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This is What Makes People Intelligent
It’s stranger than you know.
Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman had one goal. He wanted to disprove the myth of “early ripe, early rot.” The common knowledge at the time that highly intelligent kids were socially awkward, physically weak or more likely to have mental illness. So in the 1920s, Terman started his study to disprove this in California. He tested thousands of kids and picked the top scorers. Terman’s personal cutoff for the genius test was a score of 140 or higher. He ended up with 1,528 boys and girls. And followed them for the rest of their lives. The kids became known as the Termites. One kid, William Shockley, didn’t make the cut.
He took the test twice.
But Terman’s intelligence test didn’t want him.
Later in life, Shockley won the 1956 nobel prize in physics for inventing the transistor. Imagine that. The boy who was rejected changed what it meant to be intelligent. What society measures when we say someone is intelligent is not enough to prove someone is smart. There’s more to being a genius than we think. Of course, pure brainpower is part of intelligence.
But there’s more to it.
You can be smart on paper and still be terrible at life. You probably know a few people on this path. They had intelligent heads back…
