DISCUSSION PROMPT: Define intelligence

[Cybren]

This word has no meaning to me

[sdhonda]

This was posted on another forum the other day. It's a great read.

Dan Simmons responds:

OK, "Ward". I'll give the answer to the puzzle, but you'll have to forgive me as I take this as an invitation to a teaching moment. (God, how I hate it when Obama uses that term!) Sorry.

Anyway, the puzzle question was (essentially) -- "which basic intelligence from the Gardner-Sternberg list of Multiple Intelligences is predominant in the lives of the top professional athletes, the best mechanics, and the funniest stand-up comics?"

So, in full insufferable Simmons-teacher mode, I'm just going to review the Multiple Intelligences before answering the riddle. (note that many, but not all, of the basic intelligences produce "child prodigies". And most, but not all, of the multiple intelligences, are shared with other species.)

There have been revisions and nuances in the decades since these specific Multiple Intelligences were mapped out by Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg, but these remain the original set of intelligences. (And the set we based our APEX-Center district-wide gifted/talented program upon -- both in terms of allowing the children to help us find them and then serving their advanced educational needs in that intelligence field.)

1) Musical Intelligence

The obvious prodigy to work backward in understanding this intelligence is Mozart. At the age of 2, young Mozart would toddle down the stairs in the middle of the night and play an unresolved chord on the family's pianoforte, and then he'd scramble upstairs and back to bed, knowing that his musical father -- even if in a sound sleep -- would wake and come downstairs in his nightshirt to resolve the chord.

That's musical-intelligence prodigy.

But so is the story of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. When Menuhin was 3-yrs. old his parents smuggled him into some San Francisco Orchestra concerts. When the boy heard Louis Persinger play the violin, little Yehudi demanded two things for his fourth birthday -- a violin and Persinger as his teacher. The parents gave him both gifts. By the time he was 10 years old, Menuhin was an international performer.

The interesting aspect of that story is that Menuhin's musical intelligence manifested itself before he'd ever touched a violin or had any musical training. It was his powerful reaction to hearing the sound produced by Persinger's violin, followed by his impossibly fast progress on the instrument, that suggest he was biologically prepared in some way for a life in music.

There's a lot of evidence from child prodigies to prove a biological link to the intelligence. For instance, there are severely autistic children who can play a musical instrument beautifully but can't communicate in any other way. (I used to be an aide helping to teach some children like that in Philadelphia in the hot summer we landed on the moon.)

Musical skills centers have been somewhat mapped in the brain and we know that much of musical skill is located in the right hemisphere, but it's not as localized there as, say, speech skill is in the left hemisphere. When certain areas of the right hemisphere of the brain are damaged, amusia -- loss of musical ability -- occurs.

Songbirds are just one other species that indicates a strong inter-species link in musical intelligence. Evidence suggests that music apparently played an important unifying role in Stone Age (Paleolithic) societies --- perhaps as strong as or stronger than language.

2) Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence

Researching this area of intelligence -- common to superb athletes, dancers, and others -- is fun because you get into biographies of such bodily-kinesthetic prodigies as Babe Ruth.

When the Babe was 15-yrs-old and still in an orphanage, he was playing catcher when his team was getting a shellacking. Babe started laughing and shouting insults at his own pitcher. The coach, the orphanage's Brother Mathias, shouted -- "All right, George. YOU pitch!"

Ruth later wrote that he was stunned and terrified. "I never pitched in my life . . ." he whined at the coach. "I can't pitch!" Brother Mathias just told him to get his butt up on the mound.

Babe remembered it later as a life-transforming moment: "Yet, as I took the position, I felt a strange relationship between myself and that pitcher's mound. I felt, somehow, as if I had been born out there and that this was a kind of home for me."

Gardner has written that "like Menuhin, Babe Ruth was a prodigy who recognized his "instrument" immediately on his first exposure to it, before receiving any formal training".

Control of bodily movement is localized in the motor cortex, with each hemisphere dominant or controlling bodily movements on the contralateral side: i.e. in right-handers, neurological dominance for bodily movement is ordinarily found in the left hemisphere. (Reversed for left-handers.) For profoundly gifted athletes such as Babe Ruth or Alex Rodriguez (or your host), both hemispheres of the brain -- or perhaps more specifically, an complex interaction on the connecting tissue between the hemispheres -- allows them to be at least partially ambidexterous (such as batting from both sides of the plate). (Or with your superbly gifted host, throwing right-handed but batting left-handed.)

Bodily movement in humans (and in other species) follows clearly defined stages of development, across all cultures for humans.

Those gifted in bodily-kinesthetic intelligence can rapidly solve almost impossibly intricate and highly rapid (response in less than one second) problem-solving motor challenges such as hitting a baseball thrown at 96 mph or returning another professional's hard shots in tennis. This intelligence is also widely used to express emotions (as in dance) and in creating new products (inventing). A mechanic with high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence will, for instance, never strip a screw -- he or she just intuitive senses the proper amount of tension and force to be applied, both from his body and into an object. Further formal training just enhances this gift.

Like Mozart with his harpsichord or pianoforte, or Menuhin with his violin, someone profoundly gifted in bodily-kinesthetic intelligence -- like Babe Ruth -- turns his body into a well-tuned and highly precise instrument.

3) Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

This is one of the two intelligences -- along with linguistic intelligence -- that's constantly being tested for in devices ranging from standard IQ tests to one of the two basic (and college-deciding) SAT scores.

Despite the relatively large number of very young logical-mathematical prodigies in the world and in history, we don't really understand the complex neurological constellation of interacting brain centers which allows "giftedness" in this field. For the greatest mathematicians, physicists, etc., from Einstein on down, the great breakthroughs in logical-mathematical human advances -- say in producing the Theory of Relativity, which Einsten says came to him in a series of odd analogies and wild leaps of intuition -- remain mysterious. Most mathematicians produce the best of their life's work before they're 25 years old.

The constant element to mathematical prodigies or adult scientists such as Barbara McClintock (who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for her work in microbiology) is that the solution to a complex problem can be constructed before the problem itself has been or can be articulated.

In other words, the top scientists or mathematicians, in their greatest breakthroughs, almost always arrive at the answer before they can fully articulate the steps for their solutions . . . and sometimes even before the problem itself is fully articulated.

Neurological studies show not only empirical confirmation of a specific logical-mathematical intelligence but suggest that certain areas of the brain are more prominent in mathematical calculation than others, even while recent evidence suggests tha the linguistic areas in the frontotemporal lobes are more important for logical deduction.

I've once mentioned on this forum the national convention for gifted/talented educators I once attended in Las Vegas where I heard a debate on women and mathematics carried out between the two top researchers in the field -- both women -- and one arguing Nature (genetics) while the other supported Nurture (the effects of socialization on girls and boys).

The researcher arguing the genetic difference -- the reason that there are so few women in the top 3% of full-time mathematicians who are the top people in the field -- pointed out that if you look into almost any elementary school in the country and find their remedial reading programs for 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th-graders, almost all the remedial students will be boys. (As a teacher, I know this to be true)

The reason for this near-universal (in our culture, not in Japan and China for complex and interesting reasons) problem with boys learning how to read begins -- this researcher explained -- in the womb. A boy fetus produces much more testosterone than the female fetus; this testosterone works to inhibit growth of the left hemisphere of the brain -- the hemisphere in which language skills come from for most of us. In a sense, boy-fetuses are poisoning their own neural development -- in the left or language (reading, writing) hemisphere. But that same "testosterone poisoning" that makes it harder for young human males to learn how to read, allowed the right hemisphere of the brain to prosper in the womb. Since the central mathematical skills are centered in the right hemisphere which is too easily "dominated" by the verbal left-hemisphere in the fetal development of girls, this leads to girls acquiring language and reading much more quickly but boys being much more gifted -- from the earliest years on -- in logical mathematical intelligence.

This gives males that final edge, she argued, in producing that "top and lonely 3%" of mathematicians at the highest boundaries of the field.

4) Linguistic Intelligence

When T.S. Eliot was 10 years old, he created a magazine called Fireside, for which he was editor, publisher, and the sole contributor. In a three-day period during his winter vacation, young Eliot produced eight complete issues; each issue included poems, adventure stories, a gossip column, and humor.

Despite T.S. Eliot's seeming prodigy, there have been no great "prodigy novelists" -- evidently writing a great novel, like producing a great work of visual art or sculpture -- requires the tempering of age, knowledge, and experience. But many prodigies are gifted in linguistic intelligence.

Linguistic intelligence passes all empirical tests for being a discrete and neurologically based intelligence: for instance, a specific area of the brain, called Broca's area, is responsible for the production of grammatical sentences. A person with damage to this area can understand words and sentences quite well, but can't put together anything but the simplest of sentences -- even while thought processes in other areas may be completely unaffected.

Linguistic intelligence shows itself in other modalities than speech and writing: in almost every population of deaf children -- even where "sign language" is not being taught formally -- kids will invent their own manual language and use it surreptitiously. This, as Howard Gardner has written, is an intelligence that "may operate independently of specific input modality or output shared".

Thus Helen Keller, blind and deaf almost since birth, but a profoundly gifted person in linguistic intelligence, learned -- thanks to an incredible teacher who broke through the wall of the child's near total linguistic isolation -- to express herself eloquently in sign language and writing.

5) Spatial Intelligence

We value this skill in painters, sculptors, architects, builders, and such, but there are cultures where spatial intelligence is the most valued and central intelligence there is.

South of the equator, there's no fixed north star for navigation. Sea-going peoples there, in the South Seas, have for generations had to navigate long distances through a deceptively simple but seemingly impossible system -- i.e. just memorize the position of each major star in the sky for every night of the year, and keep the relation of that star each hour of 365 nights to north-south-west-directions in your mind as well.

In the South Seas -- where illiteracy still exists and where traditional IQ tests might show sub-standard results -- there have been, until very recently, boys who are studying to be Navigators. To help memorize star positions, specific long distance trips are broken into different segments and the mental star charts for each segment of the trip are memorized -- sometimes by different Navigators -- and they use song (much as the Homeric poets did in pre-literate Greece) to help their memorizing. Thus they "sing the stars into existence" via elaborate melodies and rhymes, the sung unpacking itself into a complex star chart for navigation.

The posterior regions of the right cerebral cortex seems most crucial for spatial processing. Damage to those regions can result in an inability of a person to find her way around her own bedroom or to recognize the faces of family members.

Those who want to connect spatial perception with visual perception -- a common association in a society where our primary recognition of spatial perception is in the visual arts -- have to remember that blind people, even those who've been blind since birth, build elaborate spatial models of their surroundings.

There are almost no child prodigies among the visual arts (although cultures such as the South Seas Polynesian outrigger cultures have obviously produced prodigies in spatial recognition and memory) -- it seems that, as with novelists, visual artists require maturity and experience before being capable of producing quality art.

The exception is the very rare savant, such as "Nadia", a severely mentally retarded and autistic child who, at age three, was producing drawings that rivaled the free-flowing quality of a young Picasso. I've been personally interested in the Nadia-savant phenomenon for years and have collected information about her. Many experts thought her "art" was a sort of repetitive mental tracing, since she could only reproduce images and drawings she'd seen before (but her drawings improved upon them). She would also "trace" the picture right off the page -- but this is also a sign of a gifted artist who rarely recognizes page boundaries. Intensive socializing "improved" Nadia's autism to the point that by age six she could bounce a ball with another person. As the autism seemed to recede a bit, so did her "gift" of being a prodigy-artist. By the time she was ten, Nadia was still mentally retarded and autistic, but her art had regressed from the "young Picasso" level of when she was 4 and 5 back down to the popsicle-for-a-tree, stick-figure-for-a-human pre-drawing ability of a regular 4 year old. Her story is sad and beautiful all at the same time.

6) Interpersonal Intelligence

This is one of the least-taught-to intelligences in our society and one of the most important. Interpersonal intelligence builds on a core capacity to notice distinctions among others -- in particular, contrasts in their moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions. In the most advanced form of interpersonal intelligences -- such as in gifted cops -- the skilled adult can read the intentions, thoughts, and desires of another person even when they're being deliberately hidden.

Gifted teachers are almost always gifted in interpersonal intelligence. The Anne Sullivan story with Helen Keller -- dramatized as the play and movie "The Miracle Worker" -- is a perfect example of advanced interpersonal intelligence at work.

Others gifted in interpersonal intelligence tend to become church pastors, rabbis, political leaders, successful salespersons, marketers, therapists, police detectives, and successful parents.

Some monsters in human form -- such as serial killer Ted Bundy -- could feel no authentic emotion relating to empathy or sympathy, but mimicked interpersonal intelligence so well -- primarily be reading other people's telltale emotional signs -- that from an early age they learned to make others do their bidding.

I've always felt that this intelligence has a mutation potential. In its benign form, it may lead to a political leader being elected who is profoundly gifted at making other people like him or her, but who has no idea of how to govern. In its most malignant form, it produces a truly mesmerizing charisma such as that of a Hitler or Mao, causing the deaths of millions.

It should be noted that if there is any one intelligence discussed here that will make one a lot of money, interpersonal intelligence is it.

7) Intrapersonal Intelligence

The prefontal lobes play a central role in personality change related to this intelligence. Damage to the lower regions of these lobes tend to produce euphoria or irritability, while injury to the higher prefontal regions are more likely to produce listlessness, apathy, slowness in action, and emotional indifference.

There are children gifted with intrapersonal intelligence at a very young age -- prodigies, as it were -- but their gift is usually only noticed, if at all, by their parents. Meanwhile, the autistic child is the prototypical example of a human being with impaired intrapersonal intelligence. Some autistic children can't even refer to themselves as distinct persons.

Virginia Woolf has been cited as an example of supremely gifted person in terms of intrapersonal intelligence -- writing, even at a young age, complex and careful descriptions of her moods and how they were affected by the world around her.

My choice for Intrapersonally Gifted Person of Any Century is Marcel Proust. I've just reached page 467 of the second of six volumes, Within a Budding Grove (1992 translation revised by D.J. Enright) and young adolescent Marcel (the narrator-character Marcel, not Marcel Proust, and we've not yet heard his name used in the 900 or so pages read), has just made a dear friend of the aristocrat Robert Saint-Loup. And while the young Saint-Loup is celebrating the friendship, our brooding young narrator feels almost nothing -- he's most happy, he realizes, when he's alone and reviewing his memories, thoughts, and experiences. Thus the mysterious power of the madeline, but this Marcel won't realize that for another 2,500 pages.

Of all of Gardner's-Sternberg's core intelligences, evolutionary evidence for intrapersonal intelligence is the hardest to come by. What purpose does it serve? Speculation is that -- at least in human beings in groups -- the capacity to transcend the satisfaction of instinctual drives is relevant.

It's obvious that interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences -- abilities resonating from the same constellation of sources in the human mind -- tend to interact in both positively reinforcing and negatively cancellation modes. Someone gifted with intrapersonal intelligence may become a poet or serious novelist, but at the same time she may avoid people in preference to her work. Others -- the Hemingway types -- celebrate interaction with real life and other people constantly, while also re-creating it in gifted linguistic terms.

Some people gifted in intrapersonal awareness, like Virginia Woolf during WWII, find reality and its shocks just too much to deal with; they fill their pockets with rocks and walk into the river.

************************************

It should be obvious to everyone now -- if anyone's still reading this description I've lifted largely from Howard Gardner's writings -- that only in the case of a few prodigies or autistic individuals is there only ONE category of intelligence in constant use.

For almost every person in almost every job or vocation, their skills are a constellation of these multiple intelligences. After we leave formal education, we tend immediately to use our areas of strength and to avoid -- or at least hide from others -- our categories of lesser intelligence.

Thus the intelligence that is common to great athletes, great mechanics, and stand-up comics, is indeed bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

Wait, you say, stand-up comics are showing primarily linguistic intelligence, and that's true to some extent. But when you think of the great comics of recent decades -- Eddie Izzard, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Ellen DeGeneres, Jane Simmons -- and you remember it's something physical in their presentations, something beyond language, something that seems to allow the comic to physically change shape and form in front of us as we laugh -- ala Robin Williams or George Carlin -- that is a huge part of the humor.

This bodily-kinesthetic gift is shared by the mechanic who never strips the screw, the young orphan who learned as soon as he stepped on a pitcher's mound that baseball was his home and sport, and even to a great degree by the irritating 3-year-old who demanded a violin and a famous violinist as his teacher for his 4th birthday.

The truly great people amongst us have been constellations of several of these core intelligences shining in some arrangement and sequence known only to the gods.

DS

[Cybren]

You broke my thread

[sdhonda]

I've been looking for an excuse to repost it.

[Trymantha]

From diconary.com

in·tel·li·gence   
[in-tel-i-juhns] Show IPA
–noun
1.
capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
2.
manifestation of a high mental capacity: He writes with intelligence and wit.
3.
the faculty of understanding.
4.
knowledge of an event, circumstance, etc., received or imparted; news; information.
5.
the gathering or distribution of information, especially secret information.
6.
Government .
a.
information about an enemy or a potential enemy.
b.
the evaluated conclusions drawn from such information.
c.
an organization or agency engaged in gathering such information: military intelligence; naval intelligence.
7.
interchange of information: They have been maintaining intelligence with foreign agents for years.
8.
Christian Science . a fundamental attribute of god, or infinite Mind.
9.
( often initial capital letter ) an intelligent being or spirit, especially an incorporeal one, as an angel.

[Valliac]

Not Stupid.

[Psyclone]

sdhonda, holy crap. You broke my brain.

[Slack Mesa]

in·tel·li·gence [iñ-tell-üh-géntz]
–noun
1. smartitude.
2. the capacitousness to cogitate and rememberize; brainulence.
3. the contents of the briefcase that you really should have been guarding, because the enemy just walked into our base and stole it.

[Kirkygirl]

in·tel·li·gence [iñ-tell-üh-géntz]
–noun
3. the contents of the briefcase that you really should have been guarding, because the enemy just walked into our base and stole it.

/thread

-Kirkygirl

[Elomin Sha]

Intelligence: Not found in Bible belt.

[iamafish]

thanks sdhonda, i feel smarter now.

[Cybren]

Well get it the fuck out of my thread

[Myrph]

The ability to make and understand "that's what she said" jokes!

[Tycherin]

@sdhonda: That was really, really interesting.

I find that intelligence is a lot like love: everyone thinks they know what it is, but when you examine it closely, it turns out that everyone is talking about something different, and no one has it exactly right.

[Psyclone]

The ability to make and understand "that's what she said" jokes!

You don't have to be intelligent for that.

[Myrph]

The ability to make and understand "that's what she said" jokes!

You don't have to be intelligent for that.

It actually does require a remarkable amount of 'intelligence', remarkably!

[VanHelsing23]

Wikiquote page for Intelligence.

A few choice quotes

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

- Alfred North Whitehead Dialogues (1954) 15 Dec.1939

Intelligence is the road to insanity.

- Alfred Kin

My brain: it's my second favorite organ.

- Woody Allen

The difference between intelligence and education is this: intelligence will make you a good living.

- Charles F. Kettering

The sign of intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.

- Marya Mannes

To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false — this is the mark and character of intelligence.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Psyclone]

It actually does require a remarkable amount of 'intelligence', remarkably!

I was joking, but... wow. That's going to be an interesting read. (Yay nerd excitement)

[sdhonda]

My brain: it's my second favorite organ.

- Woody Allen

It's the largest sex organ though...