A Synthesizing Mind

July 1, 2020
The latest view of intelligence combined with a compelling autobiography. Gardner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, has made groundbreaking contributions to cognitive psychology, and this lively memoir includes an extensive yet accessible introduction to his work. The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he was a bright, curious child with enough musical talent to teach piano. Breezing through Harvard, he sampled the humanities, but psychoanalyst Erik Erikson piqued his interest in the study of human intellectual development. After these early life details, the author delivers a lucid account of the life of a successful academic: thinking, investigating, teaching, and arguing about unanswered questions and then communicating his ideas in hundreds of blog posts, articles, and several dozen books, many for a popular audience. Dismissing the controversy over whether psychology is a "hard" science, Gardner explains that he avoids laboratory experiments, preferring to examine existing ideas to see where they lead. Possessing a "synthesizing mind," he prefers to "take in a lot of information, reflect on it, and then organize it in a way that is useful." Although not shy about describing other contributions, his fame rests on theories of how humans process information. Unhappy with the standard measure, the IQ test, which stresses language and logic, Gardner absorbed the massive literature on cognitive psychology and concluded that humans possess seven distinct techniques for acquiring knowledge, which he called "intelligences." Besides the two IQ standards, he added musical, spatial (navigation, chess playing), kinesthetic (athletics, dancing), interpersonal (leadership, salesmanship), and intrapersonal (self-knowledge, wisdom), which he introduced in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind. He later added several more. Gardner admits that he "would not have achieved a certain degree of notoriety if I had chosen some other noun: seven capacities; or seven competences; or seven kinds of minds" or talents, gifts, or learning styles. "Intelligence" caught everyone's attention. An insightful memoir from an eminent psychologist.

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