6 min read5 days ago

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🧠 “Some of the brightest people I’ve ever known couldn’t read a room to save their lives.”

c. Unknown — Lot’s of people according to my AI’s response

I’ve worked with some naturally brilliant people in my career, way above levels I could ever hope to reach; and most people would say I’m pretty smart. I’d be happy to name them, but I either don’t want to cause them the embarrassment, or inflate their ego any higher than it is already! Some of them might not know who they are, and the arrogant ones aren’t as smart as they think they are, but I’ll still give them credit that they are smarter than me.

Without exception, when I think of my top 5 most intelligent people I’ve worked with, the list is based completely on cognitive intelligence (IQ), and everyone on that list scores very poorly on emotional intelligence (EQ), in my perception of them.

While I wouldn’t include myself in such a distinguished list, I do recognise (and have evidence) that my IQ is above average, whilst I also believe my EQ is below average. However, I perceive my EQ has increased as I get older and learn from more experiences. Brain training works for both types, and to succeed as a leader I believe I’ve developed my EQ faster than my higher IQ peers. Not an easy thing to put on your CV (résumé for my American friends).

I asked myself (and my GenAI sidekick) what the reasons might be for this, and whether there was an inverse relationship between IQ and EQ? What makes someone a genius, is it their overall intelligence or their individual ability in a single category?

Finally, what does this mean for the future of Artificial Intelligence, can AI ever reach genius levels?

Let’s take a deeper look:

Why the Smartest Minds Often Miss the Human Part

Over the years, I’ve worked alongside some truly brilliant individuals. The kind of people who think in dimensions most of us can’t even perceive. They can deconstruct complex systems, see patterns before anyone else, and invent ideas that change industries.

Yet when I think about these people, one thing stands out with uncomfortable clarity: almost all of them lacked emotional intelligence.

They could solve equations no one else could, but struggled with empathy, humility, or simple social grace.

The Two Faces of Intelligence

IQ measures how fast you learn. EQ measures how deeply you connect.

When we talk about “intelligence,” most of us still mean the cognitive kind reasoning, memory, logic, problem-solving.

But *emotional intelligence (EQ), *the ability to read people, manage emotions, and navigate social complexity, is an equally powerful form.

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Commonly mis-represented with IQ being left brain thinking and right brain being EQ it serves a useful visual purposes while not at all biologically accurate at all.

And yet, they rarely coexist in abundance, and I’d also argue people with very high EQ rarely get the same level of recognition they deserve. They’re also guaranteed to dismiss their own EQ and nominate someone they feel is more emotionally intelligent if you acknowledge it (after thanking you for the thought).

Why the Brilliant Often Lack Emotional Depth

There’s no biological law that says high IQ must come with low EQ. But in practice, they often diverge. So what might explain this?

Cognitive dominance: Some people’s brains are wired for pattern recognition and abstraction. They live in the world of ideas, not emotions. Often wrongly labelled as left-brain thinking.

Different reward systems: Logical precision and emotional nuance don’t trigger the same dopamine hits. The “high” of solving a hard problem can eclipse the subtler satisfaction of human connection.

Social misalignment: Exceptional minds can feel isolated. When few people can meet you on your level, it’s easier to retreat into intellect and harder to grow socially.

Cognitive empathy ≠ emotional empathy: Many brilliant people understand human behaviour analytically but don’t feel it intuitively. They model emotions; they don’t mirror them.

So the appearance of an inverse relationship may actually be a trade-off in attention and experience. The more you train one muscle, the less you use the other. This makes sense to me, I feel my coding skills evaporating as I place less emphasis on maintaining them over my mental health support group and public speaking.

What Actually Makes a Genius?

We tend to label people “genius” when they see what no one else can. Was Einstein’s genius greater than Di Vinci’s? What types of geniuses (I want to write genii but you might think I’ve started talking about Aladdin) are there?

**Polymath **— Genius as breadth: connecting multiple domains in new ways (Da Vinci, Lovelace, Goethe).

**Savant **— Genius as depth: mastery of one domain to superhuman levels (Ramanujan, Mozart, Curie).

Impact — Genius as change: ideas that reshape how others think, regardless of IQ (Einstein, Freud, MLK).

Visionary — Genius as *foresight: *imagine futures and meanings others cannot yet see (Jobs, Woolf, Turing)

You’re probably ready to argue that Einstein was a Polymath, or that Da Vinci was a Visonary? Yes, they were. but the key point is genius isn’t about perfect intelligence across all dimensions. It’s about supernormal insight in one or more domains, expressed in ways that alter reality for others. Every one of the above people exhibited genius in multiple ways.

The AI Mirror: Can Machines Be Geniuses?

Artificial Intelligence gives us a strange mirror to hold up to ourselves. Let’s see what ChatGPT 5 thinks about this:

AI is pure cognition — processing, reasoning, optimizing — without emotion. In that sense, it’s the ultimate high-IQ, low-EQ being.

It already shows flashes of what we might call synthetic genius: generating ideas, solving problems, composing music, even designing code beyond human imagination.

But is that genius — or just simulation?

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If we define genius as insight plus emotion, then AI remains brilliant but empty — a mirror reflecting back our logic but not our humanity.

**It can write poetry but doesn’t feel beauty. It can mimic empathy but doesn’t *care. ***Tip: Next time your AI is being overly complimentary ask it to be honest, brutal and critical in it’s response — you know, like your best friend would after 8 pints of beer.

Emotion: The Missing Ingredient of True Intelligence

Emotion isn’t noise in the system, it’s the signal that tells us what matters.

Without it, intelligence is directionless. You can calculate endlessly but never care about the outcome. You can optimize for perfection and destroy meaning along the way. It sounds a lot like a psychopath, but don’t worry it isn’t. (You can Google or ask your LLM why yourself).

Gen AI isn’t psychopathic — it’s amoral and affectless. But that absence of empathy makes it functionally similar to psychopathy in its potential impact.

So perhaps the next frontier — for both humans and AI — is **integrated intelligence: **the kind that combines analytical clarity with emotional resonance.

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The fusion of IQ and EQ

Real emotional intelligence isn’t a guardrail you can include in your AI prompt. If you could (or when you can) I suspect it would struggle with morals, ethics and impact just like we have to every day. All it can do today is calculate how to offend the least amount of people — based on the data available to it.

Ultimately the most intelligent act isn’t to know more — it’s to understand why it matters, and that’s why humans-in-the-loop with EQ ability remain very, very, important.

Closing Reflection

If history’s geniuses often lacked empathy, maybe that’s the price of evolution — brilliance before balance. But as AI travels toward superintelligence, we have a chance to learn from our own asymmetry.

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The future won’t belong to the smartest or the most emotional, but to those who can balance insight with empathy, and use intelligence not just to solve, but to understand. (Regardless I certainly feel less inferior to my top 5 smartest people I’ve worked with than before I researched this subject).