I've been thinking about how I’m smart and not so smart.
In 1983, Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of education, published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I read at the time. Gardner challenges the notion that intelligence can be adequately measured by our skills in language and math, which is what we test for in the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and a host of other standardized tests.
It’s impossible to think about human intelligence and its many and variable forms without also bringing to mind the explosive growth of AI, which purports to replace, improve upon, or even obviate the need for our own very human intellects. Whether or not any of that is true, it remains the case that thinking about thinking - understanding how we engage with the world and what intelligence might be from person to person - is a lifelong pursuit, and one which I have hardly begun to explore.
Gardner’s idea that that are multiple measures of intelligence was persuasive to me forty-two years ago, and it still is. Since I first read about this, I’ve wondered about ways in which I’m smart and ways in which I struggle to figure things out.
Gardner’s theory introduces nine categories of intelligence, each with specific characteristics and applications. Here are four of them and how I’d assess myself in each - stay tuned for the other five in a future essay.
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Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence: Well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings and rhythms of words
I’ve always been a talker. It’s one of the ways I learn - frequently, I’m talking with someone about ideas I’ve never really thought about before, and I find myself saying things in the conversation that I am also hearing for the first time. It’s as if talking is my way of reasoning: literally thinking out loud. The same thing is true for me with writing, although I have always felt that my writing arises from my speech and not the other way around. I’m a talker first.
I’ll sit down with an idea in mind, but no details about what it means or what I believe about it. The connective tissue of ideas comes to life in the writing of it. For me, the act of writing is the act of thinking.
I got caught up in our church’s youth program when I was ten years old and, as is often the case with new converts, threw myself into the experience. My introduction to faith was marinated in language: I studied my Bible every day, prayed during an hour’s devotional period every morning beginning at six o’clock, and by the time I was twelve, I was leading a weekly group of ten-year-olds in a boy’s club devoted to recreation, conversation about important issues, prayer, and brief homilies that I’d worked on all week with the Youth Director’s guidance.
I learned from our senior pastor that he wrote out his sermons word for word, practiced preaching them several times before Sunday mornings, then spoke without his manuscript in front of him. He taught me to master language by combining speaking and writing.
If we believe Howard Gardner’s thesis that all of us possess multiple forms of intelligence in varying expressions and degrees, there’s no question in my mind that verbal-linguistic intelligence is foundational to who I am.
Logical-Mathematical Intelligence: Ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and capacity to discern logical and numerical patterns
If we believe the premise of the SATs, math and language are the two building blocks of all learning and cognitive excellence. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been particularly adept at math and science.
There are two obvious reasons for this. First, math has never been intuitively obvious to me in the way that language is. That meant I needed to work consistently and diligently to make progress in math, and I just didn’t care.
Even today, I am basically competent but I don’t know the first thing about geometry, calculus, or higher math. I never explored this, but my guess is that this kind of imaginative thinking about math and science requires dedication to understanding and absorbing numbers and equations before you can find original thoughts or concepts that arise in these areas. I never approached math or science with this kind of discipline.
Interpersonal Intelligence: Capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations and desires of others
I’m sure I initially learned this skill in the raucous clan I grew up in where, as children, we had to figure out how to deal with the various personalities around a large dinner table or at frequent three-generation clan gatherings. I’ve failed enough in my adult life that I now tend not to be judgmental and to have a huge capacity for empathy about others’ failures in both professional and personal settings. (I make a non-empathetic exception in situations that involve abuse, whether emotional or physical.)
I know how to take enough time to listen well, to climb down into the dark places into which therapy clients and friends invite me and, when we’ve been down there long enough to trust one another, to invite them to hold emotional hands and climb up out of their suffering.
This category of intelligence is so dominant in my life that a full expression of it would require countless pages. Combined with verbal-linguistic skills, it’s what I do all day, every day as a therapist, a friend, and a member of that raucous family.
Intrapersonal Intelligence: Capacity to be self-aware and in tune with inner feelings, values, beliefs and thinking processes
What are all these essays if not exercises in exploring intrapersonal intelligence? I’m sharing with you a process that goes on constantly and has for decades.
In my mid-thirties, when my first of eventually four therapists noted that I had an anxiety disorder, I was startled. I have some internal emotional glitch that is not normal? Indeed I do, and several other glitches that time and digging have revealed. Today, I can describe the emotional landscape of my childhood and teen years quite clearly and have come to master the rising impulses from these glitches that disrupted my life in earlier decades.
I’ve taught my children and grandchildren what I mined out of this exploration: Learn to manage your emotions so your emotions don’t manage you. I’m continually interested in my own inner world, and understanding it is unfinished business.
Not everyone thinks the way I do, or the way you do. Gardner gives us nine options, and there are almost certainly more. Next time, we’ll examine the other five categories: spatial-visual intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, naturalist intelligence, and existential intelligence.
The way each of us thinks seems to us obvious and universal, when of course it is not: it is as highly specific as we are, and shaped by our lifetime of experiences and our own baked-in predilections. Whatever your specific constellation of intelligences looks likes, it is invariably more complex and nuanced than you might think.
