Episode 19: Multiple Intelligences

In this episode, Dr. Sally Adnams Jones and Dr. Jen Peer Rich explore the reality of multiple intelligences- personal, social, and ecological.
1:04 Sally says this episode is on multiple intelligences. They are generalists who look at the entire field of transformation. If listeners are interested in the deeper topics, perhaps do more research. In order to learn, there must be intelligence present. There can be no evolution, without a sophisticated level of intelligence. Life itself is evolving to express higher intelligences, a complexity of thinking, feeling and consciousness. So intelligence itself seems to transform. Psychologists, educators, cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, spiritual practitioners, all ask, is intelligence the same as consciousness? And is consciousness causal, ie. Did everything evolve from consciousness? Or is consciousness evolving, ie. emerging, complexifying, getting more and more sophisticated. Nobody has solved that question yet. Sally quotes RJ Sternberg’s definition of intelligence. Intelligence is considered to be relational, an interaction between the agent and its environment, and how successfully it adapts to change. Learning allows every single manifestation of life to succeed in its environment. Learning to transform and adapt, equals success. At the bottom of all this capacity is the ability to flourish. People can study the brain with MRI’s, and see brainwave states, but can’t see consciousness or intelligence. Only the results of applied intelligence. She then describes the three ways people have looked at intelligence/consciousness 1) pan psychism. 2) consciousness as emergent after the Big Bang. 3) Consciousness as only belonging to humans. This debate is an unresolved minefield.
13:03 Jen says that our own evolution contributes to the evolution of intelligence, and that we also arise from that intelligence. She offers further definitions of intelligence. We're trying to move away from defining intelligence exclusively by reason, but intelligence includes reason, as well as wisdom, insight, flow states and spiritual, ecological, emotional, and creative abilities. This embraces diverse and divergent forms of learning, responsiveness, and problem solving on all levels of reality, not just cognitive. She cites Jordan Gruber and James Fadiman’s book “Your symphony of selves”. According to the multiple selves theory, when we put enough attention, energy and self awareness into a given situation, we can meet it with the appropriate self. There are as many intelligences as there are beings. We come from a deep intelligence, and that deep intelligence is expressing through us in very powerful ways. She then cites Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking who align intelligence with the ability to transform. So this ability to adapt, move and transform is something we're amplifying out into the universe here.
20:52 Sally says being overly identified with rational thought as the only form of intelligence has become a liability, and is now a cause of our global issues. She describes how measuring IQ’s (logic) became reified. In America today, they call logic subjects STEM - science, technology, engineering and math. Everything other intelligence becomes subsidiary and underfunded. ‘Left brain chauvinism’ arose out of modernism, and the patriarchal celebration of the left brain, and the devaluation of everything else. That became entrenched in education systems, geared towards competitiveness and objectification. In some schools, auditory, visual, and kinesthetic capacities were then included, with amendments to the stereotypical STEM curriculum. Slowly academics like Howard Gardner said there were six intelligences, and later changed that to nine. People like Ken Wilber later changed this to 24 lines of intelligence. Sally lists some of these, many of which cannot be measured, and so they aren’t preferred in the curriculum. Some schools are dumbing us down, because they want convergent, one-word answers. They want to pump kids through the factory of education, which is skewed towards market forces for employment, status, consumption and money making. So not all intelligences are ranked the same. We're changing that view, for the survival of our future, because divergent creativity itself has been diminished. We cannot fix this with the same level of consciousness, or the same intelligence, that actually destroyed our universe, by turning it into an object for our consumption. She then describes Daniel Goleman’s IQ, EQ, and SQ. And the latest quotient - AQ, named by Paul Stoltz, as the adversity quotient of resilience, the turning obstacles into opportunity. How adaptable are we as organisms? It's not just about our brain. For 3000 years Yoga has been teaching that the whole body thinks, responds and is intelligent. Now we're also understanding ecological intelligence.
For the rest of the show notes:
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