Shankar Vedantam

Scott Barry Kaufman desperately wanted to be seen as a smart kid.

But everyone kept telling him he was the opposite of smart.

He ended up repeating third grade, was sent to a school for kids with learning differences, and scored poorly on IQ tests.

Scott didn't just experience these things as setbacks.

He found them confusing.

He thought of himself as a smart kid with lots of potential.

Why didn't the world see him that way?

At one point, though, when Scott was in high school, a new teacher noticed that he looked bored in the special ed resource room.

Scott felt like he had been trying for years to tell people he had potential.

Suddenly, there was someone else who could see the same thing.

Scott was allowed to leave special ed on a trial basis.

The effect of someone believing in him was transformative.

And it's almost like this one teacher in this one moment, it was almost like a light bulb going off in your head, it sounds like.

One day, he was hanging out with friends after school.

Oh, yeah.

So you graduate high school and you still want to become a psychologist.

You decide that you want to go to Carnegie Mellon.

It's a college in your home state.

It has a strong program in cognitive psychology.

So you take the SAT.