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Multiple Intelligences

Ask yourself two questions:

Do you feel the fundamental difference in the way they pull your thinking? The first question leads us to imagine that there is a single way to be smart: one ruler which can measure us all. The second question, on the other hand, leads us to consider the diverse kinds of skills and competences we humans use to succeed in the world.

Before you read on, you might want to think seriously about that second question, and answer it for yourself: What are the different ways in which you are intelligent?

The questions were posed by Howard Gardner, whose book, Frames of Mind, set forth the central idea of Multiple Intelligences Theory: There are many valid and valuable ways to be smart. There is no single intelligence, but rather, many different intelligences. This change in perspective hugely expands the way we can think about helping our children develop their abilities.

As we talked about Cognitive Abilities Theory in the last chapter, I mentioned general intelligence — the idea that there is a single, across-the-board way of being intelligent. According to this view, people who are intelligent are just plain intelligent — they’re smart in a way they can use anywhere. Whatever you ask them to do, they’ll do it better than others. Cognitive Abilities Theory says that all the basic abilities eventually combine to form that one general intelligence.

Multiple Intelligences Theory vehemently rejects that viewpoint. Gardner draws on evidence from normal development, exceptional individuals, and people who have suffered brain damage, as well as traditional psychological tests, to propose that there are at least eight different intelligences. He points out again and again that it isn’t the exact list that is critical, but the idea that there are many ways to be intelligent.

For Gardner, the limited range of abilities even studied by Cognitive Abilities Theory is a fatal flaw, which artificially restricts the ways children can show their intelligences. If you only look for a few abilities, they’re the only ones you’ll find!

Multiple Intelligences Theory provides a definition of intelligence that opened my eyes: “the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings.” For Gardner, all intelligences are specialized types of problem solving — ways to think and act with a purpose in the world. (For example, visual intelligence comes into play when we solve problems or think or create using our eyes and the visual parts of our brain.) For a human ability to qualify as an intelligence Gardner looks for converging evidence from several sources:

• For something to qualify as an intelligence, it must be present in all normal humans. In some, it will become highly developed, in others, neglected. (For example, the ability to hear differences in tones is finely developed in musicians, while some of us are nearly tone deaf.) The different intelligences have different developmental courses: Some peak early and fade, while others go on developing into advanced age. That’s important, because the different developmental trajectories suggest that different parts of our brain are involved — if the different intelligences are housed in different parts of our brains, that supports the idea that they’re really separate abilities.
• Cross-cultural evidence about the variety of skills which are valued and which can be highly developed, around the world.
• The way abilities break down when the brain is damaged. When a certain ability is destroyed or impaired by an injury, while others are not, that suggests that the ability may involve specific brain areas critical to its functioning.
• Performances of people who show very “jagged” ability profiles, with dramatic highs and lows. These extreme differences allow us to see different intelligences operating independently of one another. We see these profiles in some high-functioning autistic children, children with major learning disabilities, prodigies (who show a very unusual level of an ability very early in life), and savants (who show major disabilities in some areas, but remarkable abilities in others).
• Information from other species, from evolution, and from psychological research and testing.

No Generals in This Army!

Does your seven-year-old know where a general keeps his army? Up his sleevy!

For Gardner, the critical point is to abandon the idea that there’s only one “general” way to be intelligent. His quest is to advance the idea that there are many ways. He doesn’t feel that he has identified all possible intelligences, or that the ones he proposes are the definitive list. To Gardner, the whole idea of a single, general intelligence — overall “smarts” — is in good part the result of examining only a limited range of human ability. Mainstream psychology and education — through what they teach and what they test — have sucked into a Western preference for just a few ways of being intelligent (chiefly language, numerical ability, and logical reasoning).

But Gardner goes farther than this. He doesn’t just deny the idea of general intelligence. He argues that supposed broad capacities like memory exist only in terms of specific intelligences: musical memory, visual memory, logical-mathematical memory — these are all different. They don’t share common brain locations, or work in similar ways. There is no general memory place in the brain, only musical memory, spatial memory, and so on.

If you glance back at the table of Broad Cognitive Abilities in the previous chapter, you’ll see immediately that those are all very general across-the-board abilities: memory, visual or auditory skill, processing speed, and so on. Each of them would be expected to operate wherever you applied it — memory is memory, whether you’re learning music, remembering shapes, or memorizing numbers or poems. And remember, these broad and general abilities combine to form a “general intelligence” that operates on any kind of subject matter. You can see Gardner is arguing an exactly opposite case: There are no general abilities, only specific ones, and the specific ones are separate — they don’t combine into one “general intelligence.”

As you see, our first two theories are “all elephant” — one sees tusk, the other sees trunk, and they sound like there’s no overlap at all. Surprisingly, those of us concerned with the practical use of these theories can afford to ignore this bitter disagreement.

Think for a moment about this idea of “memory.” Memory may be a general ability, or specific to its content area (musical memory, visual memory, and so on). Getting the theory right eventually is critical. But whether we talk about a good memory or good memories doesn’t make much practical difference in what you’ll do with your child.

Why? Well, if Gardner is correct, you’ll just need to think about developing memory in different contexts, and strong memory in one area won’t necessarily predict strong memory in another. But how could you do anything else?

Try this exercise: Stop reading for a second. Before you go on, think of something you could do to help your child develop “a better memory.”

What did you come up with? Teaching a strategy to remember names? Asking him to repeat longer and longer strings of numbers? Giving her one thing to do, then two, then three? Whatever you came up with, it had to involve specific materials — words, numbers, shapes, faces — you can’t just say to someone “Practice remembering better.” You have to remember something. So working to develop memory must always call on a specific kind of memory. Whether by doing different things you develop one general memory or many specific ones, we can only work on memory through specifics, right?

It will be the same with other abilities. It’s sometimes helpful to think of broad categories. But a child’s minute-by-minute growth always uses a specific material. You can’t get any nourishment chewing on air!

Will the Real Intelligences Please Stand up?

What abilities does Gardner want to raise to the high status of true human intelligences? Here’s his list of the different routes humans use to solve problems and make valuable products. These abilities will be major players in my vision of the Intelligence River.