Intelligence Inquisition

The day of her IQ assessment arrived with the weight of scientific destiny. She presented herself at the psychology office at the precisely appointed time, dressed with the kind of careful attention to appearance that suggested she understood this was an important performance—though she wasn't entirely sure what role she was supposed to be playing.

The psychologist greeted her with professional warmth and what seemed like genuine concern for her comfort. "This will last quite a while" she explained, gesturing toward a table arranged with various testing materials that looked like a cross between children's toys and instruments of intellectual torture. "If you feel tired or overwhelmed at any point, we can take a break or even continue another day."

The kindness in her voice was reassuring, though it also suggested she expected this process to be more taxing than our heroine had anticipated. She settled into the chair across from the psychologist, curious about what mysteries of her own intelligence were about to be revealed.

They began with what the psychologist called a "spatial reasoning task"—essentially an elegant cubic puzzle that required her to manipulate physical blocks to match increasingly complex patterns. This was exactly the kind of three-dimensional problem-solving that had always felt as natural as breathing to our heroine.

Her hands moved almost without conscious direction, rotating and repositioning the cubes while her mind calculated angles and relationships with the fluency of someone speaking their native language. Each completed pattern triggered a small burst of satisfaction—pure dopamine reward for cognitive success.

"Nice work" the psychologist murmured, making notes while she progressed through the increasingly challenging configurations. Her pen scratched constantly across her notebook, documenting something about the approach or speed or accuracy that seemed significant to her professional assessment.

Next came a tablet loaded with abstract visual puzzles—geometric shapes that needed to be analyzed, compared, and logically extended according to hidden patterns. This was even more exciting for her brain, which seemed to recognize these problems as exactly the kind of systematic pattern recognition it had been designed to excel at.

She found herself leaning forward with genuine engagement, working through each puzzle with the kind of focused intensity she hadn't experienced since before her pharmaceutical transformation began. For the first time in months, she felt like she was using her mind for something it was actually good at, rather than struggling to perform cognitive tasks while chemically impaired.

They had been working for perhaps an hour when a bell rang somewhere in the building—probably signaling lunch break for the staff. The psychologist glanced at her watch with mild surprise.

"I need to step out for just a moment" she said, gathering her papers. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll be right back."

She disappeared, leaving Me alone in the office for what stretched into ten minutes of unintended intermission. Rather than feeling abandoned, she welcomed the break. Her brain felt pleasantly exhausted from the sustained concentration, like a muscle that had been given a good workout after months of enforced rest.

She used the time to explore the office with her eyes, scanning the impressive collection of psychology and neuroscience texts that lined the walls. Titles about cognitive assessment, learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, intellectual giftedness—a library that represented decades of research into the varieties of human mental architecture.

When the psychologist returned, she was carrying what appeared to be a quick lunch—a sandwich and coffee that suggested she was fitting this assessment into a busy schedule of other appointments.

"Sorry about that" she said, settling back into her chair and unwrapping her meal. "Are you ready to continue, or would you like a longer break?"

She was actually energized rather than depleted by the visual-spatial challenges, so they pressed on.

The second phase of testing was entirely different—a series of oral questions that required her to demonstrate various forms of verbal intelligence. Digit span tests where she had to repeat increasingly long sequences of numbers both forward and backward. Mathematical problems presented verbally rather than visually. Questions about vocabulary, general knowledge, and cultural literacy.

This felt much more taxing than the puzzle-solving had been. Where the visual-spatial tasks had felt like play, these verbal challenges required a different kind of mental energy—one that seemed to drain more quickly, especially given her ongoing medication fog.

But she worked through each question methodically, drawing on decades of accumulated knowledge and hoping that her chemically dampened processing speed wasn't too obvious to the professional observer taking notes across from her.

Nearly two hours into the assessment, her cognitive stamina finally hit its limit. The psychologist posed what should have been a straightforward question: "Which is the most widely spoken native language worldwide?"

The question landed in her brain like a stone dropping into still water. Suddenly, she felt completely exhausted—not just tired, but cognitively depleted in a way that made further thinking feel impossible.

She knew the answer, of course. Mandarin Chinese, with over a billion native speakers. But in that moment, accessing that information felt like trying to retrieve data from a computer whose battery was dying.

"English" she said quickly, just wanting the question to end.

"Are you sure?" the psychologist prompted gently.

"Yes" she replied with finality, though she wasn't sure of anything except her overwhelming need for this intellectual marathon to be over. She didn't want to think about it anymore—not about languages, not about statistics, not about whether her answer was correct or wildly wrong.

The psychologist made another note, probably documenting her sudden cognitive shutdown, and mercifully moved toward the conclusion of their session.

"We're finished for today" she announced, beginning to pack away the testing materials. "I want you to know that getting your final results will take some time. This isn't just my assessment—there's an entire team that will review your performance."

She explained the process: herself as the administering psychologist, the neuropsychiatrist who had referred her, a speech-language pathologist who would evaluate certain aspects of her verbal processing, and additional specialists who would each contribute their expertise to understanding her cognitive profile.

"We want to make sure we get this right" she emphasized. "A comprehensive evaluation takes time, but it's worth doing thoroughly."

Me nodded with what she hoped looked like patient understanding, though internally she felt like someone who had just completed a grueling examination and now faced weeks of waiting for results that would somehow define her intellectual identity.

She walked home through the village streets feeling cognitively wrung out in a way she hadn't experienced since her most intense graduate school exams. The assessment had been simultaneously validating and exhausting—proof that her intelligence was still intact despite months of pharmaceutical interference, but also evidence of how much that medication had actually been affecting her mental clarity.

The contrast was striking. During the visual-spatial tasks, she had felt like her authentic self—quick, intuitive, effortlessly competent. During the verbal sections, especially toward the end, she had felt like she was operating through layers of cotton wool, struggling to access cognitive resources that should have been readily available.

She spent the evening in a state of curious anticipation, wondering what the team of professionals would make of her performance, what numbers would be assigned to represent her intellectual capabilities, and whether their assessment would validate her growing suspicion that the person she had become over recent months was a chemically modified version of someone much sharper.

The waiting, she suspected, would be more challenging than the testing itself.