Hidden Brain - Who Are You, Really?

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

You’re not the same person with your friends as you are with your co-workers or your kids. So...who are you, really? This week, political scientist Eric Oliver explores why we often feel divided within ourselves, and how we can learn to live more peacefully with those contradictions. Then, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman answers your questions on the science of intelligence. Should you worry about your memory? For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does? Check out our new video on the surprising (and reassuring!) science of forgetting to learn more. Episode illustration by Eva Corbisier for Unsplash+. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the enchanted world of Harry Potter, the young wizard discovers a mysterious artifact known as the mirror of Eresed. Carved into its frame is a cryptic inscription. The words make no sense. You have to read them backward to reveal the mirror's true purpose. I show not your face, but your heart's desire. When young Harry looks in the mirror, he sees himself and skiseless.

in the loving embrace of a family he never knew. When his friend Ron gazes into the glass, he sees himself finally stepping out of the shadows and outshining others. The vision presented by the mirror of Arisid is alluring, but treacherous. Albus Dumbledore, the wise headmaster of Harry's school, warns that men have wasted away in front of it, even gone mad. The danger lies in the lure of a single perfect image, a vision of the self so captivating

that viewers lose themselves in it. Many of us spend decades searching for a mirror of ERISID. We ask ourselves, Who am I really? What do I really want? These questions are the prelude to the thing we really desire.

Once I know who I am, once I know what I want, surely I will then know what will make me happy. This week on Hidden Brain, why the search for self-knowledge can feel like a mirage, and how to build ourselves a more accurate mirror. From our first days in school, we are taught that the goal of education is to know the world.

We go about mastering the laws of physics, the turning points of revolutions, the syntax of foreign languages. But we're also told there is a deeper requirement for a well-lived life, to know thyself. acquiring self-knowledge is supremely important, but also very difficult. There's no textbook that's been written about you. At the University of Chicago, Eric Oliver has long pondered what it would mean to have such a textbook.

Eric Oliver, welcome to Hidden Brain. It is great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. Eric, I want to talk about your own journey of self-exploration. When you were in high school, a teacher whom you admired introduced you to the first famous admonition by Socrates to know thyself. How did this advice land with you and your classmates? It landed really well. I was having a very bumpy adolescence, as most adolescence experience, and really just unsure of who I was or where I was going. And I had this wonderful teacher, Mrs. Malone.

And one day she wrote, know thyself on the blackboard. And she said, distilled in these two words was the collective wisdom of the ancient Greek. You know, those marbleized founders of democracy and poetry. And she said, if we wanted to heed their wisdom, we would need to know the self. And she was such a great teacher. And I took her words to heart. And I thought, yes, this is something I really want to do. So I spent the next three decades of my life trying various ways to get a handle on what's behind this lived experience that I'm going through. And in college, I started reading deeply into psychology and philosophy.

After college, I moved to Northern California, and I started doing yoga and practicing meditation. I experimented with everything from psychedelics to, you know, hiking naked in the wilderness to backpacking through Asia. I tried to seek out gurus and priests and Turkish rugs sellers who often have a surprising amount of knowledge about. spiritual matters, I was basically trying to do everything to click every box on the spiritual seekers bucket list. And it was a very enthusiastic and a very sincere desire to get at what was behind this experience of being. I understand that at one point you felt that finding the right person to love would be a way of discovering who you really were. Well, I think this was a big part of my feeling of discontentment was a lot of my own psychological instability at the time,

which probably traced back to my own bumpy family life. And I had this very romantic idea that there was some perfect person out there who, if I could just meet that person, they would complete me. They would fulfill all of my needs and all of my longings. And they would provide me with that sense of psychological stability that would just anchor me. And if that was a big part of knowing myself and figuring this out, was, oh, finding that right person. And what ended up happening, ironically, was that I had a series of failed relationships and bumpy relationships.

And I realized if I was going to have a successful relationship, I actually needed to figure myself out first because in a lot of ways, I was my own worst obstacle for getting the love I so desperately wanted. I understand that in some of these relationships, you actually felt like there were parts of you that were at odds with other parts of you as you pursued these relationships. Well, yes, there was that part of me that was longing for connection and attachment and love and that feeling of just great effervescence.

And yet oftentimes, as soon as I started, started getting close to someone and their full humanity started getting revealed to me, I would freak out. And I would find other parts of me pulling back in fear and finding myself being avoidant and saying, oh, this is a real human being who I'm in relationship with. This isn't the magic elixir. And something must be wrong because surely, you know, it wouldn't be bumpy if it was right. I understand it wasn't just in your love life that you felt. like you got in your own way. You were an ambitious and driven young person, but when you achieved what you thought yourself wanted a prestigious job as a university professor, it turned

out to not be what it was cracked up to be? Yeah, I struggled through grad school, like all graduate students. You know, there was a lot of work, a very long time for a very uncertain outcome, and I got my first job at Princeton. And that shocked me as much as all those people around me, I think. And I get to Princeton and I'm like, this is as far as an academic goes, this is as good as it gets. And I get there and it's this wonderful university and I have these amazing students. And I get there and my life kind of falls apart. A long-term relationship I had been in. I ended very abruptly.

I suddenly found myself really depressed living alone in central New Jersey. I barely knew anyone. And all of this pain that had come from kind of the earlier stages of my life really welled up in me. And I could barely function in front of my classes. I wasn't eating. I wasn't sleeping. And I have to say that was probably for me one of the kind of low points of my life. And there was this irony of like, oh my God, I got everything that I worked for and life feels kind of terrible. I understand that it got bad enough that you briefly consider taking a rather drastic step. Tell me what happened in that moment, Derek. Well, I was standing

on the sidewalk of a very, very busy street in New Jersey, and I'm standing there right on the curb, and I was just carrying around so much pain. And it occurred to me that, oh, all this pain would go away if I just stepped in front of this speeding truck that was coming towards me. And then that impulse, I've never had an impulse like that before, scared the daylights out of me. Because, A, it was this kind of very strong self-destructive impulse. And B, you know, getting run over by a garbage truck in central New Jersey seemed a truly humiliating way to go. So it was at that moment that I said, okay, I need to fix things. And that's really when I started pursuing therapy in great detail. I'm wondering as you went through these decades trying to find yourself and finding yourself

coming up short. What did you tell yourself? Did you just say, I'm looking at the wrong place, or I haven't looked hard enough? Well, I think in my 20s, like a lot of people, I was chasing this gold star illusion. I thought, well, whatever dissatisfaction I'm having now, you know, if I could just get that next gold star. So if I could just finish my PhD, if I could just get that great job, if I could just, you know, buy the perfect house, all of these things that we think are so important, And then all of these problems and discontentment that I'm feeling will somehow another just solve themselves and go away. And what I was finding was just the opposite. The more I was going further down the path of this gold star trajectory, the worse I seemed to be doing.

Eric spent years trying to find himself in order to understand how to become happy and fulfilled. Eventually, he came to realize that the search was misguided. When we come back, the surprising reason Eric couldn't find the self he was looking for. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. For two decades, Eric Oliver has taught a popular course at the University of Chicago about the search for self-knowledge. After years searching for his own true self, Eric came to realize why the quest had been unproductive.

He didn't have a single unitary core to his being. Eric's high school English teacher had instructed him to follow the ancient command to know thyself. But what if there is no single self to know? Eric, you say that in fact the Greeks themselves did not mean know thyself when they told us know thyself. What did they mean? They really meant something more like know thy place. And for most of human history, these were probably the best three words you could live by. Most of our ancestors lived in very small tribes, tightly bound by custom and tradition.

They didn't worry about what made them happy or how they would find true love or what their purpose in life would be because all of those things were arranged for them. Who they were, who they should love, what they should do. All of those things were prescribed by custom and tradition. And so the best thing they could do was simply to go along with that custom tradition because in return, the tribe would protect them and nurture them and keep them going. It was only around 300 years ago with the birth of the Enlightenment, the rise of market capitalism, the rise of liberalism and liberal democracy where we prioritize individual rights and liberties, that this modern notion of self, this individualized, autonomous seeking one's own purpose in life's self, really came to displace that old meaning of know thyself. I'm wondering if there was a moment when you realized that the search for your one true self

was in fact a problematic search, that there were many selves inside you. Can you think of a moment when that became apparent to you, Eric? I think it probably hit me first when I went on my first long meditation retreat. and so I went on this silent 10-day meditation retreat and at one point I was thinking during the retreat it's like oh I want to meditate because I want to be a better person and if I could just meditate somehow another maybe that will make be a better person and all my problems could go away and I realized that there was no person really that was there

because when I quieted my mind down and I was just there in my own conscious experience there was no single stable solitary thing there. It was more like a diffuse cloud of energy that was constantly in flux. And I realized that, oh, these thoughts that I typically identify with, this ego, this feeling of Eric, professor, guy, American, etc., all those were just kind of ephemeral flotsam

kind of on the surface of this much bigger roiling stew of energy that was in a lot of ways very ineffable. You've done a lot of thinking about the different ways in which we can understand how the self is divided. You've thought a lot about Charles Darwin, who introduced the radical notion that humans are animals driven by, you know, survival-based instincts. Why would Darwin's idea challenge the notion of a single unitary self, Eric? Well, once we start looking at our evolutionary lineage, we come to some kind of disturbing, qualities about ourselves. For one, everything that is alive on this planet traces back to one common ancestor that lived about 3.7 billion years ago, and scientists have playfully named this creature

Luca. And Luca had the seeds of genes that are in every little living thing today. And so one thing that means is that in a lot of ways, everything that we see that's around us are cousins to us. were all part of the same underlying life force that started burning in this creature that lived 3.7 billion years ago. And everything that we are is in a lot of ways an elaboration on these self-processes that started with Luca. And it gets even more complicated because once you start looking at your cellular structure, you begin to realize there is no single being there.

For example, each of our cells contain mitochondria. And mitochondria are interesting because they have an intelligent, entirely different DNA than the DNA that programs for us. And so in a lot of ways, we're an amalgamation of two different species at the cellular level. And then, of course, we're multicellular, so we're all of these cells coming together and carrying around also a microbiome with thousands of other species kind of living in and amongst us. And even this sense of perception and consciousness that we have is really the orchestration of all of these cells coming together. And once you begin to appreciate that that's your physical reality,

that that's what's behind this experience of being, you realize there's not really a single solitary eye there. It's much more of a we. It's also the case that I think when we think about ourselves, all of us have had the experience of, you know, wanting to be kind and good people, but then suddenly finding ourselves acting selfishly. We might want to be patient people, but then we find ourselves, losing our temper. So it's almost as if we have, you know, these different cells inside us that have their own agendas. It's exactly right. And one way to think about that is that your self is not a solitary thing. It's a process or more accurately a set of processes. And these processes sometimes work together, but sometimes they work at cross purposes. So you have a cellular

self, which is your, your cell's metabolizing energy. You have an animal cell. You have an animal cell. that's there making maps of reality and making predictions about what it thinks is going to happen next. Of course, we humans have language. So we have this linguistic self where we've created culture

and laws and morals and identities. And those are a big part of our self processes as well. And so a lot of these oftentimes are in conflict with one another. Like what our animal self is either predicting or wanting or desiring may be very, very strongly at odds

with what our linguistic self tells us we need to be doing at that moment. You also talk about the tension between our higher cognitive faculties and some of our survival-based instincts and how in some ways these tensions are compounded by modern life. Talk about the relationship we might have with food and how that's shaped both by ancient cues, but also ancient cues that are out of step with the modern world in which we live. Right. So I have a real weakness.

I feel about ice cream the way that Frederick the Great felt about tall Prussian soldiers. And I just, sugar in particular, it just has me wrapped around its little crystalline finger. And I know sugar is bad for me. I want to be healthy. I see how it jangles my mood. But boy, I just crave it all the time. I just love it, especially late at night. and that's when the ice cream cravings really hit like a freight train.

And this is a lot of conflict for me. Like here I am in this experience of me, yet I'm torn between this just deep craving for ice cream and a mind that knows that, you know, slim waste and chubby hubby just are not things that go together. And so the big part of a lot of our self-processes are about negotiating these conflicts. And that craving for ice cream is situated

in some deep biological signals in our brains about what sugar rewards for us. When we consume sugar, it's signaling to our brain, hey, this is a lot of calories. This is a great thing for us to eat. And if we were in the wild, we would just be all over it. So in a way, refined sugar hijacks our brains. And then we live in a consumeristic culture

where we're just flooded in all of these things that hijack our neural systems. We can see this in our food. We can see this with the internet, which triggers all of these dopamine releases and keeps us coming back for more and more and more. We can see it in just all the consumeristic pleasures that are offered to us in our modern capitalist society. And so all of these things are really taking our animal processes and just hijacking them and pulling them out of whack. And so no wonder we often feel so torn apart and pulled in so many different directions. Do you find your feet carrying you to the ice cream store, even when your brain is telling you,

turn around and walk away? Oh, sure. I'm like, honey, got to walk the dog again. My dog knows our neighborhood bodega very, very well. Another reason we find ourselves divided against ourselves is that most of us tend to to identify with our conscious minds as if that is the whole of who we are, when in fact we are powerfully driven by forces that are outside of our conscious awareness. Talk about this idea that even at a psychological level, it's not like there's one of us. Right. And we could

see this in what I would describe as sort of this fourth layer of self, which I would call the egoistic self. So all of us have these egos. And egos are really just these suite of neural processes, that are there to help us get what we want from other people. And our egos defend our entitlements and our rights, but they also are there to keep us from saying awkward things or things that might later get us in trouble. So we have these suite of ego mechanisms, and they get wrapped up in our identities and our aspirations.

We can see this oftentimes when we're just daydreaming and oftentimes we drift into thinking, oh, I shouldn't have done that before. That was such a terrible mistake. or, oh, I can't wait for this to happen and dreaming about the future. And our egos always pull us oftentimes in these very uncomfortable directions here. And we typically then think that that's the totality of ourselves. We oftentimes just get so compressed by these ego processes.

They typically dominate our field of consciousness that we get cut off from all the other things that are going on that are animating us. So, you know, we're so busy thinking about ourselves. we don't really taste the food that we're shoveling into our mouths, or we don't notice the beauty of nature around us, or just the smaller ways of connecting with another person. And these are really the challenges of self-knowledge because a big part of wanting to know ourselves

is getting to decompress from these ego processes, so they don't loom so large and just dominate our conscious attention the way they typically do. Talk a moment about this idea that even, as we are going about our lives, you know, trying to shape our lives and doing things consciously, we're often influenced by a host of things that lie outside of our conscious awareness. I mean, in some ways, this is at the heart of, you know, everything that we have done that hidden brain these last many years, which is this idea that there are biases inside

us that are operating outside of our awareness. Yes, psychologists have a really eloquent way of describing this, and they call this System 1 and System 2 thinking. So, System 1 thinking is our fast, intuitive, reflexive types of thinking. It's the kind of information processing that our brains do without really thinking at all. It's much more reflexive and habitual. It's how I know just to walk to work without even thinking about where I'm going, for example. And that typically orientes us through a lot of the day, and we're not even aware of it. It's just kind of on autopilot.

What we're typically aware of is what psychologists call System 2 thinking. And this is when we encounter something that requires a decision, where we encounter some anomalous information or something that's in conflict. So, for example, when I'm trying to resist ice cream, but I find myself walking to the bodega and that conflict going on. That's my system two thinking in full flower there. And when we think of this concept, for example, of free will, what it really is is system two thinking. Eric, you're a political scientist, and I understand that you've seen evidence in your own field that we have different political selves inside of us. Talk about this idea for a minute. What we can see in a lot of our politics is an intuitive kind of politics where people say,

oh, just don't trust my thinking. I just go with my gut. Well, the problem is, is think about what our gut tells us. And I try to get at the sense of how much people rely on their intuitions with a series of survey questions. For example, I would ask somebody, would you rather stab a photograph of your family five times with a sharp knife or stick your hand in a bowl of cockroaches? And you would think, oh, well, the rational brain would be like, why would I want to stick my hand in a bowl of cockroaches? But about 50% of people say, no, I'd rather do that than stab a photograph of my family with a knife, even though that's just a symbolic cost. But because it resonates so much with their intuitions, it seems real to them. And I think that's what a lot of

our politics today are, are we have various kinds of political messages out there that really bypass or circumvent our rational minds and really trigger our intuitions to get us to think about things in ways that are oftentimes very contrary to the rationalistic demands of living in a democracy. So when you think about recent events in politics, I mean, I think many people will say, well, I am thinking about them rationally. I am thinking about them deliberately. It's just the other side that's not being rational and deliberate. How would you respond to that, Eric? Well, I pride myself. I'm a university professor. So I pride myself on being a very rationalistic person. But even still, like I will see some injustice online and immediately get in real. And rather than seeing the complexity of the circumstances, I will immediately say, those people are bad. Those are the ones who should be targeted. You know, that's my first, you know, those people are evil. They're horrible. How could they be doing that? And that's that intuitive sense, like wanting to scapegoat somebody, wanting to come to a very quick and easy conclusion. And a lot of this goes back to what our animal brains are trying to do. Remember, our animal brains are prediction machine. They're taking in lots and lots of information from the world, and they're trying to map reality and make predictions about what they think is going to happen next. And our animal brains love certainty, because certainty is how we can make quick and efficient decisions and predictions.

And so we will glom on to anything that gives us a taste of certainty, because if we don't have certainty, we oftentimes experience a lot of anxiety. And anxiety is a very uncomfortable place to live in. So rather than coexist with the anxiety of uncertainty, we will immediately glom on to a scapegoat or some quick or easy explanation for something, oftentimes at the expense of the more complicated reality underneath it. And of course, from the point of view of, you know, know thyself, both these sides of us are ourselves. I mean, the side of us that wants to draw the quick intuitive conclusion is us, and the side that wants to be reasoned and rational is also us. That's right. And part of our task if we want to live better,

and I think this is what Mrs. Malone, my English teacher, was actually trying to communicate to us, is becoming aware of these different self-processes and not letting one or the other necessarily dominate us so much, but listening to them. and recognizing them and seeing what they're up to. Another reason we are divided against ourselves is that we adopt different personas

depending on the setting and the people we are with. This notion of a psychological persona was first introduced by Carl Young. What did he mean by this term, Eric? So I was talking earlier about the egoistic self. It's the part of our psychology that is trying to make its way and help us make our way

through our social worlds. And here's the funny thing about the egoistic self. It doesn't lend itself to science that well, a scientific inquiry that well. We don't know where in the brain the ego really resides. We don't know about all its constituent parts. And funnily enough, the way we know about this egoistic self is through our stories.

So if you think about when you go to therapy, for example, what do you do? You tell your therapist your stories. the stories of your day, the stories of your life. And you interpret those stories. And that's how you begin to dissect and understand this egoistic self. Well, then the big question is, is, okay, we have these stories. How should we interpret them?

And this is where someone like Carl Jung could be very useful. Now, Carl Jung was not really a scientist. He was much more of a mystic, but he offers us some really interesting conceptual tools for interpreting our own stories. And one of his great insights was this idea that we have personae. And the word personae comes from Latin origins, and it originally meant the masks that Etruscan mimes used to wear in early dramas.

And they're literally the mask that we present ourselves to the world around us. And all of us have a wide collection of these personae, and we tend to take one on, put one on or take one off, depending on whatever circumstance that we're in. So when I'm in front of my students, I have the persona of the authoritative professor, because they seem to like that. When I'm with my friends, I'm the more jovial clown. With my children, I try to be the nurturing father. And these are all parts of myself, but they don't necessarily define myself in its totality because I'm constantly switching them.

What works in one moment is not necessarily going to work in another moment. So acting the jovial clown won't work at a serious academic conference. And so part of knowing ourselves is both recognizing when we're in our different personas, but also recognizing that our persona are not us. The mask that I'm wearing at any given moment is not me. It's just a vehicle, a convenience for negotiating with this period of time. And the more that I identify or invest strongly in that one persona, I think the more distorted my experience of being is going to become. I understand that you grew up in Texas and found yourself in New England at one point.

Talk about the masks you had to wear and the masks you had to take off. Well, one of my favorite stories about this is I grew up in Texas. And even though I grew up in Houston, I never felt a strong identity of Texan. Like I never had a cowboy hat. I never had, you know, cowboy boots. I never drove a truck or any of that stuff. And I got to go to college in New England. And I thought, oh, wow, I'm going to go to New England.

And I'm going to, you know, find all these people who have, you know, are intellectual and cultural and all of these values that I have. And I get there. And the funny thing is, is the one thing that people found most interesting about me was that I was from Texas. And at the time, this is especially girls. And so, ironically, I found myself playing up my Texanness. And like when I went home for that first winter break, and my sister asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said, how about some cowboy boots?

We are not one self, but many. An instinctual animal and a polite citizen, an unconscious mind and a conscious actor, a shifting cast of characters that are appropriate to our roles as parents, friends, and colleagues. But if discovering your one true self is impossible, is it possible to know your different selves? That's when we come back.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you experienced a time in your life when you felt like a divided person, where one side of you wanted something, while another wanted something entirely different? How did you resolve this contradiction? Did you resolve this contradiction? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email it to us at Feedback at HiddenBrain.org. Use the subject line, self-knowledge. Again, that's Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. The poet Walt Whitman famously wrote, Do I contradict myself? Very well. then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Eric Oliver is the author of

How to Know Yourself, the art and science of discovering who you really are. Eric, after many years of working to reconcile the various parts of yourself, you created a course, the intelligible self, which you've been teaching at the University of Chicago for the past 20 years. What is the aim of this course? Its aim is to help my students expand the vocabulary of their own lived experience. And a lot of us, myself included, especially when we were young, go through living according to stories that we probably didn't write for ourselves. So in order to get my parents' love and approval, I need to be a good boy. If I want to have a happy life, I need to have this high status job. If I want to feel fulfilled, I've got to find this sort of perfect love. And these are

stories that are oftentimes fed to us by our parents or culture or other people. And they're not really the stories that we have figured out for ourselves because we don't necessarily know who we are. And if we want to know who we are, we need to begin to have a richer set of concepts that are available to kind of apprehend, well, what's going on behind this experience of being me? I understand that one of the first precepts in this course is to help students understand not to expect a single unified self. Right. And one of the things I do with the class is I give them a questionnaire and I ask them things

like, you know, who are you or what are you? And they typically give me kind of pat answers. You know, I am a sister, I am a daughter, I am a student. And I try to say, well, let's start with that because you're not a sister to me. I'm your professor or you're not a student to your parents. And we begin to see that a lot of the ways that we commonly think of as the singular parts of the self are really just conveniences. Or as I like to describe to them, you know, we are not nouns. We are verbs.

There's no part of us, you know, down to the molecular level, up to the cellular level, up to the psychological level, that's static. We are beings of constant change and flow. And so a big part of beginning to apprehend what's going on behind this feeling of being me is seeing what is it that's channeling this flow. How is it arising? Where is it out of balance? Where are blockages? How can I make it flow better? I love the idea that we are not nouns but verbs.

And that gets at the idea that it's not just that there are. many of us within each of us, but there are many of us, and these many cells are also constantly changing. So I don't want the same things I wanted 15 years ago. I'm probably not going to want the things I want today 15 years from now. Right. And I think it goes to a misconception I had when I was young, which I thought, oh, if I could just get a handle on this self, like that it was this thing and I could master it, then everything would be fine. And the flip side of that was whenever I was feeling terrible about myself, I felt, well, if I'm this thing, I'm a flawed thing. I'm a bad thing. You know, if I'm feeling discomfort, it must be because I'm somehow

another broken. And when you let go of thinking of yourself as a thing and you begin to appreciate the far more subtle and difficult idea that you're a process, one of the great things about that is that you'll see these fixed conceptions of yourself begin to melt away. And rather than being a broken thing, maybe you're just a slightly misaligned process. And the good news with that is that processes we can fix. What does it mean to understand that we are a process? Can you give me a tangible feeling of what that means for an individual?

Where do I take that and how do I run with it? If you engage in a contemplative practice, as you begin to sort of quiet your mind down, and open your consciousness up, what you begin to appreciate about your own physicality is that it always has this effervescence, that we are beings of energy. Now, most of the time, this experience of luminescence is so subtle,

it just gets crowded out in our ordinary consciousness, and we don't really experience it. But the more that we can get in touch with those aspects of ourselves, where we can quiet our minds down, where we can kind of open up our sensory experience, to kind of the more raw, unfiltered information coming through our perceptions, the more glorious our experience of being becomes. And I think this is what is at the heart of a lot of spiritual practices.

It's very much at the heart of the contemplative practice. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do with this class, and in some ways with this book, is give people some tools so that they can decompress from a lot of the things that dominate their consciousness and begin to open up some space for this inner feeling of effervescence to make itself more available. One of the philosophers you cite is your own cat. Tell me what your cat has to teach the rest of us, Eric.

Well, one of the things I always notice is that my cat seems to live so much better than I do. Like, she just seems perfectly content in herself. She's happy to stay curled up in a cute little ball. and I have always wondered like why is it that my cat who's a far simpler creature than I am is so much happier than I am and more importantly what is it that I could do to maybe live a little bit more like my cat and one of the things that I'm burdened with that my cat doesn't have is this discursive mind the fact that I'm a creature of language and that language dominates my ordinary consciousness and so a lot of the times I'm there and I'm ruminating and my thoughts are twirling around on one subject or another

and I had this mental dialogue going in my head and it's it's kind of the byproduct of being this linguistic being and so a lot of what I try to do to go throughout my day to live in a less encumbered way is to try to be deliberative yet not so caught up in my own thoughts like this morning for example I was I was getting really nervous about this interview and I was like oh I'm going on hidden brain. This is going to be a great thing. But oh, this is a lot of pressure? And I was just thinking, okay, is this thought helping anything? Is my obsessing over about how well I'm going to perform in this conversation really making my life any better? And the answer, like with a lot of my thoughts, was no. And so what can we do in those moments? Well, we can let go of the thought. And to say, okay,

that thought's not really working for us. Let's let it go. And maybe just focus on the breath because one of the wonderful things about our existence is that the breath is this one kind of neutral constant. It's this remarkably peaceful place of refuge for us. When our minds are in so much storm, the breath is a place that we can always come back to that has no judgment, that has no criticism that, you know, is just the breath. I like to sort of tell you, my students that, you know, they're really only two certain scenes in life, which are breath and taxes. In many ways, these sound-like practices that are connected to, you know, yoga or meditation.

Are these things that you practice, Eric? Yes. So I've been practicing both yoga and meditation for about 30 years. Not in any kind of, like, big, fancy ways. But I try to spend about 15 or 20 minutes meditating every day and try to spend the about 20, 30 minutes doing yoga. And I find these remarkably helpful in terms of stabilizing my mood, helping me keep things in perspective. For someone who isn't in a religious tradition like myself, these are the things that provide me a spiritual discipline, a way of kind of getting in touch with the energies that animate me, that is not simply this world of ideas that I'm so

typically caught up in. And I found these incredibly helpful for me in terms of at least helping redress some of the imbalances in myself processes. Do you have students actively try and practice this? Yes, so I will typically teach them a little bit of meditation, partly just to get them a sense of, oh, tasting what might be behind this ordinary experience of being here. So we will sit in class and and I'll say, okay, we're just going to spend the next 10 minutes just focusing on our breath. And we do this and then, and I say at the end of this, okay, how many of you were able to do that? And everyone says, no, I'm thinking about, you know, what's going to be on my phone or what my next exam's going to be or all these things. And I say, okay, well, what's going on behind that?

Because remember, all I ask you to do is focus on your breath, that your mind was generating this whole torrent of thoughts and ideas. And that's the beginning where we can begin to apprehend, okay, our thoughts and ideas do not define us, you know, despite what Renee Descartes deduced, we are not just simply beings of thought. We are far more deep and complex than that. And similarly, I sometimes like to take my students and help them do a little yoga too. And it's just simple, sort of stretching. And the reason why I focus on yoga is, I think a big part of living better is this two-step process of, on the one hand, recognizing where our imbalances are and then learning to let go of them.

And one of the things that I try to teach them is that letting go is not a passive activity. We often think about letting go is, oh, I'm just going to let go of it and just kind of kick back. And that's not really how we work. If we really want to let go, that's a vigorous, engaged activity for us. It's about actively pushing back against these habitual patterns, these kind of system one and system two thinking routines that typically dominate our consciousness. And in cultivating a more deliberate way to live, we have to kind of push back against those mental habits. And that takes a lot of work. It's a very vigorous engaging activity.

And interestingly, yoga is kind of an interesting metaphor for this. Because when we're doing yoga, we're not just simply just kicking back and stretching. We're engaging some muscles to loosen up others. And so I think the yoga practice, at least as far as like the physical asanas that we do in the West, which we call yoga, are really good lessons in that engagement with letting go. You talked to me earlier about the idea that, you know, all of life is interconnected, that there is a single source, a common ancestor that connects everything on Earth. You say that there are times in your life when you feel these different cells inside you are all connected

and not just with each other, but with other creatures as well. Talk about these moments, Eric. They almost sound mystical. They are. I have one experience in particular that stands out. So when I was younger, I used to go backpacking in the wilderness by myself. And for anyone who's done this, backpacking by yourself in the wilderness is both exhilarating and horrifying. It's really scary, especially at night when you're there and you feel very, very vulnerable.

And then there are all the sounds of the wilderness kind of coming up and it's in the dark. and I would often find myself having a hard time falling asleep because I was just convinced that there was some bear or cougar or axe-wielding maniac who was about to come and get me. And one night I said, okay, I'm going to flip the script on this. And I started thinking, instead of hearing every rustle in the bushes as an imminent threat, I would think of them as friendly helloes

because all of these other creatures are my cousins in the life force. We are all part of the same fire of life that has been going on this planet for at least 3.7 billion years. We're all different expressions of this. To use another metaphor, it's like we're all, there's one big tree of life and we're all just very, very different leaves. And once I was able to sort of tap into that, this really deep feeling of kind of continuity and connection really just enveloped me. That kind of lonely vulnerability that I oftentimes feel and carry around really went away. Now, that was also a bit of an illusion because, yeah, sure, a lot of those animals probably would have happily made a meal out of me given the opportunity. And it's both kind of a wonderful thing and a mixed blessing for us because on the one hand, it means we're never truly alone.

Like I said earlier, we are an amalgamation of different beings coming together that are underneath this experience of an eye, a singular eye. and part of I think knowing ourselves and opening up our minds to ourselves is getting more in touch with a more collective sense of being that I am just not an eye I am both this multicellular creature but I'm also connected with everyone else around me my self processes do not exist in isolation they are the byproduct of my social interactions so we are deeply interconnected on the other hand it also means that each of us doesn't really matter all that much and that's a bit of a gut punch, at least for me, because I like to believe that I'm special and that I'm distinctive, but really I'm not. And so part of appreciating that is also letting go of this kind of egoistic conceit that somehow another, you know,

I am distinct in the universe. And I think the more that we can actually let go of that, the more peaceful our experience of being becomes. When you look within, who do you see? Is there a coherent sense? a singular I, a noun, as Eric Oliver puts it? Or do you see yourself as a verb in a state of flux and evolution? This question animates many aspects of human behavior.

One domain where it is particularly salient is intelligence. Do you think of your cognitive abilities as fixed or as something that can vary based on your environment and experiences? Recently, we heard from a listener named Darby. She says she excelled at school. I did very well on IQ tests as a kid and was told I was very smart by the test results and by my parents and by my grades. I'm good at language and math and seeing patterns. It seems like that's what is tested.

But outside of school, Darby didn't feel particularly smart. Just really like not very aware of my surroundings or the names of things don't stick. I could go on a trip and not really tell you where I was, stuff like that. So it produced a lot of confusion for me. I didn't understand why if I was so smart, why did I not actually seem that smart in the world in a lot of ways? It was almost like Darby had multiple selves, the one who could ace a tricky math test

and the one who struggled to navigate an unfamiliar neighborhood. Many people feel this way when it comes to intelligence. We feel smart in some domains, but not in others. We shine on a science test, but cannot figure out how to form a proper thesis for an English paper. We can invent a daring new recipe, but forget to bring our shopping list to the grocery store. Our society tends to hold up highly intelligent people as heroes. Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. And for good reason, their insights have led to countless.

breakthroughs and innovations. But when we use words like intelligent or smart or gifted, what exactly do we mean? And are we prioritizing a certain kind of intelligence and ignoring the people who don't fit that definition? Are we thinking of intelligence as a noun and not as a verb? When we come back, what it really means to be smart? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. From an early age, children develop a sense of their aptitude as students. In many schools, tests play an important role in determining which students are tracked into gifted programs and which are not. But what if the tests we use to make these judgments prioritize a certain kind of intelligence?

That's a question that has long animated Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies the science of human potential. Scott was a guest on a Hidden Brain episode titled why you're smarter than you think. Today, he returns to the show to respond to listener questions and comments about his work. Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Thank you. That's so great to be here. Scott, in our last conversation, we talked about IQ tests and how they came to be used in the United States. Tell me a little bit of that history again. How did the IQ test come about? Well, one of the first IQ tests was not actually called an IQ test,

it was actually called an intelligence test. It was Alfred Bernay, a Frenchman, was tasked by the Department of Education there to come up with a test that would differentiate those who needed help in school versus those that didn't need help in school. And it was never thought of by Benet as an intelligence test. But that was a couple Americans, including Lewis Terman at Stanford, who discovered those tests and saw opportunities to measure genius with them. And basically an individually administered test, like a one-on-one very intimate test that was created by Alfred Bernay was converted into a multiple-choice mass-produced test that was used for all sorts of purposes that didn't have its original intent. And sadly, you know, Alfred Bernay died quite angry at Americans and frustrated because the purpose of the test was never used in France. And he saw how it was being used in America. What do IQ tests purport to measure, Scott, and what aspects of intelligence might they be overlooking?

IQ tests measure a bunch of different cognitive abilities, vocabulary, spatial rotation, working memory. So it's measuring a set of cognitive skills that aren't irrelevant to our lives, aren't important. But I think the big question is, you know, do we want to put the label intelligence on the sets of skills and and to what degree if we aren't sky high in those things is it really limiting us in our potential and those are the kind of questions that that really animate me. Scott, we heard from many listeners who struggled with IQ tests when they were students. Here's Jamie. School was always painful or maybe scary is a better word as I was always scared and almost crying when I had English and social studies that day. Anytime there was a test, I was always the last one out of the room and would

see the teacher looking at me with a, what's wrong with you look in her eyes? Then there was the less frequent big tests that I understood were IQ tests. Again, I was always the last one out of the room, and when the two hours were up, I would only have about two-thirds of the test complete, and it would be taken away from me. I felt broken and different than all my peers. So, Scott, I think I can hear the pain that Jamie felt when he did not perform well on these tests. Talk a little bit about your own experience with these tests, and why it is for many people, these tests have come to be something of a referendum on our feelings of self-worth. Well, I definitely resonate with Jamie.

I had two major IQ testing sessions. One, I could barely hear the test instructor because I had this auditory processing disability at that time, and I remember leaving that feeling like, oh, my gosh, they're going to think I'm really stupid. The second one was to decide what special school I should be sent to in fifth grade. And so just having that in my mind already, that they're giving me a test to figure out which school for the learning disabled they should send me to all. It didn't really set it off on a good foot there. So yeah, I mean, it's just, there's so much intense.

You feel this pressure on you. You feel like some deep part of you is being evaluated. It's, you know, they don't think that's going to make too many people feel good. Hmm. So that's one side of the testing coin Scott. We also heard a different point of view from a listener named Carla. She grew up in rural Iowa in the 1970s. We were all required to take an IQ test and an inventory of basic skills and interests

so that we could guide our future education. I never thought I was all that smart, but I must have done well on the test because the guidance counselor at the school met with my mother and told her, Carla can do anything she chooses to do. She's very smart and she can do anything. So over the years, my mother has reminded me of that when I thought maybe I couldn't make it through something or I didn't have what I needed. And it has definitely and absolutely been kind of a foundation.

So whether it was true or not, it gave me the courage and the confidence. to just try whatever I needed to do. I'm wondering if this is one of the benefits of standardized testing, Scott. When we perform well on these tests, can they give us confidence to attempt difficult things? Yes, I think that there's really important nuance here, which is that these tests can be very useful tools, and they shouldn't be used to limit possibility or limit potential. Both things can be true at the same time.

It's not a contradiction. to say that the tests are reliable and valid in the sense they're measuring a certain slice of human cognition, which some people score very high in those things. And it can actually tap into some people's hidden potential for sure. For sure. I mean, I imagine that a lot, if not most physics professors, you know, did well in an IQ test when they're younger or, you know, certain fields. it can kind of test maybe your promise for certain things. But I think that that's the nuance we need is to simultaneously acknowledge that there are people

who are intellectually gifted in a certain way that deserve just as much appreciation and acceleration as any other student. I'm an advocate of gifted education. My whole thing is expanding the pie of and doing universal screening and a lot of other nuanced stuff that we could talk about. but I don't want to get rid of gifted education. In some ways, the story that Carla tells reminds me of the story that you told us about how you took an IQ test at one point that found that you were profoundly gifted and that result was so important to your sense of self that you taped it to the wall of your bedroom.

That's right. Oh my God. I forgot I told you that. Yeah, I remember vividly that I put that on my wall. I mean, I don't know if it was healthy, you know, my obsession was. with my intelligence. I'm not saying that was a great thing, you know, like, why did I need that for my ego? I mean, that was around the time where I thought that everyone thought I was stupid. So it was exciting for me to, like, I remember telling my parents, like, look, you know, I took this test online that says I'm a genius. It felt great.

But I don't know how healthy that is, to be honest. Maybe that was a little narcissistic of me. We spoke some time ago on Hidden Brain with the psychologist Peter Gray, and he told us, about how his son hated school until he started going to a school where students guided their own learning based on their interests. There were not any assessments in the traditional sense. Now, for some students, it seems that doing away with testing altogether can give them the space to actually learn, but there are also many circumstances in which an assessment can be very useful to give teachers a sense of what students understand about a topic.

I'm wondering what you think about the extent and purpose of testing in our educational system, Scott, and how you would change things if you could, you know, you could be the emperor of our educational system for a day. Yeah, you know, if more humbly, if I was Secretary of Education, then I would, what I would do. And I used to dream of being Secretary of Education when I was younger. But what I would definitely emphasize is the fact that we put way, you know, policies matter. And we put so much of our funding and money into assessment. that there's very little leftover for programming. And I would absolutely redistribute that

and acknowledge that programming will enhance all students. This idea that only certain students who meet a certain arbitrary threshold or cutoff on a standardized test are worthy or deserving of enriched resources is one that, quite frankly, Shankar, makes my head explode. A listener named Jonathan called in with a philosophic. question, Scott, about how we measure ability and also what that says about our priorities as a society. Your piece brought to mind the question, what dignity does a human being deserve from his or her peers and on what grounds? Aren't the contents an import of the IQ test

indicative of how our society chooses to value one another? What we value comes through in the chart that relates IQ score to prevailing notions of success. What would a test look like if our society dignified qualities of self-sacrifice and peaceful problem-solving over academic and professional achievement? What do you make of Jonathan's comments, Scott? I love that. I love all these questions are so thoughtful. I really like Jonathan's question a lot.

This test measures general intelligence, and we overvalue general intelligence. We don't need to expand the definition of general intelligence to encompass every talent and skill and every single characteristic, human characteristic. Instead, what we need to acknowledge is that we overvalue general intelligence and don't really appreciate talents,

the character, from, like, creativity to love, to spirituality. I mean, those are the building blocks of a good life, not your IQ-type cognition. I mean, when you think about the people whom you might want to have as friends or as life partners, you know, sure, people want to have intelligent friends and intelligent life partners, but I think many of us would say qualities such as kindness or compassion or reliability or loyalty, these things in the end, they matter so much more. I think what we're really getting here in this conversation, what's emerging, is this idea that self-actualization and the journey of self-actualization is such an intensely personal process that to have standardized tests that kind of have this assumption that we're testing your potential in life based on these general standardized things where you're being compared to other people. That's the problem, really, if you want it in a nutshell.

When we come back, a teacher's perspective, plus the many factors that can shape how we perform as students. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all want to believe that we're capable, that we're clever, that we're intelligent. But how do we know that we are smart? Do standard methods to measure intelligence reflect who we are or what we're capable of doing? At Columbia University, Scott Barry Kaufman studies the science of human intelligence. Today, he's responding to listener comments and questions about his work.

Scott, we've seen how students believe that standardized tests reveal something innate about them. Listener Terin was an educator for 31 years. She worries about how these tests affect the way teachers see young people. I am concerned that testing creates this idea about who the student is for teachers and counselors and psychologists and affects us in how we see that student and what we expect from them. And so I think we have to be very careful about how we use these tests, what we do with them, and to educate people about the importance of seeing the whole child and our expectations of them.

What do you think, Scott, do these tests brand-we- one student is smart in her teacher's eyes and brand another one is slow? Well, I want to pick up on something that Turin said there at the end is that seeing the whole child, that's it. That's the key there is that we all contain multitudes. We're all brimming with our areas of strengths and our areas of weaknesses. And most of these tests are not designed to capture the whole person. They're designed to capture a slice that will try to predict your further test scores.

It's like test scores are trying to predict further test scores, which are then going to predict, will that get you into Wall School? And then will that get you into the nursing home you want eventually? You know what I mean? It never ends. One thing that strikes me in this conversation, Scott, is that there's only so much one can do inside school to foster a student's success. There's so much that happens outside the classroom

that also impacts how a student will fare when she takes a test. Some listeners called in with questions about how childhood trauma can affect intelligence. Others, like listener Chi, want to talk about traits like resilience and adaptability. Growing up, I moved between China, Poland, and the U.S.

Often changing schools every six months to a year That constant moving made me feel like I was always behind or somehow dumb, even though I was keeping up, adapting, and surviving in completely new environments. I think a lot of that feeling came from how intelligence was measured via grades, tests, and how teachers and adults generally correlated them with a child's potential unworth. Like Scott, as a child, I could sense that something wasn't right. The fact was, I had to navigate between. languages, cultures, and systems, and I had to figure out how to keep pace without really being able to compare myself to anyone else due to lack of friends and neglect. Deep down, I suspected that I was doing well, just in ways that wasn't recognized or captured

by traditional schooling. As I've grown, I see that this pattern shaped how I approach life and work. I adapted quickly, recognized patterns across fields, and can solve problems in ways that formal tests never measured. Listening to your episode reminded me that intelligence isn't just about what shows up on paper or even what professionals claim. So it's notable that Chi showed a lot of resilience during her many moves around the world. She navigated vastly different school systems and cultures.

What role do you think resilience and adaptability should play when we talk about intelligence, Scott? Yeah, I'm really touched by Chi's comments. I got chills. listening to it and a little bit emotional. What kind of stinks a little bit is that, yes, she showed so much resiliency, but none of that counts. There are so many things that just don't count. They're not like being valued.

They're not being because they're not being measured, you know. And there's so much that she is showing the school system she's actually able to withstand. And the ways that she's able to draw connections between different cultures. And there's so much, she's bringing with so much potential, but because of her situation, her working memory is being overloaded. And so she's not able to, like, demonstrate in testing situations, you know, that make huge demands on memory, you know, what she's really capable of. So my heart breaks in a really big way when I hear those kinds of stories.

And I hear these kinds of stories all the time. So this is, there's something really pervasive about this that we're maybe not talking about as openly in society as we should be. As we discussed in our last episode, Scott, as an intelligence researcher, you spent a lot of time studying the relationship between intelligence as measured by IQ tests and life outcomes. Can you talk a moment about that? What does the data tell us about the relationship between those two things?

Okay, so we talked earlier about how context matters. And depending on what we're trying to predict statistically, IQ has a stronger, prediction and a less strong prediction. So when it comes to the arts, for instance, and that's a wide swath of things from creative writing to visual arts to music performance, we've published papers showing a zero correlation with IQ and creative achievement in the arts. Within the sciences, some fields show much stronger correlation than others, fields that are very math-heavy, physics-heavy, really draw on what we're really talking about here is abstract reasoning ability, your ability to really generalize and think of this very abstract, like philosophy, you know, is even correlated

with IQ, especially like logic form of philosophy, where you have to hold lots of things in your working memory, and, you know, IQ matters for that kind of stuff. And so it really depends on what you're trying to predict, but even within those fields, you always, you have so many exceptions. I'm wondering if you think, Scott, that these tests are better used as a compass, in that they give us directional guidance, but not really precision guidance. Wow, that's really clever. Yeah, I think that there are tools that can provide information about a person's patterns of strengths and weaknesses cognitively,

and we have to recognize that there are so many other human attributes that are brought to the table in the process of self-actualization, especially as we become adults and we leave. grade school. So we need to hold all these things in mind at once, but I really like the way you put that. Scott, in the United States and also in other countries around the world, students from wealthy families often do better on standardized tests. In the U.S., for example, wealthy families, kids from wealthy families often do better on the SAT, for example. I'm wondering how you explain this and what this says about how we should use IQ tests in educational systems.

election. There's something called the Matthew effect in psychology where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And you do find that very small advantages when you young can really compound, when you give people resources. And then over time, you see these huge differences and you say, see, like, you know, these differences are really deep and meaningful, but you're like, well, we as a society created those differences. And so people who have more money for resources, those children have more opportunities for cognitive enrichment. And we know things as simple as how many books are in a household correlates with reading ability. And so I think we have to be very sensitive to Matthew effects and how society and inequality can actually create those conditions.

Do you think that these tests are better done away with altogether, Scott? You know, I think that these tests can be useful for certain people. And for some students who grow up in very impoverished areas and don't have many ways of displaying their intelligence, these tests can be a ticket out for them. There can be a way for them to advance and for others to see, wow, they do have potential. So we have to be careful. We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. My point is that we can use these tools in various valuable ways while at the same time, not using them to limit potential.

So Scott, we got hundreds of emails from listeners about our conversation with you. I think one reason for this is that talk about intelligence strikes at something deep in how we think about ourselves. Here's a message we received from listener Leslie. In middle school, she wanted to be in the advanced math and science track, but was placed in regular classes instead. I loved science. I thought I was good at math because of my conviction.

my mom eventually called the school to ask specifically why I was not an accelerated math and science. And I guess my math teacher, who by that point had worked with me for some time, told my mom that I was actually a B student. And the reason why I was getting A's is because I did all my homework, and I participated in class. and that's what brought my grade up. And when I heard that, I was devastated. And it really stuck with me and became part of my identity.

That I am not smart. I'm a hard worker. And that there's this difference between being smart and being hardworking. Scott, what are your thoughts on Leslie's story? So I think the idea of a gifted underachiever is incorrect. I don't think there's any such thing. Because if you've gifted underachievers, that means you have unguisted overachievers who just got there through sheer hard work, I guess, is the idea.

I think what we need to recognize is that if you show and apply whatever attributes to solve something, you've brought your intelligence to the table to solve that thing. I think it is insulting and demeaning to a human to kind of try to explain it away by something else. While at the same time, I think that it's a great thing to be a hard worker as well. So we should still pat ourselves in the back for working hard. But I hope my point was made. I'm struck by some of the research findings that ask people what makes someone smart. And I've heard that in the United States, people tend to point to ability and intelligence, natural abilities.

In many Asian countries, people point to hard work and drive as the central factors behind success. And I find it so interesting that intelligence itself can be understood so differently in different places. Yeah, and maybe there are cultures where hard work is more valued than intelligence, so that telling a student, maybe the reverse would happen in a different culture, but you tell a student, you're just smart, you didn't work hard. and how to upset them. So a lot of it comes down to what do we value in our culture, yeah, overvalue perhaps. Yeah. In addition to hearing from listeners who struggled with standardized testing,

we also heard from those who did well on these tests, but then came to feel unhappy about it. Here is listener Barbara, followed by listener Matt. How much research has been done on the opposite problem of the damage done to children who are told at an early age that they are extremely gifted. That was my case. I did well at Tess,

and I excelled in school. And I think the impact on me has been largely negative because family and friends and teachers and coaches perceived me as being exceptionally gifted. They expected that I should be able to achieve anything I wanted to, and when I didn't, I was accused of not trying or of being lazy. And I worked hard to meet expectations

until it very nearly killed me in my later high school years. Because I had a high IQ, I was able to get into large positions of responsibility at work, but frequently didn't have the emotional or social intelligence to stay in those positions. This has resulted in me moving forward.

45 or 50 times, you know, my 63-year-old life. But anyway, I was just interested in whether or not that's something that's been examined about how, when you're considered smart, you know, the downsides of that and how that might affect the rest of your life. What do you think of Barbara's and Matt's perspective, Scott? There's this idea because you're gifted, you're expected to act a certain way and achieve a certain outcome in life. And that's a big problem with equating giftedness with achievement potential, as opposed to just treating it as, well, these students have advanced needs or have certain needs

in their school system that are valuable needs. And, you know, that makes a lot of sense. But signaling to the child that you expect, you know, them to act a certain way is setting them up absolutely for this psyche, you know, where they're a failure in life if they didn't achieve a certain set of expectation. And you see a lot of these young kids who show prowess or, you know, like the prodigies and they get paraded around, you know, on different talk shows and TV shows and, you know, look what they can do. And also you see a lot of unevenness among children who show, you know, these kind of advanced skills, I should say, what you see is a lot of unevenness.

You'll see that their social, emotional development, could be lagging two standard deviations behind their intellectual, you know, advancement. And, you know, just recognizing the huge unevenness, you can see among a lot of these children who we put the label gifted on is so, so important. When we come back, refusing to let your label become,

your destiny. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist at Columbia University. He is the author of the book, Rise Above, Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. We're talking with Scott today about intelligence, how we measure it and the effects that IQ tests have on us. Scott, we heard from a listener named Gigi who said that she got a good score on an IQ test and was labeled smart, Gigi's brother, on the other hand, did not score well. His initial scores came back in the low 70s,

and he spent his entire academic career in a special education track, and it was really kind of a hard life for him. Like he fell between a lot of cracks and didn't quite have a group, and the services available to him were sometimes limited. but then he took another IQ test in his late 30s, and he scored below 70, which is the threshold for intellectual disability. And after he got that score, all kinds of services and opportunities opened for him that he didn't have before. And honestly, his life changed so much for the better, just over a couple IQ points. And I just wanted to share that with you guys, like some of it's

kind of arbitrary, but it can have these huge impacts on people's lives. And I, I'm curious to hear what you guys think. So this is a very important question, Scott. A central issue we've been grappling with is that IQ tests try to turn this very amorphous thing called intelligence into one simple score. You're making the case that this one score is often an oversimplification. But when you start using test scores to screen people, whether that's for giftedness or for disability, you're going to have people on the cusp who could easily fall into one of two categories. And as Gigi says about her brother, different tests can produce different results.

with dramatically different consequences. Yeah, it's true. Depending on what test you give someone, you might find a different score. And we do live in a system where, unfortunately, these test scores are required in order to get the resources that are important.

I've actually argued that people within the IQ band of 70 to 85 really fall between the cracks in a lot of ways because their IQ score is not low enough to get special resource, It's not high enough for gifted education. And a lot of people within that IQ ban could probably benefit from some extra resources, not always, but they probably could. But my argument is intimately tied to my dream of changing policy and having a world where you don't need a label in order to get the resources that showing the need by itself is enough to get the resources.

Hmm. How would you run such a system, Scott? I'm trying to figure out in terms of resources that you might assign to people who might, you could say, have disabilities of some kind. Wouldn't you need to have a cutoff at some point? And isn't that what these scores are providing? Well, one avenue, which I think is interesting to think about, is a school system where everyone doesn't go through the same, is not expected to go through the same rate in every class. and that you're somehow behind, you know, everyone else if, like, you're not doing well across the board. One idea is this idea that people might use acceleration in one class but not another, or the whole grade-based system might want to be rethought in a lot of thoughtful ways. Of course, there's a benefit of having some more aged people. But just the notion that the process that everyone is on is it looks very deep. different from one student to the next.

If you buy the idea, Scott, that these tests are measuring only a narrow slice of human ability, is there a way to design a test that in fact captures all of us? What a profound question. I mean, I've attempted to create tests that measure a wider swath of human potential. You know, at self-actualizationtest.com, you can see all a bunch of tests I've developed and designed and scientifically validated, such as... a self-actualization test would love to see that administered in K-12. It shows a much greater multitude of ways in which people can have their own paths, unique paths to self-actualization.

I don't think any test could measure a whole person, but I think we can do a lot better than IQ tests. I've often noticed, Scott, that the older I get, that many jobs are less about intelligence and more about drive. If I had to hire someone and I was picking between someone with a high IQ score and someone who was very driven, I think I would go with the more driven person every time. We received a story from a listener named Pavel about his journey involving IQ tests and hard work. I went to a very small grade school where I was only one of 16 in my grade. I had what was now well known to be dyslexia. This contributed to consistent D's in spelling, reading, writing, and sometimes even math. While the school did not have a

psychologist, they did have a slow learner's track, where I found myself from grades three through five. By fifth grade, I remember feeling out of place in the track, so I asked my father if he could advocate for me to be moved into the regular track. Instead of obliging me, my dad told me, this would be something that I would need to show my teachers, not tell them. So every night he made me read my homework into a tape recorder, and then transcribe what I heard. with special emphasis to correct any transpositions. By the sixth grade, a very kind science teacher, had me move into the regular track.

Now armed with the tape recorder, which I ended up using all the way through medical school. I started doing relatively well in school. I also leaned into my auditory learning style, and it probably contributed to my choice of the listening specialty of psychiatry. So, Scott, that is such an inspiring story. What do you make of Powell's account?

No, I think one thing that illustrates is that, While the idea of learning styles has been discredited in the field of educational psychology, if you think of in terms of visual learning or auditory learning, kinesthetic learning, the research actually does show that learning styles is not very predictive. Just focusing on a singular way of learning doesn't seem to be the magic ticket to learning. I think this illustrates the fact that giving more avenues and more opportunities to learn something through multiple ways of getting at it can be hugely beneficial to a student who may be limited in a particular way of learning something.

You know, for all students, increasing the opportunities for different ways of encoding the same stimuli, whether it's note-taking, whether it's asking questions, seeing the teacher after class and getting that kind of reinforcement. The more reinforcement, the better. So we should be giving those enrichment opportunities across as many modalities as possible to all students. It's going to benefit learning for all students. We heard from many listeners who are diagnosed with dyslexia or ADHD or other learning differences at various points in their education. You mentioned to me that you had an auditory processing issue as a young student.

What do you think our educational system should do to support students with these sorts of challenges who may be labeled not gifted? That's the question, because school systems are not designed to support neurodivergent individuals. And that is like my life's mission is to figure out ways in which not just the school system, but organizational structure. Society can be more welcoming and destigmatize and in a way normalize the fact that we're all freaking weird. You know, like we're all are. And yet we're all expected to be the same. And you go down the line, there are very specific needs that all these different forms of neurodivergency take, where there could be custom-tailored, individualized self-actualization plans that really build on the strengths that a lot of these kids have,

as opposed to just focusing on their weaknesses. That would be the big one. You take ADHD, you know, there's rich imagination there. There's rich creativity that is being just squelched because you're forcing them to focus on a boring lecture which drives them, you know, their executive functioning crazy. You know, it's really difficult. It's difficult. If you want to take dyslexia, for instance, a lot of kids with dyslexia are going to be great at business.

You know, if you give them opportunities to sell things to other students or to create a business, figure out a business plan to go out there and act and move and not be forced to just. just read, you know, you'll see that they have amazing capacities there. Autism, you know, if you want to look at autism, you can say, well, wow, if you listen to their special interest area, if you listen, if you really ask them, you know, what are you passionate about? What is that? You know, and listen to them and lead with that as opposed to forcing them to be interested in things that are, you know, you'll see so much greater potential than you see. So there's a lot there. There's a common thread in all of the examples you just gave me, Scott, and that's,

the system is trying to put everyone through the same, you know, round hole. And some of us are round pegs, and we go through the hole really easily, and some of us are square pegs, and we don't. And you're saying, let's build some more square holes. I agree with that a thousand percent. And I really agree that that is a major problem we have in our education system. It's not designed for difference. It's designed. for sameness in a way. And in some ways, that's a very industrial model of education, right? Because we want widgets, and we want all of the things to go through the assembly line in the

same way, as opposed to saying, well, you're dealing with human beings, you're not dealing with widgets. And so maybe the assembly line has to adapt itself to the people instead of the other way around. That's right. And also acknowledging there's many paths to greatness. And that one insight can revolutionize education if we took it seriously. Hmm. We heard from some listeners who are really struggling with their perceptions of their own intelligence and feelings of self-worth.

Here's a message we received from a listener named Jennifer. I related to a lot of what Scott was mentioning throughout the podcast about just having moments where you are like singled out and you're like, oh my gosh, like, am I the dumbest person in the world? and I guess I sometimes get so caught up in the belief that I am not good enough, not smart enough, and I often forget about the moments where I am told I'm shown otherwise. And I guess my question to Scott would be, what, how do you get yourself to, I guess, believe more about not getting so hung up on the negative, but staying on the positive. I think it's something that I really struggle with. Yeah, I guess what are helpful ways to make me remind myself that I am smart enough?

So you can hear how Jennifer has struggled with this question, Scott. My heart really goes out to her. What advice would you have for listeners like Jennifer? Yeah, well, first I want to say relatable. You know, Jennifer's not alone, and it's such a pervasive, common feeling in question. But I think for a lot of people who feel things very deeply and are really caring, compassionate humans, they have a lot of trouble with something I call self-anchoring. So they'll constantly be scanning others for approval,

and they won't ever feel like they can feel confident in themselves or feel worthy, unless someone else deems that they're allowed to feel worthy. And I think that self-anchoring is a process. It takes a lot of work, but it's a skill set. I have come such a long way, and I still have a long way to go, my friend. But when I think about how I used to be and how I would never have any sense of my own self, I was always just looking at how other people were judging me, and I would internalize that.

I realized that life doesn't have to be that way. I realize that you can lead with yourself. You don't have to wait for the world to tell you who you are to act or be a certain way. You can learn self-anchoring and self-leadership skills. Can you give me a couple of aspects of the self-anchoring process, Scott, things that you did yourself to help you anchor yourself rather than look to others to give you a sense of your self-worth? Yeah, it's all about leading with your passions, with your values, with the things that you know are true and valid about yourself. The earliest example of that is when I took myself out of special education, I chose myself. At that moment, I was in a position where the school system was telling me I was a certain way.

And I was like, you know what? I'm going to change the script. I'm going to tell the school system that I can handle it. Give me a chance. I'd like to share one more listener story with you, Scott. This one comes to a man named Sean. From an early age, Sean was told that he was bad at math, but he did not allow that to deter him. As I went through school, I was repeatedly reminded that I was not good at math.

I ultimately barely graduated high school by taking what was called business, math at the time, simply balancing your budget and keeping a checkbook. But it wasn't until my late 20s when I decided to go back to college and had to take a placement exam. I tested into what was called Math E, which was math essentials. It was self-paced learning and I had to relearn multiplication, subtraction, division, decimals, you know, percentages. It was very, very basic stuff. But after that, I got into my first algebra class and quickly rose to the top of it. Ultimately, I went on to get a degree in economics with a minor in accounting. And for the rest of my school career, absolutely loved math, numbers, puzzles, and problem solving,

and went on to graduate with honors. And so it's difficult to say that one form of intelligence is better than another, because, like I said, I was told I sucked at math, and now that's what I do for a living, and I do it well. So Scott, Sean's message makes me think about how learning never ends and who we think we are can change over time. I love that. You know, I saw Larry David give a talk recently.

He said, I went like 25, 30 years trying to do stand-up, and I sucked. He said, people booed me off stage. She's like, I thought I had no talents. I thought like my life was like over, you know, And then, you know, him and Seinfeld were like, let's start a TV show. He realized that, wow, like, this was my very specific niche that, like, I can actually be great and I can actually flourish. And I just, I think we have to really remember that life is this overarching curve that, you know, we're not defined or limited by who we are or how we're being received in this moment in time. Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist at Columbia University.

He's the author of Rise Above, Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. Scott, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Always talking to you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor. If you enjoyed today's conversation,

please consider sharing it with your friends and loved ones. Word of mouth recommendations really help to connect more people with the ideas and research that we explore on the show. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.