was after going through a few things. Maybe, that’s why there was the disparity. Emotion, for sure, have affected me more than the average person. I am trying to find the right explanation without dragging on for an hour.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Harrysingh: Yes, there is so much to explain in the story for me. This is the reason for the stammering to an extent.
Jacobsen: In some sense, this overexcitability, this feeling out of place, this being at the bottom of the class and then being at the top of the class, it matches well the idea of asynchronous development. The asynchrony being between one’s intellectual abilities and one’s emotional maturity. Do you note this is more extreme in terms of the asynchrony for boys than for girls, men than for women?
Harrysingh: It makes sense. I have been suggesting things like this for a long time. I made those inferences. However, I believe, if you look at the curve of IQ, you will find more boys very, very far to the right. There is a high proportion of males who have extreme and profound giftedness than females. Also, we have a higher number of males who are profoundly handicapped. Females tend to cluster in the middle. They tend to be more ‘cold’ or tend to be less emotional in the perspective of their giftedness. That makes sense to me.
Jacobsen: Also, in some ways, it would match the idea of far more women in English Literature, in writing, in journalism, when it comes to postsecondary education. Because those fields, in light of the fact of being in postsecondary education, will require a higher level of general intelligence. They also require a greater level of emotional maturity and insight into the human condition based on the combination of analytic ability and emotional maturity. What have been some odd jobs for you? What have been some more fruitful and fulfilling jobs for you?
Harrysingh: My professional life is a bit of a mess to be honest with you. I have had a very, very unique life with respect to spending early 20s searching for spiritual enlightenment. After that, the only thing I got into was personal entrepreneurial stuff. I am more of an outlier in that sense. I am not someone with a vast professional life. I am not someone tremendously active and accomplished in academics. I am always someone who has mostly denied my own abilities until relatively late in life to pursue higher level academics, and developing a perspective. For me, it goes back to the emotional side of things. I felt passionately, particularly about personal issues of family. It helped in finding my purpose of existing; I sacrificed a lot of younger years, where I would have been in academics, with a pursuit of enlightenment to find the truth behind it all.
Jacobsen: Let’s talk about tests, what are some of the tests and the scores?
Harrysingh: I am new to this. I scored 160 on this one. However, this one is based on a great crystallized intelligence tested. So, there is a lot of information needing research. I didn’t want to spend too much time and effort on it. I submitted it early. It has to be a fact taken into consideration with intelligence testing. Some take months on a test. Some will take a few hours. For me, I did this in the space of one or two days and spent three, four, or five hours in total. Even though, I started weeks before. I didn’t continue. I started like two and a half weeks before. Most of the stuff was done in a couple of days. I think the two tests done prior to this one were intelligence tests with the ceiling being really low. The ceilings were or 160 or 165, which will tend to lower the score. I scored about 150 on those. However, this is the first full scale test going to 200, which I have done. I expect that I will score a lot higher in the future. I need to get more time to be tested based on things not too foreign to me. That’ll more test more fluid intelligence than crystallized intelligence.
Jacobsen: Now, if we are talking about intelligence and a life in the 20s spent on spiritual pursuits, how are you defining the spiritual here? In other words, what is human nature? What is the nature of the world? What is the human nature in this spirituality that you have developed as a sensibility or a worldview over time?
Harrysingh: Excellent question, I would say, “I first started becoming spiritual when I was 15.” I was depressed by the ways in which my family related to each other. I felt, to some extent, unloved. To some extent, this drove me to search for a meaning to life. I looked around myself. I saw how people spent all of this time on developing ways to survive, and working. I could see almost nobody as truly happy or someone who was truly moral. I started pursuing the spiritual path. It started with curiosity first. I had to find out if there was a spiritual path. Should I believe or not if there is a God? Which religion should I choose? Which pathway seems to be the truest? I wouldn’t believe something simply because it was put in a book. I was too smart for that. I started questioning life, little by little, and testing personal theories and different ideas. That’s when I started having certain personal experiences leading me to greater depth of belief. It continued later into the teens and early 20s. After certain issues and relationships, things like that. Truly, the emotional side of life led the pursuits for me. To an extent, it is the thing with gifted people. Mostly with those on the side of philosophical side of thinking rather than the traditional side of academics. It is sad to me. Philosophy and ethics are left out of modern day academics because I think human society is decaying largely in part to the disappearance of this part of our intellect and our development.
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Member, World Genius Directory.
[2] Individual Publication Date: October 22, 2020: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/harrysingh-1; Full Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2021: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
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