Too smart for some?

John Derbyshire over at National Review includes this communication nugget:

A friend of mine, an academic psychologist, remarked offhandedly a few months ago that communication between two human beings is difficult if the gap between their IQs is as much as one standard deviation (i.e. 15 points). If you try communicating across gaps bigger than that, she said, mutual understanding quickly becomes impossible.

One wonders how, say, Jesus every winsomely delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Or, how John Wesley effectively communicated with those whose lower-class faces were stained with coal. Or...well, you get the idea. True intellectual brilliance has little to do with standard deviation differences and more with how to take God's gift to your mind and transform it into that which is life-changing and understandable.

C.S. Lewis being able to communicate new worlds to my exceedingly humble imagination comes to mind, for instance...