A psychic prodigy would still show up in the statistics. The problem is the researchers never encounter people like that, they just got people who might do slightly better than chance. A Bolt would be a much better thing.
Sorry, I think I did. When I was 8, the Tavistock arrived at my school starting testing on the extension of IQ testing to kids, in the 1960s. So we all sat the same General Knowledge paper, really long, and that was that for a while. Then the Head announced we'd been accepted, we all got set an IQ test. So we sat that. And then the outliers were tested again. I was called. Some were obviously thick, I wasn't. Then they wrecked my adolescence, because they announced I'd tested with the General Knowledge of a 14 year old - aged 8. Three years after I learned to read. Did the dumb klucks ever take it out on me. And then the Tavistock called me up to see them in person. I was 11. Another IQ Test, Congratulations, you just joined the main baseline group. Oh, and by the way, you can never test, it would be statistically invalid. So I had a taxi back, and that was that.
Roll on 50 years, and I've done stuff which is rather unusual. A lot of stuff which is really unusual. Some joker gave the team the top gong. I've got some medical concerns which send me to Harley Street, they start work, but at the same time word goes around, a shrink takes one look and tests me, on the basis that me-now and me-then are very different people. The results are impressive, in the mid 150s, implying I was in the 160s at peak. Now intersect those 2 data sets.
The suggestion of positive reinforcement certainly holds true in terms of applied competence. However, the IQ test doesn't focus on that, but on underlying mechanisms, in other words the potential. That was certainly genetic, in my case, but releasing that took some rather unusual events.
Socially, it was the opposite: I now know I have very mild Aspergers, so I mismanaged my social response to the reaction to the dumb klucks, and it got worse and worse and I ended up in protective measures. That actually allowed me to stand out and show what I could do as a functional adult with a maturity ten years ahead of my physical age. 14 with the knowledge and competence of a 24 year old. By the time I was 17 I was running an entire Cadet Battalion.
My social status did eventually recover, when I had enough distance between me and the background. But it's unreliable, because I don't react well to kids with an IQ of 80 or 90 trying to lord it over me. Now I have a formal diagnosis, I don't think it's helped much. I've now got an excuse to hide behind, a self-image which whilst objective means I no longer even try to identify with someone slightly below average. Come at me with zero respect and you get zero back. Come at me with a sense of Entitlement (to kick me around) and you get exactly what I wasn't powerful enough when young to administer - because now, my gym's the other branch of where the World Heaviweight Boxing Champion trains. I've the experience to be very frightening indeed. Latest count last week was sending six young thugs running. Will it catch up with me? Perhaps, but I've had two knife wounds when younger and survive. I've just had three ops, and those scars are settling very nicely.
OK, that's the core facts. More interesting here is that I started testing for hyperperception in my mid-20s, with what's described in a First-Califate text as am initiatory experience, triggering the potential. From there, competence built by degrees, but it was never something I had premeditative control over. I was there ahead of the field by a country mile on the important stuff, but normal in most things. About the time they got around to testing me, I was in the company of a Wiccan field-sensitive, who told me outright that I had the aura of a Reiki Master. I'd never thought along those lines, but I had trained as a paramedic, and knew I had rather advanced finger sensitivity. As the original Usui line of Healers came from the same professional domain I'd worked in, there was precedent, so I took myself along to an Open Day at a Reiki Healer Centre some distance away from home, and sat in on a workshop in which I was utterly unknown. Using my general meditational sensitivity, I "read" the room, and detected a fairly common feel from those presentt. OK, so that's the average Reiki feel, then. But there was one area where the feel had a gap in it, so I offered power to it, and that was taken. Right, I sat back and waited. The meditation ended, and sure enough, one of the group of four in that spot spoke up, really puzzled, "I've meditated often before, but I've never come out of it tinngling before. Is this usual?"
I then owned up, and convened a mini meetup with the meditation leader and the new sensitive. The leader was happy to have a new trainee, the trainee happy to have the reason she was getting nowhere sorted, and me, well, I had the result, I'd switched on the powers across a room. That's a master-level gift.
However, I do make one distinction. Most healers work in their own power, which is relatively weak. Because I passed the seer test as well, I tap the universal, which is far more powerful, but do so only when I'm positive I should, to be respectful. That means I don't practice normally. It's not a waste, that is how I learned to work long ago and that's how I like to work, very quietly. What I'm doing here is taking me to the limit, and soon I'll go quiet for a while to reduce my profile, because there's entirely too much of me in this. Let the ripples subside. And that's why the Scientific Rationalism test isn't going to work, because it reduces something of the spirit to the mechanical. It rejected the Spiritual 400 years ago, and is logically demonstrated to be bounded in scope. Therefore, it isn't qualified to sit in judgement on the spiritual, the universal. It's as absurd as asking a frog to declaim Hamlet's Soliloquy. Yes, I grew in competence by slow degrees, but what that method doesn't explain is why the challenges I faced also grew to match. Eventually I faced the toughest possible, and now things are somewhat easier, if not beginners' stuff.
So, what do I think is happening? Firstly, I learned sensitivity to the odd. You'll never get anywhere if you don't appreciate the minor extraordinary things around you. The day every bus on a route drove past in one long line. Heaven only knows why, they just did. Slowly testing the power to anticipate the unpredictable. But slowly things grew, so I became aware of the inner voice of the seer. Once that kicked in heavily, matters really took off, and the scale of growth accelerated. Eventually it reached the point where it simply wasn't possible to take refuge in normality any longer, and yet I found I had a psychologist to discuss matters with: they were happy with my rationality. So timorously I found myself going where nobody I had ever come across had gone before. I knew how it related to established knowledge, and waited for other research to get a cross-bearing on the new position, confirming that it was no longer hypothesis but contextual.
What I'm a tad thoughtful about is the classical dichotomic definitions in use. ESP. Is that really what my shrinks call Hyperperception, and I term a seer gift? Telekinesis. Well, if I can affect someone's meditative state at a distance, that's influenced something physiological about them, so is doing something to a material object significantly different? Perhaps it's because I've never really had to, although I have shown adrenalin strength a couple of times when really needed. Was it just adrenalin? My Reiki powered a concert to a new level, I just put the fear of God into six teenagers who were up to no good exactly the same way, by concentrated intent. All of these are simply facets of a me that isn't just the sum of my physical parts. Some I've found a use for, others not. Perhaps they're not in my gift. I'm not bothered either way, because what I've done is sufficient. I left a permanent mark on the world aged 14, in such a way as not to be noticed, yet which invokes my name more often than the seried ranks of Thibetan monks invoke the Buddha. Quite funny, really. Enough.
I speak from experience, because it would be a lie to pretend otherwise. Let others do the same. I'm far more proactive than most, because it's easier for me to be so, but do you have to be just an observer following what you feel to be interesting, or can you start to move from passivity into activity? I suspect that with the growth in our brains, far more people than we think may be able to do the unusual. I see others like me, children of prominent scientists and academics, who are equally as unusual: some of them I can sense as spirits as clearly as I can see and hear them. You can sense someone behind you, perhaps. Like that, but far more powerfully. Is that telepathy? It starts somewhere.
The other part of the story is whether the subject is ready to recognise the potential, or if they and their surroundings dismiss something real with a prejudiced snort of "Impossible". Of course it'll be impossible if you never try. Eventually it becomes inevitable, one way or t'other.