Frames of Mind

Picture three individuals. The first is a 12-year-old Puluwat boy from the Caroline Islands. His elders have selected him to become a master sailor, which he’ll do by combining extensive knowledge of sailing, stars, and geography. The second individual is a 15-year-old Iranian boy who’s memorized the entire Koran, mastered Arabic, and is now going to a holy city to learn to become a religious leader. The third and final individual is a 14-year-old Parisian girl who’s just learned how to use a computer program to compose musical pieces.

Three competent individuals, each taking on a challenging task and attaining a high degree of achievement – you could reasonably say that they all exhibit intelligent behavior. Yet current methods of assessing intelligence have no way of measuring their potential or achievements.

The key message here is: The modern conception of intellect is severely limited.

The word intelligence has been used so often that it naturally conjures up images of itself as a tangible, measurable quality. But it’s better used as a convenient shorthand that describes a person’s potential to attain a high degree of competence in a particular area. Which areas, exactly? 

Well, the author’s list consists of seven intelligences: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. 

To come up with that list, he used several criteria. One is that, for a competence to be considered a distinct type of intelligence, it must be possible for brain damage to isolate it. That is, if a particular area of a person's brain is damaged, their skill in that specific area must be markedly diminished with little or no impact on their other abilities.

However, the competence being considered must also enable individuals to find and solve problems. For instance, the ability to recognize faces can be isolated by brain damage, so it meets the first criterion. But the ability to recognize faces doesn’t lend itself to problem-solving or the acquisition of new knowledge, so it’s not an intelligence. 

Importantly, the author acknowledges that his list of criteria is by no means definitive. That’s because he’s considering intelligence broadly, taking into account multiple levels of analysis. It’d only be possible to come up with a complete list if you stuck to one level, like neurophysiology. But that would mean ignoring other possible levels of analysis, like the correlations between competences and outcomes and how well they predict a person’s academic success. 

Of course, this limitation raises a question: Why try to define intelligences at all?