Is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence Useful in Human Relationships?

I recently received the following note from a student in Belgium regarding logical-mathematical intelligence vs. interpersonal intelligence.

Dear Mr. Gardner,
I'm a Belgian student, I’m not doing any work on your theory, I’m just a curious reader of your book. Now that I know the basics of multiple intelligences, I have been able to apply it to myself and, unconsciously, to the people around me.
A certain person attracted my attention more than the others. In the first place, I thought that this person possessed a logical-mathematical intelligence as well as a highly developed interpersonal intelligence. However, the more I analyzed it, the more I wondered if his interpersonal intelligence was, in fact, not very developed but that his logical-mathematical intelligence was so developed that thanks to it he had the possibility of understanding human behavior. He understands them thanks to logic.
So my question is: "Could a great logical-mathematical intelligence compensate for a weak interpersonal intelligence?"
I apologize for my poor English. Hoping for an answer, I wish you all the best.

I suspect that what this student suggests is true. In Silicon Valley (center of computing in the United States) and in universities with a focus on engineering, there is an abundance of individuals “on the spectrum."  I would conjecture that they navigate the personal spaces as well as they can, but that there will be blind spots and cues that they miss.

It's less easy to see how strong interpersonal intelligence could allow someone to succeed in math or science, but they might find a way to circumvent the usual requirements⁠—one hopes, not by cheating!

For Your Amusement

For those who are interested in varieties of intelligence, this poem appeared in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine (click here for link). The article is reproduced in full below.

Poem: A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve by Brooks Haxton

Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts

From his new collection, “Mister Toebones,” Brooks Haxton gives us poet as trickster. And to be honest, I’m so tired of the bell curve and how it comes around like Halley’s comet every so often — but instead of bringing delight, it’s just a footnote to pedantic racism. Here, Haxton reminds me that there’s something spectacular in the caterwauling nine lives of a cat, and if that’s not an intelligence all its own, of course the tests don’t matter. 

A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve

By Brooks Haxton

Pigs may be the most intelligent
of the domestic animals,
but next to pigs cats look like
geniuses for diet, caterwauling
sex, longevity, and hygiene.
Sows suffocate their young
by accident, or swallow them
alive on whim. I’ve seen them
puke their breakfast in the dirt
and eat it warm for lunch, their faces
smeared with shit. The poor,
some experts say, are less intelligent
than the rich. This they prove
with numbers from a test
which, I’m just guessing,
is the one they use on pigs.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and a lawyer. He created Freedom Reads, an initiative to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons across the country. His latest collection of poetry, “Felon,” explores the post-incarceration experience. His 2018 article in The New York Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to working lawyer won a National Magazine Award. Brooks Haxton is a poet, a translator and a nonfiction writer whose latest collection is “Mister Toebones” (Knopf, 2021). He teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.

COVID: A Test from God?

This is the question posed in a recent article (click here for link) that cites my theory of multiple intelligences.

I agree with the author, Dunstan Chan, that those who are able to hold on to power for decades have certain skills—which could range from knowing how to foreground their alluring personalities to being able to manipulate (or shut down) the ballot boxes.

But what this author is asking for is the use of our intelligences for positive ends. And this is what we have been doing as we link “multiple intelligences” with “good work” and “The Good Project” (click here to read my article, “Intertwining Multiple Intelligences with Good Work”).

Photo by CDC

Who’s smarter? A cuttlefish, a dog, or a song bird?

If you are like me, you have never heard of cuttlefish or know almost nothing about them. Turns out that these little cephalopods have three hearts, green blood, and (in view of their football size) very large brains. Moreover, they demonstrate quite remarkable cognitive capacities. Give them a choice of an immediate easy to access a meal, as opposed to a tastier meal available at some time in the future: lo and behold, these cephalopods will reject that immediate snack and instead wait expectantly for the tastier food that is likely to come some time in the future.   

Those familiar with the psychological literature will say “Aha, the cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test.”  Like more precocious pre-schoolers, they will refrain from eating a single readily accessible marshmallow if they have reason to expect that they will receive two or more marshmallows in the future.

Cuttlefish have other surprising capacities—for example, they will not continue to take identical routes to a target. Rather, like children who favor exploring, they remember how they navigated the terrain in the past and can “choose” to follow a different path as they seek rewards in the future.

But my goal here is not to glorify cuttlefish. I might just as well celebrate songbirds who can hear a new melody a few times and then reproduce it, or dogs who will alert soldiers to imminent attacks and help rescue wounded soldiers.

Rather: as conveyed by my title, I think it’s a fool’s errand to conclude that the fish, or the dog, or the bird is the smarter animal. Rather, members of each species exhibit different intelligences. If we want to engage in comparisons at all, we should compare them to other members of their species or to species that are closely related (song birds who can learn new melodies to ones who can only chortle their species songs; varieties of domesticated dogs to varieties of wolves; cuttlefish to octopi or squids.)

May I suggest a link to human beings? We should stop asserting or concluding that one person is generally “smarter” or “dumber” than another. Rather, we should examine the various ways in which human beings can succeed at a wide range of tasks. And then we should give each person credit for the kinds of problem solving, pattern recognition, or creativity that draws on that form of intelligence.

To be clear, life is not fair. Some individuals will excel over a range of intelligences. But those persons are the anomalies. Much better to recognize at least the relative strengths and weaknesses that each person exhibits, and work to strengthen those that are most useful or most desired.

Reference

Greenwood, V., 2021. Did a cuttlefish write this?. The New York Times, [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html> [Accessed 23 July 2021]. 

 Photo credit Francis Nie on Unsplash

Brain Circuit for Spirituality Identified

No surprise that this headline grabbed my attention. While I have deliberately avoided the phrases “religious intelligence” or “spiritual intelligence,” I have often speculated about the existence of what I term “existential intelligence”—the intelligence that poses and ponders “big questions.” All of us have the capacity to raise big question—about life, love, existence, death—but individuals differ greatly in their capacity and their inclination for pursuing such questions. As I have sometimes quipped “All kids pose big questions—but only a small subset listen for answers and pursue them further.”

Researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have located spiritual concerns in a specific area of the brain—a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning and pain modulation, among other functions. The researchers drew their conclusions from neurosurgical patients who were interviewed about “spiritual acceptance” before and after surgery for a brain tumor. (A similar set of questions were posed to war veterans who had penetrating head trauma).

The findings: out of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Spirituality seems to map on a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductral gray region (known as the PAG). One could readily conclude that the results were random or simply a bell-shaped curve. But the authors also report several case studies of patients who became hyper-religious after certain brain lesions (this finding had been reported in previous decades with respect to patients who exhibit temporal lobe epilepsy).

Given everything that’s been established about evolution in the animal kingdom, I cannot believe that there are certain areas of the brain that relate to, or undergird specifically religious beliefs and behaviors. But I find it quite easy to believe that certain areas of the brain deal with experiences that seem to be enveloping—what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called “an oceanic feeling.” In my own case, those experiences occur specifically when I am playing or listening to music, and in interactions with family members, particularly the youngest and the oldest. My own preference is to call these “existential issues, drawing on existential intelligence”—but if researchers want to invoke the terms “spiritual” or “religious” that’s OK with me.

Clearly, there’s some affinity between the PAG and the capacity to engage in overarching issues. But it will take a lot more research to establish just what functions are subserved by that brain area, how they are manifest, and which procedures or diseases exacerbate or minimize these “existential” inclinations.

Reference

Ferguson, M., Schaper, F., Cohen, A., Siddiqi, S., Nielsen, J., Grafman, J., Urgesi, C., Fabbro, F. and Fox, M., 2021. A neural circuit for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain lesions. Brain Psychiatry, [online] Available at: <https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)01403-7/fulltext> [Accessed 29 June 2021]. As reported in Neuroscience News.