Beware: The Intelligence Story We Get Wrong — and the Future We Can Lose if We Believe It

"It’s not our abilities that limit us — it’s the ceilings we agree to." Dr. Ellen Langer (born March, 1947, researcher, author, Harvard professor)

"The idea that the brain is fixed in adulthood is not only wrong - it is dangerous." Dr. Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself

"Your brain is changing every moment - and you are the architect." Richard Davidson (neuroscientist, University of Wisconsin - Madison)

This blog is different from my usual. I'm going to go on a rant. It's not about religion or politics, but rather about a subject that I have been quietly seething about for years which I do think is a moral wrong. It's prevented us from flourishing. Kept our potential in a little box. We have misunderstood intelligence and been quite righteous about it... and that has led to diminished lives.

The whole fury began for me in my Tennessee high school when we were tested for intelligence. The day when results of the tests were returned was spent with us comparing scores, scratching our heads in confusion, and in many cases shrinking our personal dreams to fit our determined intelligence.

Later I met a young woman in college who was enrolled in microbiology and was getting A's at Virginia Tech. However, she confided to me, she would never be able to really be a microbiologist though she loved it and found it fascinating because she knew that her IQ was only 90.

"I am barely average in intelligence," she sighed with resignation. One needed to be much smarter to be a microbiologist.

I wanted to scream. I tried every which way I think of to convince her that she obviously was doing the work. Help her see that she was clearly capable. She was acing her classes and exams. But she wrongly believed the results of the intelligence test.

Fast forward to the day I received a letter from Cashmere schools saying the kids were going to be IQ tested. It was happening all over the valley and probably all over the United States. I remember the tightening inside me — not protective fear, but moral resistance.

Achievement testing? Fine — that could show how they were doing in subject mastery. But IQ testing? As if their future could be reduced to a fixed number printed on a page? Absolutely not. I opted my kids out of that nonsense — not because I was anti-science, but because I felt the science was too small.

Decades later, I now see how many lives were quietly shriveled up by that smallness.

My own father-in-law once believed — because that is what consultants and gurus were wrongly touting — that after fifty, it was nearly impossible to build muscle. The science said so. So he stopped trying.

It wasn’t laziness. It was obedience — to outdated biology. Today we know the opposite is true: people can build muscle in their sixties, seventies, even eighties. Neuroplasticity and physical plasticity remain alive far longer than we were once told. And, we age as we believe.

And belief, we now know, is not just mental. It is biological. In Ellen Langer’s famous study, hotel room attendants were simply told that their daily work counted as legitimate exercise. Their behavior didn’t change. But their mindset did — and in four weeks, their blood pressure dropped, their body fat and waist-to-hip ratio improved. Nothing physical changed — except their perception of their own agency. The mind tipped the body forward.

Which is why the newest intelligence research is not just fascinating — it is morally consequential. In a new groundbreaking twin study, psychologists Jared Horvath and Katie Fabricant found that identical twins, pay attention here - "identical twins" who were raised in meaningfully different schooling environments differed by as much as 12 to 15 IQ points!

To put that in plain English: 12 points is often the difference between someone being classified as “average” and someone being labeled “gifted.” Meaning the child wasn’t born ordinary or exceptional — they were shaped into one or the other by context. That is not a minor shift. It is a profound correction.

And it gets more radical. Neuroscientists studying “Super agers” — older adults whose memory and cognitive sharpness rival people 30 years younger — have found something astonishing: some of these brains contain the same amyloid plaque markers seen in Alzheimer’s patients. But they do not show cognitive decline. Their brains have literally rewired around the damage — finding alternative neural routes, like intelligent detours.

The brain did not avoid deterioration. It outmaneuvered it. That is neuroplasticity not as theory, but as defiance — proof that indicators of decline is not always destiny.

Norman Doidge's belief in neuroplasticity led to incredibly successful approaches to stroke recovery

So this tragic smugness, this pretense that we know all about the boundaries of human capabilities which we personally and collectively have succumbed to should be packing its bag. And that will make space for hope and new approaches to unleashing our capacities.

We were told for generations that intelligence peaked early, that ability hardened by midlife, that decline was inevitable and irreversible. We built entire educational and economic systems on those assumptions. We labeled children too soon. We quietly invited millions of adults to stop trying because “the window had closed.”

But the window never closed.

It was the story that was too small.

And once we see that intelligence is not a verdict but a living system — one that can be trained, enlarged, even rewired at almost any age — you cannot go back to designing lives around ceilings.

I refused to allow my children to be tested for intelligence not because I rejected measurement — but because I rejected premature judgment. I strongly believed that a child's intelligence is not a number set in stone. And now the science not only supports that instinct — it vindicates it as far as I'm concerned.

Human beings are still becoming. Let me repeat that. Human beings are still becoming... at seven. At forty-seven. At eighty-seven.

Given the right challenge, the right environment, the right belief — the mind does not merely persist. It grows. It reorganizes. It refuses finality. Just recently I saw another research finding. Oops we were wrong, intelligence doesn't peak in the third or fourth decade, it's more like the sixth or seventh. We needed to adjust some of what we were measuring. Please.

Our task is no longer to measure or predict intelligence it is to cultivate it.

Not as a score — but as a lifelong unfolding. Do you remember the work of Dr. Carol Dweck? She is the one who preached growth mindset over fixed mindset. She showed middle schoolers how neurons, cells in the brain, re-wired themselves and even grew new ones in response to the right challenge. Those kids with their heads on their desks lifted them. One said, "You mean I don't have to be dumb?"

Dr. Carol Dweck work led to impactful changes in our beliefs about human capabilities in areas related to intelligence, performance, and even personality

How sad. It was never that our brains were limited. It was that our beliefs were. And the future — scientific, cultural, ethical — will belong to those who dare to act on the larger truth.

That we are not finished.

Not even close.

How might we journey together to The Good Life by embracing the idea that we are not finished? Not by a long shot.