Some thoughts on "5 Minds for the Future"

Welcome to the next installment of my blog, "Making Music with Mr. Belloto". As you may recall, in my last blog I examined some issues and concepts involving Brain Dominance Theory, and Daniel Pink's assertion of the merits, great advantages and so-called outright "superiority" of , "Right-Brained" thinking. In that discussion, I used the real-life example of a brilliant engineer, Mr. Mark Tomion, who, while not exhibiting the typical characteristics of a Right-Brained thinker, nonetheless accomplished a great technological achievement. Yet, in spite of his brilliance, he never got a chance to see his invention realized. In this current blog, I am going to delve even further into the "mysteries" of the human mind by investigating the Theory of "Multiple Intelligences" created by Howard Gardner. Yet again, Mr. Tomion provides a real-life example, or, I might say, once again, "Life imitates art." Could it be that there are correlations to be found in the intellectual skills employed by Mr. Tomion during his lifetime, and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences?

But first, let's define exactly what Gardner's theory entails. In his ground-breaking text entitled, "Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Perspectives for the 21st Century", Gardner tells us that Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Musical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalistic are the eight types of Intelligences that comprise the basis of his theory. For example, a brief overview of his theory states that Linguistic Intelligence includes a love of language, a curiosity and fascination with words, meanings, and grammatical structure. What has any of this got to do with Mr. Tomion? To begin to answer this question, let's take a look at Tomion's own book, entitled, "Stardrive Engineering", published in 2002. Although a world-class visionary in his own right, this revolutionary technological volume, numbering about 400 pages in length, certainly demonstrates a high-level grasp of the full spectrum of the English language, both scientific and prosaic. In his book he succeeds in explaining many complex scientific concepts in a manner that is accessible to everyone, lay persons such as me included. These actions clearly demonstrated his possession of a great level of Linguistic Intelligence as described above. This type of Linguistic Intelligence is also borne out in another of Gardner's books, entitled "5 Minds for the Future", in which he identifies an intellectual entity called the "Disciplined Mind", which also focuses on scientific discovery.

Many other such telling examples and corollaries with Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theory, hereafter referred to as MI theory, may be found in the life span of this special man. As
previously stated, although not living long enough to see his great scientific and technological inventions come to fruition, he carried out many intellectual processes and skill sets during the process of discovery and invention which demonstrated many of Gardner's Intelligences. For example, many of Tomion's scientific theories, especially those having to do with future space flight at light speeds and beyond, involved the use of an extremely high levels of mathematical equations. Here we see a clear use of Gardner's MI theory's Logical-Mathematical Intelligence at its most effective. Moreover, Tomion spent many hundreds of hours researching the relevant technological and theoretical information necessary for his scientific endeavors, thus calling upon the use of both Linguistic (research) and Logical-Mathematical (scientific) Intelligences concurrently.

Moreover, Tomion's book, "Stardrive Engineering", mentioned above, contains an abundance of explanatory and detailed graphs, charts and diagrams, directly reflecting his use of Spatial Intelligence, (keen and accurate perceptions of the physical world through lines, angles, etc.). Spatial Intelligence was also evident in his grasp of not only technological information, but also of vast amounts of astronomical data as well, as this type of intelligence pushed his knowledge of the physical world to include the world of "outer space" too. Also present in his works was Interpersonal Intelligence, as seen in his magnetic leadership ability, encouraging others to follow and support him in his visions for future space flight and also clean energy production.

Already we have been able to identify several Intelligences (Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, and Interpersonal) outlined in Gardner's theory in the brief but meteoric life of one individual, Mark Tomion. Deeper investigation would no doubt reveal many others. But, finally, applying the MI perspective to classroom teaching, I now believe that Gardner's theory can indeed be used to create, modify and improve my own teaching methods by using this newly gained understanding which reveals that students will excel in the areas of academic growth only when their wider range of skills, talents, and "intelligences" are recognized and nurtured. For example, as a classroom music teacher, I can now see how one pathway to asses Musical Intelligence in students might be to expose them to a new melody in a familiar idiom, and determine how readily they can learn to sing it. Who knows how many hundreds of "intelligences" may be discovered sitting in my own music classroom? I think it’s worth a try!