As We Now Know, Smarts Come in a Variety of Flavors

“My students have often asked me whether there is a cooking intelligence, a humor intelligence or a sexual intelligence,” Howard Gardner says dryly. “They have concluded that I can recognize only the intelligences that I myself possess.”

It’s been almost 17 years since the Harvard psychologist published the groundbreaking “Frames of Mind,” which argued that intelligence doesn’t come in a single flavor, but in several--seven, in fact. He contended that our test-obsessed, hierarchy-happy culture has elevated logical and linguistic intelligence above the musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intra- and interpersonal intelligences.

Gardner’s theory was a hit in education circles, and has been applied in hundreds of classrooms and school districts around the world. The idea has also entered the public discourse, influencing our debates over curricula and standardized tests.

Now Gardner has returned to stake a fresh claim for multiple intelligences in the new century--a time, he says, when we’ll need all the brainpower we can muster. His new book, “Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century” (Basic Books, $27.50), is a progress report on how we’ve assimilated the concept of multiple intelligences.

Sitting in his publisher’s Manhattan office, the cordial, slightly rumpled professor spoke about why IQ tests are inadequate, why he doubts there’s a spiritual or a moral intelligence and why we may radically change our thinking about the kind of people we consider intelligent.

Question: Much of your latest book is devoted to explaining and defending the theory of multiple intelligences. Has it become a kind of Frankenstein, a monster that you have to spend all your time managing and controlling?

Answer: I don’t spend all my time managing and controlling it, and I give myself some points for that. No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three other people in our field. So when you suddenly find the world catching on to something you did, it’s tempting to devote yourself to it and be afraid to change your mind about it because you’ll lose your industry.

I’ve tried very hard not to commodify multiple intelligences. There are hundreds of products such as CD-ROMs and summer camps based on the idea out there, but I don’t endorse any of them. And I avoid singling out people whose work I don’t like--with one exception. In Australia, they had an educational program in which they linked each of the intelligences to a particular ethnic group. I thought that was heinous, and I went on television and said so.

Most academics are naive in thinking that their ideas won’t be noticed, and if they are noticed, they’ll be understood correctly. Boy, have I been disabused of that notion. One of the purposes of the book is to address some myths that have proliferated around multiple intelligences, such as a single “approved” educational approach based on multiple intelligences theory. . . . In fact, the theory has changed enormously in terms of my own understanding of it.

Q: The big news in this book is that you’ve added an intelligence to the list, one that you call the “naturalist intelligence,” the ability to recognize and classify features of the environment. What led to that decision?

A: I was giving a speech to specialists in the history of science at Harvard, and one of them said, “You’ll never explain Darwin with your theory.” And he was right. So I spent the next several years reading about how people recognize patterns in nature, how they discriminate among living things and things that are inorganic but natural, like rocks or clouds. . .

One speculation I make in the book is that our current consumer culture may be based upon the naturalist intelligence. A consumer culture assumes that we can tell one sneaker from another, the taste of one kind of coffee from another--and if we didn’t have a naturalist intelligence, we couldn’t do that.

Q: You considered adding a spiritual intelligence, but ultimately decided against it. Why?

A: The more I investigated spirituality as it’s used in our society, the more I became convinced that even if it’s terribly important, it’s not an intelligence. Spirituality is just a mess intellectually. . . Many people would say that what’s important about spirituality is the feeling that comes with it. The problem is that we don’t know how to measure people’s feelings because they’re not quantifiable.

In mathematical intelligence, for example, we’re interested in how well people can compute. How they’re feeling at the time is irrelevant. They could be feeling lousy or wonderful--it’s how well they compute that matters. When you start making a subjective feeling part of the definition, it gets very slippery. Can people be spiritual only if they feel a certain way? If David Koresh feels that way, does that make him spiritual? If the pope doesn’t, does that make him unspiritual? So it’s very hard to find dry land, and scientists are looking for dry land.

Q: But you think that one aspect of spirituality--the contemplation of existential matters--may qualify as an intelligence?

A: Existential intelligence denotes our capacity to ask very big questions about the meaning of life and death. We know that people all over the world ask these questions . . . and art, religion, philosophy, mythology are all efforts to deal with them . . . [but] we haven’t found a part of the brain dedicated to dealing with these questions. So I say that I think there are 8 1/2 intelligences.

Q: You also rejected the possibility of a moral intelligence. Why?

A: Morality involves value judgments, and I want my intelligences to be value-neutral. Yet I’m very interested in how intelligences can be used for moral ends. It’s important that people keep a sense of calling at a time when things are changing very quickly; the market is very powerful, and technology is revamping our whole sense of space and time. Young people entering a profession need to find or invent the institutions that will allow them to do what they think is really important, and not let the current practices dictate their actions. I think journalism is more at risk than any other profession. It’s caught between the tastes of the public, which are capricious at best, and the pressures of shareholders, who don’t say, “Oh, what a wonderful editorial,” but rather, “Did we make more money than last quarter?”

Q: Does the value placed on particular intelligences vary among different cultures and eras?

A: Yes, absolutely. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, you were going to a place where you would study Greek, Latin and Hebrew. And I’m absolutely certain that people who could learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew then are not the same as the people who nowadays would do well on the SAT. In China, as part of the extensive classical examination system, scholars wrote intricate essays that had to conform to a schema that was described as “eight legged.” Whereas in Western Europe, cultural literacy was very important, and you had to know about the paintings of a particular culture and so on.

My work is very critical of what I call “the dipstick theory,” which is the notion that everybody is born with a certain amount of intelligence and it doesn’t matter where or when you live, how much stuff you have will show. So if you were smart in the Paleolithic era, you’d be smart today, and if you were smart in the Middle Ages, you’ll be smart in the year 2050. I think that’s nonsense. I think we’re built with different kinds of potentials, and whether they get realized depends on what’s available in society. . . .

Q: How will our ideas about intelligence change in coming years?

A: The biggest change I foresee will be the extent to which we will want to know about the intelligences of each person and how we will utilize that information. As long as we rely on a universal yardstick such as the SAT or the IQ, we dismiss individual differences. In the future, computers will make it easier to ascertain individual intelligences and implement different ways of learning.

Those companies and educational institutions that figure out how to learn about an individual’s intelligences profile and use it profitably will have a tremendous advantage. The notion that there’s only one way to teach and one way to learn and one way to assess ability will look silly. . . .

Q: How might measures like the SAT or the IQ test be changed to reflect an appreciation for multiple intelligences?

A: The best way to find out what people can do is not to test for some essence by asking a series of questions, but rather to put them into a situation that mirrors the one they will encounter in real life, and see how they handle it. I call these intelligence-fair assessments, and I think it’s no longer fantasy to think that we could do simulations like that. . . .