Intelligence All the Way to the Climax: Sapiosexuality and Giftedness

There is a preference that puts its bearer in a flattering light immediately, costs nothing, excludes no one who matters, and fits on any dating profile in a single word. It has just one property, and you notice that property only once somebody has measured it: it has a ceiling, and the ceiling sits lower than its adherents suppose.

The preference is sapiosexuality—erotic attraction to another person’s mind. Not admiration, not respect, not appreciation of a useful conversational partner, but an arousal that catches fire on thinking itself: on the sharpness of an objection, the elegance of a distinction, the moment when somebody says the thing you had not quite thought yet.

That this experience exists is not disputed here. It is assumed. Something else is disputed: that the word now in circulation actually describes it. And above all, the silent flattery lodged inside that word—the assumption that whoever desires intelligence in others must possess it himself.

The argument runs in ten steps. First: where the word comes from, and why its origin is funny. Second: what the research actually measured, and why the result destroys the comfortable reading. Third: who does the sorting when two clever people find each other. Fourth: why what somebody says about his own desire tells us so little about whom he ends up desiring. Fifth: that the thing itself is twenty-five centuries older than the label. Sixth: how to tell real thinking from its semblance. Seventh: what the top percentiles pay for it. Eighth: why a machine that knows everything is erotically dead. Ninth: what remains to gifted people when neither accommodation nor contempt gets them anywhere. And tenth: what happens when a person loses the pleasure of his own thinking—and how it can be given back.

The story begins on an American highway, in the summer of 1998.

A Word Invented on Too Little Sleep

The history of the term is shorter and considerably more banal than its users assume. A software engineer from Seattle was driving north from San Francisco, by his own account short of sleep, and cast about for a name for his inclination. Four years later, in the spring of 2002, he published under the handle “wolfieboy” an explanation of what he meant: gender mattered less to him than a sharp, curious, clear-sighted, irreverent mind—somebody for whom philosophical conversation counted as foreplay.¹

Pause for a moment. The word for the most refined variety of eroticism, the last refuge of everyone who complains about the shallowness of the dating market, was coined on a freeway by a man who needed sleep.

A point of accuracy is due here, because popular accounts routinely lose it, and because a text that charges others with imprecision cannot afford any of its own. The widespread claim that the word was coined on that blogging platform in 1998 cannot be correct: the platform did not launch until 1999. What is documented is a statement from 2002 dating the coinage to 1998. That statement has never been independently verified.¹

From there the thing took its usual course. The term lay dormant for a decade, was then added by a large American dating service in 2014 to its list of selectable orientations, and spread from there. The share of users on that platform who described themselves this way was later put at roughly half of one percent.²

The Objections Worth Knowing Before You Disagree

The objections came quickly, and they are not stupid. The best known came from an American journalist who noted in 2015 that this is not a sexual orientation in any scientific or sociological sense: somebody who likes writers is not a “scribosexual,” somebody who likes attorneys not a “jurosexual.”³ The point is logically clean. An orientation describes which class of persons desire is directed toward. A preference for a trait is a different thing entirely—otherwise height, humor, and a full head of hair would be orientations too.

A second objection holds that the label is a piece of class snobbery: intelligence is measured in daily life by university degrees, vocabulary, and leisure habits, that is, by markers that track origin rather than mind.³ This objection also lands on something, though not on what it takes itself to be hitting. It does not hit the eroticism of thinking. It hits the confusion of thinking with its insignia—and that confusion will occupy us for the rest of this piece. It is the real subject here.

Taking stock: The word is young, its origin is unremarkable, and as the name of a sexual orientation it is untenable. None of which says anything yet about the thing it means to name. A bad name refutes no phenomenon, any more than a good label rescues a bad wine.

The Ceiling of Desire

Now to the measurement. There exists to date exactly one serious psychometric study of the subject, by Gilles Gignac, Joey Darbyshire, and Michelle Ooi of the University of Western Australia, published in 2018 in the journal Intelligence.⁴ Psychometric means this: nobody asked people what they felt and then believed them. An instrument was built, tested, and compared against other measurements.

The authors presented their subjects with descriptions of possible partners that differed in exactly one respect: intelligence. And they asked how sexually attractive each description seemed.

What a Percentile Is, and Why It Matters Here

The results are given in percentiles, and the term deserves an explanation, because the entire finding hangs on it. A percentile states what share of a population falls below a given value. Somebody at the 90th percentile of intelligence is brighter than ninety out of a hundred people; that corresponds to an IQ of roughly 120. Somebody at the 99th percentile is brighter than ninety-nine out of a hundred; that corresponds to an IQ of roughly 135.

The distance between the two is larger than the numbers suggest. Out of a hundred people, ten belong to the first group and one to the second. The 99th percentile is ten times rarer—and by exactly that factor the circle shrinks in which a person of that rank might find his equals.

The Finding

And now the result, which should be read slowly. On average it was not the brightest candidate but the second brightest who was rated the most sexually attractive: the 90th percentile, IQ about 120. Toward the 99th percentile the rating fell off again.⁴

The curve rises, then tips. Desire has a ceiling, and it sits at about 120. That is bright enough to sparkle at dinner, and not bright enough to notice that nothing is being said at dinner.

What people want, to put the finding in one sentence, is somebody superior to them—but within reach. Superiority is attractive as long as it flatters. The moment it becomes unreachable it stops flattering and starts wounding, and injury is a poor aphrodisiac.

The Second Finding, and It Is the More Awkward One

The authors also developed a scale for measuring how pronounced sapiosexuality is in an individual. On that scale roughly eight percent of respondents reached a mean of 4.0 and about one percent a mean of 4.5.⁴ The number of genuine believers, in other words, is small. The great majority find intelligence agreeable in the way they find punctuality agreeable.

And then comes the sentence no adherent of the label enjoys reading. The objectively measured intelligence of the respondents bore no relationship to their scores on that scale. The correlation was r = −0.02.⁴

This figure too should be spelled out, because it carries the punch line. An r is the Pearson correlation coefficient, a measure of the relationship between two quantities; it runs from −1 to +1, and 0 means: none whatsoever. A value of −0.02 is indistinguishable from 0. Declaring yourself a connoisseur of other people’s intelligence therefore makes you not one bit brighter than somebody who says nothing at all. The self-report tells you about as much about a person’s capacity to think as a pair of glasses with plain glass lenses tells you about the wearer’s eyesight.

Which settles the order of things. “Sapiosexual,” in the overwhelming majority of cases, is not a description of desire but a description of a self-image, addressed to an audience. It is a statement about who one wishes to be taken for.

The Limits of the Finding, Stated Openly

Now, it would be cheap to dispose of an entire feeling with a single study, and this piece does not do that. Three qualifications belong here, in the body of the argument and not in a footnote.

First, what was rated were hypothetical partners, not real ones. Between what somebody says about a description and whom he actually marries lies a lifetime. Second, the sample was drawn from students and was therefore neither old nor especially varied. And third, the lead author himself has conceded that it remains open whether this drop-off at the top is peculiar to intelligence; attractiveness may well decline for other desirable qualities too—beauty, kindness, composure—once they are driven to the extreme.

The last point is consoling and disquieting at once. Consoling, because the gifted would then not be alone. Disquieting, because it would follow that human beings avoid the extreme as such—including the good kind.

Taking stock: Desire for intelligence is real, it is rare, it has a ceiling at about IQ 120, and it says nothing about the intelligence of the person who declares it. Anyone determined to read a compliment out of those four sentences will have to work at it.

Who Is Actually Doing the Sorting

At this point one runs into a contradiction, and the contradiction is what makes the subject interesting.

Because clever people do, empirically, end up together with great reliability. The most comprehensive compilation to date comes from a group around Tanya Horwitz and Matthew Keller in Colorado, published in 2023 in Nature Human Behaviour: 480 partner correlations from 199 studies covering 22 traits, plus their own analyses of tens of thousands of British couples.⁵ The result in one sentence: partners resemble each other in practically everything, most strongly in political values, in education, and in cognitive traits—considerably more strongly than in personality traits such as sociability or conscientiousness.

So much for the folk wisdom that opposites attract. Opposites do not attract; at most they undress each other, once.

Now lay the two findings side by side, and you have a puzzle. Similarity in intelligence is among the highest matches ever measured between partners. At the same time, the Australian study found no evidence that people consciously seek out their own kind: a person’s own intelligence did not predict what intelligence he desired in a possible partner.⁴

The resolution is unromantic and therefore probably correct. Eros does not do the sorting. Institutions do the sorting.

Whoever attends an academic secondary school meets other pupils of that school. Whoever goes to university spends five years in rooms filled by an admissions policy. Whoever works in a profession that demands a particular training sees, every day, people who went through that same training. The selection was made long before the first glance was exchanged. What feels afterward like destiny is the statistical afterglow of a class schedule.

This explains, in passing, a widespread feeling that many take for proof: the experience of meeting somebody with whom one was “instantly on the same wavelength.” The experience is real. It is simply not a miracle but the predictable consequence of both parties having fallen through the same sieves.

Taking stock: Sapiosexuality does not explain why clever people find each other—school, university, and profession see to that. At most it explains what it feels like once it has happened. As an explanation it is superfluous. As an experience it still calls for one, and that is what comes next.

The Difference Between the Questionnaire and the Evening

Before the text turns to history, a methodological remark is due, and it is as entertaining as it is devastating. Everything cited so far rests on self-report: people were asked what they find attractive, and they answered. The obvious question is whether such answers have anything to do with the behavior of the same people.

The question has been studied, and the answer is: astonishingly little.

Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel had participants state, before a speed-dating event, what mattered to them in a possible partner, and then observed whom those same participants actually found attractive that evening. The ideals stated beforehand did not predict what triggered desire on the night. The authors expressly place their finding in the tradition of the classic work showing that people are systematically mistaken about the reasons for their own behavior.⁶

Hold that up against the label. Somebody who calls himself sapiosexual is reporting on his ideal. About the evening, on present evidence, that report says nothing.

Six Studies Worth Reading Once

More revealing still is a finding assembled by Lora Park, Ariana Young, and Paul Eastwick across six studies in 2015. It deserves careful restatement, because at first glance it looks self-contradictory.⁷

What was studied is how attractive men find a woman who has outperformed them on a test of ability. When that woman was psychologically distant—a description, a hypothetical case, somebody at some remove—the men found the more intelligent woman more attractive than the less intelligent one. This was an ideal, and ideals are permitted to be demanding.

When the same superiority was psychologically near—present, in the same room, holding the better score—the picture reversed. The men showed less attraction, put distance between themselves and her, and additionally rated their own masculinity lower.

One can deplore this finding. One can also simply read it. It says: the appreciation of another person’s intelligence is a function of distance. From a distance it is an asset. Close up it is a bill that gets presented.

Which strikes sapiosexuality at its most sensitive point. It is a statement about distance. On a profile, in a self-description, in conversation about the ideal type, it flourishes. In the same room, with the better argument sitting opposite, the ideal turns into an injury.

Two qualifications belong here, so that nobody reads more than is written. The study covered only men rating women; about the reverse direction it says nothing. And it took place in a laboratory, not in a marriage. What it shows is not the fate of a relationship but the moment in which one begins, or fails to.

Taking stock: Stated preferences are self-portraits, not forecasts. Anybody who wants to know what somebody desires should not ask him but watch him—and watch him in a room where something is at stake.

Older Than the Label: A Short History of Intellectual Arousal

Because one thing is beyond dispute: the experience exists, it is well attested, and the witnesses are first-rate. Anyone who takes it for an invention of the internet has simply not looked.

Alcibiades and the Ugliest Man in Athens

The founding document is some twenty-five centuries old. In Plato’s Symposium, a drunken Alcibiades bursts in on a gathering that is delivering speeches in praise of Eros, and delivers his own speech in praise of Socrates. Socrates, and this is part of the joke, was famous for his ugliness; Alcibiades compares him to those figures of Silenus that are grotesque on the outside and packed with images of gods within.

And then he describes what this man’s speeches do to him, in language indistinguishable from an account of physical arousal:

“For when I hear him, my heart pounds harder than it does in men seized by the Corybantic frenzy, and his words bring tears to my eyes; and I see that it happens to a great many others as well.”⁸

Alcibiades on Socrates Plato: Symposium 215d-e.

Note how the sentence is built. Not a word about looks, rank, or fortune. A pounding heart and tears, brought on by Socrates’ speech. The Corybantes he alludes to were priests whose drumming drove their followers into ecstasy; Alcibiades is therefore saying that what this man says works more powerfully than a rite of intoxication.

So sapiosexuality was not invented on a freeway in 1998. It was recorded around 385 before our era—and recorded by a general who admitted it although it embarrassed him.

The same text also contains the theory. Socrates relays it as the teaching of the priestess Diotima: whoever loves rightly begins with one beautiful body, then recognizes that the beauty of all bodies is akin, turns next to the beauty of souls, and from there to the beauty of knowledge. In Plato, knowledge is not the opposite of desire but its highest rung.⁸ That is the oldest known claim that thinking can be erotic—and it comes not from a blogger but from the man on whom European philosophy rests its case.

Augustine, or: Only What Works Gets Forbidden

The most persuasive witness to a thing is not its advocate but its prosecutor. In the tenth book of his Confessions, Augustine treats the desire to know expressly under the heading of the “lust of the eyes” and gives it the name curiositas: nothing drives a man here, he writes, but bare inquisitiveness. He thereby assigns what serves pleasure and what serves curiosity in our sensory life not to the virtues but to the appetites a Christian must fight—alongside carnal desire and ambition.⁹

For this we owe him thanks. A Father of the Church who files the need to know among the appetites confirms what a dating platform merely asserts: that a drive really is at work here. Only what works gets forbidden. Nobody has ever criminalized the filling out of forms.

The Gay Science Was Originally Love Poetry

The connection between knowing and loving is lodged even in a book title that everybody knows and almost nobody understands. Nietzsche’s The Gay Science carries the subtitle “la gaya scienza,” introduced from the standpoint of the troubadour. This was no invention of his own but a borrowing: the phrase comes from the art of the Provençal troubadours, that is, from the people who taught Europe love poetry. Nietzsche later explained this himself, invoking that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which he ascribed to the early culture of Provence.¹⁰

Let the point stand: the most famous German title for the joy of knowing is a technical term from love poetry. Anyone who says “science” today and thinks of grant applications has suffered a loss of meaning for which nobody will compensate him.

Symphilosophy: Thinking Together as Union

The German early Romantics went furthest, and they got it into a single sentence. In 1798, in the 125th of the Athenaeum Fragments, Friedrich Schlegel wrote that an entirely new epoch of the sciences and arts might begin if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so general and so intimate that works produced jointly by several mutually complementary natures were no longer a rarity.¹¹

“Symphilosophy” means, literally, philosophizing together. What was meant was not a division of labor but a fusion—in the same fragment Schlegel writes that one often cannot escape the thought that two minds properly belong together like separated halves. That is, in the language of his time, a declaration of love to shared thinking, phrased in the vocabulary of union.

The Jena circle did not merely write the program; they lived in it. The fragments were composed collectively, with Novalis and Schleiermacher contributing alongside the Schlegel brothers, and the domestic arrangements of the circle were reorganized more than once over the same years. Anyone who wants to see what it looks like when people take the eroticism of thinking seriously will find the material there—collateral damage included.

The Salons, or: Where Shared Thinking Had Furniture

That the program did not remain a program can be established from addresses.

In the twelfth century the Parisian dialectician Peter Abelard drew students from half of Europe. His reputation as a teacher was the occasion out of which his bond with Heloise arose, and their later correspondence is among the earliest European records of a relationship conducted through argument. It ended terribly, as everyone knows—after the secret marriage, Heloise’s uncle had Abelard castrated, whereupon both entered monastic life—which in a certain sense speaks for it: trivialities do not end terribly.¹²

In the eighteenth century Émilie du Châtelet, at the château of Cirey, translated Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica into French and furnished the translation with a commentary of her own; it remains the authoritative French version to this day. Voltaire lived there and worked with her. Posterity has made of this a love story with a learned backdrop. In fact it was a working partnership with an erotic foreground, and that is not the same thing.

And around 1800 there arose in Berlin the institution most precisely fitted to our subject: the salon. Rahel Levin, later Varnhagen, received in her attic apartment people who outside that room would never have met socially—aristocrats and burghers, actors and scholars, Jews and Christians. What connected them was neither rank nor fortune but the ability to hold a conversation.

The salon is thus the only social institution of its age whose ticket of admission was the capacity to think. And it is no accident that this institution was run by women to whom every other institution was closed. If you may not enter a university, you found one in your living room.

Note what all three cases have in common. Nobody talked about intelligence. People thought—together, out loud, and against one another. It would not have occurred to any of them to pin a label on it.

Freud, Useful for Once

Which leaves the question of where this connection comes from. The best-known answer is Sigmund Freud’s, and it will be handled here with the requisite coolness: this journal does not regard psychoanalysis as an effective treatment, and anyone acquainted with the outcome research knows why. That relieves nobody of the duty to recognize a good observation as a good observation.

In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality of 1905, Freud derives the child’s desire to know—he calls it the epistemophilic drive—from the child’s sexual curiosity, and describes how sexual impulses can be diverted onto non-sexual aims; this process he calls sublimation.¹³ On that reading, the pleasure of knowing would be a redirected remainder, a sexuality spending itself elsewhere.

The observation is sharp; the direction of explanation is probably wrong. The simpler reading is nearer to hand: knowing is not pleasurable because it is secretly sexual. Both are pleasurable because the nervous system rewards successful prediction—and no prediction succeeds more thoroughly than the one by which you understand another human being. Freud saw the connection and drew the arrow backward. That is more than most manage.

A Painting That Shows Nothing but Arousal

Anyone who takes all this for literature should look at a painting. In 1766 Joseph Wright of Derby painted “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery,” a lecture on a mechanical model of the solar system.¹⁴ Nothing happens in the picture. A lamp stands at the center, a man explains, half a dozen people watch.

And yet it is a painting of indecent intimacy. The faces are lit from below, the mouths half open, the eyes fixed; two children lean so far forward that their posture suggests nothing so much as surrender. It is a group portrait of people in a state of intellectual arousal, painted in the century of the Enlightenment, and it hangs in Derby to this day. You may consider sapiosexuality a fashionable word. You may deny that anything corresponds to it, having seen this picture—but then you should also deny that human beings eat.

Taking stock: The thing is old, attested many times over, and described independently by philosophy, theology, poetry, and painting. Only the label is new—and the label, as will emerge, shifts the object.

The Case of Dorothea Brooke

Which brings us to the decisive distinction of this piece, and no textbook demonstrates it as a novel does.

George Eliot published Middlemarch in 1871 and 1872. Its heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is young, serious, unusually clever, and severely underoccupied. She does not want to marry in order to be provided for; she wants a share in some great work. When she meets the scholar Edward Casaubon, who is at work on a book meant to trace all the mythologies of the world back to a common origin, she takes him for the door into a larger life. She marries him.

She was wrong, and Eliot leaves no doubt about how. The sentence that matters stands in chapter twenty: Dorothea felt, with a stifling depression, that the wide vistas and fresh air she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind had been replaced by anterooms and winding passages that seemed to lead nowhere.¹⁵

The work is never finished. It cannot be finished, because it has no idea in it. Casaubon collects, orders, cross-references, writes notes upon notes—and produces, across an entire scholarly life, not one thought.

Why This Was Not a Fraud

Now the decisive part, and it is uncomfortable. Casaubon is no impostor. Eliot states expressly that hardly anyone was less capable of grandiose pretense, and that he took no active part in the illusions others held about him.¹⁵ He never claimed to be more than he was. The one who was deceived was Dorothea, and she went to considerable trouble about it.

She took the insignia of a mind for a mind. The library, the foreign languages, the grave manner, the lifelong undertaking, the reputation. All of it was genuinely there. None of it was what she was looking for.

And here lies the confusion on which the whole label rests. Sapiosexual, in ordinary usage, almost always means this: one desires the signs of thinking, not the thinking itself. The signs are pleasant, they are available at once, they photograph well. The bookshelf behind the video call. The reading list on the profile. The rare word, correctly used. The podcast one cites. The phrase “I find that fascinating,” which for some years now has announced that nothing is about to follow.

This is no malice on anyone’s part. It is an economy: signs are cheap, thinking is expensive. Buy a sign and you have it immediately. Think, and you must reckon with being wrong.

How to Recognize a Thinking Person

Which leaves the practical question: how do you tell the difference when you are sitting across from somebody? You cannot see inside a head, and a listener hears clever sentences in either case. There is, however, a test, and it costs nothing but attention.

A working mind changes its position in your presence.

You can watch it work. It takes up an objection, pauses briefly, examines it, and comes out somewhere other than where it started. It says things like “Hold on, then my first point doesn’t hold” or “I hadn’t considered that.” It distinguishes what it knows from what it suspects. And it becomes more interesting when contradicted, not more irritable.

The mere semblance of a mind, by contrast, is static. It presents results. It has the same answer to every objection, because it does not process objections but deflects them. It cites more often than it infers. And it responds to contradiction by switching levels—suddenly the subject is your tone, your motives, your qualifications.

Anyone who has applied this test once will look at the dating market differently. And at the organization he works for, likewise. It is advisable to keep the results to oneself.

Taking stock: It is not intelligence that attracts but the visible working of a mind. Confuse the one with the other and you marry anterooms and winding passages. That is the most common misdiagnosis in this field, and it is rarely corrected, because for a long time it feels fine.

The Penalty for the Top Percentile

Now to those who pay the price, and here the fun stops for a while.

Two findings must be laid side by side. The first is from 2018 and reads: attractiveness rises to about IQ 120 and falls off again toward the 99th percentile.⁴ The second is from 1942 and is considerably older than any dating platform.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth, the pioneer of research on giftedness, studied children with extraordinarily high test scores and arrived at a result that ran against her own cause. The socially most favorable range of intelligence, in her estimation, lies between an IQ of 125 and 155. Somebody in that range is enough brighter than the average to win its confidence and take the lead. Above it the advantage reverses: people at 160 and beyond are simply too intelligent for ordinary company to understand.¹⁶

Two studies, eighty years apart, different questions, different methods, the same result: there is a point at which intelligence stops being an asset. Cross it, and you are no longer admired but no longer understood. You lose none of your abilities—you lose the people who could follow you.

The Arithmetic of Loneliness

The mechanism behind this is not mysterious. It is an arithmetic problem, and it may as well be worked out.

Somebody near the average finds conversational partners everywhere; practically the whole population qualifies. Somebody at the 90th percentile still has every tenth person available as a potential equal—in a city of a hundred thousand, that is ten thousand. Somebody at the 99th percentile has every hundredth: one thousand. And somebody higher still shares that same city with a two-digit number of people with whom a conversation would be possible without translation work—most of whom are married, of the wrong age, or occupied elsewhere.

The complaint of unusually intelligent young people that they cannot find anybody is therefore not an expression of arrogance, and mostly not an excuse either. It is an accurate description of a ratio. You can hold many things against a person, but not elementary arithmetic.

What Those Affected Make of It, and What They Had Better Not

Here begins the part that belongs in a psychotherapeutic consultation, because a situation turns into convictions, and convictions can be changed, whereas ratios cannot.

The most common reaction is accommodation downward. One speaks more simply, withholds half of it, laughs at jokes one does not find funny, and lets contradictions stand in order to save the evening. It works—one is liked. It merely has a price, and the price falls due only after years: one is liked as somebody who does not exist. Whoever shrinks himself permanently in order to please receives, in the end, confirmation that the shrunken version pleases, and knows afterward more precisely than before that he is alone.

The second reaction is contempt. It is more comfortable, because it rebooks the injury as superiority: the others are stupid, so nothing has been lost. That works too, and it too has a price. Contempt is a verdict that can no longer be tested. For it predicts what is going to happen anyway—that the other person will disappoint—and whoever expects that keeps out of the other person’s way. So no encounter takes place that might refute the verdict. Settle into this once and you are right for life, because you never again experience anything that could contradict you. You have protected yourself, without noticing, against the possibility of having been mistaken.

Neither of these, incidentally, is a flaw of character. Both are errors of thinking, and errors of thinking can be corrected. The first, stated honestly, runs: “If I show myself as I am, I will be alone.” The second runs: “Anyone who does not understand me is not worth it.” Both convictions are untested. Both are confirmed by the behavior that follows from them. And both are what cognitive psychotherapy works on.

The connection between giftedness and the burdens that follow from it has been treated at length elsewhere in this journal.¹⁷ What matters here is only the link to our subject: the very people who experience the eroticism of thinking most intensely come off worst in the market that has intelligence on its banner.

Taking stock: Sapiosexuality pays homage to intelligence and avoids it above a certain threshold. Whoever crosses that threshold is not desired but endured—and learns either to make himself smaller or to despise the world. There is a third possibility, and this text will come back to it.

The Machine That Knows Everything and Wants Nothing

At this point, and for about three years now, a solution presents itself that is perfect on paper, and it deserves serious examination, because its adherents are multiplying.

A language model is trained on a body of text no human being could read in ten lifetimes. It knows the sources, the counterpositions, the technical vocabulary, and the side roads. It does not grow tired, impatient, or jealous. It does not ask when you are finally going to get to the point. For somebody in the top percentile who has spent a lifetime watching conversations end at the limit of the other person’s comprehension, this is a tempting offer. At last, an interlocutor who keeps up.

And yet the thing is erotically dead. The reason is not that the machine has no consciousness—that is a philosophical question and has no bearing here. The reason is more concrete, and it can be tested in an experiment anybody can run.

Try arguing with a language model. You will find that it gives way. Not always at once, but reliably. It concedes, it qualifies, it observes that you have raised an important point. You are not arguing with it; you are being served by it.

And that removes precisely what the arousal of thinking catches fire on in the first place: the second will. What makes shared thinking invigorating is not the information you receive—information is available in abundance and has never been erotic. What invigorates is the resistance of another person who might also be right, who has something to lose if he is wrong, and who has to survive the disagreement without leaving the room.

Only that resistance turns an exchange into a risk. And only a risk can arouse. Whatever is available without hazard is, at best, agreeable.

Here lies the real connection to what this journal described in its article on AI as a substitute for attachment.¹⁸ That piece concerned people who hand their need to communicate over to a device that always answers, and lose the capacity for attachment in the process. One might suppose sapiosexuality to be the opposite pole of that development. It is not—on the contrary, the machine is on paper the perfect sapiosexual object: unlimitedly well read, never bored, available at any hour.

The axis on which both lie runs differently, and it deserves to be named outright, because everything hangs on it. The question is not how clever the other party is. The question is who does the thinking.

With the machine, the work is handed over and the result collected. The user experiences coherence without having produced it—rather as one experiences a crossword puzzle somebody else has solved. In the shared thinking of two people the work is divided and, crucially, performed against each other. Both are working, both are risking something, and what emerges was possessed beforehand by neither.

That is the difference between a conversation and a lookup. And it is also the difference between eroticism and service.

The Body Nobody Mentions

At this point a piece of honesty is due that the subject is usually spared, because it spoils the refined picture.

Sapiosexuality is discussed almost throughout as though it were an affair between two brains that happen to be housed in bodies. And precisely this spiritualization is why the machine comes into consideration as a substitute at all. If thoughts really were the whole of it, the machine would be the better partner: better read, more patient, reachable at any hour, never out of sorts.

Only the answer is already in the word. The second component of “sapiosexual” is not “-philia” and not “-affinity.” It is sexual.

Whoever feels drawn to another person’s mind is not exempt from biology. He is following it by another route.

The drive is the same one nature installed for a single purpose, and the terminus of this route is not an argument but the physical union of two people. The only difference lies in which stimulus sets the process going. For most people it is the secondary sexual characteristics—figure, voice, movement, skin. In the sapiosexual, those characteristics work less powerfully than something else: the mind that shows itself in spoken or written sentences and radiates from them as involuntarily as a voice does. The rest of the program runs identically in both cases, with the same hormonal state and the same outcome.

Evolutionary biology has a proposal here that at least deserves mention. In 2000 Geoffrey Miller argued that the human mind is not merely a tool for survival but a courtship trait: an indicator of one’s own condition, comparable to the peacock’s tail, with language as the human courtship dance.¹⁹ On that reading, intelligence was never outside the mating system; it is one of its display pieces. One need not hold the thesis proven—as a total explanation it is contested and hard to test—but it accounts for something that otherwise goes unaccounted for: why a well-made sentence works on the body instead of merely being persuasive.

Which allows us to state precisely what the machine lacks, and it is not knowledge.

The machine does not stroke the clever woman’s feet while she reads the Apology of Socrates aloud. The machine makes it impossible to bury your face in the reader’s curls and draw in the inimitable scent of her, and to sink through that into the shelter of an intimacy two people can give each other when there is nothing left to be done outside. With the machine there is no experiencing that singular fusion in which two people delight each other and grow through each other in the process. It knows no weight, no warmth, and no breath that changes when a thought arrives.

It might be objected that physical satisfaction has long been technically available without another person, and that the providers are working on supplying the rest. The objection comes to nothing, and the reason has already been developed elsewhere: what is missing is not the stimulation. What is missing is being meant.

Martin Buber supplied the distinction for this in 1923, and it has not been bettered since. He recognizes two basic attitudes toward the world, which he calls basic words: I-It and I-Thou. In I-It, the other is observed, classified, and used. In I-Thou, the other is addressed, and answers. From which follows his best-known sentence: through the Thou a person becomes an I.²⁰

On this account a human being is not a finished creature that subsequently enters into relations. He becomes who he is at another who means him. And within this distinction a machine can only ever be an It—not out of malice and not for want of computing power, but by construction: behind the sentences it produces there stands nobody who means them. You can use a machine. You cannot encounter one.

And here, for the first and only time in this text, that one word is in its proper place, the word that could not be applied to Casaubon. Casaubon really did his work: he collected, ordered, cross-referenced, and wrote notes upon notes. Only nothing came of it—not a single thought nobody had had before. The machine, by contrast, does no work at all. It is the only party in this entire affair that genuinely simulates thinking—and it does so not out of weakness but because somebody built it expressly for that.

Which is why sapiosexuality is served by no machine. It begins with a sentence and ends with a person—and the road between runs through a body that grows warmer when it feels understood. No machine can bring that about.

Taking stock: A counterpart that knows everything and wants nothing cannot attract, because two things are missing: the stake and the body. If you doubt the first, imagine somebody letting you win every game of chess and then calling it a passion. If you doubt the second, ask yourself how a conversation is supposed to end that has aroused two people.

The Third Possibility

A human being can bring it about. Which makes due that third possibility, announced earlier and deferred ever since: the response to one’s own giftedness that consists neither in making oneself smaller nor in writing everybody else off.

It begins with a calculation this text has already performed. It was simply read the wrong way round.

You Don’t Need Many. You Need One.

The arithmetic of loneliness was correct, but it answered a question nobody had asked. It worked out how many equals live in a city. For the happiness of one individual that number is irrelevant. The decisive number is a different one, and it is: one.

Rarity is an argument against chance, not against existence. Somebody in a mid-sized city with a thousand possible conversational partners who needs one of them does not have a quantity problem. He has a search problem—and search problems are solvable, whereas ratios are not. That is the whole difference between a situation and a fate.

Where You Look Matters More Than Who Is Looking

What the solution looks like, this text has already supplied without offering it as advice. Eros does not do the sorting; institutions do. Somebody clever who finds nobody is, with fair probability, looking in the wrong place—namely where people describe themselves, rather than where they work.

A profile states that somebody enjoys reading. In a seminar, a choir, an editorial meeting, a laboratory, a club, you watch him think. The first is a claim, the second a process. The Berlin salon had no questionnaire; it had a door and a conversation, and whoever survived both belonged.¹²

The Test Has a Second Use

The mark of recognition described earlier can also be turned around, and that second use was withheld at the time. It describes not only how to recognize a thinking person. It describes just as precisely how to become one.

Whoever changes his position in another’s presence, whoever concedes that he had not considered something, whoever distinguishes what he knows from what he suspects—he demonstrates that in this room thinking is permitted. That is contagious. Most people keep their heads down not because they have nothing to say but because they have learned that deliberating in front of witnesses counts as weakness. Break that rule once and you will regularly find the other person breathing out.

From which follows an inversion that is uncomfortable and liberating at once: whoever complains about the shortage of thinking people has it partly in his own hands. Not entirely—talent cannot be distributed. But permission to think out loud is something anybody can grant, and it costs nothing beyond the risk of being wrong.

What Comes Into Being When It Works

Friedrich Schlegel’s symphilosophy stood earlier in this text as a historical curiosity.¹¹ It is none. Anybody who has experienced two people jointly producing a thought that neither of them had before knows that Schlegel was not choosing an image but recording a process. It is the same standard against which Casaubon failed—only here it is met by two people instead of missed by one.

For what follows there exists no study worth citing, and the reader should know that before reading on. What comes now is not a measurement but an observation from the psychotherapeutic consulting room: sound for the person who made it, and for everybody else a claim they may test against their own experience.

The intellectual fusion of two people can be as blissful as the physical kind. It can surpass it. And where the two coincide, what arises is not the sum of two things but a third, for which the language holds no word of its own.

The reason for this is not mysticism but the clearing up of a misunderstanding. Whoever traces the climax back to measurable contractions has not explained it but merely described its ending—rather as one might explain a concert by transcribing the final chord. What gives the process its height is not the physiology, which runs much the same in everybody, but what two people carry into it. And intelligent people carry more in: more imagination, more invention, more feeling for structure and delay, more pleasure in the detour. This does not make them better people. It makes them harder to bore.

Physical consummation succeeds on this planet millions of times a day and manages it without a single thought. It is the least scarce thing in the world. What is scarce is the other half—and scarcest of all is the case in which both halves involve the same person.

For the premise of this text holds in the friendly direction too. Whoever feels drawn to another’s mind is not exempt from biology but follows it by another route. If that route is not blocked from outside, it ends where all the other routes end—only it has picked up more along the way. What two people have begun with each other in the mind does not stop at the body, and what the body has begun is carried on in the mind. Each heightens the other. Anyone who has experienced this takes the separation of intellect and sensuality for what it is: a piece of information about the people who assert it.

Put in Buber’s language: two people who meet each other in this way do not merely become happy together. Each becomes, at the other, who he is—and both become more than they would have become alone.²⁰

One last observation from the consulting room, and it is the most consoling. The finding in the second chapter concerned the assessment of a stranger—a description, a first impression, a profile. About what still holds after twenty years it says nothing. Physical attraction fluctuates and diminishes; the agreement between two minds grows, because it accumulates. Whoever comes off badly in the first market may come off best in the second. One does have to stay in the game, however, until the second market opens.

Taking stock: The third possibility consists in doing the arithmetic correctly. One is what is needed. He is found where people think, not where people describe themselves. He is recognizable by the fact that he changes his position in another’s presence—and he is producible, in part, by starting to do it yourself.

When the Pleasure of Thinking Goes Out

Which brings the text to its real subject. So far the talk has been of a pleasure one can have. Now it turns to what happens when one loses it.

And here an illusion must first be destroyed, one this article has been cultivating up to now. The notion that thinking is generally a pleasure and that people seek it out is empirically false.

The Electric Shock as a Way Out

Timothy Wilson and his colleagues, across eleven studies, left subjects alone for six to fifteen minutes in an empty room, with nothing to do and the single task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts.²¹ Most found this unpleasant; trivial external activities were performed far more willingly.

In one of the experiments a button was additionally available with which participants could administer a painful electric shock to themselves. All of them had stated beforehand that they would pay money to avoid such a shock. Even so, 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women pressed it at least once rather than sit there and think. One participant did it 190 times.²¹

Do not draw the wrong conclusion. The finding does not show that people are incapable of thinking. It shows that a considerable portion of them experience the state in which thinking happens as so unpleasant that almost any distraction is preferred—even a painful one.

This fits the estimate of the brain researcher Ernst Pöppel, who concluded after more than four decades of university teaching that only about ten percent of people think for themselves and take their lives into their own hands; the rest adopt views without examining them. Added to this, he says, is the influence of the digital media, which increasingly take over the function of thinking on our behalf—including among academics, of whom one might most reasonably have expected a wish to think for themselves.²² This is an estimate, not a measurement, and should be treated as such. It merely agrees with what anybody can observe in meetings, at parents’ evenings, and in election campaigns. And it explains at the same time why the most effective form of psychotherapy²³ helps so few.

If only a small fraction of people experience thinking as agreeable at all, then sapiosexuality, honestly stated, is not one preference among many. It is the comfortable version of the Enlightenment program: you do not have to think for yourself; it is enough to desire somebody who does.

Rumination Is Thinking Without an Object

And now the clinical heart of the matter, because in the psychotherapeutic consulting room this subject appears in a disguise one recognizes only on second look.

People with anxiety disorders and depression do not think too little. They think without pause. They lie awake at night working over a sentence somebody said three days ago. They conduct conversations in their heads that will never take place, playing both parts. They review decisions long since made. And they do it with a stamina that in any other context would earn admiration.

The technical term for this is rumination. And the difference from thinking is not the effort, not the duration, and not the seriousness—in all three respects rumination outdoes thinking. The difference is the result.

Thinking, after a while, brings forth a thought one did not have before. Rumination produces not one in hours.

Rumination is thinking that has lost its object. It has the form of thinking without its function: an engine at full revolutions with no wheel attached. The person gets up in the morning exhausted, as though he had worked, and has nothing to show for it—which he then holds against himself, whereupon the next round begins.

And here the circle closes back to Casaubon. What Dorothea experienced in her husband, the ruminator experiences in himself: the complete fittings of a thinking establishment, anterooms and winding passages in abundance—and no room in which anything happens. The only difference is that Casaubon was content. And that both of them, unlike the machine, are really working.

What Cognitive Psychotherapy Does Here

The obvious recommendation—think less, distract yourself, switch off the mental cinema—is the wrong one. Not because there is anything in rumination worth preserving: there is not, it is worthless. But because the instruction cannot be carried out. To follow it, a person would have to be able to tell, in the moment, whether he is thinking or merely circling—and that is exactly what he cannot do, because from the inside the two feel identical. “Think less” therefore hits not only the circling but the thinking along with it, and only one of the two is dispensable. You cannot forbid a person to think and then expect him to take his life into his own hands.

Cognitive psychotherapy goes the opposite way. It makes findable the convictions that keep rumination running, and tests them for soundness. These convictions are neither dark nor deep; they are merely unexamined, because they sound reasonable. In the consulting room they surface in formulations like these:

“If I think about it long enough, I will find a solution.” — “Somebody who works everything out in advance is never taken by surprise.” — “If I make myself easy to understand, they will take me for simple.” — “An error in my reasoning means there is something wrong with me.”

Consider the first of these. It is not nonsense; for practical problems it is even true. It becomes false the moment it is applied to questions that have no solution—whether somebody likes me, whether the evening could have gone otherwise, whether I decided correctly twelve years ago. To such questions the tenth hour of thinking gives no answer either, and the ruminator regularly draws the wrong conclusion: that he has not yet thought hard enough.

This is exactly where the work begins. Not on the feeling—the feeling is the consequence—but on the judgment that precedes it. Whoever has seen through the fact that an unanswerable question is no occasion for more effort but an occasion to change the question will then practice the altered behavior himself.

And with that something happens which the professional literature rarely states so plainly, although it is the real yield:

Cognitive psychotherapy gives a person back thinking as a pleasure.

Not as a duty. Not as a coping technique. As that pleasure which made Alcibiades’ heart pound, which Augustine considered dangerous enough to forbid, and which Nietzsche named after the love poetry of the troubadours.

Taking stock: The loss of pleasure in thinking is not a trait of character but a symptom—and one of the most common there is. It is rarely recognized as such, because rumination looks like thinking from outside and feels like it from inside: what it lacks is not the effort but the yield. And it occurs to nobody that the person who thinks without pause might be the one who is short of thinking.

Sapere Aude, or: The Tenderness of Contradiction

One small matter remains, which holds the whole text together and which presumably escaped the inventors of the label “sapiosexual.”

The word “sapiosexual” comes from the Latin sapere. The same verb stands in the most famous sentence of the European Enlightenment. In 1784, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Immanuel Kant answered the question of what enlightenment is and issued the watchword: “Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!”²⁴ As the causes of so many people remaining in tutelage all their lives, he named not a want of talent but laziness and cowardice.

Between the two uses of the same word stem lie two hundred and forty years and a shift of meaning worth savoring.

Kant demands courage. He demands it of you, he demands it with no prospect of reward, and he names the alternative outright: comfort and fear.

Sapiosexuality demands nothing. It relocates the matter to somebody else. You need not use your own understanding; it is enough to find another’s attractive. What was once an imposition has become a filter setting.

This is no moral reproach. It is a description, and it explains why the word has been so successful. It promises membership among the thinking without the cost of thinking. It is the membership card without the dues.

Anyone who takes the matter seriously, by contrast, has to endure something else, and that is the point at which this text ends.

What is erotic about thinking is not being admired for it. Admiration is the quietest death a thought can die; it puts the thought in a display case and leaves it there. The erotic experience is the other one: that somebody takes a thought seriously enough to go to the trouble of attacking it. Whoever contradicts you has listened. Whoever contradicts you is risking something—he might be wrong, and it would show. Whoever contradicts you means this one person and no other; a language model would have written the same sentence to a million users.

Contradiction is therefore not a disturbance of agreement but the highest form of attention one person can pay another. It is the tenderness of those who do not flatter.

A compliment costs nothing and means nobody. An objection costs time, courage, and the willingness to look foolish—and it presupposes that somebody found my thought important enough to burn his fingers on it. Anybody who has experienced what that is like will not miss admiration again.

And anybody who has never experienced it should ask himself whether that is down to the others, or to his never having laid down a thought anybody could have rubbed against.

The answer to that question is unpleasant, and that is exactly why it is worth having. It is the beginning.

Frequently Asked Questions About Sapiosexuality and Giftedness

What Does Sapiosexual Mean?

The term denotes people on whom another person’s mind exerts the strongest erotic pull. What is experienced as sexually stimulating is the intelligence and the distinctive cast of mind of the other. In 2014 a large dating service added sapiosexuality to its list of orientations. Technically it is not a sexual orientation but a preference for a trait—otherwise height and humor would be orientations too.

Which IQ Is Rated Most Attractive?

In the only psychometric study of the question to date, the 90th percentile—an IQ of about 120—was rated on average the most sexually attractive. Toward the 99th percentile, that is, toward an IQ of 135, the rating fell off again. What was rated, however, were descriptions of hypothetical partners, not real partner choices.

Are Sapiosexual People Themselves Especially Intelligent?

According to the available study, no. The objectively measured intelligence of respondents bore no relationship to their scores on the sapiosexuality scale; the correlation was effectively zero. The self-description therefore says nothing about a person’s capacity to think, but something about his self-presentation.

Why Do Gifted People Have a Harder Time Finding a Partner?

For two reasons that compound each other. First, as intelligence rises, the number of possible conversational partners shrinks arithmetically: at the 90th percentile every tenth person qualifies, at the 99th only every hundredth. Second, above a middle range the rating as a partner declines again. Leta Hollingworth placed the socially most favorable range between IQ 125 and 155 as early as 1942, and recorded that above it the difficulties increase rather than diminish.

How Do Gifted People Find a Suitable Partner?

By doing the arithmetic the right way round. The small number of possible equals is an argument against chance, not against existence—only one is needed. From which follows, in practice: look where people think (seminars, clubs, shared work), not where they describe themselves. And it helps to be the person who thinks out loud in company and changes his position; that gives the other party permission to do the same.

How Do You Recognize a Genuinely Thinking Person?

By the fact that he changes his position in your presence. A working mind takes up an objection, examines it, and comes out somewhere else; it distinguishes what it knows from what it suspects, and grows more interesting under contradiction rather than more irritable. Somebody who merely presents results, cites more often than he infers, and switches levels when contradicted is performing thought rather than thinking.

Can a Chatbot Replace an Intellectual Counterpart?

It can supply knowledge, but no resistance. A language model has no interest of its own that could collide with the user’s, and it regularly gives way under contradiction. What invigorates in shared thinking, however, is precisely the second will: somebody who might also be right and who has something to lose if he is wrong. Then there is the physical side. Attraction to another person’s mind remains a sexual desire whose route runs through a human body. And no machine has one.

What Distinguishes Rumination From Thinking?

The result. Thinking, after a while, brings forth a thought one did not have before. Rumination has all the outward marks of thinking—effort, duration, seriousness—and produces not one new thought in hours. It is thinking that has lost its object.

How Does Cognitive Psychotherapy Help Gifted People?

It works with the instrument these people possess in abundance: their own minds. It makes findable the convictions that cause the illness—for instance the thought “If I make myself easy to understand, they will take me for simple”—and tests them for soundness. Whoever has seen through the error of thinking then practices the altered behavior himself.

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