A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory

by Howard Gardner

Overview

An authority on the human mind reflects on his intellectual development, his groundbreaking work, and different types of intelligences—including his own.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon—a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. It debunked the primacy of the IQ test and inspired new approaches to education; entire curricula, schools, museums, and parents' guides were dedicated to the nurturing of the several intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind, Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor.

Gardner discusses his mentors (including Erik Erikson and Jerome Bruner) and his collaborators (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and others). Comedian Groucho Marx makes a surprise (non-)appearance, declining Gardner's invitation to chat with Harvard College students, in favor of “making a living.”

Throughout his career, Gardner has focused on human minds in general, or on the minds of particular creators and leaders. Reflecting now on his own mind, he concludes that his is a “synthesizing mind”—with the ability to survey experiences and data across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. The thinkers he most admires—including historian Richard Hofstadter, biologist Charles Darwin, and literary critic Edmund Wilson—are exemplary synthesizers. Gardner contends that the synthesizing mind is particularly valuable at this time and proposes ways to cultivate a possibly unique human capacity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262044264
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of thirty books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed; and The App Generation (with Katie Davis).

Read an Excerpt

We can’t do the experiment, but I am convinced that I would not be writing this memoir, and 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, recalling the book that I had outlined some years earlier; or seven talents or seven gifts, or even, to use a phrase I detest, seven learning styles. No, with little doubt, it was by virtue of the decision to beg, borrow, seize, or steal the word intelligence that I caught the attention of so many readers, including the then all powerful members of the so-called chattering classes.
Ever since Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a great French psychologist, the use of the word “intelligence” and the instrument called the “intelligence quotient test” or the “IQ test” has taken on a special, even sacred meaning in much of the Western world. We want to be intelligent ourselves; we want to know and befriend people who are intelligent; and above all, we want our children to be intelligent.
How best to convey that capacity to the world? Take a short-answer, multiple-choice style test, tote up the right and wrong answers, and compare your performance with that of peers. If you do about as well as others in your cohort, you’ll be called average. If you do better, say by a standard deviation, you’ll be called smart; and if you don’t do as well as your peers, you’ll be called dull, dumb, or, to be more politically correct, a bit on the slow side or “very nice.” And if you are two or three standard deviations away from the mean of the group, you’ll be hailed as a “genius” at one end of the bell curve or dismissed as an “imbecile” or an “idiot” at the other, less happy end of the curve. The devising and administration of the intelligence tests turns out to be a notable achievement of psychological measurement, but also a perilous one.
As a scholar, having settled on a noun, I also needed a definition of what constituted an intelligence. Over the years, I have tinkered with the exact wording of that definition. But in Frames of Mind, first published in 1983, I put forth my thinking in informal terms: “A human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving—enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters, and, when appropriate, to create an effective product—and must entail the potential for finding or creating problems—hereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge” (62).
Looking back nearly four decades, I am relieved that I was appropriately modest in my claims for the definition and the criteria of an intelligence: “Ultimately it would certainly be desirable to have an algorithm for the selection of an intelligence . . . at present, however, it must be admitted that the selection (or rejection) of a candidate intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgment than of a scientific assessment . . . where my procedure does take a scientific turn is in the making public of the grounds for the judgment, so that other investigators can review the evidence and draw their own conclusions” (Frames of Mind, 63).
I had thrown down the gauntlet: Goodbye, or even good riddance, to a single intelligence as probed by the ubiquitous IQ test; greetings to multiple intelligences, modes of assessment yet to be determined. I would soon see how the world would react to the words and claims in the new and perhaps daring synthesis that I was putting forth.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix 
Part I The Formation of a Synthesizing Mind 
1 My Ten-Year-Old Mind 3 
2 Weighing Tests and Tracks 19 
3 Discovering Enduring Interests and Alluring Approaches 35 
4 Resisting a Single Frame 63 
5 Assembling a Network of Enterprises 91 
Part II Multiple Intelligences: Reframing a Human Conversation 
6 Steps toward Frames 109 
7 Reactions to MI 129 
8 MI in the World 141 
9 Putting MI in Its Place 159 
Part III Unpacking the Synthesizing Mind 
10 On to Education and Good Work 177 
11 My Scattered Pursuits and the Mind That Connects Them 197 
12 Understanding the Synthesizing Mind 211 
Acknowledgments 237 
Appendix: List of Blog Posts by the Author 239 
Bibliography 245 
Index 249

Editorial Reviews

"An insightful memoir from an eminent psychologist."
– Kirkus Reviews

"An easy and worthwhile read."
– The Washington Post

"In a world where brains and neurons have too readily been exploited as explanations for human behavior, Howard Gardner’s much awaited memoir takes us in a different direction: into the life of the mind. More impressively still, this deeply reflective text opens up to every reader’s inspection the extraordinary mind in the life of one of the greatest and most frequently cited intellectuals of modern times." 
– Andy Hargreaves, Research Professor, Boston College; author of Moving: A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility

"This is a personal yet objective account of the evolution of a peerless scholar. Howard’s reflective storytelling and his insightful narration of the events that shaped him are a joy to read, giving us an intimate insight into how multiple, often seemingly disparate threads intertwine to shape an exceptional mind."
– Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder, The Riverside School and Design for Change

"It’s been quipped that theories in psychology are true of those who propose them, and that’s certainly the case with Howard Gardner: creative, openminded, artful, disciplined, and in command of multiple intelligences. It’s a cause for celebration that one of our most influential living psychologists has trained his insight onto his own life and work." 
– Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now

"Read this book for Gardner’s self-reflection — a mind that synthesizes ideas writing about how it came to be a mind that synthesizes ideas — and for what he has to say about the changing academic and intellectual world around him. Are we narrowing our focus when we most need open minds?" 
– Sherry Turkle, Professor, MIT; author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

"Howard Gardner has done what scholars dream of doing but rarely accomplish: he had a powerfully original idea which he developed in a way that changed an entire field, reaching well beyond the academy and affecting our nation’s social policy and collective understanding. A Synthesizing Mind is an illuminating account of how such a breakthrough came about, a thick description of the life trajectory and the intellectual formation that led to this enduring achievement." 
– Stephen Greenblatt, author of Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

From the Publisher

2020-06-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews