Frames of Mind

For much of the twentieth century, being intelligent meant getting a good score on an IQ test. Howard Gardner looks at that habit and asks: can a single measure really capture a guitarist, a soccer player, an attentive nurse or a construction engineer?

In Frames of Mind, he proposes that the human mind is not a single piece but a set of relatively independent capacities. Each person would have their own profile, with strengths here and difficulties there, instead of one overall score that would rank them.

The idea irritated academia and delighted educators. It gives a name to something many people already sensed: the student who does badly on tests but draws like few others, or the adult who is awkward at public speaking but is the person everyone turns to when the mood gets heavy.

Gardner arrived at this proposal after studying both children and adults who had suffered brain injuries. He noticed that someone could lose speech and keep composing music, or the other way around. These dissociations convinced him that the mind has modules that organize themselves independently.

Gardner defines intelligence as the capacity to solve problems or create products that are valued in at least one cultural setting. The definition is broader than that of the paper-and-pencil test, and it includes what we do with our hands, our bodies, sounds and people.

The word culture matters. What counts as talent depends on the place: in a fishing community, knowing how to read the sea and the wind is a complex problem that demands great intelligence. In a big city, understanding the subway and office relationships fills that space.

This doesn't mean everything is intelligence. The author sets criteria for deciding what makes the group, precisely so it doesn't become a catch-all for any skill. That strictness is what sets him apart from informal lists of talents.

In practice, the question the book asks of each ability is: does it have its own basis in the brain, its own path of development and a recognized role in the culture? If the answer is yes to all of these, it becomes a candidate for the title. If not, it's a talent, an interest or a technique.

To separate an intelligence from a simple taste or isolated skill, Gardner used a set of signs drawn from different fields. One is the possibility that a capacity can be affected by brain injury without the others being touched. Another is the existence of prodigies and of people with extraordinary gifts in only one area.

Also counted were identifiable mental operations, a distinct development over a lifetime, a history in the evolution of the species, support from psychology experiments and tests, and the possibility of being expressed in some symbol system, such as writing, musical notation or maps.

The method is interesting because it gathers clues from neurology, anthropology and psychology. The controversial point is that the weight given to each sign is the author's decision, not the result of a test that any lab could repeat with precision.