Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: What assumptions about intelligence do we have from childhood?
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.
I just remember being taunted and being told things like, oh, you're too stupid to go on to fourth grade, you idiot, that sort of thing. But yeah, it was really painful.
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?
It almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ intelligence. And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.
In the first three years of his life, Scott Barry Kaufman suffered from a number of ear infections.
It made it very hard for me to process auditory input in real time. And so I was a couple milliseconds behind everyone else. I would hear things and then I would have to, in my head, cognitively process it. Like listen to it over again while everyone else was already on to the next thing.
The conclusion that many people drew? Scott wasn't very bright.
You know, it's very easy to look at someone and just judge them as dumb because they're slower than someone else. And that sort of processing speed issue is one that I confronted first and foremost as a kid.
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Chapter 3: How does Scott Barry Kaufman's early experience shape his view on intelligence?
From the outside, it might seem like Scott was privileged. His family had the resources for him to go to a school that would meet his needs. But as a kid, Scott felt the adults in his life were sending him a clear message.
I am really different. Like, I am, okay, we'll go even further. I'm a freak. Like, I'm a freak. Like, I am, like, something's really wrong with me.
The outcome of Scott's IQ test was the opposite of what he had secretly hoped for. His dream was that he would do so well that the psychologist would recommend he move to a prestigious school near his Philadelphia home. It was called the Haverford School. Now, each day on his way to his new school, he'd pass Haverford. To Scott, his dream school might as well have been on Mars.
By the sixth grade, Scott was back in public school, but still on the special ed track. That was the year he discovered that along with kids like him who had special needs, there was another category of kids who were really special.
I have a vivid memory of walking to my special ed classroom and hearing the announcement on the speaker, gifted kids report to room three for your gifted classes. I remember thinking to myself, wow, here I am reporting to my special ed class. Who are these people? That was one of my first introductions to the term gifted, by the way. It was through the speaker in my middle school.
And it was a vivid moment for me. It really was a vivid moment because I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's a whole different class of humans that's the direct opposite of what I am. And they're the gifted ones. And suddenly it was like I'm stuck in the complete opposite world.
It felt awful.
one way it felt awful was that the expectation carried me around from class to class to class even some of the more mainstream classes i was starting to be put into in middle school i remember being in a mainstream class and on the first day of class i saw this girl who i had such a crush on oh my gosh i was way too shy to ever say anything to her but i saw her all around
And she was at the front of the classroom. And I was walking in and I think I sat at the back and the teacher opened up the class and said, is Scott Kaufman here? And I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, looking down, you know, Scott Kaufman here. Oh, you're Scott Kaufman. Can you please come up to the front of the class?
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Chapter 4: What are the limitations of traditional IQ tests?
There were more psychological tests as time passed. Scott found himself simultaneously angry with psychologists and fascinated by them. On one occasion, his mother took him to see a therapist.
And I remember him asking me, what do I want to be someday? You know, what are my dreams? And I remember seeing the tag name, Dr. Milnick, I believe was the name, Dr. Milnick, psychologist. And I remember it just like snapped in my head. I remember telling him, I want to be a psychologist. I want to be a psychologist. And I still have the reports.
I have them all saved from like 1989 or something like that, where it said when he grows up, he wants to be an academic PhD psychologist. But here's a big kicker to this. My mom tells me that they told her that your son wants to be an academic PhD psychologist. He wrote that on his thing, but we think he has delusions of grandeur.
In Scott's young mind, psychologists had all this power. They were able to peer into your head and see things no one else could see. When they said stuff, people listened to them. The things they wrote down in their charts changed your life. They determined which school you went to and which school you didn't go to. Scott felt psychology had shaped his life for the worse.
If he could become a psychologist himself, he was sure he could do better. Sometimes he'd imagine himself giving talks about psychology to rapt audiences.
I remember taking a shower and just closing my eyes and giving a 50-minute speech on human potential. The thing that excited me were ideas about how people are capable of so much more than they realize, how we don't really see the fullness of a human being.
And this is even before TED Talks, but I remember in my head, the recollection of it is that the kind of talk I was giving matches exactly what a modern-day TED Talk looks like, you know?
Scott tried to become his own psychologist. If he couldn't convince psychologists that he had potential, he decided he would prove his case to himself.
I became obsessed with IQ tests around that point. I remember just taking one IQ test after another. Some of them I didn't do too well on. And then some of them I did really, really well on. And I was like, okay, I'm going to throw away those ones that said they weren't so good. I'm going to keep the others. I remember one IQ test result I took on the internet, which said I was profoundly gifted.
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Chapter 5: How does engagement impact our potential for learning?
And he's like, you know, this is.
this is your score uh he's like you're not gifted um you can't you know fortunately you can't qualify for gift education um but i'm here you know if you want to talk about anything else school psychology related what was your score scott 89 something like the 87 something like that i mean that's that's almost embarrassed i'm almost embarrassed because it's just like it's a pretty low score.
Not that anyone should be embarrassed who has that score, but it's, I am so resistant to having people judge me through the lens of that. Like, that's why I don't even really tell the story anymore. You know, like I feel like I'm even taking a risk, like even saying that giving a number, you know, I'm not that person anymore.
When this happened, Scott, do you recall him saying where you sat on the IQ spectrum? I mean, if 130 was gifted and 90 to 110 was normal, did he describe what 87 was?
He didn't really describe it to me, no. There wasn't a real explanation. It was really like, you're not gifted, and my hands are tied. What can I do?
I understand that after you left his office, you went to the school library and you basically looked up how to read IQ tests. What did you find?
I remember seeing a textbook on human intelligence and they have a chart in there that shows what different IQ bands people are capable of achieving. And I remember seeing my range that he kind of just showed me and it said, it said, unlikely to graduate high school.
And I, you know, I always had this rebellious bone in my body though, because I remember saying that and throwing the book across the library.
By this point, Scott was actually doing well in school. He had a case to be moved to the gifted track. But in looking at the results of his IQ test from when he was in elementary school, the school psychologist was saying some important things. First, the test had picked up something innate about Scott. It didn't matter how much he'd learned or what he'd accomplished in the years afterward.
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Chapter 6: What role does creativity play in defining intelligence?
Suddenly, there was someone else who could see the same thing.
I felt like people thought I was crazy for thinking that I had some potential. In this moment, I was like, yeah, I don't know what I'm doing here. That's what I've been trying to tell people.
Scott was allowed to leave special ed on a trial basis. The effect of someone believing in him was transformative.
I actually went from like a CD student to like a straight A student, like almost overnight. And I took summer school classes. I joined so many things like plays, you know, I did musicals and everything. I just, something just erupted in me at that point where all this stuff just bumbled forth. And I was like, I love learning. I love everything about this.
And thank you for giving me that opportunity. Finally, school system that never gave me the opportunity before.
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.
It wasn't like a white bulb. It was like a volcano erupting. A volcano of human potential that had been dormant.
One day, he was hanging out with friends after school.
And they said, hey, we have to just go to the choir room and pick up something. This was after class, after school, after school. And so I just walked, went with them. And they were in the choir room and the choir conductor was there. And I remember just sort of like making fun of them. Like, I was like, you know, you all sound like this.
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Chapter 7: How can acceptance improve relationships?
Everything in that moment of like frustration, anger, like I put it into that song. And they told my parents that they thought I could be a real good opera singer, and they accepted me on a partial scholarship to Carnegie Mellon, when the other department at the university, they rejected me.
So I didn't bother to tell the music department, just so you know, I've already been rejected in another part of your school. I didn't do that.
¶¶ ¶¶ Scott mentally prepared himself for the path of an opera student. By then, his second semester, he signed up for an intro to psychology course.
It reaffirmed how much I love psychology. You know when you meet something, you're like, this is me, and then you go away from it, and you come back to it, and it's still this is me? That's telling you something. That's important information. And I was like, I've got to do this.
He quietly transferred into the psychology department. Soon, he was learning about intelligence and the science of IQ tests. His goal from the very start was to tear down the edifice of IQ testing, but he felt he had to go into the lion's den first in order to tear it down.
By the time he was 20, Scott had talked his way into a spot at Cambridge University in England, working with one of the most prominent researchers on the science of intelligence.
I was so nervous and excited. I didn't know if I was going to be able to be as intelligent as I needed to be to be a research assistant at Cambridge University. It was almost hard for me to fathom that I would legitimately be intelligent enough to be worthy of the situation. I was like, Scott, even with all your grandiose fantasies and everything, this is a little... Are you serious?
What are you doing, Scott? What are you doing? But Scott's mentor, Nick McIntosh, set him at ease.
Nick couldn't have been more wonderful, more supportive, and he must have seen something in me. He saw the person that I was in that moment.
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Chapter 8: What strategies can couples use to navigate conflicts?
Can you just describe that? You in some ways were coming to him perhaps with an agenda that he didn't know, that your agenda was really to pull down the edifice of intelligence and intelligence testing. And maybe he didn't know that you were a saboteur who had just arrived at Cambridge University.
But describe to me the way he worked and sort of the effect this had on you and the way you started thinking about the questions you were grappling with.
McIntosh was a traditional British psychometrician. I mean, that's as traditional IQ as you get on paper and pencil. But his personality and his demeanor and everything about him just signaled a pure, pure love of science. No agenda. No agenda on Nick McIntosh's part. He wrote a textbook, The Science of IQ. which I remember reading and it almost instantly made me a, I won't say convert.
I don't know if that word quite applies, but it almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ intelligence. And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta.
I forgot. At one point, Nick McIntosh asked a simple question. Assume for a moment that there is no underlying innate ability called intelligence. Some people are good at math, others are good at reading. But if that was the case, he asked, why is it teachers often notice that the same students who do well at math also do well at reading?
I mean, if you read this book, The Science of IQ by McIntosh, it's just... So interesting to see all the little nuances of the field. Things that just didn't dawn on me could be true. I had all these ideologies and thoughts that there's no such thing as general intelligence or that IQ doesn't matter in life. And then here I am reading in this textbook.
It generally didn't have to be this way, but it's very interesting. curious that someone's score on a non-verbal IQ test could correlate so highly with someone's score on a verbal. And then he would ask questions like, what is it about vocabulary that could be in common in terms of cognitive processes than rotating an image in the mind?
What does vocabulary have in common with cognitive processes like rotating an image in the mind? If verbal skills and spatial skills were just that, skills that could be learned with practice, wasn't it odd that the kids who were good at one were often also good at the other? Scott found himself intrigued by questions like this.
My curiosity just took over, you know, and I started actually doing really traditional, serious experimental research with him when I got there to Cambridge.
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