This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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

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

We get passed over for a job or a promotion.

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

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

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

medical school.

There are other times, however, when rejection is not about our limitations, it's that other people see us as limited.

Our concerns over how we are judged are often most acute, most charged when it comes to the topic of intelligence.

Most of us don't just want to be smart. We want to be seen as smart.

I just remember being taunted and being, you know, told things like, like, oh, you're too

stupid to go on the fourth grade, you idiot, like that sort of thing. But yeah, it was really,

it was really painful.

This week on Hidden Brain, many of us have knee-jerk conclusions about what intelligence is and how it can be measured.

We think we know what intelligence is, but do we really?

It almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ intelligence. And I forgot that I

was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.

In the first three years of his life, Scott Barry Kaufman suffered from a number of ear infections.

It made it very hard for me to process auditory input in real time.

And so I was a couple milliseconds behind everyone else.

I would hear things and then I would have to, in my head, cognitively process it.

...