What is intelligence?

Perhaps some of you already did- at some point in your life- an IQ test, whether found online or during a job application process. Usually, these tests consist of solving mathematical equations, spherical thinking, testing your foreign language skills, and perhaps general knowledge or gained skills. But how accurate are these tests? Can you calculate an IQ by only covering the analytical (left) part of the brain?

If you google the question “What is intelligence?”, you will find several scientific explanations. According to verywellmind, “Intelligence is the ability to learn, recognize and solve problems”. But there is a lot more to include in the true science of Intelligence:

According to Howard Gardner's book “Frames of Mind”, there are 9 major types of Intelligence:

1. Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence: The ability to control your body movements and to handle objects skillfully. Examples would be dancers or athletes.
2. Interpersonal Intelligence: The capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations, and desires of others. In other words, a person who has good collaboration skills and can solve problems collaboratively.
3. Intrapersonal Intelligence: The capacity to be self-aware and in tune with inner feelings, values, beliefs, and thinking processes. A person with high intrapersonal Intelligence knows their “inner programming”, like the beliefs they were taught by their parents or their values shared by their culture.
4. Logical-mathematical Intelligence: The ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and the capacity to discern logical or numerical patterns. Or simply someone good in math 😉
5. Musical Intelligence: The ability to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timbre. A person who has “the rhythm in the blood” or has a certain feeling for music.
6. Naturalistic Intelligence: The ability to recognize and categorize animals, plants, and other objects in nature. Here I would further say that people with high naturalistic Intelligence can distinguish particular natural “objects” by just a few tiny different characteristics.
7. Verbal-linguistic Intelligence: Well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings, and rhythms of words. An example would be a person who can express themself well regarding words, syntax, composition, and visualization writing. People with high linguistic Intelligence usually quickly learn new languages.
8. Visual-spatial Intelligence: The capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly. For instance, a person with good drawing and painting skills, putting puzzles together quickly and interpreting pictures well.
9. Existential Intelligence: The sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence such as: What is the meaning of life? Why do we die? How did we get here?

shutterstock_250460509.jpg (688×419) (simplyangelika.com)

Even though Gardner's theories expanded already the knowledge of Intelligence beyond the only analytical part, there are a lot more types of Intelligence that should not be left out:

• Perceptual speed: Ability to quickly and accurately grasp perceptual details and determine similarities and differences between stimuli (Thurstone).
• Inductive Reasoning: Ability to derive general rules and principles from the presented information. (Thurstone).
• Memory: the ability to recall information like words, formulas, or definitions (Thurstone). Here I would also add the distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory. 
• Another subtype that could be mentioned is “social memory”: A person high in social memory can recall comparably more social interactions and conversations than others.

Intelligence is also age (and therefore experience) dependent. Raymond Cattell and John Horn proposed Fluid Intelligence (the ability to solve problems in novel situations without referencing prior knowledge, but rather through logic and abstract thinking). On the other hand, Crystallized Intelligence (the use of previously acquired knowledge, such as specific facts learned in school or specific motor skills or muscle memory). With increasing age, the FI decreases, whereas CI grows.

Robert Stenberg added another type:

Practical Intelligence. The ability that individuals use to solve problems faced in daily life, or when a person finds the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment. Adapting to the environment involves either utilizing knowledge gained from experience to purposefully change oneself to suit the environment (adaptation), changing the environment to suit oneself (shaping), or finding a new environment in which to work (selection). This type of Intelligence involves a critical aspect, especially nowadays: The sociocultural part includes the person’s ability to adapt to a (new) cultural or social environment appropriately.

Personally, I would differentiate between practical Intelligence and Cultural Intelligence. A person can be high in practical intelligence in a familiar and well-known cultural environment; however, once this person moves to another country, perhaps the ability to adapt to a new culture properly is not that good or takes more time.

Salovey and Meyer came up with another exciting type of Intelligence: Emotional Intelligence. EI is the “ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior”. EI includes furthermore self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship- management.

In science, there are nowadays loads of discussions about this topic, especially regarding Intelligence and gender differences. Some studies suggest that women seem to score higher in terms of Emotional Intelligence, whereas for decades it was believed that men seemed to get better results in the classical, old-fashioned (and left-brained focused) IQ tests. Recently, it has been proved that there are “no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women”.

The list of types of intelligence I presented in this article is not full yet. For instance, a “new” type is Ethical Intelligence, or Green Intelligence, or of course Artificial Intelligence. There is also Animal Intelligence/ Cognition.

Intelligence cannot be measured easily; it is a concert of different parts of the brain. Speaking of it: Did you know that playing an instrument is like a full brain workout? It requires almost all the brain parts and connects the left hemisphere with the right one!