Doyle Saylor wrote:
> There are many paradoxes in humans, for example great athletes usually
> though not always can't speak of their feats knowingly.
part of the problem is that our language is not set up for expressing
athletic knowledge or intelligence. It's like describing how wine
tastes. The oenologists try, but it seems risible. ("it's a naive
domestic, but you'll be pleased by its presumption.")
> Hence there is
> a sense of carving up cognition into kinds allows one to look at MRI
> scans about brain activity in ways that a single 'intelligence' can't.
> There are layering of brain structures due to a long history of brain
> development going back in evolutionary time.
>
> Oliver Sacks most recent essay in the New Yorker aptly applies to this
> 'multiple' layering of cognition. His example is a famous musician who
> had a stroke in his forties (twenty years ago) that reduced his short
> term memory to about a duration of a second. Closed his eyes and look
> at you again he forgot who you were and it was as if you were there new
> again.
>
> What Sacks pointed at was the difference between so-called episodic
> memory and procedural memory. Frontal lobe damage affects remembering
> episodes as events. So this man could not remember people from his
> past or new people coming into his present. But he had not lost his
> musical ability or intelligence and could still play the piano, read
> music, conduct a choir once he got started. Sacks refers to these as
> 'islands' of intelligence that remained after the stroke carved up the
> brain system.
this is exactly the kind of thing that Gardner's system is trying the handle.
> It is a commonplace to say smells evoke vivid memories. However, the
> ability to smell in humans has declined over that of other animals. We
> know the ability to feel or have emotions is one of the oldest formed
> cognition structures going back to reptiles. Just as we know the
> enlargement of visual occipital lobe importance is what we share with
> our primate ancestors but not cats and dogs whose visual system is
> distinctly different in structure from primates. The development of
> sight upon different islands of cognition gave humans means to
> intelligence unavailable to those whose smell dominates their
> 'intelligence'. At eh same time this breaks down the human
> exceptualism that says humans are something special in intelligence.
So Gardner's seven-fold way can help us understand the contrast
between humans and the beasts.
> Hence the detachment of 'reason' from emotion in the brain has a great
> deal to do with how visual sense developed more recently but does not
> mean that intelligence is wholly language ability.
>
> Hence carving up intelligences puts research into a concordance with
> the tools we use to know the brain chemically, and via fMRI and other
> non-invasive means of seeing brain activity in a live human.
right.
One thing: Sacks himself points to a limitation of the
multiple-intelligence theory: there must be some sort of "executive
functioning" (Ego) to allow the coordination of various types of
knowledge and intelligence. That itself may be more effective for some
than for others. This seems to bring in another kind of intelligence.
--
Jim Devine / "The trick for radicals has been and will be to make of
earth a heaven, but without blind faith." -- Mike Yates.
