We all like to think of ourselves as intelligent, but if everyone were above average there would be no average.

There are ways of measuring intelligence, though not everyone is convinced that IQ tests and similar exams are all they’re cracked up to be. There are also different forms of intelligence. Is a math whiz smarter than a polyglot, chess grandmaster, or musical prodigy? With no one universally agreed-upon metric, it might all be relative in certain respects — a series of apples-to-oranges comparisons that don’t tell us as much as we’d like.