Framework

The Ten Intelligences.

The Ten Intelligences describe capacities you use to understand and act in the world, from working with words and images to coordinating movement and understanding people.

Ten areas of capacity

An Intelligence is a capacity that can develop through sustained effort. Each concerns a particular area, such as language, music, movement, or understanding other people.

Looking at these capacities alongside your Natures helps distinguish what you are able to do from what you tend to be drawn to. Both matter when you are choosing what to learn or considering how to use your abilities.

The Multiple Natures framework uses ten Intelligences, adapted from Howard Gardner’s work on Multiple Intelligences.

The ten

Gross Bodily: Perceiving and coordinating whole-body position, movement, timing, and force in relation to your surroundings.
Fine Bodily: Perceiving and coordinating precise hand and finger movements, including their timing and force.
Interpersonal: Perceiving, interpreting, and responding to other people’s feelings, signals, motivations, and patterns of relating.
Logical: Recognizing and reasoning about patterns, quantities, sequences, causes, and other forms of structure.
Linguistic: Perceiving, understanding, learning, and producing language.
Graphic Visual: Perceiving and working with line, form, color, texture, composition, and images.
Spatial Visual: Understanding how you, objects, and surroundings relate in space, and using that understanding to navigate, move, or arrange things.
Musical: Perceiving, remembering, generating, and producing musical patterns, including pitch, rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Intrapersonal: Perceiving and interpreting your own bodily signals, internal states, motivations, values, limits, and recurring patterns.
Naturalistic: Recognizing, distinguishing, tracking, interpreting, and responding to patterns in living systems and natural environments.

How capacities develop

Your profile considers all ten Intelligences. You may find some kinds of activity easier than others, and your capacities can develop over time.

Development takes sustained effort. When deciding what to work on, consider your current capacity, the skills you need, and the practice and support available to you.

Reading the whole profile

Different activities call on different capacities. The ten descriptions help you look more closely at what you can do and where you may need further development.

Look for examples of each capacity in your own activities, including ones you have had little opportunity to use.

Adaptation from Gardner

Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences is the starting point for this part of the framework. Steven Rudolph adapted its eight categories into the ten used in Multiple Natures.

MN distinguishes Gross Bodily from Fine Bodily, and Graphic Visual from Spatial Visual. These distinctions help describe differences that matter in practical activities.

For the background, see the Gardner research entry and why Multiple Natures uses ten Intelligences.

Bringing the two together

Graphic Visual Intelligence and the Creative Nature are a useful pair to look at. Graphic Visual concerns the capacity to work with images; Creative concerns the tendency to explore possibilities and bring something new or distinct into being.

A painter may reproduce the same scene a thousand times with considerable visual skill. Another painter may make a thousand different versions, experimenting with each one. Both use Graphic Visual Intelligence; their approaches give us different clues about the Creative pull.

Looking across both Natures and Intelligences gives you more to explore than either one alone. MNTEST offers an initial profile that you can check against examples from your life.

Explore the Nine Natures or return to the framework overview. For a fuller introduction, read Multiple Natures.