When I.Q. Isn't the Best Intelligence. What is?
Multiple Intelligences for exploring self-improvement and personal development
“These newsletters serve a demographic of highly intelligent readers, and deep thinkers with a passion for ideas, critical thinking, and unknown possibilities. Wu wei and the Law of Attraction are among those ideas. Readers of my posts are usually tired of being patronized elsewhere by fact-less, opinionated know-nothings, who complain about everything they don’t like, but lack a willingness to think about, find resources, or create life hacks, shortcuts, and solutions to fix what they don’t like.” If you are a visual type of person please check out my “AskLewis, Lewis Harrison” Channel on YouTube
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On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.
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Q. Lewis, I heard that as a child they tried to put you in Special Ed classes for the mentally slow and later decided you were intellectually gifted. Is this true, and if it is how can we accurately decide if a person is intelligent or not?
A. It is true. I was a slow learner, who did not like sitting in a classroom all day and this was reflected in various behavioral issues. I wasn’t the problem! The system was. In the end they put me in the back of the classroom where I spent most of my time memorizing encyclopedias and flunking most of my classes. I barely escaped from high school and when I was 20 years old, in a second-rate college a brilliant mathematics professor “discovered me”. The rest, as they say, is history. 26 published books, a radio show on an NPR affiliated station, and a career developing game theory-based life strategies.
Today there is much written and broadcast about self-improvement, personal development, and self-awareness. Together these are can be described as Human potential. Human potential is the capacity for humans to improve themselves through training, studying, and practice, to reach the limit of their ability to develop skills and aptitudes. Essential to the concept of human potential is the idea that in reaching their full potential an individual will be able to lead a happy, content, mindful, and more meaningful life. One approach to measuring a person’s potential is to measure their intelligence.
Many educators focus on IQ as a measurement of intelligence. An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation “IQ” was coined for the German term Intelligenzquotient, a term for a scoring method for intelligence tests.
Historically, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person’s mental age score, obtained by administering an intelligence test, by the person’s chronological age, both expressed in terms of years and months. The resulting fraction is multiplied by 100 to obtain the IQ score.
Today, fewer and fewer and fewer educators use I.Q. as a measure for intelligence. This is because we now know that every individual has multiple intellectual abilities or different types of intelligence, present in varying degrees.
“Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail, Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Each individual possesses a unique blend of all the intelligences. Gardner firmly maintains that his theory of multiple intelligences should “empower learners”, not restrict them to one modality of learning.” - W. McKenzie, (2005). Multiple intelligences and instructional technology. ISTE (International Society for Technology Education)
For a while, I corresponded with psychologist Howard Gardner about my own childhood experience and his revolutionary Multiple Intelligences Model. Gardner originally proposed seven types of intelligence that were later expanded into nine.
Each of the nine types, which are described below, has its own potential. In addition, they interact with one another when required. Any given cognitive activity encompasses several of the intelligences coordinating together. In addition, according to Gardner each type of intelligence is linked to an independent system in the brain.
The nine types of intelligence include:
1. logical-
2. mathematical,
3. linguistic-verbal,
4. spatial-visual,
5. body-kinesthetic,
6. existential,
7. musical,
8. interpersonal, intrapersonal, and
9. naturalistic intelligence.
Takeaway
The effectiveness of coping with the challenges we run into as adults may be strongly influenced by Multiple Intelligence Theory, especially when dealing with specific types of stress, and personality types. Of course, how skilled we are at using one intelligence over another will depend on the individual and the circumstances. Coping responses are partly controlled by personality (habitual traits), but also partly by the social environment, particularly the nature of the challenge encountered.
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This newsletter is an excerpt from Winning the Game of Life: Lewis Harrison’s Life Strategies Playbook Method from A-Z.
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