What I should mention, and this is available on my website. With my colleagues Shinri for Azawa and Anti Tuture, we wrote a ten thousand word essay earlier this year called Who Owns Intelligence and Who Owns Intelligence? Shinri talks about animal intelligence because we know vastly more about animal intelligence now than we did even forty years ago. Plant intelligence.
I never thought about plant intelligence, but any research there and there are things that plants can do signaling one another when something dangerous is coming, some potion or so on, which would count in intelligence of humans did it. And then I, with my very limited knowledge but with my considerable interest, talked about artificial intelligence and to what extent it fits these different criteria, and this is mentioned in
the two books The Essentials. If I were given another ten or twenty years, I would love to be able to consider not just human intelligences, but animal, plant, and artificial because I think that's the next frontier for to say psychology in the large sense.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist interested in the science of intelligence, creativity, and human potential. Today we have a very special guest on the show Doctor Howard Gardner. Doctor Gardner is a developmental psychologist and a professor of cognition and Education at
Harvard's Graduate School of Education. He was a founding member of Harvard Project Zero in nineteen sixty seven and has written hundreds of research articles in over thirty books, including his most recent books, The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind and The Essential Howard Gardner on Education. His most well known book, however, is his nineteen eighty three book Frames
of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This book was revolutionary at the time because lenge the notion that intelligence is singular and that intelligence can best be measured by IQ tests. On a personal note, when I was an undergraduate, I remember coming across this book and deciding then and there that I wanted to spend the rest of my life studying this topic. I credit Howard Gardner as being one of the most important influences on my decision to
go into the field of psychology. I was actually accepted to be his graduate student, to be co advised by him and the late Kurt Fisher, but ultimately I decided to study with Robert Sternberg for graduate school who also has done groundbreaking work on human intelligence. This is a very lively discussion with a person who I deeply respect.
My own thinking on intelligence has evolved quite a bit since I was an undergrad, and it was an honor to have a bit of a debate with doctor Gardner on what I see as some of the limitations of his theory. Nevertheless, I considered it a privilege to be able to have this conversation and to share it with you all today. So with that further ado, I bring you the legendary doctor Howard Gardner. Professor Howard Gardner. It's such a pleasure to have you on the Psychology Podcast.
Thank you, Scott. Looking forward to our conversation.
I am really looking for this conversation. I don't know if you remember a twenty three year old Scott Barrett Kaufman sitting in your office, uh, asking what is intelligence? I don't, I don't. I don't presume you remember remember that. But do you remember?
Do you remember? Well?
I remember we've had some contacts, but I wouldn't be able to say.
Of course happened.
Of course. Well, let me just say that there are two people in the field of psychology who have influenced me the most in going into this field, and it is you and Robert Sternberg. So I must off the bat really thank you for the incredible work you've done. And it was such a fun journey reading these two books, The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind and The Essential Howard Gardner on Education. I learned so much that I didn't
even know about your career and your influences. And I thought today what we would do is focus on education. But they're both so intertwined. Both books are really have a lot of overlaps. So I looked in my preparation for today, I looked for the overlaps, and I thought.
We could talk about that today.
That's fine, great, okay, So let me begin a little bit with young Howard Gardner and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Growing up around the same time as Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the forties and fifties. What were you like as a kid. You said you never thought of yourself as a future scholar.
Is that right?
Iden and I are the same age, and we're both from Scranton, but we didn't know each other.
He moved away pretty quickly.
No, I came from a family of German Jews who escaped from the Nazis literally in the nick of time. They arrived here on the night of the Broken Glass in November ninth, nineteen thirty eight, and academics was not on their mind. Scholarship was not on their mind. And since they lost their youth because of Hitler, and I was a a studious kid. I liked school. I was quite gifted pianist, a good boy scout. But I didn't really even know about the world of scholarship and knowledge.
And I'll mention two things. One is, when I arrived at college sixty some years ago, I didn't realize there were people who'd written books who were still alive. I was astounded to be in a class at Harvard College with people who had written books I thought of at least scholarly books were all written a long time ago. The other thing is I had an uncle Fred, who was almost like an extra father to me. And when I was sixteen so in high school, he gave me
a textbook in psychology. It's actually one was written by Norman Munn, who was a well known psychologist. And I leaped through the book and I realized that the book could explain something about me which I'd always been mystified by, and that is that I'm colorblind and I can't see colors, and of course almost everybody else can. But I learned about the Ushahara test, and there were actually ways of explaining why it is that the small percentage of the
population can't discriminate colors. So the idea of psychology was imprinted in my teenage years. But when I went to college, I studied history because that's the sort of thing that you study in high school. You don't study psychology in high school, at least not in the nineteen fifties and Scranton. But I ended up not liking history because in our tutorial we read historiography, which is not history, but rather how people think about history. And I was too young
and naive to realize that that's an interesting question. Now, being in my eighties, I realized it's a fascinating question.
But at Harvard at that time, in the early nineteen sixties, there was a field called social relations, nicknamed a sockrel, and gave you exposure to psychology, sociology, and anthropology, a little bit of economics and political science, and that was just right for me because I was a wanderer and a wonderer, I really wanted to learn about these different fields, and I was very lucky to get as my tutor
a great psychiatrist named Eric Erickson. Would be known to people who studied psychology, particularly because he outlined a number of crises that individuals encounter during their lifetime, and the crisis of adolescents, which my friends and me were so interested in, is the crisis of identity versus role diffusion. Identity means you sort of put yourself together, you know where you're going, you have a future, you feel pretty confident and competent. And role diffusion is I don't know
whether I want to do this. I don't know whether I wanted that. Do I married, do I move away? Do I switch? You know, my hobbies? And this was just the issue of my colleagues and I were interested in. So having Eric Erickson as a tutor made a great difference. Later, if we come to it, i'll tell you about how now in my eighties, I have rethought one of Ericson's crises.
But I want to let you proceed with your.
Schedule and your set of issues.
That's well, thank you. I put that on my list. Who else influenced you around that time at Harvard? Was there anyone else that had a major influence.
The person who by far had the greatest influency on me was a person I worked with right after college. That was Jerome Bruner, known as Jerry Brunner, and he was a great cognitive psychologist, one of the people who founded the field which will post scnarian and behaviorism. But I got to know Bruner because he was developing a curriculum for middle school kids, a curriculum of social studies, and he hired me and a bunch of other young people to help create the curriculum, and that the seaweed
was working. The curriculum now has very ancient sounding name, but it was a great curriculum. It was a social studies curriculum called man a course of study. Now, of course, we had called human beings a course of studies. And that curriculum raised three questions which I think about every day. What makes human beings human? How do we get that way? And how can we be made more so? How can
we be made more human? And I'm happy to talk about that for the next hour because I think it's the most important question we as a species face today. But I want to stick with your question, and I would say that Jerry Bruner and Eric Erickson were certainly the biggest influences in my work in psychology, but there were two people who had enormous influence on me outside of psychology, and that helps to explain in a sense, the rest of my scholarly life. One was Nelson Goodwin
and the other was Norman Geshmand. Both have the initials NG. Nelson Goodman was a very well known philosopher and analytic philosopher, but at Harvard almost sixty years ago, he started a research group called Project zero, which was studying artistic education and artistic knowledge. And as I mentioned, I was very involved with music, also with other arts, and I realized that in psychology almost nobody paid attention to what it meant to become an artist. It was how he become
a scientist or an intellectual. And so Nelson started an organization called Project zero zero meaning we don't know anything about it, but it that's the stimulus to learn more. And now literally fifty eight years later, Project zero not only has survived, it's thriving. I co directed for many years and I'm still very actively involved. My wife Ellen Winner, you know, Scott the psychologist, is writing a study of
the impact of Project zero. The study is over five hundred single space pages already and she's not finished yet.
The other energy, very different was Norman Geshwind. Norman Geshwind was a neurologist who was one of the first people who studied what happens to people when they have different kinds of brain injuries through a stroke, or through a tumor, or through shrapnel or a bullet round and Geshwind helped understand the nature of language, the nature of mathematics, the nature of recognizing faces, the nature of being able to
find your way around a path. And when I was going to do a regular post doc in psychology like my colleagues did my peers, I said, I need to learn something about neuroscience because there are a lot of answers to questions that I'm asking in particularly about the arts, which you can't really approach unless you study the brain. Example, or Reese Ravella was a great composer. He suffered a stroke. What happened to his music, what happened to his language,
what happens to his ability to read? Music, you can only ask those questions of somebody where nature causes a stroke or some other kind of compromising of an area of the brain. And so then Scott I changed my postdoc plans and spent twenty years working in the Phasia center in the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, learning about what different parts of the brain do and different kinds of cognitive faculties that we have as human beings, and how
they can be impaired through brain damage. And then what do we do if we have a stroke in the middle of the left hemisphere and right handed and we can't use language in the ordinary way? Can we communicate through music? Can we communicate through drawings? Through other kinds of signs? And what I've just done is to indicate how I ever came up with my theory of multiple intelligences, which is, for better or worse, what people know me about,
if they know me at all. And I realized that the notion of intellect as being singular, and in fact, if you were smart, you'd be smart and everything. If you were average, you'd be average in everything, and if you didn't do well as tests, you'd do poorly at everything was simple minded. Simplistic, or I would even say wrong. So I was very fortunate colleagues and I got a five year grant to study quote unquote the nature of human potential. I used to joke that's more of a
West Coast question than an East Coast question. When I had a research team and we traveled around the world, visiting different cultures, interviewing different experts, we combed the neurological literature, the genetic literature, the anthropog anthropological literature. And in nineteen seventy six I had started a book called Kinds of Minds, but I realized that I wasn't really talking about kinds
of minds. I was talking about different mental faculties, which I came to call different intelligences, and that led to frames of mind, the theory of multiple intelligences. And even though as you know, Scott has never been warmly accepted within the trade of psychometricians, it's really the idea, along with Dan Goldman's emotional intelligence, which everybody else in the world believes in, because it's right.
Oh, are you saying maybe some of your theories not right or you're not contrasting that all right?
No, I say, I opened the door I never think any theory is right, theories, race questions. I'm still thinking about intelligences now. I'm saying everybody now talks about it, emotional intelligence, personal intelligence, music. But if you go to a psychology department, they say, well, there's really only IQ, and that's because they create tests which just prove them
right rather than looking in the real world. It's kind of sad, really, and if we get to it, it makes me kind of sad about psychology in general because I think it's much too narrow and if we spend more attention to attention to anthropology, to computer science, to neuroscience, to genetics, it would be a much stronger field.
Oh, I definitely agree. I love the interdisciplinary nature. When I read Frames of Mind, and I didn't read it in nineteen eighty three, but when I read Frames of Mind, which was originally published in nineteen eighty three, I read it in the maybe nineteen ninety nine or so. It really blew my mind because I really wanted to believe desperately there was so much more than IQ, because I didn't do particularly well in IQ tests as a kid, so I was like, okay, this is And then I
read Robert Sterberg's work, which is complementary to yours. I would say, you would agree with that, right, it's complementary. Yeah, And and I've gone down this rabbit hole of intelligenting human intelligence for the last twenty twenty five years. Let's really let's really get into some of the criticism, let's really get into some of the nerdiness aspect of this, because we really can discuss this at that level of analysis. So so so intelligence researchers don't say there's only IQ,
but they have the whole. They have a hierarchy, so everything still fits within their hierarchy of cognitive abilities. So they would absolutely say there are multiple abilities underneath the top level G factor, the which stands for general intelligence. But what was really so radical about what you were saying is, well, if we look at so many different levels of analysis, so many different areas, and we integrate them,
really G is not doesn't even even exist. I think you you would go, you would go so far as to say that G does not exist? Is right or not?
I wouldn't say that. What I would say is that it's I want to say an artifact, because that's a little bit meaning it's a general competence which emerges when you use a certain kind of instrument. Let me try to make this concrete. Let's take the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and the twenty first century, and let's take
getting into college, because that's something we know about. If the nineteenth century, you wanted to predict who would be able to succeed in college, you would see can they learn English, Latin, and Greek. That's what it took to get in Harvard and Yale in the nineteenth century, So we wanted to predict her, we would have a test that's very heavily loaded on how you can learn languages. In the twentieth century, the era of liberal arts, which I was in the middle of and you were kind
of at the tail end of. It's can you cut across a number of different fields, you know, history, mathematics, literature, what we call liberal arts, and so you'd have a test which kind of samples rather broadly in terms of language and logic. We're in the twenty first century now.
If we want to predict who could benefit from a college education, the first thing we have to say is what is it that we want to achieve and what is it that large language instruments can't do and probably I mean I was thinking about geography the other day. When I was in Scranton in seventh grade, we had to draw a map of the of all the counties in scrant in Pennsylvania by memory. And at that time for geography you actually had to know where things were
and how to draw them. I now have a machine which you can see which has everything is, and so we wanted to predict who is going to be successful in the twenty first century. We wouldn't use a paper in pensil test for a half an hour an hour. So to summarize this, the soliloquy what we're valuing in human beings at a certain time in history will determine
what we valorize. And many people now, and even if they've never heard of me, say, what's important now at the workplace is can you get along with other people? Can you understand what they want? Can you join a team? The IQ test, even if you get a two hundred and IQ test, you might get a zero in that sort of stuff. You might be autistic. Some people now who are very popular in our country are artistic and autistic and can't read those things at all, but they
do very well on a certain kind of tests. So the takeaway is not the g doesn't exist. Any kind of test will produce more of a general factor. But the question is why was the test developed? And what is it that you're trying to find out?
There are general cognitive mechanisms that certainly pervade multiple domains. The idea is it possibly be generally smart. Well, let's say, for instance, you have a very good executive functioning, good working memory. I mean certainly that is going to make you generally something advantaged on cognitive tasks in daily life, not just on paper and pencil tests.
Right, yeah, No, I mean I think we'd have to do it faculty by faculty. And if you say, all right, I want to posit an executive function, you have to give me a bunch of different things to do, and see, you know what I could do well, what I could do badly? And I happen to have been a very good marcher as a boy scout. I could drill very well, but if I had it wouldn't have made any difference. And I would say the same thing about memory. I have a good memory for language, I have a disastrous memory.
For visual things.
So maybe if you and I had a conversation decades ago, I might remember the conversation. There's no chance I remember what you look like, So you have to apply the multiple intelligence lens to any so called faculty. I argue with my son all the time about attention. I think I had greater, he says, he said, you have attention deficit, and then we argue about where I have it and
where I live. So a good way to think about this, for Scott and for your listeners is my effort is always to pluralize, to think of different uses, different demands, different faculties, and to see to what extent a label we use, whether it's attention or memory or recognition or recall,
where is it strong and where is it bad? And clearly, the more you just talk about academics the way they were done in nineteen sixty, then you know you say, yeah, there's a general intelligence, because you're good at the way academics were done in a liberal arts era. One of the interesting things about Bob Sternbrig and me is that we both fell out of love with tests when we were young. He fell out of love with ten because at one time they told me he was stupid and
he didn't like that. And when I was thirteen, my parents and who did not have much money, took me to Hope Oken, New Jersey, to the Stephen Institute of Technology. I talk about this in my Essentials books. And for a week I was tested, and I took all batters of tests. I can't remember any of them, and I've tried to find out from Stephen's what they were, but this is a nineteen fifties so they don't exist anymore. So at the end of it, we get called into a room and the tester is probably a man, but
I don't remember. Said, well, mister and missus Gardner, your son Howard is a bright kid. He can probably do most anything, but his real skill is in the clerical era area, which doesn't mean becoming a minister. But I'm very good at crossing out all the t's and the list and all the ease. And I said, for Christ's sake, if we spent a week in a hotel and three hundred dollars, which was like three thousand dollars now.
To be told that I should be.
A clerk, this shows me to be to be skeptical about tests.
That's funny, I would also you and and and serve, but I'll say me too, uh. Part part of this I wrote about this in my book I'm Gifted About I wasn't special ed as a kid, and I didn't I didn't love IQ tests either.
The one thing you can do for sure if you have a high IQ is you can join MENSA MENSA an organization with a high and then you can congratulate one another about being in MENSA. But I'm not interested in whether somebody is a high IQ. I'm interested in whether they want to do something worthwhile and can do it and can take feedback if they aren't doing it well, and if they really aren't doing it well, to find something else to do. That's that's what my work has been for sixty years.
I really get that, and I really get that You're you're interested in in in the what for question? You know so much of psychological intelligence research. While I find it very interesting, and I do think it isn't adding to the knowledge base of humanity looking at this correlation and that correlation, You're what for question, I think is a very important one for us to constantly be pointing to.
So I think that's very valuable, but I would I would push back on one, just one thing, because I've been studying generalized cognitive mechanisms in my career, and you said we would have to go faculty by faculty, But I would argue that not all faculties have the same level of a specificity, the same level generalizability. Put another way,
so for instance, I picked working memory. You know it's this is a really I think the crux of this of multiple intellig's theory and some critiques is that one could argue some of these things are more talents, so music and art are more specialized. Like you can have no music ability and you could have no art ability. Are no talents, no, no talent of very little talent for music and art, but you can as long as you have a high G you know what, the kind
of facilities they're measured IQ tests. You can still learn and you can still grow. But the reverse is kind of catastrophic in a lot of ways to pervasive functioning. Right if you have an extremely low IQ, I mean, autosic savants do show some of these specific talents which you would call intelligences, But there is a specificity question in a generalizability question of these faculties, don't you think so.
But let's go back to my two examples. Let's say in the nineteenth century, to get into a prestigious university, you had to be able to show you could learn foreign languages.
And you could learn them quickly.
I have no reason whatsoever to think that people who have a high GI in the twenty first century are people who could learn Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.
Easily.
Similarly, let's say in the twenty first century, all the mathematic and linguistic things can be done better by large language instruments. Then a test of the standard test of IQ won't tell us anything. Maybe it's all a question of can you figure out where to live where you can pursue your hobbies well and not be bothered by other people who you don't want to be bothered by.
And that's why traveling to different cultures and thanks to the grant that we got in the nineteen eighties, was so important, because when we talked about intelligence in certain countries, I think both in Latin America and in Asia, what people were looking for would not how well people could compute, but rather were they well behaved, did they do the
proper thing. Again, if we look at mister Musk who is running or ruining the country in the beginning of the twenty first century, he doesn't have how to get along with anybody, but that's not needed for the kind of ability that he's So I think that as long as psychology and this you know more about this than I do. As long as psychology is studying such what they call weird populations, which are white, educated, Western kinds of people, it's going to get a very restricted view
of human nature. Or if you look at human nature from the Paleolithic era to the end of the anthwer Praccene, the end of the of the era in which we're in now, we're not going to find a lot of general faculties. We're going to find that different periods and different ecologies foreground different abilities, and people who are good in one sort of thing may may not be good in another.
Sort of thing.
So that would be the Culnar argument, your argument.
Thank you. So your contextual approach is also very in line with a lot of Sternberg's research on different cultures and intelligence and different cultures.
You know, I think Bob Stenberg and I disagree about very little, but there's a big difference between us, and he might not put it the same way. Bob Sternberg really thinks of myself as a scientist who wants to talk to other psychologists and to other people who are interested in psychology. I'm a generalist or as you know, I'm a simple sizor. I put stuff together from many different fields. That's what I'm good at. I'm not a good making test I'm not good at doing experiments. I
can get away with it, but that's my strength. My strength is to is to corral lots of knowledge, weave it together, reflect on it, put it together, and then throw it out. And sometimes psychologists like it, sometimes historians like it, sometimes the general public like it. Sometimes nobody likes it. But as you know, even in my ninth decade, I'm blogging all the time, probably a blog every week, maybe two months, and I'm blogging about what I'm interested
in and what I'm working on. In fact, I mentioned at the beginning of the program that I have been revisiting ericson Eric Erickson, the great Sosuch analysts, talked about the set of life stages. The life stages for old people was called integrity versus Despair, Integrity was if your life sid of hangs together, you kind of did what you wanted to do, You didn't do anything terrible, you
don't have a lot of regrets. That's integrity. Despair is if my goodness, I had all these chances, I muffed it. I wasn't nice to people. Bad things happened to me because I caused them work because I was unlucky.
That's despair.
So here I am looking in my own life and I'm saying I feel I'm very lucky things have worked out well for me. But I look at the world, I'm filled with despair. Climate change smeat machines, which are very smart but not at all moral or ethical dictators all around the world. You can name them. I don't have to kings as they call themselves. I'm filled with
despair about that. And Ericson didn't really think about the life stages except within human psychology, and I think we have to think about them with how we relate to.
The rest of the world as well.
So that's what I'm blogging now as we speak in early in twenty twenty five.
Strike me and all the time I've known you, you are consistently very ethical and you care very much about certain about living by a certain set of principles. I believe you even wrote a little ethics guide for your grandchildren. Is that right?
That's right, though, I have to say right away, Scott, nobody can judge his or her own ethics. You have to study me and talk to lots of other people and get their own views. But I will say two things. One yes, when I turned eighty, I have five grandchildren. One of them just called me the middle of this broadcast, and I thought I would write just for them. They got it handmarked and sealed of the things that I thought were most important in life. And I hope that
they won't forget about it. And they they'll, they'll they'll take it seriously. And I try when I do something bad or wrong, I try to make amends. And they were This year, just as we turned from twenty twenty four to twenty five five, there were two people who I felt I hadn't been nice too, and I reached out to both of them and one didn't respond, and
the other we reconnected as friends. And so ethics that not do you do the right thing or the moral thing all the time, nobody does, but do reflect on stuff and if you screwed up, do you try to make amends. And that's one of the things that I shared with my grandchildren. But because I love my grandchildren, this message is such for them, so they unless one of them wants to tell you about the ethical will, that has to remain private.
Beautiful. I want to return to your thoughts on leadership and good leadership and being a human. I want to return to all that, But I don't want to leave multiple intelligences just yet, because I think another big issue in the educational world is the difference between an intelligence in your theory and learning styles, because that's a hot topic. The idea of learning styles is not really replicated as
in Willingham. Daniel Willingham has really criticized learning styles. Can you tell me do you see a difference between multiple intelligences and learning styles?
Well? Right or wrong?
Mold of intelligence is based in the analysis of the brain and of psychology and of different environments, and it will succeed or fail on whether the synthesis that I put together makes sense to people. Learning styles is a claim that people learn in certain ways and that you have to teach them in those ways. That's an empirical claim.
And you know, there may be some stylistic categories which are helpful, But when people talk about something like visual learning style or auditory learning style, I think that's rubbish. I mean they often use the word visual for people who have trouble reading, but of course reading not well analyzed, and so I don't like to be thrown into the same coup speak as the learning styles people. And I've never said that multile intelligences tells you what to teach,
you how to teach. I make just two dreams, and this is written at length in both The Essentials on Education and the Essentials on Mind. The two claims are individuation and pluralization. Individuation is learn as much about the learner, which would be you or your child or your student as man, and try to teach that person in ways
that work for that person. And of course that's infinitely easier in the twenty first century than it ever was before because through computers there's many, many different ways in which we can reach people. So that's individuation. Pluralization is figure out what's important and teach it more than one way. And any good teacher has more arrows in his or
her quiver than just one way of teaching. And if you're taking geometry as I did a century ago, and the teacher explained something, and I say, well, I don't understand. Can you explain it another way? Teacher says no, you've got to understand my way. That teacher should lose as or her license. Nothing important can be taught in more than nothing important can be only taught in one way.
And you know, as we talk about very different difficult ideas, you know, let's say quantum mechanics or stupor string theory, or the notion of black holes or infinity. Those are things which hardly people even thought about a century ago. And we have to figure out what it is important and what are the different ways in which we can convey them. And computers are going to make it infinitely easier.
But as I was saying earlier, there may be some things we don't need to learn because our machines can do it so well. It's a waste of time to say you have to learn it if you want to learn it. I mean, we don't say don't play chess anymore because because the computer has a chess program that's better than yours. But it should be something voluntary. We shouldn't force everybody to learn jes.
So are there certain ways that educators have applied your theory of multiple intelligence that that bring you pause, that are concerned.
Well, the very worst, which I have written about, was when a state in Australia this is thirty years ago, to listed all my intelligences I now talk about eight or nine intelligences. I don't remember how many they were then they were at least seven, and then listed all the racial and ethnic groups in Australia, including the First Nations people, and listed which intelligences they had and which ones they lacked. And that made a mockery of everything
my life's work. So I actually went on television there when something called the Sunday Program it was probably like being on CBS or ABC, and said, you know, this may be well motivated, but there's now the shred of evidence that it's right. And anybody can learn new things if you are if you are flexible enough in how you present them and how and you can interact enough with them.
And the schools and schools museums.
You know there's going to be a playground in the In the Latin American country, which are based on multiple intelligences. People read about my ideas and say, let's create a museum, or let's create a school, or let's create a playground, or let's create a game. There are many multiple intelligences games, and let's use the idea that human beings have different faculties and we vary from one another in which faculties are strong the weak, and which ones we can use.
Let's use. Let's use that to make life life more fulfilled. And that's the right use. But anybody who says Gardener says these are the a intelligence? Is this the way you have to teach uh to me? That's that's garbage.
I'm glad. I'm glad you said that. Can you tell us what the EID intelligences are that you know for people? There's mightbe some listeners of this podcast maybe are not familiar with them.
The first two ones I always mentioned are linguistic intelligence and logical mathematical intelligence. Everybody knows that those are important nowadays because if you're good in language and good in logic and math, you will do well in a modern Western school, whether you've done well in a Chinese school two thousand years ago or in an Indian school one hundred years from now. That I can't tell you because
as the world changes, what we value changes. The other intelligences are musical, spatial, bodily, kinesthetic, interpersonal understanding other people, intrapersonal understanding yourself. Very one that intrigues me because it's
very hard to test for. The eighth intelligence, which I added thirty years ago, is the naturalist intelligen and that's the capacity to make appropriate distinctions in nature between one animal and another, one plant and another, one cloud configuration another, and certainly in human prehistory going back thousands of years, just determined whether you survived or not in the southern
African areas where human being started. But nowadays where we use naturalist intelligence is when we go to the grocery store or to a shopping center, or go out to go to Amazon and we try to decide which of two shoes to buy, or which of two hair dryers to buy, or which of two bibles to buy. We're using the same brain wear that was UH developed to say to say, you better eat this seed, but not this seed. You better plant this seed but not this seed.
You better run away from this animal and tame this animal, or capture this animal. That software, I'm sorry that hardware doesn't disappear, but the software, the way it's used is very different. So those are the intelligences. I often talk about existential intelligence, which I call the intelligence of big questions. I always say that children all ask big questions, but most of them don't listen to the answers. They just
like asking the questions. Page great psychologists study that somebody who has existential intelligence likes to ask questions like what does the future hold?
What is love?
Why do people prejudice? Prejudice against one another? Why do we do podcasts and to think about those kinds of things, And not because they're necessarily a right answer, but because we'd like.
To think about those things.
And certainly people in philosophy uses existential intelligence, but many writers do, many artists do. And religions are the cultural inventions to deal with existential questions. But people say, well, well, Howard, why don't you say religious intelligence or a spiritual intelligence?
And I have equipped for that. I said, if I said there was a religious intelligence, it would make some of my friends happy, but it would make my enemies even happier because it would make me sound like I'm promoting a certain religion and I don't want to do that.
But given what we know about the brain, and you know as much about this as I do, and what we know about cultures, it's not surprising that all over the world people do adhere to religions, but the religions to which they got here change, and some of them have a god component, some of them a fraternity component, and some people in my world, the religion is often scholarship. We believe that the most important thing is to know more, and that's a kind of religion.
Yeah, I agree, I abouly agree. That you lay out certain sets of criteria that you say each intelligence must fit in order to count as an intelligence, but very few of the intelligences actually fulfill all the criteria, Like even if a psychometric is one of them, like verbal is correlated with spatial, for instance, so it doesn't fit that criteria. So what counts as an intelligence? What doesn't count as an intelligence? And what do you do with the fact
that all your intelligences don't fit the criteria completely? And are you okay with that?
Yeah?
Well, this would take us another hour to speak. But when I wrote Frames of Mind, when I wrote Frames of Mind. I laid out eight criteria for intelligence, and they ranged from evidence of brain evidence from psychology tests to evidence in different cultures to genetic kind of evidence.
And nothing made the.
Final list unless it got a good score on most of those criteria. And the reason I could add naturalist intelligence in nineteen ninety four is because I spend a whole year investigating that Canada intelligence. The reason I haven't added another intelligence since is because life is short and I don't have years to spend researching them. So every day somebody says to me, Oh, there's a humor intelligence, Howard Gardner, Why didn't.
You I like that?
I like that one, And I say, for late talk, you can talk about anything, but if you want to talk in psychological terms, then you have to look at the criteria that I've played out on on what I should mention. And this is available on my website. With my colleagues Shinri for Azawa and Anti Suture, we wrote a ten thousand word essay earlier this year called who
Owns Intelligence and Who Owns Intelligence? Shinri talks about animal intelligence because we know vastly more about animal intelligence now than we did even forty years ago plant intelligence. I never thought about plant intelligence, but any research there and there are things that plants can do, signaling one another when something dangerous is coming, some potion or so on,
which would count in intelligence of humans did it. And then I, with my very limited knowledge, but with my considerable interest, talked about artificial intelligence and to what extent it fits these different criteria, And this is mentioned in the two books The Essentials. If I were given another ten or twenty years, I would love to be able to consider not just human intelligences, but animal, plant, and artificial because I think that's the next frontier for let's say,
psychology in the large sense. I wrote a textbook forty years ago, nineteen eighty five, forty years ago called The Mind's New Science, about cognitive science, and in there I wrote about six different fields, including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and brain science and so on. And I said that psychology will never in itself have all the answers, and what psychologists need to do is to make the best possible connections and ties to these surrounding bits of knowledge.
And when I wrote about this about computer science then it was so much and primitive then that we didn't even understand how powerful machines could be just by feeding them examples. Everything in those days had to be done with zeros and ones, and logic was basically chess and syllogisms. But now, of course anything, whether it's faces, trees, podcasts, we just throw them into a large language institute instrument and they can come up with many, many different variations
and many many new forms of those things. So I think this is a long winded way of saying, if you were to look at intelligence today through the relevant sciences, that we just know too much more about the brain, and about genetics and about the nervous system, about different cultures to simply fall back in what I wrote in nineteen eighty three. But I'd like to think I opened the door. And I think the best scholars, I hope I'm at least a good scholar, are not the ones
who come up with final answers. It's ones who open doors. And I think that's one of the rays of Sternberg and I have a common feature. We're not afraid to open to open doors. I'm not, in general a brave or courageous person. If anything, I'm a cautious person, but not when it comes to ideas.
Oh gosh, you and Sternberg more than open doors, especially for me a personally, I would not be in this field probably if I didn't discover the work of you too, So that's quite an understatement. And a lot of people. You've opened the doors for a lot of a lot of scot young scholars. So for sure, the question of what we can learn and generalize from brain damage research is interesting to me about you know, I think that brain damage research is elucidating about the modularity of mind.
Just as if we look at patients who have their corpus closum cut, it tells us about the left and right hemisphere and their unique functions. But how much does that tell us about every about people who don't have a severed corpus closim or those who don't have brain damage. How much do you feel like we really can generalize from the brain damage research to general intelligence or human intelligence in the every day population.
This question is totally different than twenty twenty five than it was in nineteen eighty.
Really, okay, we can do.
All kinds of measures of the brain well with people who are still actually still in the womb, certainly at birth at any other time, and when they're ancient the way I am, so there's no need to wait for that. But we have to remember then, when I went into this field, which was in the late nineteen sixties, we hardly had cat scans, we didn't have MRIs, and there was no real way of investigating what was going on in the brain, as we say in vivo. So now
the question is almost the opposite. We have a scholar at Harvard now who can actually examine brains before a person is born and see whether that person is going to be at risk for dyslexia. And that's amazing. But does that mean when the kid comes out of the womb, which to start giving them phonics?
No?
This becomes then a question of social policy. How do we use knowledge about the brain to help people rather than to classify them. I'm sure that for many reasons we could talk about. My brain is not the average brain. I'll just give you one. When I was ten years old, I went to camp and I picked up a rifle and the houser said, you're you're left handed. I said,
I'm not left handed. But I went home to my mother and she said yes, you were born left handed, but in Germany we made everybody who was left handed right handed. So you know, God knows what's going on in my brain. But now we can we can look at that, We can look at that sort of information. So the question, Scott is not should we look, but rather what do we do with that knowledge? I mean to to what extent if it looks like someone's at risk for being good or bad as something? Do we
then do they? We then fashion their life in a different way. And this has to do with things which I'm not compliment to talk about, but things like sexual and gender identity.
You know the expression if all you look at, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You know that expression. One could argue that if all you look at are modular intelligence is through the most extreme examples, then you, of course you won't see a generalized intelligence. One one could argue that, you know, there's a whole big field of uh, generalized artificial intelligence, and does that exist?
You know? And I don't make so that word unless you tell me what you mean by general And I think I've all my life is a challenge to that.
So the challenge you're right, You're right. This is we could double click on this because this is the challenge of your whole career. Yeah, what a great, what a great opportunity this is for me to discuss this with you. I feel just so I just want to meet at a meta level just say how honored I feel that I can even just discuss this with you. Yeah, so I hinted at this earlier because you know, I've been
studying in my career. I've been studying domain specific intelligences or abilities along the lines of what you call multiple intelligences, and I've also looked at generalized domain general cognitive mechanisms that that appear to be relevant to multiple pull domains of human intellectual functioning that you know, to human reasoning,
to to human synthesis of ideas. There are certain cognitive generalized cognitive mechanisms that that across the board are relevant versus more domains specifically relevant.
But I mean, I'm not going to say that you're you're wrong and I'm right or vice versa.
But it will let's sympthaesize, let's sympthesize, right.
But many people, including me, fifty years would have you said, Well, people have good or bad memories. But that's not true. As I told you, I have very good linguistic memory. I have disastrous memory for people I've seen in met and so on. Uh, And so you to convince me there's such a thing as general memory or general attention attention. I told you my son thinks I have intentional disorder because he looked looking at a certain thing, and have to say, uh, you know, I maybe not put it that,
but doesn't mean I have general attentions wroblems. So you're not going to convince me of these general capacities unless you let me look at them across a wide range of Uh. I've been married twice to two wonderful women. You would say they have good memories. They're both tone deaf. They cannot tell Beethoven from the Beatles.
So but but but I would say, I would say, I would say that there's a big difference between being tone deaf and having a bad, uh long term memory across the board. When you say there's a there's a difference there in terms of the implications for your daily functioning.
Well, I think we'd have to we'd have to sit down and lay out the lay out the studies. I mean, if you can't if you can't remember, if you can't recognize tunes, how can you remember them?
But but not being able to remember tunes is not as relevant to generalize thinking and reasoning.
You're falling into general by eliminating the examples I'm using. You say, what music doesn't count? But I'm saying it doesn't count. It's just memory is not the same as memory for French or memory for geometry.
Well, I would say it counts in a more limited range of contexts, is all I would say.
Okay, Well, then then we'd have to sit down and actually douke it out.
Okay, let me put this another way, in a way that I think you will agree with this. When you say there are a certain set of generalized thinking skills that we should be teaching young individuals that would apply across a multitude of reasoning contexts.
No, I wouldn't agree, because thinking in geometry is completely different than thinking in history. And I actually have written an essay but is this such a thing his historical intelligence? And I bet it has nothing to do with geometric intelligence.
Wow, Okay, this is so this is so interesting. So even as we're having a conversation right now and trying to apply a synthesize. How about just synthesizing as a generalized thinking method, like to be a synthesizing mind. Aren't you implicitly arguing that there is something generalized that is a synthesis way of being.
No, what I'm saying, and it's a good question is and I hope and certain people whom I admire are very good at taking lots of disparate information and organizing in it a way which is at least useful for me and may be useful for other people. But let's take the French Revolution. I might have a useful synthesis of the French Revolution, but that doesn't keep a hundred other historians from having a useful synthesis as well, which could be quite different. And then you might say, well,
how about a super synthesizer. Maybe that person will take what everybody says and put together.
I say five, Yeah, I mean that that would be.
Text is a synthesis, right, But you and I both know there are hundreds of psychology textbooks and there's some things that they all have, but there are other things which are very into syncratic. I mean both Sturberg and I got very annoyed when there was a pointed page handbook on psychology of intelligence and we got exactly one box.
Well, that wasn't the handbook I edited with Sturnberg, though, was it the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence?
Two authors and I communicate with them. I mean it was perfectly friendly. I can disagree with people without being having an analyst. In fact, they said, but you help me sell my textbook in the education school.
That's funny. The idea of learning about human intelligence in an education school versus learning about human intelligence in a psychology department is very different. I want to point that out and make that very clear that the approach is different. One could argue the benefits and disadvantages of both perspectives, but I.
Would put it somewhat differently. Psychology is a discipline, as its history and philosophy and physics. And when you go to a psychology department, psychologists teach you how psychologists think about things, how they do research, how they write stuff up, how they set up labs and so on. Education is not a discipline, it's a professional field. And in a good education school, you know, you could learn language about language.
You could learn about cognition. You could learn about social relations, and they might even have people who are sociologists or psychologists or linguists. But we're not training people to be professors or scholars in that area. We're training people who will either train other educators or will become you know, superintendents of schools or working for a curricular development organization
or something like that. So if you go to law school, you also learn something about legal history and about legal logic and so on. But it's different and having a PhD in philosophy or or in political science. So that that's the real difference. And I don't even when I was teaching and I talked for forty years at the Harvard Ed School, I only touched intelligence when people were interested in. I didn't have a course on intelligence, No, I I had courses on ethics and morality.
For example.
I'm interested in I co taught, of course with David Rose and Kurt Fischer on cognition and social psychology, but also in developing interventions for kids who have learning problems. So that's the kind of things we do with a school of education.
What do you make of, then, of Keith Stantovitch's work on you know rational rationality and how that is different from i Q. But there are generalized rational I think like the my side bias, you know it has it has a certain generalizability as we see today in politics.
Don't you think the degree of intelligence that you show in various domains or sectors has nothing to say with whether you're going to go about it in a moral or ethical way. The examples I use is both good at the poet and Gerbels. The propagandists mastered the German language, they used it for very different reasons. Nelson Mandela and Slobodon Melosovitch that the South African and the Yugoslavia had plenty of interpersonal intelligence, but they used it in very
very different ways. So I think the relationship between intelligence and rationality we need to be picked picked apart in the same way.
Yeah, well, the whole idea of being a good human, how do you define that?
Well?
With lots with lots of difficulty. I make a distinction, and this is probably the last thing that we can talk about today, between the neighborhood and morality and the ethics of roles and I write about this in both my books Essential Mind and The essential education. Neighborly morality is what the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule tell you. Maybe, you know, be kind to other people, you know, be obedient to your parents, don't kill, don't steal, it's the
Golden rule. Treat people the way you'd like to be treated, don't treat people the way you wouldn't want to be treated. And every culture has some version of no neighboring morality. And if you're lucky, that's something that you learn as you're growing up.
And when you.
Said to me that I was ethicalized, that I can't make that judgment. But if I am, it's because I came from a very ethical family and not very lucky.
But you don't.
It's much more, much higher. What I've studied with Bill Damon and like Chick sent Mahai are the ethics of roles, the role of being a professional, and the role of being a citizen. And neither of these are things that we learned from early life. Citizen is a modern concept where you actually have a say in what goes on in your society. I mean we vote about things, we vote who's going to represent us. We also vote a by amendments and about various kinds of proposals for government change.
And a citizen can't be a good citizen unless he or she knows the laws and the rules and tries to obey them. As I speak, in twenty twenty five, there's really a wrestling for the soul of this country on what it means to be a good citizen. Good professional is we were talking about becoming a teacher of
psychology or becoming a teacher of education school. These are roles which are professional, and there are certain things that you should do and not sink, certain things you shouldn't do as a teacher or as a professor, and certainly as a doctor or as a lawyer. There's certain things you should do and other things that you shouldn't do. And that's not something that we most of us can learn where when we're five years old or even fifteen.
That's the reason you have. You have professional education, and you go to law school to really understand the law and how it works. You go to medical school to understand the body and health and chemicals and so on, and you know, you go to let's say a graduate school in psychology to learn about research methods and about how to do a fair study and how to stick to your data and not make wild assertions and so on, And there is no easy ethical issue. Ethical issues by
the very nature are complicated. So in the way we talk about it when we're teaching is to say, ethical people face dilemmas and then they have to do a bunch of things beginning with D.
Dilemma begins with.
D, define, discuss, debate, decide, and then afterwards reflect on it. I'm missing the D there, but maybe you can come with it. It's kind of like the divesting on it. But basically you have to figure out what the ethical issue is, analyze it as much as possible, make a decision, but then you have to reflect on it and see could you have done it all? And those are that's nothing that That's not something that one can learn when you're five years old. You have to learn it by
going to medical school or graduate school. Certainly, you can learn some of it in high school, you can learn some of it in college. But professions are serious, you know, they're serious undertakings. But with Anti Secura, who's one of my colleagues who worked in the intelligence thing, we're writing a blog now about truth, beauty and goodness. In the era of the influencer, influencer was a word I hadn't
even heard, hadn't even heard five years ago. But nowadays professionals often have less I have less influence in what we do than influencers. And if influencers are not trained, or they only want to get as many hits as possible and they don't try to do the right thing,
that's very, very bad for the professions. So both my work on intelligence who owns Intelligence and my work on truth beings, goodness and the error of the influencer are things that use whatever synthesizing abilities I have, but I'm really just throwing them out to the learning community and say this is what you should be thinking about in the years ahead. And both at the end of The Essentials on Education and The Essentials of Mind, I have a chapter called had I wrote Enough and Time? This
is a line from the poet Andrew Marvel. But what I'm saying is at a certain point, maybe soon I'm not going to be able to do this anymore. But here are the questions I think people should be focusing on, and here's how I think they.
Should be focusing on.
And that's if you will. I hadn't thought about it before. This is like an ethical will to my readers and students, not to my grandchildren.
Yeah, that was probably my favorite chapter of your book. What what do you think? You know just about leadership and what we'll wrap up this interview, But you know what, what do you think? Do you think that there's something objectively it means to be an ethical leader.
I think that you can't even begin to be an ethical leader unless you realize that there are issues that are very complicated, that don't have fixed answers, that require you to reflect, discuss, talk to others, make a decision, and then afterwards decide, decode, you know, whether you could have done it better. And as I'm talking at the beginning of twenty twenty five, that is precisely what's not
being exhibited in our country. It's sort of decide first and then move on to the next thing, and it's going to ruin the country, it may ruin the world.
I hope it does not. I hope it does not, But yes.
For your saying, and for your family's sake and for my family's sake, I hope not. And I don't like saying this. I'd much rather not being worried about politics. But you know, if you if you care about the planet, if you care about the end of the answer proceine the end of the era, which has been existing for millions of years, you need to think about what's right and what's not right. You know.
But like fifty percent of this country would argue that it is right, you know, or maybe not fifty percent, but you know, sort of an large chunk. So you can't all say they're unethical. So I think it's it's it's it's tricky, you know, how do you make your work?
APO don't.
I don't agree with your analysis at all. I mean, let's say about one hundred percent of vote, does that mean they were ethical?
It?
See, it means exactly the opposite. They didn't really think clearly show what they were doing and the consequences.
Right, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Popularity is No, it's I agree with you.
It's making a hard decision, but realizing you might be wrong.
No, absolutely, you can't. You can't judge ethicality based on popularity. We're both agreed, agreed on that. My question is how you know when you have different perspectives on the table of what ethical looks like, and the right moral decision what it looks like. People disagree about what the moral decision is. Try to find that really tricky psychological territory.
Yeah, that's a serious question, and everybody that I know is wrestling with that question. And that's why we have education for young people. That's why we have liberal arts education before we have professional education. But all of those are in jeopardy now, and those of us who were benefits, beneficiaries of it the way you and I are, need
to do the best we can to propagate it. I mean, and when Donald Trump said seven years ago, I love the poorly educated, that's not something you should have been proud of.
I'll end here on a quote from your book that I loved. While scholarly work necessarily focuses on those findings that can be generalized, human potential, as we know it is realized in some way in each and every person, And while we still can, we should admire the heights of human potential and make sure that whatever happens next can preserve and build on those achievements. Thank you for the incredible, incredible legendary legacy that you've built for our field,
your influence on so many people. I highly recommend people read your books, The Essential Howard Gardner in Mind, The Central Hard Garnment Education, and your hundreds of other books and writings. Thank you, doctor Gardner for being on my podcast. Was a true honor and pleasure.