Frames of Mind

Frames of Mind

In the autumn of 1979, a neuropsychologist at Boston's Veterans Administration Medical Center watched a patient named Frank try to name a fork. Frank had suffered a stroke two months earlier and lost most of his language. He could not say the word "fork." He could not write it. He could not find it in a list of words read aloud to him. Yet when the fork was placed in his hand, he picked it up, slid it under a piece of beef, cut deftly, and brought the food to his mouth without hesitation. He knew what a fork was. He just could not say so.

Howard Gardner had been watching patients like Frank for years. The Veterans Administration hospitals of greater Boston were full of men who had lost one ability and kept another, men whose brains had been selectively damaged by war injuries and strokes and tumors, leaving islands of competence floating in seas of deficit. A mathematician who could no longer recognize faces. A sculptor who could no longer follow a conversation. A musician who had lost his nouns but could still play Chopin from memory. Gardner was not just treating these patients. He was reading them -- reading the architecture of intelligence they revealed by breaking down in pieces rather than all at once.

The question that had been forming in his mind for a decade was this: what if intelligence was never a single thing in the first place?

That question became a book. In 1983, after years of research funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation through Harvard's Project on Human Potential, Gardner published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. It argued that the human mind is not a general-purpose engine running a single program called "smart." It is a collection of relatively independent cognitive systems -- at least seven of them, Gardner proposed -- each with its own developmental trajectory, its own biological substrate, its own history in evolution, and its own potential to be damaged or preserved in isolation. A linguistically brilliant person is not automatically a gifted spatial reasoner. A child who struggles with numbers may have the kind of bodily intelligence that makes her a natural dancer. Smart, Gardner was saying, comes in kinds.