5 myths about being a genius

Below, Dr. Josh Turknett shares five key insights from his new book, The Genius and the Impostor: The Neuroscience of Unlocking Human Potential. Turknett is a neurologist and founder of the Institute for Performance Neurology, where he works at the intersection of neuroscience, learning, and human potential. He is also an award-winning musician and host of the Performance Neurology podcast. What’s the Big Idea? The brain you were born with contains the same learning engine as every genius who ever lived. But a dedicated neural system in your mind has spent years convincing you otherwise, narrating a fiction about what you can and can’t do. Josh draws on decades of neuroscience to dismantle that fiction, and show you what your brain is actually capable of. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Turknett himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. You are already a genius, but you’re blind to it. As you read these words, your brain is pulling off an insanely complex task. It’s taking a continuous stream of symbols and slicing them into identifiable chunks called words. It’s looking up the meaning of each word, snapping those meanings together into ideas, app…