More than one way to be smart

In 1983 a Harvard psychologist named Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind and argued against the single number that had ruled a century of schooling. There isn't one intelligence, he said, measured by an IQ test. There are several, and most people are strong in some and weak in others, and the test measures only two.

He named them. Linguistic: words. Logical-mathematical: numbers and reasoning. Musical. Spatial: the architect, the sailor, the painter. Bodily-kinesthetic: the dancer, the surgeon, the athlete, who think with their hands and bodies. Interpersonal: understanding other people. Intrapersonal: understanding yourself. And later, naturalist: reading the living world. Eight, by his final count.

The theory has been argued over for forty years. Psychologists point out that the intelligences correlate, and that the evidence for them as separate systems is thin. Teachers point out that it changed classrooms for the better anyway, because it gave them a reason to look for the gift in the kid who couldn't sit still.

For the Meaning chamber, I'd hold it as a mirror rather than a science. Most of us spent school being measured on two of the eight and drew our conclusions about ourselves from those scores. The person who was told she wasn't smart because she couldn't do algebra, and who can read a room, or a horse, or a melody, better than anyone she knows, was measured with the wrong tape. Gardner's gift was a wider tape.

And it bears on what you'll make. Meaning comes from working in your strongest intelligence, not your most rewarded one. The mirrors in the first month asked a version of this. Gardner asks it about the mind itself.