Shankar Vedantam

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I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Many of us know what it feels like to be overlooked.

The school we would love to study at doesn't love us back.

We get passed over for a job or a promotion.

When we ask to try our hand at something, we're told no.

Now, sometimes rejection might be a true reflection of our abilities.

We can't run fast enough to make the team or remember all the facts needed to get through medical school.

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.