Intelligence types (capabilities, part 1)¶

Lifehack.org has a list of intelligence types and invites everyone to think about them. Well, why not! You've got to list the types you think you're good at.

Linguistic and verbal intelligence

I read a lot. And at conferences I'm always writing up summaries that I put online at this weblog. A number of people at various conferences gave me positive feedback on this. I'm pretty happy with the speed with which I can write things down. The verbal intelligence bit isn't something I'd say I possess, I can be quite difficult to understand if I'm trying to explain something or if I'm trying to state my position.

Logical and mathematical intelligence

Technical university. Good with computers. 'nuff said.

Spatial intelligence

This is a harder one, I don't recognize all that's mentioned in the description at lifehack.org. I do like photography. Geometry is nice. And I'm real good at directions. I like maps a lot. So: yes, this is probably me.

One specific point that I like to mention: I can often remember quite vivid and detailed images of places where I've been. And I'm good with maps. Our honeymoon was somewhere in Germany (along the Mosel river) and I had rented a car to get us there. I memorised the route. I drove there all the way (Annie has no driver's license) and let Annie have the map, inviting her to guess where we'd end up. I needed a refresher for the last 5 km, but that's ok :-)

There's one other thing (geotagging), but I'll save that for a separate blogpost.

Musical intelligence

Remembering old songs? Yes. Good feeling for rhythm. For quite some time I played the guitar. I'm not really musical in the sense of playing instruments well, but that guitar was for accompanying a couple of songs we customarily sing at the start of a small bible study group. They always obeyed the rhythm I set down (and it would most times be ok). Nice, strict, steady.

My preferred musical style (for listening) is progressive rock, which is often quite complex. For an example, look at this Neal Morse video on youtube, a great part is between 1:00 and 1:30. Often several melody lines that you can try to follow mentally. I enjoy listening to such songs several times in order to pick up all the various instruments. Then I can try to follow all those various instruments at the same time when listening to the song, "explicitly" enjoying them all at the same time. Great.

That's 4 types of intelligence. Well, what are the 4 that I'm missing?

• Body and movement intelligence.
• Interpersonal intelligence.
• Intrapersonal intelligence. (Though I might "score some points" here: I do analyze things and I'm trying to find out my strengths and weaknesses like I'm doing here in this post. Perhaps it is just the naming of this intelligence type that bothers me.)
• Naturalist intelligence. Nature is fine, but I enjoy the landscape even more if there's a nice railway running through it :-)

So. That's part 1. Part 1? I'll explain later.