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He was a working artist, successful by most measures, with paintings in regional galleries and a steady stream of commissions. He had come to see me not about his art but about a private fear he had carried since childhood. “I have always been told I am creative but not smart,” he said. ...

She was the youngest of four, a partner at a major law firm, and she had brought a particular question into our session. “My oldest sister is a cardiologist,” she said. “My second sister is a federal judge. My brother teaches mathematics at a research university. And I am the partn...

He was forty-three years old, IQ measured at 142, and working as a part-time bookstore clerk. He had arrived at my office at the recommendation of his wife, who had grown tired of watching him abandon every project he started. He had begun and never completed a PhD in philosophy. He had written 60,0...

In twenty-two years of clinical and forensic practice, I have lost count of the patients who arrived in my office convinced that their inability to stop thinking was a defect. They described 3 a.m. spirals about a single sentence in an email sent earlier that day. Weeks-long mental rehearsals of con...

In my clinical practice, the question comes up at least once a month. A parent, almost always sitting in the chair across from me after a child’s neuropsychological evaluation, leans forward and asks, half joking and half serious: “So, did she get her brains from me, or from her dad?R...

In my clinical practice, and even more often during forensic evaluations, patients and examinees will mention, almost apologetically, that they “do their best thinking at 2 a.m.” Some have read the headlines: night owls are smarter. They want to know if that is true, or if it is pop-scie...

In my forensic practice, the most common and most heartbreaking mismatch I see is the high-IQ adult diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-eight, who spent three decades convinced they were lazy, flaky, or “not living up to their potential.” Their school records show a child who tested in the 95t...

One of the questions I am most often asked in clinical practice, usually by an adult arriving for a cognitive evaluation in their fifties or sixties, is some version of: “Doctor, does this number actually mean anything for my life?” For decades, I had to give a cautious, qualified answer...

A college junior sat across from me last fall, fidgeting with his phone. He had been referred for a cognitive evaluation after his grades collapsed despite, by his own account, spending more time than ever on coursework. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I use ChatGPT for every...

She was one of the most cognitively gifted individuals I have ever assessed. A thirty-eight-year-old software architect with a Full Scale IQ of 145, placing her in the top 0.1 percent of the population. She could identify complex patterns in data that her entire team missed. She could hold seven or ...

A seventeen-year-old sat in my office last month, referred by her school counselor for an attention evaluation. She was bright, articulate, and visibly frustrated. “I know I’m smart,” she told me. “But I can’t focus on anything for more than like a minute. I’ll st...

Last month, a colleague sent me a link to an AI leaderboard and asked a question I have now been asked dozens of times in the past year: “So, is ChatGPT smarter than me?” I looked at the numbers. GPT-5.2 Thinking had scored 141 on the Mensa Norway IQ test. Gemini 3 Pro Preview had [&hell...

I was sitting in my office in January 2026 when neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told the United States Senate something that made headlines around the world: “Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” Within days, a tweet from World of Statistics on February 6...

A few years ago, I assessed two individuals on the same afternoon who perfectly illustrate why understanding what IQ tests measure matters more than most people realize. The first was a forty-one-year-old engineer referred for a neuropsychological evaluation after a mild traumatic brain injury. His ...

I tested the same woman twice, twenty-three years apart. The first time, she was a twenty-two-year-old college senior referred for a learning disability evaluation. Her processing speed was exceptional, in the 95th percentile. Her working memory was strong. Her vocabulary, solid but unremarkable, fe...

A mother sat across from me last year, her eleven-year-old son fidgeting in the waiting room outside, and asked me the question I hear more than any other in my practice. “Can we raise his IQ?” Her son had been assessed at 94. Solidly average. Not low enough to qualify for services, not ...

Let me tell you about one of the most unsettling moments I have witnessed in a courtroom. A defendant was being evaluated for competency to stand trial. His Full Scale IQ, tested twice across different occasions, placed him solidly in the average range. By every standard metric, this was a man of no...

A few years ago, a corporate attorney walked into my office for a neuropsychological evaluation. She was sharp, articulate, clearly accomplished. But her cognitive test results told a different story. Her working memory scores landed nearly a full standard deviation below what I would have predicted...

As a clinical and forensic psychologist, one of the most common questions from parents and adults is not simply “What is my IQ?”, but “Which IQ test should we actually use at this age, and does it really matter?”. The short answer is yes: IQ tests are age‑normed, and choosing an appropriate test for...

In modern organizations, the pressure to make better people decisions with fewer resources has never been higher. Cognitive and IQ‑style assessments have become one of the most studied and effective tools for predicting how quickly employees can learn, adapt, and solve complex problems at work. When...