When teams of slick, seasoned Microsoft sales guys set off in search of corporate-software business 25 years ago, a young and scruffy Bill Gates often tagged along. He looked more like a tech-support guy than the CEO. Customers usually turned their attention to the older and more polished "suits" who traveled with him. But inevitably one of the Microsoft executives would toss a question to the floppy-haired kid: "What do you think of that, Bill?" Ignoring the skeptical gaze of middle-aged execs and computer engineers, Gates would hold forth about hardware, software, floppy drives and the interfaces between them. With others you sipped at a water fountain, but when Gates spoke it was like "drinking from a fire hydrant," said a former sales chief. Sometimes it was invigorating and restorative; other times it was a shock to the system.
But you don't have to be Bill Gates to intimidate. There are brainy types everywhere who bend discussions and meetings to their will: getting off the best laugh lines, asking the seminal questions, puncturing bad ideas and thinking up most of the good ones.
For some mere mortals, a bout of self-examination might follow: "Why didn't I think of that?" For others, the experience is an invigorating intellectual romp. The way we react to dazzling intellect reveals something of our individual personalities as well as much about humans in general. People who cower in the presence of great minds are more apt to be deficient in self-confidence than in brainpower. And those who relish the experience are likely learning from (rather than sparring with) the luminary in question.
Being in the presence of genius causes people to change their behavior, their body language and the way they speak. We tune in to the pitch of their voice, the steeliness in their eyes, while always looking for a hint of irritation.
"A lot of people are intimidated and don't say much at all," says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. A senior Microsoft executive once said of Gates: "People worry, 'If I take a nanosecond more to explain something, will Bill get impatient?'"
But it's not just anxiety about our own performance or bruised ego that causes us to be acutely aware of the brainpower of others. Tracking the star performer allows us to build the right alliances, to learn new tricks and to avoid making mistakes.
Beginning in the Pleistocene era, as our ancestors competed for limited resources, the more intelligent beings, not just the biggest and strongest, moved to the alpha position in the group, argues Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis who studies genius, creativity and eccentricity.
The rest of the group did well to attend to the bright light in their midst. "We do a great job of intuitively recognizing intelligence," affirms Seligman. Brainpower can be signaled in a variety of ways: as wit, wisdom or withering criticism. There are also objective cues to intelligence—speed of reaction time, fluency of speech, spontaneous humor.
Peter Borkenau, a professor of psychology at Martin-Luther University in Halle, Germany, has shown that study subjects are able to estimate the mental capacity of persons videotaped reading short sequences of standard text aloud. "It was sufficient to hear how fluently others spoke," he says. Let them open their mouths, even to read someone else's words, and their level of intelligence could be discerned. When the individual spoke extemporaneously, the correlation between perceived and actual intelligence was higher still.
Extraordinary ability is even more noticeable in small feats. James Udall, a shipmate of Lt. Richard Nixon on a World War II troop carrier, remembered card games with the future president, calling Nixon "as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen." Bob Kavesh, who worked at Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1950s, remembers a young consultant, Alan Greenspan, at various gatherings of economists. "He was the ultimate anatomist of the system," said Kavesh. "He knew how the whole thing fit together. He knew the bones, muscles and blood. By the late Fifties, nobody knew the numbers better than he did."
Teachers are often especially attuned to and impressed by giftedness. Hillary Rodham's sixth-grade teacher Elizabeth King was so taken by the child's ability that, when Hillary moved on to junior high school, she got herself transferred to the new school so that she could continue as her teacher. Chief Justice John Roberts's eighth-grade math teacher, Dorothea Liddell, never removed his birth date from the student birthday book she had kept for decades. His was the only one she retained. "I like to think that was an omen for wonderful things to come," she told Time.
But not everyone is as taken with raw intellect as are schoolteachers. Associating with the supernaturally smart has a chilling effect on many people.
"There is a mixture of reactions," says Borkenau. "On one side people may feel admiring of the person and on the other they may feel inferior and intimidated." No one wants to play the fool in the presence of those who don't suffer fools gladly.
Robert Oppenheimer, who helped unlock the power of the atom, had a remarkable ability to absorb information rapidly. Physicist Lee Dundridge told Oppenheimer's biographers that the hero of Los Alamos "could read a paper—I saw this many times—and you know it'd be 15 or 20 typed pages, and he'd flip through the pages in about five minutes and then he'd brief everybody on exactly the important points."
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