Shankar Vedantam

There are other times, however, when rejection is not about our limitations, it's that other people see us as limited.

Our concerns over how we are judged are often most acute, most charged, when it comes to the topic of intelligence.

Most of us don't just want to be smart.

We want to be seen as smart.

This week on Hidden Brain, many of us have knee-jerk conclusions about what intelligence is and how it can be measured.

We think we know what intelligence is,

But do we really?

In the first three years of his life, Scott Barry Kaufman suffered from a number of ear infections.

The conclusion that many people drew?

Scott wasn't very bright.

Scott's teachers didn't know what to make of him.

He was often very creative, but he didn't seem to be able to keep up with his peers.

Things came to a head in the third grade.

Scott has seen the reports his teachers wrote about him when he was a kid.

They say the problem was about more than academics.

He quickly discovered that when you repeat a grade, the kids around you start to look at you differently.

Scott has a specific memory from that additional year he spent in third grade.

A group of kids formed a circle around him in the bathroom.

When Scott was seven, and again at 11, school administrators made him take IQ tests so they could figure out next steps for him.

One test stands out in his memory like a scene from a movie.