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My View of the Elephant

The Second Tributary — Many Ways to Be Smart

The essential contribution of Multiple Intelligences Theory to the Intelligence River is the idea that there are many ways to be smart. Although the idea has a long history, we associate it recently with Howard Gardner. His catalog of ways to be intelligent has changed and may continue to change. But it isn’t the list that’s essential to the Intelligence River, it’s the idea behind it — that there are many different ways to be intelligent.

On the next several pages I’ll offer my personal list of these many kinds of intelligence. Whether you call them “intelligences,” “abilities,” or “skills,” they are all ways to meet goals, accomplish things, and make valued products. They are all possible routes to personal accomplishment and satisfaction.

Although I’ve worked primarily from Gardner’s proposed list of intelligences, I reorganized it considerably. If we think of my categories strictly as “intelligences,” that’s a risky thing to have done, since his list was carefully thought through. But I’m focused on your practical use of this information, so I’ve tried to think both of kinds of intelligence and of how you can best affect them. For example, I’ve split intelligence based in language into two parts, keeping language skill itself separate from reading and writing, since each of these important areas has separate routes of influence.

Body Intelligence “Wow, when I watch her dance, I feel so happy!” Body Intelligence is intelligence expressed physically. The athlete, the dancer, the skilled tool user — all these people are demonstrating Body Intelligence. We never used to think of “physical” as having anything to do with “intelligence.” I’m afraid I may sometimes have thought of the two words as opposites! But two of our theories strongly include physical intelligences, and once we start to think about it, it’s hard to imagine that we could ever have doubted a physical intelligence.

We’ve always assumed that general good health would include a “healthy” brain, but our new view of intelligence claims much more than that: Some kinds of intelligence are expressed through the body. The key here seems to be not merely that our body is used in the intelligence, but that there is no comparable way to express an idea — if talking about it were as good as doing it, Monday-morning quarterbacks would be paid as well as Sunday afternoon ones. You can’t put a dance in words. No matter how eloquent and expressive the words, they can never be the dance.

It seems likely that there is a continuum: For some pursuits, the physical component may be highly salient, as in a skilled woodworker or a dancer. In others, the physical may be blended with other key abilities. Perhaps there is no vocation which doesn’t have some component of Body Intelligence: secretaries at keyboards, professors supplementing words with eloquent gestures, salespeople exuding nonverbal confidence as they approach a potential customer, and so on.

Personal Intelligence “He just knows how to make everyone he meets feel so comfortable.” Personal Intelligence is the complex set of skills which allows us to understand, work with, empathize with (or manipulate) other people. It is also, somewhat confusingly, our internal ability to work with our own feelings — to introspect, to be insightful about what makes us tick, to have strong beliefs and values based in a real understanding of ourselves.

An intelligence centered on our relationships with other humans is more and more widely recognized, especially with people who are interested in effectiveness in the real world: two of our theories include it. There’s another authority to list here. Ask several friends to name the abilities that allow people to function well in the world. I’ll bet most will mention skill in personal relationships, as well as self-understanding.

Once again, as with Body Intelligence, as soon as we begin to really think about it, our common sense assures us there must be a Personal Intelligence. How could there not be? We humans are social animals to our core.

Visual-Spatial Intelligence “I really panicked when it fell apart, but he saw right away how to put it back together.” Visual-Spatial Intelligence is the ability to perceive and solve problems which use sight and space, like solving puzzles, shaping a clay pot, fixing a complex instrument, reading a map, or designing a building .

The term Visual-Spatial Intelligence needs some explanation. Psychology and education often talk about “visual-spatial” and “visual-motor” abilities. This jargon just refers to two natural links. We always use our vision in space — in the three-dimensional world around us. And whenever we use our muscles along with our eyes, as when we write a sentence on a piece of paper, our visual and our motor systems are working together. Why didn’t I just call this intelligence “Visual” for short? Because there is obviously part of it that is not visual: People blind from birth find their way through space, and solve nonvisual spatial problems competently. So why don’t I just call it “Spatial” for short? Because vision is such an important human ability it seems foolhardy to slight it. So we need “Visual-Spatial.” And we need to remember that it’s really “visual-spatial-motor,” but that’s out-of-control jargon!

All three of our theories include this intelligence that centers on our vision and our ability to perceive visually, solve visual-spatial problems, and express ideas visually in a space. To leave it out would be like building a theory of how fish swim without mentioning water.

As with Body Intelligence, much human activity involves Visual-Spatial Intelligence. For those of us who are sighted, our vision is vital to most of the things we do — absolutely central to our moment-to-moment functioning. These tasks aren’t necessarily visual-spatial at their core, but we use some level of Visual-Spatial Intelligence to do them. Some tasks, like skilled needlework and many athletic skills, put a high premium on a blend of visual-spatial and visual-motor skill.

But, beyond that, there are tasks which are simply visual in their core. A painting, like a dance, is absolutely specific to its medium. No matter how eloquent the description of a painting, it isn’t the painting at all. In fact, one of the key features of true Visual-Spatial Intelligence seems to be its separation from language. This fundamental difference between problems we think about and solve with words, and problems we think about and solve mostly through eyes and hands, has been a feature of traditional intelligence tests. Even though we hope to go beyond that traditional view, it still captures a truth.

The Language-Based Intelligences

I feel sure that if we knew all there was to know about intelligence, we wouldn’t be labeling these individual little boxes — a box of Body Intelligence, a box of Visual-Spatial Intelligence, and so on. Instead, we’d see a richly interconnected system, where each component shares and works with others.

When it comes to ways of being intelligent which are based in our use of language, the connections are so rich, so obvious, that you might well wonder why I’ve made separate boxes at all. But remember that our goal is to influence our children’s development for the best. Each of the intelligences we consider next has its own routes of influence and so it pays to think about them as separate, but interconnected. In addition, many children show different levels of ability in these areas (for example, a child with a reading interference often has good underlying language ability and a terrific fund of information). So it will be helpful to look at them separately.

We already talked about the complicated connection of knowledge and intelligence. We’ll talk about how knowledge fits into the Intelligence River in a bit. But just a reminder now that our fund of knowledge is richly interconnected with our ability to use language as a tool to get information about the world.

Language Intelligence “When she explained it to me, I finally understood.” Language Intelligence summarizes a treasure chest of skills used by poets, technical writers, philosophers, politicians, teachers, kids explaining why they’re late again, parents explaining why they care — how could we possibly think of human intelligence without language? When I talk to parents about language, I stress primarily its use as a tool: a way to get information in, work information over internally (“verbal problem solving”), and give information back to others so they can understand our thoughts. An intelligence centered on language is present in all our theories, although they divide it up differently.

If you are the parent of a hearing-challenged child, you know that American Sign Language, and other signing systems, are true languages, which qualify as a kind of intelligence just as much as other language forms. I’m using Language Intelligence to include them, but they have different qualities (for example, the obvious overlap with the visual) that give them a different range of expressive possibilities than oral language.

Reading and Writing Intelligence “When I read that book, I felt like I was really there, living it.” Reading and writing are all about language, of course. But they are so important! So influenceable! So important to success! Since our goal is to influence children’s intelligence in the world, we have to give these critical abilities a place of their own.

There is another reason they need to be considered separately: Reading and writing have an important additional element added on to oral language. If we were into jargon, Reading and Writing Intelligence could be called something like “Symbolic Language Intelligence,” because they are complex applications of language to an abstract and arbitrary symbolic system. We often forget, once we learn how to read and write, but if you stop to think about it, those little squiggles that cover this page are complicated! We know that our brains are deeply prepared to learn language. Language acquisition, and the speed and ease with which children accomplish it, is already astonishing. But learning to decode the symbols we use to show the sounds of our language is an add-on ability beyond speaking a language. When children learn to read and write, they learn to “map” the complexity of language onto a series of abstract and arbitrary markings like “a” and “x” and all the squiggles of the world’s written languages. Those squiggles don’t have meaning in them — they’re just squiggles — but we somehow learn to give meaning to them. For some children, who have learned language well enough, this additional process is very challenging.

Be clear here: the great majority of reading interferences are, first and foremost, the result of a problem processing the flow of sounds that make up language. In spite of the myth that dyslexia is a visual problem, most reading problems are based in a problem with oral language. That means that most reading problems are really pre-reading problems. But with that caution, it makes sense to look at reading and writing as separate from spoken language when our goal is to influence all the different ways a child can be intelligent.

Math and Reasoning — A Pair? A kind of intelligence centered on thinking, problem solving, reasoning, and mathematics is evident in all three theories, although they don’t divide up the territory in the same way. Once again, with an eye to practicality, I’m going to separate out the mathematical part of this area as Number Intelligence, because that’s how parents and schools intuitively think of it. We know arithmetic and mathematics should have an important component of logical thinking, and we try always to show kids the logical aspect of numbers. But when we want our kids to “be logical,” we usually mean something else — something which is more of a Management Function. (Of course, when parents say that, we usually should say "try to be more logical than I am right now!" but that's a whole different topic!) And when we think of math, unfortunately, we still don’t usually think of problem solving first. With the focus always on helping our children develop, I’ve split off the ability to work with numbers, separate from reasoning. I cluster reasoning, thinking, and problem solving as part of the Director — as Management Functions. They’ll come up shortly.

Number Intelligence “I just try to memorize what a cosine is, but she always seems to understand all that stuff.” Math intelligence is skill with numbers — written or embodied in the concrete facts of the world, formally or intuitively expressed. Math is a very important way of “being smart” in our world. Like Language Intelligence and Visual-Spatial Intelligence, it seems to be a unique way of thinking. It demands a place of its own as we think about our children’s development.

We seem often to put Number and Language Intelligence in opposition, coming close to an assumption that someone can't be strong in both. At the worst, junior high and high school students will seem almost to take pride in being strong in one area and weak in the other, as a way to identify themselves among a school's various subcultures. The division between the two areas is reflected in many ways in our culture, perhaps most painfully when we make fun of someone for being good in math! The separation is never clearer than on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). When you take the test, you receive both a verbal and a math score, which says that our culture sees these two kinds of thinking as both important and different. If you’re stronger in one, you’re encouraged to look towards certain occupations. If you’re weaker in one, you’re steered away from some directions. Maybe by the time students take the SAT, they really have focused in either a verbal or quantitative direction, but I think that's unfortunate, because if you’re strong in both, the sky’s the limit.

You know how much value I place on word origins: Consider the preeminence the Greeks gave mathematics when they named it: The root is first the root for science (which itself meant knowledge, not just what we call science now). That derived in turn from the root for learning, and also tied to wise. They agreed with us — numbers are fundamental.

Musical Intelligence “When he sang that, I felt like laughing and crying at the same time.” Howard Gardner has argued convincingly that music deserves status as a separate intelligence, even though our other theories don’t give it much attention.

Indeed, it seems possible that music may turn out to be more central, more pervasive in its influence, more fundamental to us as humans than we now realize. I wonder whether the music of our own body and our mother’s body — the first sounds we hear — may resonate within us in profound and still-unknown ways. I wonder why so many mathematically capable people also have a deep relation to music. I still wonder, thanks to Hank Cross, my much-valued mentor, why rats apparently perceive octaves. I wonder why the need to tap our feet is so strong. I wonder why music soothes the savage beast.

There is lots of speculation and some research going on right now that’s asking about the possibly unique position of music in human experience and consciousness, but it’s not going to reach agreed-on conclusions in time to help us. So when we talk about influencing children’s intelligence, I want to give music a kind of special status. I’m going to argue that growing up with music is unlikely to hurt anyone, and may help cognitive development more than we can yet realize. Some of us will express musical ability as an active and central intelligence. The rest of us seem likely to profit by having it in our lives.

Naturalist Intelligence “Whenever we go for a walk, she knows the names of all the plants we see.” This intelligence was added to Gardner’s list years after his first list. Neither of our other theories gives it any special consideration — I think they would see the natural world as a place where intelligences can be applied, but would be doubtful of this as a separate intelligence.

Gardner’s definition of Naturalist Intelligence bothers me. The name says it’s about nature, right? It takes as its exemplars people like Rachel Carlson and Jacques-Yves Cousteau — people who certainly had enormous intelligence of a sort well described as Naturalist Intelligence. But its actual definition is quite limited: It is the intelligence which “allows people to distinguish among, classify, and use features of the environment.” Although the examples are of people like naturalists, the intelligence is being defined in a restricted way — as the ability to classify and organize. A kid who can name the features of every make of car is given as an example of someone who shows this intelligence. As it’s being used, it sounds to me as though it should really be called something like Taxonomic Intelligence — which would accurately describe its focus on classification and categorization. (In my scheme, that sort of organizational task is part of what the Director does.)

I regret this limited definition, because I would very much like to believe in an intelligence which referred to a deep and intense relation to the natural world. Such an intelligence would certainly include awareness, keen observation, and an ability to see likenesses and differences, but it would also expand to include the vivid appreciation and excitement that people like Cousteau managed to communicate to us — a love which inspired action and caring in others.

In any case, this candidate intelligence is new, and certainly speculative. I don’t list it as a separate intelligence in the Discover and Develop chapters. But when you get to those sections, you’ll find that the natural world gets a lot of attention. A river is part of nature, and flows through the natural world. Our Intelligence River must do the same.

Sketching in the Map

How shall we imagine the second part of the Intelligence River on our map? With Cognitive Abilities Theory, we imagined a major tributary made up of an indefinite number of smaller branches. We can think of the influence of Multiple Intelligences Theory as a second major stream, representing the idea of many ways to be intelligent. In our model, there are seven branches, representing the individual intelligences we’ll focus on. (Again, remember that research doesn’t yet allow us to say that seven is somehow the magic number. But that’s how many we’ll focus as we go on to work with our own children.)