To See Others As We See Ourselves

[omorka]

I'm sure most of y'all are familiar with Gardner's multiple intelligences theory. (If you're not, just follow the link.) Now, I don't buy it completely - in particular, I do think that there's something to the idea that there's a general intelligence that underlies all the multiple facets, and that there's also some justification for the opinion that trying to measure or quantify intelligence(s) at all is a futile effort - but it happens to work reasonably well as a working model for quite a few aspects of education, and fits a non-trivial amount of my personal experience. (Those of you who know me well will realize how important that last criterion is to me.)

Now, I have reasonable levels of most of the various intelligences. I'm a little short on bodily-kinesthetic except where it overlaps with musical, and my spatial is only slightly better than average if that. However, while trying to discuss the Spouse's headspace from this weekend with him, and trying to explain why I didn't think DM was being rude to him, I realized something:

A lot of people compensate in one of the intelligences that they're weak in with one that they're strong in. For example, being good at logical-mathematical can compensate for weaknesses in spatial intelligence in many situations, and high linguistic intelligence can cover over a multitude of flaws. A lot of my kids in years past would compensate for low logical-mathematical with high spatial and bodily-kinesthetic.

I'm not, I think, too bad at interpersonal, but I'm far from great at it. (Comes with being an introvert.) However, I'm fucking brilliant at intrapersonal. (Comes with being an introvert.) I'm capable of feats of self-analysis that Jung would envy. And I use the latter to compensate for the former. I deal with people largely by constructing an elaborate internal model of what I would be thinking and feeling in their place. This works adequately most of the time, but when it fails, it fails spectacularly. (Case in point: quantumduck - when we think alike, we can be so in tune it's scary, but when he's gone somewhere I can't follow (or vice versa), it invariably ends in tears.)

This means that I have very detailed mental constructs of almost everyone I interact with stored in my head, which I mentally "step into" when I'm trying to consider how they'll react to something. Having a meltdown/failure to communicate actually makes it more painful for me to "take up" that person's mental construct the next time I need to do it, which makes it more likely that I'll make a misinterpretation and thus screw up again.

This is on top of the empathy issues, of course.

No wonder I think of myself as a creature that keeps a huge hoard . . .

(Note: iTunes has travelled from "They'll Need a Crane" to "Windpower" over the course of this post. This strikes me as terribly fitting, somehow . . ."

Comments

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

The meta-question then becomes, which intelligences are the spouse's strong and weak ones, and in what way did this affect his intereactions this weekend with DM?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Spouse and I complement each other in interesting ways - he's far better than I am at interpersonal, and far worse than I at intrapersonal. Which means, among other things, that we both understand me a lot better than either of us understands him. :(

DM and the Spouse, on the other hand, (to drop into a different idiom) are both rather clueless in many ways. Unfortunately, their areas of cluelessness are almost entirely non-overlapping. This results in their completely misunderstanding each other an awful lot of the time. I think that's largely what happened. That, and K is really freaking annoying. :/