Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify ... into every corner of our mind."
--John Maynard Keynes

Try connecting all nine of these dots with just four straight lines without lifting your finger or retracing a line:

Four-year-old Heidi Hankins is all over the news. According to the Daily Mail, she "has an IQ of 159 -- only one point below Albert Einstein's -- and has become one of the youngest members of Mensa." As her father has pointed out, she has always shown an...

Cognitive training works. But does it work equally well for all people?

A new study suggests that the effectiveness of working memory training depends heavily on personality. Barbara Studer-Luethi and her colleagues focused on two personality traits in particular: neuroticism and conscentiousness. Neurotic people are anxious...

In a 2011 academic album, Professor Gaga made the bold empirical claim that we are just Born This Way. This set off intense debates among academic psychologists about the role of nature and nurture in determining genius. Was Gaga right?

In one sense, Gaga was on the right...

A little while back, I sat Tucker Max -- one of the world's best-known self-proclaimed narcissists -- on my couch and revealed his psychological test results. Unsurprisingly, he scored high (31/40) on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; you can take the test here). He scored the...

The relationship between intelligence and creativity has long been debated and studied.

One of the hallmark tests of "general intelligence" is the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. This test gives you a matrix of figures and you have to figure out the missing piece that completes the pattern.

Here's...

[This article was co-authored with Kevin McGrew]

Our society has clear expectations regarding students who don't fit the norm. In a 2004 national survey reported in Education Week, 84 percent of 800 surveyed special and general education teachers did not believe that students in special education should be...

A bulk of research shows that when people are put in situations where they are expected to fail, their performance does plummet. They turn into different people. Their head literally shuts down, and they end up confirming the expectations. When they're expected to win, their performance shoots back up. Same...

Today, lots of different definitions of giftedness exist. This wasn't always the case. Prior to 1972, practically every school used one criterion and one criterion only to identify giftedness: an IQ cut-off of 130. This criterion was heavily influenced by the pioneering work of Lewis Terman, who equated...

Talent, skill, ability -- whatever you want to call it -- will not get you there. Sure, it helps. But a wealth of psychological research over the past few decades show loud and clear that it's the psychological vehicles that really get you there. You can have the best engine...

Creativity is great. In the words of the philosopher Elliot Samuel Paul, "Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality. The vehicle of self-expression. The engine of progress in every human endeavor." Still, this doesn't mean creativity is always ethical. Creativity comes from humans, and humans are complex....

Flow -- the mental state of being completely present and fully immersed in a task -- is a strong contributor to creativity. When in flow, the creator and the universe become one, outside distractions recede from consciousness and one's mind is fully open and attuned to the act of creating....

In 1932, the entire population of Scottish 11-year-olds (87, 498 children) took an IQ test. Over 60 years later, psychologists Ian Deary and Lawrence Whalley tracked down about 500 of them and gave them the same test to take again.

Turns out, the correlation was strikingly high -- .66, to...

I always thought there was something psychedelic about Apple products.

In an interview with New York Times reporter John Markoff, Steve Jobs noted that "doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." He even remarked that Bill Gates...

In August 1903, the first ever science film was only a minute long, and starred cheese mites crawling through a piece of Stilton, magnified through a microscope and broadcast in black and white. Science films have come a long way since then.

Showing just how far we've come,...

I've got a proud confession to make: I'm a pop music junkie. Drizzy Drake, Britney, Adele, Nicki, Ke$ha, you name it. I love it. But I've got to admit, after awhile it all seems to jumble together. If I listen to too much of it, I get sick of the...

When I think of self-presenters, I conjure up images of slimy, used car salesmen and telemarketers on TV at 3 a.m. But maybe I'm being unfair to self-presenters. After all, the ability to put your best self forward without deception is an important skill, whether it's during a business interview...

If I asked you to draw a person from planet aardvark, would you be more creative if (a) I gave you no examples, or (b) gave you a few examples of what aardvarkians look like?

Research suggests you'd be more creative if I didn't allow your mind to roam free....

When it comes to success, conscientiousness seems like a great thing. All else being equal, the person who has tenacity, persistence, stamina and grit is more likely to be more successful than the person who is lazy and unmotivated. Over 25 years of research supports this commonsense view: Conscientiousness is...

Do you focus on the forest or the trees? Whether you have more of a global (holistic) or local (detail-oriented) processing style influences how you fundamentally perceive the world, and it is one of the most prominent factors influencing creative thought.

Beyond your personality, however, situational...