Gardner’s 9 Intelligences

Last week in class we learned about Howard Gardner’s 9 intelligences. He believed that students posses different kinds of minds (intelligences), and that every individual has a unique blend of them.

He argued that the big challenge facing the deployment of human resources was ‘how to best take advantage of the uniqueness conferred on us as a species exhibiting several intelligences.’

Below are the 9 intelligences and a little bit about them-

1. Linguistic Intelligence- the capacity to use language to express what’s on your mind and to understand other people.
2. Logical/Mathematical- the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of casual system, the way a scientist or a logician does.
3. Musical/ Rhythmic- the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them.
4. Bodily/ Kinesthetic- the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production.
5. Spatial Intelligence- the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind.
6. Naturalistic Intelligence- the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world.
7. Intrapersonal Intelligence- having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward.
8. Interpersonal Intelligence- the ability to understand other people.
9. Existential Intelligence- the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

After we learned about the different intelligences, we were asked to rank them in order of our strongest to weakest. Doing this was a little harder than I anticipated, a lot of the intelligences embody many characteristics. Some of which I’m good at sometimes and other times not so much. Anyways, here is how I see myself (sort-of)..

1. Linguistic
2. Interpersonal
3. Naturalistic
4. Musical
5. Existential
6. Intrapersonal
7. Spatial
8. Bodily
9. Mathematic

After reading about Gardner and his intelligences, do you think everyone fits into these 9 types? Do you think there are more? Where do you see yourself? Are there some characteristics that are more important than others?

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