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 flexible and expansive.
Intelligence has little to do with standardized test results or other
conventional measures of intellect, Dr. Bliss argues. Intelligence is a
process, a journey defined by change that cannot be scored or taken
away. Intelligence is influenced by our surroundings in ways that are
often overlooked--more than Baby Mozart or flash cards or superfoods,
factors like stress, connection, and play actually sculpt young minds.
In Rethinking Intelligence, Dr. Bliss shares insights from the
burgeoning science of epigenetics to help us harness our environments to
empower our minds. If we truly want to nurture potential, we must
eliminate toxic stress so that our genes can work optimally, in harmony
with our environment. Dr. Bliss offers successful strategies we can use
as individuals and a society, including embracing a growth mindset,
prioritizing connection, becoming more mindful, and reforming systemic
issues--poverty, racism, the lack of quality early childhood
education--that have a negative and lasting neurobiological impact.
Joining acclaimed works by Carol Dweck, Amy Cuddy, and James Clear,
Rethinking Intelligence reframes human behavior and intellect,
offering a new perspective for understanding ourselves and our children,
and the practical tools necessary to thrive.
