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Intelligence

Cognitive Psychology
Term Paper
Word Count: 4,002

Discussing Intelligence

Defining intelligence is a complicated task to begin with. Many people have very specific view regarding what is intelligence. In my opinion, and it is shared by others as well, intelligence itself is something of an amorphous concept. According to some there are several different types of intelligence, and I belong to the school of thought that believes in what is known as the Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
After years of research, Howard Gardner proposed a new theory and definition of intelligence in his 1983 book entitled Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The basic question he sought to answer was: Is intelligence a single thing or various independent intellectual faculties? Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds an adjunct faculty post in psychology at Harvard and in neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. He is best known for his work in the area of Multiple Intelligences, which has been a career-long pursuit to understand and describe the construct of intelligence (Gardner, 1999a).
Gardner describes his work with two distinct populations as the inspiration for his theory of Multiple Intelligences. Early in his career, he began studying stroke victims suffering from aphasia at the Boston University Aphasia Research Center and working with children at Harvard's Project Zero, a laboratory designed to study the cognitive development of children and its associated educational implications (Gardner, 1999a). In Intelligence Reframed, Gardner states,
Both of the populations I was working with were clueing me into the same message: that the human mind is better thought of as a series of relatively separate faculties, with only loose and non-predictable relations with one another, than as a single, all-purpose machine that performs steadily at a certain horsepower,...