Brains are overrated. We all know people who breeze through life — too stupid to realise they’re thick

THE day I passed the 11-plus, I told my father some of my schoolfriends had been promised bicycles by their parents if they got through the exam. His withering reply sticks in my mind to this day, more than half a century on.

‘Have they, indeed?’ he said. ‘Well, you’re not getting a bicycle from me. But you should count yourself lucky, boy. I would have thrashed you if you’d failed.’

I should say at once that this was his idea of a joke. Though he believed in corporal punishment, my blind father was never much of a thrasher — and this was only partly because his disability made it all too easy for me and my siblings to escape his clutches when he thought we deserved a smacking.

As I knew perfectly well at the time, he would certainly not have beaten me if I’d failed. On the contrary, he would have been the very soul of consolation, no doubt telling me that the 11-plus was a silly exam, devised by charlatans, testing nothing more meaningful than the ability to pass spurious IQ tests.

But I also knew my parents valued intelligence and academic success highly — and no matter how hard they might have tried to hide it, they would have been deeply disappointed if I’d failed.

Wounded

My father, after all, had been one of the most dazzlingly brilliant students at Cambridge in the Forties, winning a starred double-first in history despite his handicap of being unable to read except in Braille.

As for my mother, though she was not academically minded herself, she was the daughter of a highly distinguished classicist, mathematician and historian, who was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Hard acts to follow, you must agree.

It was perhaps understandable, therefore, that my late father didn’t go into raptures when I passed the 11-plus, since he expected nothing less. But I will always remember the ten-year- old me, thinking it would have been nice if he’d said ‘Well done, boy’, instead of cracking his little joke about the thrashing.

I thought of his remark this week, when I caught Monday’s edition of Channel 4’s Child Genius, in which 12-year old Rahul scored 14 out of 15 in a timed memory round. He would have scored the full 15 if he hadn’t been narrowly beaten by the clock.

But it was his mother’s reaction that took me back half a century. If your child or mine had done so well, we might have said something like: ‘I’m so proud of you, my brilliant and beautiful boy! You got all your questions right!’

But not Rahul’s mum. Though you could tell she was pleased, her first words to her son (if I caught them correctly) were: ‘ You missed one. You ran out of time.’ Bloody hell! Give him a break! Was it my imagination, or did a wounded look pass momentarily across the boy’s face?

Either way, I reckon it’s fair to guess that Rahul’s mum is not among the 90 per cent of mothers who were found this week to put intelligence low down the list of characteristics they would most like to see in their children.

For those who missed the report in yesterday’s paper, a survey by academics at Goldsmiths, University of London, asked mothers to name their top choice for their young from a list including intelligence and the ‘big five’ personality traits recognised by psychologists: extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness.

Just over half put extroversion — or outgoing sociability — at the top of their wish-lists. This compares with only 10 per cent who rated intelligence as the quality they valued most highly.

As for the rest, 20 per cent picked agreeableness, 10 per cent openness, 9 per cent conscientiousness and, unsurprisingly, none plumped for neuroticism. (When was the last time you heard a mum boasting to her friends: ‘We have every hope little Jessica will grow up to be fabulously neurotic?’)

Success

True, the psychologists questioned only 142 British mothers, which means this is hardly a comprehensive study of maternal aspirations. But I must say I didn’t share the astonishment of their team leader, Dr Sophie von Stumm, at the low priority most of these mums gave to intelligence and conscientiousness.

‘Given that both are linked to positive life outcomes, such as success at school, at work and in relationships,’ she said, ‘ it’s surprising that only one in ten mothers values them as the most important characteristics for their child.’ But is it really?

If my reading of human nature is correct, the overwhelming majority of parents, asked to name the gift they most wanted to bestow on their young, would unhesitatingly answer: ‘ Happiness.’ That’s certainly what I want, above anything else, for our own four boys — just as I’m sure it was what my own parents wanted for me. So I suspect the question those 142 mothers asked themselves, when they were told to pick from the five personality traits, was: ‘Which of them is most likely to make my child happy?’

Seen in that light, is it really surprising that so many plumped for extroversion, and so few for intelligence?

Of course, some may see a fine mind and academic success as the surest routes to happiness. I suspect they include Rahul’s mum — as they did my late father, who derived great fulfilment from exercising his intellect and wanted the same for his sons and daughters.

But I reckon I’m with the 90 per cent of mums who thought otherwise. After all, isn’t an outgoing nature and a wide circle of friends a far greater guarantor of happiness than even the sharpest of minds?

Some people, I grant you, are lucky enough to have both. Indeed, I’ve known very clever men and women who were at the same time gregarious and cheerful, easy-going company (my late father was among them).

Inferiors

But it is also true that the most introverted and screwed-up people I have known, almost without exception, are also strikingly intelligent. In my experience, it is very much rarer to meet people who are thick as well as miserable. They say money doesn’t secure happiness, but then nor necessarily do brains.

A part of the explanation, I imagine, is that it must be agonisingly boring for geniuses to be surrounded all the time by intellectual inferiors. Indeed, most of us have known something of what they must feel when we arrive at the pub, late and stone-cold sober, when all our friends are drunk and talking inane nonsense.

But in my case, it’s nothing that a few pints can’t put right. For a genius, the tedium of other people’s conversation must be never-ending.

No, if I had to name the personality trait most likely to bring happiness, I’d choose self-confidence — and I guess extroversion is the closest approximation to that on the psychologists’ list.

It was for this reason I put our two eldest sons down for Eton at birth, calculating that if they turned out to be stupid, this would be the best place on Earth to instil in them a sense of selfworth (mercifully for my bank balance, all four of them turned out bright).

It’s a rare Etonian indeed, whether brilliant or stupid, who doesn’t appear perfectly at ease with himself and the company he keeps.

No, brains are overrated as a means to achieve happiness. Don’t we all know people who have sailed through life on a wave of self-belief, as happy as sandboys, too thick to realise that they’re thick?