Morita Yuji had already established a reputation for himself as a genius at the early stage of his life. He entered one of the most prestigious high schools in Japan and showed excellent performance in all subjects. He was especially good at math and his specialty was to finish a math exam of National Center Test for University Admissions (a test like SAT) within 20 minutes (The exam was supposed to be finished within 60 minutes) and get a full score on it. He took an IQ test at his cram school when he was a kid and the result showed his IQ score was over 180. Nobody including himself casted doubt on his ability: he was believed to be a real genius with various knowledge, not a mere test-smart student.
It was natural that Morita entered Tokyo university just after graduating from high school and majored in psychology. This was because he wanted to utilize his excellent brain to find out the mechanism of human mind, a huge black box. After that, he continued to engage in psychological studies until he got a doctoral degree. Some of the papers he wrote while he was in graduate school received high evaluations in academic circles.
After completing his doctoral course in three years, Morita founded a school in order to contribute to society by utilizing his psychological knowledge he had learned during his school days. The school offered classes which aimed to enhance businesspersons’ motivation and performance as well as ones for school entrance exams. Morita had already published some books while in graduate school, so he had earned some publicity. As soon as he founded the school, he received a flood of inquiries from men and women of all ages who wished to learn from him.
Morita’s school got off to a good start. His students seemed to be satisfied with his classes, and many of them willingly put into practice the unique study techniques and self-improvement methods he invented. They seemed to be impressed with Morita’s broad knowledge and have no doubt about what he said. Even when someone expressed doubt, Morita could argue them down.
However, even after several years had passed, his students showed no improvement at all on their school grades or performance at work. Morita couldn’t believe that there was something wrong with his methods based on his psychological knowledge he had accumulated for a long time, but they seemed to have absolutely no effect on his students’ performance in fact. Though more and more people started to express doubt about what he said during classes, his broad knowledge still allowed him to argue them down with ease. Even so, his school began to have a bad atmosphere, and Morita was often in a bad mood and so hard on his students.
And one day, an enormous incident happened where one of Morita’s students who was a high school student jumped in front of a moving train and committed suicide after tormenting himself thinking that it was because of his inferiority that he hadn’t got a good result despite the assistance from Morita, a teacher he adored. In fact, it wasn’t that Morita wasn’t responsible for this incident: when the student asked him for advice about his grades which hadn’t been improving at all just before the incident, Morita shouted abuse at the student in front of many other students, saying, “It is because you don’t put into practice what I have told you correctly!”
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After the incident, people around Morita left him one after another because he got a reputation as a teacher who had driven his student to suicide. In the end, his school went bankrupt. After all, the study techniques and self-improvement methods he had developed didn’t work at all and he was betrayed by the people who had once adored him. Since he faced the double whammy of these facts, he became mentally ill and went to see a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist listened to what Morita had to say and advised him to take some psychological tests. Later, the psychiatrist summoned Morita to his hospital to tell what he had learned from the tests to Morita.
“Doctor, I’ve been especially good at studying since I was a child, and once I was even recognized as a genius whose IQ score was as high as 180. The methods with which I taught my students were the culmination of both my efforts through which I had achieved amazing results and my psychological knowledge which I had learned during my school days. Therefore, I had no doubt about their effects, but things have turned out like this. Now, I feel like everything I have experienced in my life isn’t tangible. To begin with, was it true that my IQ score was 180?”
To Morita, who asked like this, the psychiatrist replied calmly with a brooding look,
“Well, actually your IQ score is enormously high. There is no doubt about that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been admitted to the graduate school of the University of Tokyo, from the beginning.”
“Then, what was wrong with me? Or was it my students that were to blame?”
Here is the answer to this question of Morita’s from the psychiatrist:
“Judging from the fact that you taught so many students and none of them showed any improvement, it must be your methods that were defective. That is to say, thanks to your extraordinary high IQ, you were able to pass the entrance exam easily, however illogical your way of studying was. Also, your unique perspectives and extremely high information processing ability afforded high evaluations to your papers you wrote during your graduate school days. In academic circles, arguments with a certain degree of logic tend to receive high evaluations whether they are applicable in the real world or not. Frankly speaking, even though your IQ is high, you lack almost all the other abilities.”
“IQ score is an index which indicates only information processing ability one’s brain has, after all. To make a right decision, information processing is important, needless to say, but if one’s brain processes a lot of information in a wrong direction, the result it will get will be quite wrong too. For example, though it is an extreme example, it should be possible to write a plausible paper about such a nonsense topic as ‘the earth is flat’ if you collect only biased evidence which justifies it. However, it’s just armchair philosophy based on a wrong perspective. We can say your methods are something like that. You had been processing a lot of information which didn’t fit in with the reality and had been proceeding in a wrong direction.”
Without caring about Morita, who was taken aback hearing what the psychiatrist said, the psychiatrist continued as below:
“That is, human intelligence contains factors which aren’t measurable in numerical terms. And in your case, you totally lack the immeasurable intelligence, such things as what we call intuition. The result of the psychological tests I asked you to take the other day also suggest that. Well, at least, you should avoid jobs in which you will have influence on others in the real world. Jobs such as a writer in which you can make use of your excellent information processing ability and unique perspectives may be suitable to you, though.”