Who Are You, Really?

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the enchanted world of Harry Potter, the young wizard discovers a mysterious artifact known as the Mirror of Ericet. 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.

Many of us spent decades searching for a mirror of Ereset. 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 it.

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 famous admonition by Socrates to know thyself. How did this advice land with you and your classmates?

It it landed really well. I was having a very bumpy adolescence, as most adolescents 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 Greeks, you know, those marbleized founders of democracy and poetry.

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.

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 uh attachment and love and that feeling of just, you know, great effervescence. And yet, oftentimes, as soon as I 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 uh and finding myself being avoidant and saying, oh, this is a real human being who I'm in relationship with.

Yeah. 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 uh 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 um, 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.

I understand that it got bad enough that you briefly considered taking a rather drastic step. Uh tell me what happened in that moment, Eric.

Well, I was standing on uh the sidewalk of a very, very busy street uh 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 the 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. 'Cause A, it was this kind of very strong self destructive impulse.

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 I'm looking in the wrong place or I haven't looked hard enough?

Well, I think in my twenties, 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.

Eric spent years trying to find himself in order to understand how to become happy and fulfilled.

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 Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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.

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 I think it probably hit me first when I went on my first long meditation retreat. Um and so I went on this silent ten day meditation retreat. And at one point I was thinking during their treatise, like, oh, I want to meditate because I want to be a better person. And if I could just meditate somehow or another, maybe that will make me a better person and all my problems could go away.

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 flotsum, 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 uh Darwin's idea challenge the notion of a single unitary self?

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.

It's also the case that I think when we think about ourselves, um 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 agenda.

That's exactly right. And one way to think about that is that yourself 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. Um you have an animal self that's there making maps of reality and making predictions about what it thinks is gonna happen next.

And so

A lot of these oftentimes are in 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 faculty. instincts, um, and how in some ways these tensions are compounded by modern life. Uh 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 uh about ice cream the way that Frederick the Great felt about tall Prussian soldiers. Uh and I just yeah uh sugar in particular just has me wrapped around its little crystalline finger. And I know sugar's bad for me. I I wanna be healthy. Uh I I I see how it jangles my mood, but boy, I just crave it all the time. Uh I just love it, especially late at night. Uh and that's when the ice cream cravings really hit like a freight train.

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, oh honey, gotta walk the dog again. Yeah. Uh my my dog knows our neighborhood bodega very, very well.

Another reason we find ourselves divided against ourselves is that Most of us tend 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, you know, defend our entitlements and our rights, but they also are there to keep us from saying awkward things or things that might late later get us in trouble.

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 um, you know, everything that we have done at Hidden Brain these 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 one and system two thinking. So system one 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 it's much more reflexive and habitual. It's, you know, how I know just to walk to work without even thinking about where I'm going, for example.

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 when w with uh in a lot of our politics is an intuitive kind of politics where people say, Oh, I 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 this sense of how much people rely on their intuitions with a series of survey questions. Um, 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 know, 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 fifty percent 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

Hmm. 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 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 enraged. 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 that was that's my first, you know, th those people are evil. They're horrible. How could they be doing that?

And of course from the point of view of uh, you know, know thyself. Both these sides of us are 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 and not letting one or the other necessarily dominate us so so much, but but listening to them and recognizing them and 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 Jung. What did he mean by this term?

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

I understand that you grew up in in Texas and found yourself in New England at one point. Uh 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 uh 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.

We are not oneself 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 Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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.

Its aim is to help my students expand the vocabulary of their own lived experience. Um, and a lot of us, myself included, especially when we are 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, you know, be a good boy. I if I want to have a happy life, I need to have, you know, this high status job. Uh if I want to feel fulfilled, I've got to find this sort of perfect love.

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 what 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 tried 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.

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 fifteen years ago. I'm probably not going to want the things I want today fifteen years from now.

Right. And I I think it goes to a misconception I had when I was young, which is 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, I it it must be because I'm somehow another broken.

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? Um 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 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.

One of the philosophers you cite is your own cat. Uh 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 just 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?

Ha ha ha.

In many ways these sound like practices that are connected to, you know, yoga or meditation, uh are these things that you practice, Eric?

Yes, so um I've been practicing both yoga and meditation for about thirty years. Um, not in any kind of like big fancy ways. Um But I I try to spend about fifteen or twenty minutes meditating every day and try to spend about twenty, thirty minutes doing yoga. And um I find these remarkably helpful. In terms of stabilizing my mood, um keeping helping me keep things in perspective.

Do you have students actively try and practice this?

Yes. So I will typically uh teach them a little bit of meditation, partly just to get them a sense of, oh, tasting what might be h behind this ordinary experience of being here. So we will sit in class and I'll say, okay, we're just gonna spend the next ten minutes just focusing on our breath.

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. Um, 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, uh, Eric. Uh they almost sound mystical.

Um, they are. Um, I 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 it's really scary, especially at night. When you're there and you feel very, very vulnerable and then they're all the sounds of the wilderness kind of coming up and it's in the dark.

When you look within, who do you see? Is there a coherent self, 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 um 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. Um, I could go on a trip and not really tell you where I was. Um, 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 is You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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. Um tell me a little bit of that history again. Um how did the IQ test come about?

Uh well one of the first IQ tests was not actually called an IQ test, wasn't actually called an intelligence test. It was um 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.

What do IQ tests purport to measure, Scott, and what aspects of intelligence might they be overlooking?

IQ tests measure uh a bunch of different cognitive abilities, vocabulary, spatial rotation, working memory. So it's measuring a a sub um a set of cognitive skills that aren't irrelevant to our lives, aren't important. But I think the the the big question is, you know, do we want to put the label intelligence on those sets of skills and and and to what degree if we aren't

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 a the teacher looking at me with a what's wrong with you look in her eyes.

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'd definitely resonate with Jamie. I I had two major t IQ testing sessions. One, uh 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, I they're gonna 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 that they're giving me a test to

So that's one side of the testing coins cart. We also heard a different point of view from a listener named Carla. She grew up in rural Iowa in the nineteen seventies.

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 um 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.

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 uh 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 um the tests are reliable and valid in the sense they're measuring a a certain slice of human cognition, which some people

In some ways, um, 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 I remember vividly that I I put that on my wall. I mean, I don't know if it was h healthy, uh you know, my obsession with my intelligence. I'm not saying that was a great thing. You know, like did I 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 m my parents like

We we spoke some time ago on Hidden Brain with the psychologist Peter Gray. Um 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.

Yeah. You know, if uh more humbly, if I was Secretary of Education, then uh what I would uh what I would do. And I used to dream of being secretary of education when I was younger. Uh but um 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 left over for programming. And I would absolutely redistribute that and acknowledge that programming will enhance all students.

A listener named Jonathan called in with a philosophical question, Scott, about how we measurability 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 and 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 achievements?

What do you make of Jonathan's comments, Scott?

I love that. I love all these questions are so thoughtful. Um, 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 of general intelligence to encompass every talent and skill and every single characteristic human characteristic. Hm. Instead, we what we need to acknowledge is that we've overvalued general intelligence and don't really appreciate

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 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 that to have standardized tests that kind of have this assumption that we're testing your potential in life based on these general standardized um 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 Vedantham.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 are 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.

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 one student as smart in her teacher's eyes and brand another one as slow?

I wanna pick up on uh something um that Tarin said there at the end, is that seeing the whole child, that that that's it. That's the the key there is that we all contain multitudes, we're all brimming with our areas of strengths and our areas of weaknesses. And uh most of these tests Are not designed to capture the whole person. They're designed to capture a slice that will.

You know what I mean?

It's a 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 success. Um there's so much that happens outside the classroom that also impacts how a student will fare when she takes a test. Uh 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 US. often changing schools every six months

Two a year.

That constant moving made me feel like I was always behind or somehow dumped, 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 and worth. Like Scott, as a child, I could sense that something wasn't right.

So it's notable that she 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?

Yeah, I'm really touched by Cheese uh uh comments. I I I got chills listening to it and I'm a little bit emotional. What what kind of stinks a little bit is that

Yes.

She sh showed so much resiliency, but none of that counts. There are so many things that just don't count. They're you know, 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 a actually able to withstand and the ways that she's able to draw connections.

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 uh we're trying to predict statistically, IQ has a a a ha 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 create and creative achievement in the art.

I I'm wondering if you think, Scott, that these tests are better used as a compass in in that they give us directional guidance, but not really precision guidance.

Wow, that's really clever. Yeah, I think that they're 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 become we become adults and we leave grade school. Um so we need to c 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. Uh in the US, for example, wealthy families, uh 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 uh educational selection.

There's something called uh the Matthew effect in psychology where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And you do find that uh very small uh advantages when you're young can really compound when you give people resources. Um, and then over time y 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.

Do you think that these tests are better done away with altogether, Scott?

You know, I I think that these tests can be useful for certain people. And for some students who grow up uh in very impoverished areas and don't have many ways of displaying their intelligence. These tests can be a ticket out.

So Scott, we got hundreds of emails from listeners about our conversation with you. Um 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 convictions, 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 And that's what brought me greet up. And when I heard that I was devastated.

Scott, what are your thoughts on Leslie's story?

So I think the idea of a gifted um underachiever is is incorrect. I don't think there's any such thing. Because if you have gifted Underachievers, that means you have ungifted 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, um

Yeah, 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, uh 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 where you tell a student You're just smart. You didn't work hard and that would upset them. So a lot of it comes down to what do we value in our culture. Yeah. No, over v 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 a early age that they are extremely gifted? That was my case. I did well at tests 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, um, they expected that I should be able to achieve anything I wanted to and when I didn't I was accused of not trying.

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 forty five or fifty times uh, you know, my sixty three 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?

There's this idea because you're gifted, you're expected to um 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, then you know that makes a lot of sense. But signaling to the child that you expect

When we come back, refusing to let your label become your destiny. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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.

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 thirties and he scored below seventy. Which is the threshold for intellectual disability.

So this is a very important question, Scott. Um 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.

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. Um I've actually argued that people within the IQ band of seventy to eighty five really fall between the cracks in a lot of ways because their IQ score is not low enough to um get special resources.

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, uh, 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 one avenue which I think is is interesting to think about is 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 um might could 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.

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 of human potential. I, you know, at self-actualization tests dot com you can see all 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 through 12. It shows uh a much greater multitude of ways in which uh people can have their own paths, unique paths to self-actualization.

I've often noticed, Scott, that the older I get that that many jobs are less about intelligence and more about drive. Um, 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 c grade school where I was only one of sixteen 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 didn't

So Scott, that is such an inspiring story. Um what do you make of Pavel's account?

No, I think one thing it illustrates is that while the idea of learning styles has been discredited in the field of educational psychology. If you think of it in terms of visual learning or auditory learning, kinesthetic learning, that that the research actually does show that learning styles is not a is not very predictive.

Hm. We heard from many listeners who were diagnosed with dyslexia or ADHD or other learning differences at various points in their education. Um, 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 structures, society can be more welcoming and destigmatize and in a way normalize the fact that we're all freakin' weird. You know? Like we're all are. And yet we're all expected to be the same.

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. Um, and I really agree that that is a major problem we have in our education system. It's not designed for It's designed, you know, 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.

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, you know, 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

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, uh Jennifer's not alone and uh and it's it's such it's such a pervasive common feeling and question. But I think for a lot of people who feel things very deeply and are really caring, compassionate humans, um, 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

Can you give me a couple of aspects of this self anchoring process, Scott? Things that you did yourself to help you uh anchor yourself rather than look to others uh to give you a sense of uh your self worth?

Yeah, it it 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. 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 gonna 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 from 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 rejected.

Peter.

reminded that I was not good at math. I uh ultimately barely graduated high school by taking what was called business math at the time, um simply balancing your uh budget and and keeping a checkbook. But it wasn't until my late twenties 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,

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 I saw Larry David give a talk recently. He said I went like twenty-five, thirty years trying to do stand-up and I sucked. He said people booed me off stage. He's like, I thought I had no talents. I thought like my life was like over it, you know, and then you know he him and Seinfeld were like, let's start a TV show. He realized that wow, like this this was my very specific niche that like I can actually be great and I can actually force.

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. Car, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Oh, thank you. It was a real pleasure always talking to ya.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's 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.