Below, Dr. Josh Turknett shares five key insights from his new book, The Genius and the Impostor: The Neuroscience of Unlocking Human Potential.
Josh 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 Josh 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, applying the rules of grammar and syntax, all the while inferring the tone and intent behind the language. And it’s doing all that automatically, instantaneously, and effortlessly. You don’t have to try. It just happens.
That is an intellectual achievement that rivals or surpasses what we typically celebrate as genius. The same is true of spotting a friend’s face in a crowd or strolling across a cluttered room while mid-conversation. These are cognitive feats of staggering complexity, and we only realized just how staggering quite recently.
Back in the mid-20th century, computer scientists set out to build intelligent machines. They figured that the problems humans find hardest, like chess and math, would be hardest for computers too. And that the things we find easy, like walking and talking, would be easiest to replicate. They had it entirely backward. We’ve had pocket calculators since the 1970s. A computer beat the world chess champion in 1997. But it was only very recently that we built computers capable of holding up their end of a conversation—and they’re still not at human levels. Robots that can walk across a messy room without face-planting, much less fold a basket of laundry while chatting about their dinner plans, remain a work in progress. Scientists call this Moravec’s paradox: the most complex feats of cognition are the ones we find easiest. It revealed just how little we understood about our own minds.
Why are we so prone to underestimating ourselves? Because the brain builds expertise by building problem-solving circuits. When those circuits are built, they stop requiring conscious effort. The better we become at something, the less effort we feel, and we mistakenly equate that effortlessness with simplicity. But effortlessness is not a sign of simplicity. It’s a reflection of mastery. Which is how the most impressive feats your brain performs can feel like nothing at all.
2. Extraordinary minds are built from ordinary brains.
When Einstein died in 1955, scientists were eager to examine his brain. Most of them subscribed to what I call the “special brain story” of genius—the idea that geniuses are born with different, special hardware. After arguably the most thorough pathological examination any brain has ever received, nobody found any special brain bits in Einstein’s brain. No golden neurons, no diamond-tipped synapses. His brain was even slightly smaller than average. The most extraordinary thing about Einstein’s brain was that it was boringly ordinary.
“He didn’t believe he’d been born with a special brain.”
Einstein himself could have saved them the trouble. “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious,” he once said. He didn’t believe he’d been born with a special brain. He believed he’d built one through a lifetime of curiosity-driven learning. He believed that genius didn’t arise from special hardware, but from how he’d used the hardware we all possess.
Neuroscience backs him up. When you get down to the level of neurons and networks, learning the piano, the two-step, or theoretical physics is enabled by the same exact processes. All of our extraordinary cognitive abilities are built through the same learning engine that exists inside every brain. That learning engine is your genius, and it never leaves you.
3. The voice in your head is a PR agent, not a truth-teller.
In the 1960s, neuroscientists began working with a remarkable group of patients. To treat severe epilepsy, surgeons had separated the two halves of their brains. This handed researchers the unique opportunity of delivering a message to one half of a person’s brain without the other half ever knowing.
In one representative experiment, researchers flashed the word walk to only the right side of a patient’s brain. Sure enough, the man stood up and started walking. But the left hemisphere (the talking half) had never seen that command. When asked why he’d gotten up, you would think he wouldn’t have the faintest idea. But instead, he invented a reason: “Oh, I thought I heard the church bells ringing and wanted to walk to the window to see.” This happened over and over, with every subject tested. The left hemisphere would fabricate explanations for behavior it hadn’t caused, rather than admit its own ignorance.
These researchers discovered a system in the brain whose sole job is to narrate your life. Not to report what’s true, but to construct what’s believable—to maintain a stable, sensible identity in the eyes of others and yourself. You know this voice well. It’s your inner narrator, your inner critic. It’s the voice that decided years ago whether you were a math person or a music person. The voice that tells you what you can and can’t do, what makes you look smart, and what makes you look foolish.
This is what I call the imposter. And the imposter isn’t just a metaphor—it comes directly from the neuroscience. That storytelling machinery is a real, dedicated brain network, and it’s running in every one of us. The trouble is that your imposter and your genius can’t work the neural gears at the same time. How much of your extraordinary potential you actually realize comes down to which one is driving.
4. You don’t have the same brain throughout the day.
The brain that fired off your emails this morning, the one fading in the after-lunch slump, and the brain you’ll take into the shower tonight are not the same brain. They are different settings or modes of operation on the very same machine. And each mode can reach different parts of what you know. Each mode has its own strengths and its own blind spots.
You have felt this. Think of the last time a name got stuck on the tip of your tongue. You knew that you knew it, but no amount of straining would shake it loose. Then an hour later, the name comes sauntering into mind. Where was it hiding? Tucked away in your brain the whole time, perfectly intact. The irony is that while you were searching, that very search mode was the thing making the name impossible to find. It was only once your brain toggled into a different state that it could reach the circuits.
“The research suggests this isn’t a quirk of unusual brains, but true of all of them.”
It’s the same reason a speaker can go totally blank at the podium, then remember every word five minutes later offstage. What your brain can pull off at any given moment depends on the mode it happens to be in. Which also means you are almost certainly carrying gifts you’ve never encountered.
As a neurologist, I’ve seen just how far this goes. I once had a patient, a 63-year-old car salesman, who out of nowhere started producing beautiful, wonderfully detailed drawings at the very same time a form of dementia was damaging his brain’s language centers. He’d never taken an art lesson. He’d been far too embarrassed to draw a stick figure if asked. And yet this artistic gift emerged from one part of his brain just as another was deteriorating. The research suggests this isn’t a quirk of unusual brains, but true of all of them.
This is why so many of the great thinkers were deliberate about shifting their brain states. Einstein took long walks to the woods. Darwin wore a path in the gravel behind his house, walking it every afternoon. Salvador Dali would doze in a chair with a key pinched between his fingers so that the instant he fell asleep, it clattered to the floor and jolted him awake with his dreaming mind’s images still fresh. None of them were slacking off. They understood that the walk, the nap, the daydream, was where the real work gets done. That’s where the best ideas live. The kind no amount of grinding at a desk will ever find.
5. Your brain didn’t stop being able to change. It stopped needing to.
For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists were quite sure the adult brain couldn’t change. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, put it bluntly: “In adult centers, the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable.” The old saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks appeared to have the weight of scientific authority behind it. Your potential came with an expiration date.
Then, toward the latter part of the 20th century, we realized we’ve been very wrong. The brain’s capacity to change, remold itself, and acquire new complex knowledge and skills is lifelong. Your brain stays plastic throughout life.
If the machinery is alive and well, why does learning feel harder at 50 than it did at five? Adults change less because less needs changing. You arrived on this planet with almost nothing wired up, so childhood is one long, frantic construction project. By adulthood, the core skills are built and running. And your brain, being a ruthlessly efficient organ, follows a simple rule: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s a feature, not a bug.
“Your brain only rebuilds when it’s convinced the effort is worth it.”
It means the rewiring won’t happen on its own anymore. Your brain only rebuilds when it’s convinced the effort is worth it. Learning the ukulele at 60 is not, strictly speaking, a survival emergency. So you have to give your genius a reason to care. And curiosity is the most powerful reason there is.
The sooner you start, the better because plasticity itself is plastic. The less you learn, the harder learning gets because your brain stops maintaining machinery it isn’t using. But it works the other way too, and it starts the moment you begin again. The engine that built the most impressive feats of cognition humans have ever performed is still with you, still humming away, still capable of building new ones. It’s switched on by curiosity and fueled by learning. The only question left is where you’re going to point it next.
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