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?

Spectacular Failures

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

I think our meltdowns have more to do with the fact that I tend to do absolutely no introspection. I am largely uninterested in myself, which I think comes off as arrogance.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

My issue with the MI theory is that I don't see most of the "intelligences" as being separate things, but rather a combination of broad ability and specific interest, while the rest seem too specific. I see Musical, Linguistic, and Interpersonal intelligences as being heavily interrelated(communication). And what's the difference between Logic/Math and Naturalist? "Abstract relations" and "classification" are almost the same thing! The way my mind works, Math and Spatial are the same thing. Isn't Bodily/Kinesthetic(and for that matter everything else) largely a result of practice rather than some innate capability? I would even go so far as to say that it is mostly interest in a given area that makes people become good or bad. If there is any truth to the idea of a built-in intelligence, I think it would be better shown on the genius level rather than on the level of ordinary people. In closing...

Adam's Files of Wisdom #16:

16. On the necessity of learning new things:
"It's weird how when I look back at college, I find my best compsci
teachers were, indeed, the most literate teachers. There was one guy
who read all of Dickens every year. Another guy taught himself a new
language every year. I remember I happened to be in one of his
courses during the year he was learning Latin and had to put up with
loads of these weird Latin quotations he'd put everywhere. Flash
forward ten years and I'm stuck in a super-intense Latin 101 course
for grad students who need to learn a foreign language pronto,
and I realized why my little bald compsci teacher was so gungho for
conjugation and for quoting Virgil at every turn: you realize that
in some weird -- perhaps even unconscious -- way everything that you
force yourself to learn *outside* of your chosen "track" actually
feeds *into* that track and makes you wild, creative, and utterly
un-fucking-predictable. You scare yourself, scare your friends, and
you realize, damn, dude, just chill. Cool it on the caffeine and
espresso because if you get too juiced with the creative jazz -- if
you make too many connections -- leaping from liberal arts shit to
comp-sci shit to physics shit -- it's almost overwhelming. The more
you learn, the more connections you can make -- and the more
creative you become."

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Heh . . . deja vu. I had this exact same conversation with MLL. Rather than rehash the whole thing, I'll merely point out that Spatial and Math are only vaguely connected for me, at best - and that Math is far more closely related to Music than Interpersonal is, for me. And that these things are so different for different people seems to lend a certain amount of credence to MI. Not enough for me to give up g - after all, if there weren't some underlying commonality, there'd be no reason for SAT-M and SAT-V to correlate at all, and they do - but enough to find the language useful, at least.

I am an unabashed generalist. When I tell my colleagues I'm certified to teach both math and English, they look at me like I just sprouted another head, and wonder aloud how anyone can do both. But for me they're the same at the root - expressing and relating complex concepts. And music is part of the same structure. But spatial awareness and comprehension isn't - and it, and the ability to play baseball, and appreciation of photography and painting are all part of another memeplex, one that I have no keys to (save dance, which really belongs to the other plex for me, despite being so solidly spatial and kinesthetic). That, for me, is the hard stuff, the what-I-have-to-work-at. My ways into it are through the ones I'm good at - a good painting brims with geometry and something like music squashed flat; I can't see a particle's path through space, but I can describe it, and know what it means to be the particle.

I'm quite sure that Bodily-Kinesthetic is at least as much a matter of "natural talent" as Logico-Mathematical is. Certainly practice makes it much better, and someone with mediocre talent can train themselves to be much better than someone who was born "gifted" and never trained it, but we don't all start in the same place.

[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. :/

Re: Spectacular Failures

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid it does. Only the oppressor has the luxury of not knowing himself; the oppressed must know themselves and the oppressor, too. (Sorry to drop feminist theory on you, there, but it's 99.44% accurate in my experience.)

Re: Spectacular Failures

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I thought the oppressors was supposed to be able to remain ignorant of the oppressed, not themselves.

Re: Spectacular Failures

[omorka.livejournal.com]

The oppressor can remain ignorant of damn near anything, and usually does. That's why we have unflattering world opinions of Imperial Brits and Ugly Americans. (The Romans were seen similarly by the intellectuals of Greece, Persia, and Egypt quite a bit of the time, too.)

Or, to paraphrase Dennis Miller, "The vagina goes inward, so women are introspective. The penis sticks out; we want to knock things over." :)

Re: Spectacular Failures

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Don't apologise. I beleive in 'speak truth to power'. It's just a little funny that I have to remind myself how MANY different ways I'm part of an oppresor class in life!

The realist is that I;m very aware of my 'real' self. What i have very little understanding of is the conscious self that runs on top of that. If they ever come up with reverse regression therapy I'll sign up.

Ah, the many ways to know...

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

It's funny to me what links you see. It's not that your'e wrong mind you, I just see things differently, being from one of the other camps.

I see math and music being linked to spatial and kinesthetic reasoning (You gotta move to make the noise, light, or whathaveyou). I see Interpersonal, Language, and Emotional knowledge as being sperate from that complex, but with obvious close ties along one side of the structures.

I feel pretty lucky, because I think I got a little from each column. That means I won't ever be great at anything, but I have some ability to translate from one column to another.

Re: Ah, the many ways to know...

[omorka.livejournal.com]

It has been suggested in the testing/assessment literature that one of the "real" differences in the thinking of the genders - that is, one of the few that is organically based in brain structure, as opposed to potentially or probably learned very early in life - is that almost all men "do" logical-mathematical stuff using their spatial-processing system, but women have the option of doing it using their linguistic-processing system instead. (Some women also do it spatially. I'm not one of them.)

Intrapersonal/emotional knowledge is also mediated for me by the linguistic-processing system - that is, it more closely resembles "talking to myself in my head" than "moving or building a structure in my head." I think one of the reasons I do interpersonal with less facility is that it is at least partially spatial for me - the sensation of interacting with too many people at once is very, very similar to the sensation of trying to physically handle too many objects.

Music is intensely not-spatial to me, despite being partly kinesthetic. My dancing style contains a lot of gestures that are closer to Signs (that is, morphemes in a sort of pidgin sign language) than to athleticism - it's essentially singing with my hands, feet, and hips instead of my voice.