Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential

A genetics expert and professor challenges our understanding of intelligence, explaining what it truly means to be "smart," why conventional assessments are misleading, and what everyone can do to optimize their potential.

Growing up in middle-class suburban Los Angeles in the 1980s, Rina Bliss was saw intelligence as her ticket out. Like height and stature, intelligence was said to run in families. The prevailing idea was that mental capacity was determined by our DNA and could be measured; a simple IQ test could predict a child's future.

Yet, once Dr. Bliss looked closer, first as a student, then as a scientist, and later as a mom of identical twins who share a genome, she began to challenge conventional wisdom about innate intelligence. In Rethinking Intelligence, she shares her findings, drawing on cutting-edge scientific research to offer a new model for how we understand, define, and assess intelligence, using a measurement that is far more...