Ungifted

“After school, I dash off to the local library and find a book about human intelligence. I flip through the pages and come face to face with a terrifying chart. At the top is listed the average IQ of PhDs. I am way lower than this number. Tentatively, I go down the list. College graduate? Closer, but still no cigar. My blood pressure is rising. Semi-skilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally find my range: ‘Lucky to graduate high school,' it says. In a fit of panic, I throw the intelligence book as far as I can with an audible ‘F**k!'”

This passage describes the author's dawning realization, before college, of the discrepancy between his dreams of attending Yale and what his low IQ tests predicted for him.

My interest in reading this book was to find out how artists and writers like I could use human intelligence research to nurture our work. It provides many ways to do that.

It is an effective book because Kaufman has skin in the game; he describes his own experiences (alongside his research findings), as a kid whom teachers labeled “special education,” and how he overcame the predictions of that label because an observant teacher intervened. That teacher gave Kaufman hope and self-confidence, while his parents were giving him the opposite by following what experts were telling them.

Kaufman went on to achieve miraculous things that school year, and later, because he had found passion, inspiration, positive mindset, self-regulation, deliberate practice, his domains of talent and creativity, and his mentors: things that studies say produce high achievement.

But I can relate to Kaufman's experiences, because when I was a kid, my doctor told my mother that I was “mentally retarded”—because I drew people without fingers. Just circles for hands.

Luckily, my mother thought he was an idiot. And, luckily, she saw my intelligence.

And I'll add the complication that my doctor was a white male and my mother and I were females of Puerto Rican descent—a complication that Kaufman highlights throughout his book: that IQ tests—and testers—are biased against people of color.

Early on, Kaufman makes the point that IQ tests were created by people. Fallible people. Fallible white European male people. Fallible white European male people who created these tests relatively recently, in the nineteenth century, in ways that were, at times, completely arbitrary.

He describes Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a French psychologist, as the inventor of the first practical IQ test. To give you some perspective, Binet worked at La Salpêtrière in Paris, a hospital known for its public displays of their female “hysterics.” Even though Binet acknowledged the limitations of his IQ test versus the remarkable diversity of human intelligence, teachers and school administrators have given IQ tests inordinate power over children's futures. And, thus, self-appointed (and community-appointed) authorities and evaluators label unconventional children as disabled.

So it's gratifying that Kaufman concludes, “We are all capable of extraordinary performance; the key is finding the mode of expression that allows you to create your own unique symphony.”

Like Kaufman, because an adult saw my intelligence and believed in me, that gave me the fire to go on to college and grad school and complete projects that I've been passionate about.

As a kid, when I drew people, fingers weren't necessary. Because the person I drew had her hands in fists.