According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at [email protected], or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about Workspace Theory.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, there’s an idea called workspace theory with regards to the operations of the mind and cognition. I sent the article or the link to you in a reference to it. What are some of your preliminary thoughts on it? Does it have any relevance to informational cosmology?
Rick Rosner: Yeah, I did my usual cursory examination of it and it seems to be dead on, I mean pretty exactly corresponding to that part of IC; that sensory information that makes it to conscious attention probably because it’s urgent or novel and then all the associations, all the things, and that everything worthy of consideration during a given moment plus all the associations pulled up by those things in your mind is the conscious workspace. I think the theory says consistent with what we believe that is so advantageous in terms of doing what the brain does which is helping you survive by modeling and predicting reality that that is a thing that arises. It’s circular reasoning to say that it’s the predominant mode of thought. It’s the thought that we’re aware of because it’s consciousness and we’re freaking conscious but it’s a big deal and for several reasons it seems to be like the best way to use your brain.
You think about things that seem to require thinking and by thinking you mean pulling up anything that your brain thinks might help you think about the things that need thinking about. It can be more than one thing at a time and all that stuff, all the things worth thinking about in a given moment according to your brain’s learned prioritization is the conscious workspace. For instance, it’s a terrible thing to get a BJ while driving. It’s very unsafe and in fact it was the precipitating… I almost got run over on Easter Sunday. I mean not run over; run off the road by a couple; a guy getting a BJ on the way to church. He was in his Easter finery and he was driving erratically and we could kind of tell there was somebody down in his lap and it’s also the precipitating incident in the Stephen King novel ‘Thinner’; somebody getting a BJ runs over an old gypsy woman and gets cursed.
So, if you’re getting a BJ while driving, there are several things demanding your attention. So, that’s an example of the conscious workspace. On the one hand the BJ and on the other hand driving and really that’s more than enough but there are other situations. I mean especially since everybody is often frozen in place like a zombie by what’s coming in over their phone, you’ve got the world that’s on your phone then you got the world that’s around. So, anyway I mean that’s the deal, that’s your workspace and we know it’s a good way of addressing reality because that’s what everybody has and uses whenever they’re awake. That’s all I got.
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Photo credit: Rick Rosner and Lance Richlin.