Rethinking Intelligence

A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential

By: Rina Bliss

Narrated by: Samantha Tan

Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

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 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.

©2023 Rina Bliss (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers

If you are an open-minded person, you will most likely enjoy this book.

This book deconstructs many preexisting beliefs surrounding intelligence, from IQ tests to socioeconomic and environment influences. The author offers thorough explanations to her criticisms of these measures, which aligns with much of the modern literature and critiques offered by a number of psychologists and sociologists towards the traditional view of intelligence. I especially appreciate her demonstration of the interactive relationship between environment and biology, where the two are rarely ever completely distinct from one another.


That said, I think some people who have fairly fixed mindsets will have a more difficult time digesting the material in this book. It requires a willingness to challenge preexisting beliefs that many of us hold and to interpret historical events (i.e. the eugenecist movements of the 1900s) through a sociological lens. Much like how one's biology cannot be completely separated from their environment, one's personhood and capabilities are closely tied to their society; the individual is not wholly distinct from the collective they are part of. It is the collective's role to foster each individual according to their needs, through a qualitative understanding of their abilities and desires. By insisting that we quantify human potential, we effectively place a price tag upon the person and their value.

I am not familiar with whether or not this author has other works, though I will keep this book in mind for my future research if I ever focus on the subject of human intelligence or other similar themes. This was a fantastic read, with content that engages with intersectional themes and incorporates content from both psychology and sociology. 10/10

A Triumph of Ideology over Science.

Bliss is the new age version of Lysenko, the Soviet biologist who was so convinced of the Communist dogma he undertook a grand plant experiment that millions died. Not to make this an ad hominem attack, but because Bliss recurrently describes herself as Academic, Gifted, etc & frequently drops name of nice schools, so her career does demand inspection. First noted but never mentioned by her is her "Dr." is not in science or math or education, but in Sociology. And that degree was obtained from a n on-line school which does not require GREs for entrance. My work surrounded me with folks in the top 1-2% of the intellectual population, and none of them ever described themselves as she does. They let the work produced do the speaking.

Her painting of the complete and dominate role for IQ testing in US education is as faulty as her very bad description of the current understanding of the role of genetics and intelligence. Intelligence itself is a hard to define yet a very real & variable attribute of people . While all such measurements have some error room, overall they are useful predictors of many avenues of success (or not) in life. The key is genetics is highly influential but NOT determinative. Her descriptions of twin studies was biased, shallow and not current. There are many parts to be added to the stew before getting the end product. Bliss do an actively bad job describing the best ideas and data now available.

The rest of her rant about social injustice may have some validity but is largely devoid of data, just lots of opinion. This book was not worth the time and I am probably dumber for listening to it.