I’ll venture that most people go through life barely knowing their own distinct skills and talents, that which God, nature, or genetics have granted them and with which they fall into the 90% percentile. Why is this? Most people aren’t given to that type of self-analysis and we don’t systematically measure abilities or traits other than IQ, height, weight, or occasionally for sports measurements like speed or strength. Therefore, most people go through life ignorant of where they’d fall on a distribution curve, content to assume they are average or above-average, as few people will determine themselves to be below-average in any category, sans specific measurement.

So what, you say? For many people ignorance is bliss. How would it change your life to know that you had traits or abilities that were rare and favored? Hmmmm. Now I have you thinking. Would you seek ways to leverage those rare traits and abilities or would you “hide them under a bushel?” Conversely, what if you were to discover that you were in the bottom 10% on a certain favored trait or ability and there was something you could do to improve it? Would you take steps to do so or just be content to do nothing?

The determination of skills and abilities has been of interest to man for thousands of years, but usually as it pertained to survival. For example, Hans might have been the best tracker or Karl the best bowsman, and the skills that aided survival were identified. For most people in the United States these hunting skills are no longer favored and we’ve turned our interest to other skills and traits, so many that it can boggle the mind…unless you are particularly skilled at handling complex models and numerous mathematical formulas.

What’s has changed in the last 20 years is that we now have computers that are fast enough to easily run complex calculations, software that has the capacity to identify specific traits and one’s placement on the distribution curve, and a delivery system (the Internet) that facilitates mass testing on hundreds of traits and abilities. And yet we haven’t made much progress in the identification of who can do what the best.

Which brings me back to my post title…is ignorance bliss? Are we better off not knowing what we might be able to do that others can’t?

I have it on my list to invent a “personality translator”. This is a digital device like a PDA (or it could be incorporated into a phone) that helps the user understand what the heck the other person in a conversation is really saying.

One of my seminar topics that I enjoy expounding on is the differences between individual personality, or temperament to be more specific. For thousands of years philosophers have found it useful to segment the population into 4 or more groups based on similar behavior patterns. The most widely known system of categorization relates to the zodiac, or birth signs.

Here in Utah many people have been exposed to Taylor Hartman’s Color Code, although personally I favor Don Lowrey’s True Colors.  Regardless, having a system of categorizing people as to their motivators, emotions, etc., can increase understanding and improve communication. The problem that I have found is that while these systems are interesting and insightful, it is still difficult to translate another person’s actions or words on the fly. Hence the need for a “personality translator.”

It would work like this: “Honey, does this dress make me look fat?” would translate to “I’m feeling insecure about my physical appearance. Please reassure me that you love me no matter what.” The typical response of “No, it looks fine” could be translated as “Of course I still love you even though I never tell you and yes that dress makes you look fat but I don’t really care and my mind is on something else at the moment anyway.”

Workplace communication could be enhanced also: “Johnson, where is that report?” could be translated as “You lazy bum, I am really tired of having to cover your tail by doing all the work I’ve assigned to you by myself.” Johnson’s reply of “Sorry, boss, I’ll get right on it” would end up being displayed on the personality translator as “Got ya again, sucker. I am so out of this place. Go…..” Well, maybe the translator would have to have some filters on it.

And I’ll bet you think I’m kidding about this device. How much would you pay for it?

One of the great debates among psychologists centers around the question “What is Intelligence?” My intent is not to give an overview of the different sides of the debate but to introduce the topic as a foundation for explaining why J.P. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect is a valuable tool in describing intellectual ability.

Supported by the idea that there is a universal, general intelligence (g) that we all possess, psychologists have developed the use of the IQ test to measure and define mental capacity. I took my first IQ test in 3rd grade and have taken dozens since. They are easy to find on the internet and they vary in the way they are structured. Consequently, the results for an individual may fall within a 40 point or higher range, bringing into question the validity of some of these tests. One prevailing idea is that one’s IQ is mostly set and can’t be raised…smart people are smart people and there you have it.

Another group of psychologists took a different approach to intelligence and tried to separate it into types of mental processes, like memory, reasoning, and visualization, etc. Their idea was that there were types of “intelligence” that were not tested by standard IQ tests and yet were measurable and distinct. This concept of sets of intellectual abilities developed into Multiple Intelligence Theory. In the 1950s and 60s, a key proponent for this approach was Dr. J.P. Guilford, with his Structure of Intellect model. Today, Howard Gardner is one of the leading psychologists in the Multiple Intelligence field, yet I favor Guilford more than Gardner.

Dr. Guilford performed 20 years of research at USC while working on the Structure of Intellect model, which he displayed as a cube of cells, 5 x 5 x 6. Guilford proposed that each of those 150 cells represented a distinct intellectual ability. Later in his life he expanded the cube to 180 cells and acknowledged that additional cells were theoretically possible. Furthermore, Guilford voiced his opinion that there was a higher order of intelligence beyond his Structure of Intellect (SI) model. It’s my opinion that that next level of intelligence will be found to consist of the combination of cells from the SI model into supercells of a new model. Interestingly, the new supercell model might eventually begin to correlate well with some of the elements of the universal intelligence (g) theory.

Most scientists and psychologists have bypassed Guilford’s SI model, largely due to its complexity and being too unwieldy to use regularly with clients. On the other hand, the precision of having 180 different measures of intellectual ability can provide tremendous insight. An effort was made in the 1990s to program some of Guilford’s tests and to create a computerized interpretation program. I became involved with the project in 2002, only to have it stall due to lack of funding later that year.

It’s been an interesting journey for me. Working with the Structure of Intellect is not my primary mission in life, at least I don’t think it is. Yet, I am really drawn to the topic and find that my specific intellectual strengths are very useful in this endeavor. I can see things that I believe Guilford got wrong, as Guilford’s work was limited by the speed of computing power in the 1960s and he wasn’t able to calibrate his tests one with another. Lacking a Ph.D. it would seem blasphemous to some for me to make this statement. However, that’s the beauty of Multiple Intelligence. I don’t have to have a degree to have the ability, and the mere presence of a doctoral degree does not mean that one is qualified to solve certain types of problems.

My intent for this blog is to introduce the components of Guilford’s SI model, as well as other information that relates to our own Intunique.

I’m partially colorblind…a fact that I was unaware of until I was 13 years old. I’m not particularly coordinated when it comes to making arms and legs (like in playing the drums or organ) move in independent directions, another fact that came to the fore when I was a young adult. (Fortunately I can walk and chew gum at the same time and drive and talk on a mobile phone without difficulty.) I guess my nose is on the larger side…but I can’t really tell because I’m limited by what I see in the mirror…and sometimes the mirror distorts reality.

I was 40 before I realized that I perceived the world from my own paradigm and naturally believed that others must be seeing it that way, too. Like being on an ocean liner and looking out of one’s porthole as if that view was universal to all on the ship. Logically I knew better…but it takes time to step out of one’s “cabin” and see the world from another vantage point.

When I was an AM radio station manager, I met a man who had no thumbs. In a moment of idle conversation I asked him what it was like to not have thumbs. He politely responded that he wouldn’t know, as he had been born without them. (Duh.) A few years later I was enjoying the movie Gattaca and noted that the featured pianist had 6 fingers on each hand. I eventually laced these two events together into my “Digits” analogy and have used it when presenting training seminars to illustrate the fact that we know what we know. The purpose in so doing isn’t about fingers or toes but relative abilities.

Most of us know our age, height, weight, girth and perhaps even our IQ. These measurements in and of themselves don’t make us young or old, short or tall, fat or skinny, smart or stupid. Only when compared to a group of others do measurements take on some meaning. Attributes without measurement or comparison are perceived by most people as “normal.” How could I have possibly known that I was colorblind? How does one know they have an excellent ear for pitch? It’s natural to assume that one’s personal attributes are normal, unless there is some obvious input to the contrary.

So off to school we go and before long we are taking standardized tests and some of our previously unmeasured intellectual attributes are being assessed. And that’s part of the problem…because IQ wasn’t supposed to be a measure of ALL intellectual abilities, just those that might predict scholastic success. Got a high IQ? Boy, you MUST be smart!

What a tragedy!

The truth is that intelligence is multi-faceted and that there are many (just how many is up for debate) intellectual abilities that we possess in a range of relative strength or weakness, most of which are NOT measured by an IQ test. We are all “smart” or “stupid” when measuring individual intellectual abilities. Ironically, scientists are among those who perform very well on IQ tests and we shouldn’t be surprised at the evolution of IQ to the point of it becoming the defining measure of intelligence. What of creativity? What of kinetic behavior? Social skills? Street smarts? There are hundreds of different points of comparison when considering our traits.

Big deal.

Well, the big deal is that until those traits are measured we run the risk of being a 99th percentile person and just assuming we are a 50th percentile person. Would it make a difference in one’s life to find out that that thing they can do is a rare skill? Or maybe that they are in the 5th percentile and there is something they can do to improve that skill?

I think it does matter.

Dr. J.P. Guilford created his Structure of Intellect Model in the 60s and it has largely been ignored due to the complexity of the measurement process. In an era when computers filled entire rooms it didn’t make sense to try and implement his multi-intelligence tests with a large number of people. Today is a different story.

But that’s not what’s driving my push for Intunique! Rather, it’s the progress that scientists are making in understanding the brain and how it functions that is leading on a converging path with multiple-intelligence theory. And that’s cool.

So, kind reader, what are your intellectual strengths and weaknesses? What makes up your Intunique?

Stay tuned.

On our way to a family gathering yesterday I had the opportunity of chatting with my 2nd son about intellectual abilities, the structure of the mind, and spirituality in specific. For those non-parents out there, it must be difficult to fully understand the satisfaction that one can receive from having a conversation with an adult child (he’s 21). I’ve had the experience with my oldest son (24) on a number of occasions and this isn’t the first time that it has occurred with son #2. We just happened to be talking about spirituality and the theory that just as there are a range of intellectual abilities (Guilford) covering cognition, memory, creativity, kinetic behavior, etc., there are likely parts of the mind that govern what could be referred to as “spiritual” aspects. My Counseling Psychology PhD candidate wife reminded us that Gardner had also addressed Spiritual Intelligence, although my point was more along the thought that those who are naturally gifted at logical thinking often use and develop that part of the brain at the expense of their weaker spiritual aspects. We took a moment to discuss what has become the “religion of the Scientific Method” and how easy it is to ignore one’s spiritual abilities due to a desire to “prove” the “truth.” I’m sure I’ll address this topic again in a later post, but what was notable was my son’s interesting reaction to the conversation:

“Dad, I don’t want to be morbid, but if you die before I do, who am I going to be able to talk to about this type of thing?”

I hope he and I both get ample opportunity to spread the word about each person’s Intunique for many years to come! Science will continue to discover new and fascinating facts about how our minds operate and Psychologists will have to catch up to the new developments. And there will always be a place for some of us to try and interpret, synthesize and replay information about our nature that can provide additional insights as to who we are.

Over the past few years I have assembled a small library of books that relate to intelligence and creativity, usually purchased for a buck or two at the Provo Deseret Industries. In preparation for my upcoming workshops I am reviewing some materials from some of these well-known psychologists. Here are some notes from and thoughts about a book called Creativity by E. Paul Torrance, part of the Dimensions in Early Learning Series, Dimensions Publishing Co., San Rafael, California, 1969.

As Torrance’s book was part of a series addressing learning in young children, much of this small book (83 pgs) speaks to pre-schoolers and elementary school age concerns. However, Torrance is one of the recognized and oft-sited experts in the field of creativity and his ideas in this book can be distilled and applied to all ages.

In no particular order:

There are many ways to define creativity, as one might expect from anyone interested in the subject. (Think Divergent production.) “New order from chaos” is one that I like.

Creative people:
Are free to be conforming or non-conforming.
Are willing to try the difficult.
Prefer a calculated risk.
Have a tolerance for chaos & ambiguity.
Discard the irrelevant and produce new order from disorder.

The creative process can include:
Questioning, inquiring, searching, manipulating, experimenting, playing, guessing, testing, revisiting, retesting

Creative people return to familiar things and see them in a different way and in greater depth. They can abide silence and hesitation before responding. Are adept at physical manipulation of items and as such produce a greater number of ideas than those who aren’t. Absorbed thinking and dreaming are common, as are fantasy and role playing.

From Chukovsky (Russian psychologist): “Fantasy is the most valuable attribute of the human mind and should be diligently nurtured from earliest childhood.”

Children who produce greatest number of creative answers are also seen as producing wild or silly ideas, and possessing originality, humor and playfulness.

Those seen as being the most creative are not necessarily credited with being the most important member of a group nor are their ideas typically used. Studies indicated that by 6th grade the lesser creative members of a group had developed the ability to diminish the impact of the more creative members by consensus building, thereby frustrating and isolating the creative members.

Torrance relates some findings about family patterns of highly creative children from a 1961 study by Weisberg and Springer: “The family unit is not an overly close one, there is little clinging to one another. There is little stress on conformity to parental values. The marriage is not always a particularly “well-adjusted” one. There is open, and not always calm, expression of strong feelings. The father interacts strongly and positively with the child, and the mother also interacts strongly but is sometimes ambivalent in her maternal feelings. When the child regresses, the parents accept the behavior without great discomfort. The creative child is often an older sibling. He is not particularly favorite, however, there is no over-evaluation of his abilities by the parents. The father of the more creative children have greater occupational autonomy or independence than the fathers of their less creative peers.”

Yes…that was 1961, it was a small study of just 32 children, and the world has changed since then. I couldn’t help but think Orange-Green or Green-Orange (True Colors) when I read that paragraph.

Torrance also mentions a 1962 study by Goertzel and Goertzel of autobiographical data of 400 eminent people whom most others would regard as creative. “Many of them had opinionated parents, failure-prone fathers, dominating mothers but few dominating fathers. Some came from troubled homes while others came from relatively happy homes. Many of them experienced considerable agony during their childhood years, but persisted in developing their talents and skills in spite of almost every known type of adversity.”

Also, Catherine Cox Miles commented about her1926 study of historical geniuses that these 300 hundred people were outstanding at a young age and differed from average children most conspicuously in persistence, effort, self-confidence, and great strength and force of character.

Torrance: “In the upper range of intelligence there is practically no relationship between measures of intelligence and measures of creative thinking abilities.”

Being human, I suppose that I pulled the parts from Torrance’s book that supported what I already believed about creativity. I still believe that creativity is a function of our intellectual abilities (Guilford, Structure of Intellect) and can be enhanced through training, practice, and persistent effort. Yes, some are naturally more creative than others…but we can improve our creativity regardless of what degree we were born with.

As I have determined to play the student and seek out info here and there as related to intelligence and personality, my plan is to list some of the websites that I StumbleUpon along the way. This trek also leads me to some interesting sites, like Expressivo, nifty little site where one can type in anything that they would like to have read aloud. I first experienced this technology years ago with AppleTalk and I still get a smile out of hearing someone else tell me that I’m awesome, even if it’s not real. Warning: Check your speaker volume before you get too carried away.

I was very interested in BrainTypes in that it fits in with my ideas about brain wiring. Jonathan P. Niednagel has put together a system that plays off of the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator (MBTI) wherein he is able to categorize a person’s brain type by watching their physical movements. Niednagel has his own codes and names for his 16 brain types and on his site he lists them and their corresponding MBTI codes. While there are several methods for grouping us into one or another of 4 (nice chart here) or 16 (Keirsey, Socionics), my personal favorite is my own modification of Don Lowery’s True Colors. While I’m sure that Brain Types has some value, what caught my interest was the connection to physical movement as an extension of brain wiring, thought processing, and personality/temperament. This is part of my journey…to flesh out the idea that much of what we are and do is based on our brain wiring.

Another really interesting site that I found was focused on FACS (Facial Action Coding System). While I’m sure that the learning curve is steep and long, the idea that there are trained people out there who can discern the smallest facial movement and the underlying feeling. This kind of relates to my Intunique quest in that many of our facial actions are involuntary and it’s likely that personality/thought processes/brain wiring play a role in what is displayed in our faces.

Just for fun…American Sign Language displayed letter by letter.

I’ll admit to being at a fork in the road. One path leads to seminars and presentations about Intunique–our unique intellect and personality/temperament–and the other is a journey for additional knowledge. I’m leaning toward the latter in that there is soooooo much info on the internet that relates to IQ, intelligence, personality and temperament. Anyone who wants to know the basics can find them without any difficulty. As one might expect in a soft science topic, there are plenty of theories and programs that exist to help us understand intelligence, etc.

I have a few ideas that I want to flesh out that relate to intelligence and personality. The old Nature vs Nuture debate is taking on a new spin as we get better and better research into DNA and the workings of the human brain. My personal belief is that Nature creates the limits of our intelligence and Nuture (and experience) is what determines where we end up on that continuum. I’m a big fan of multiple intelligence theory as put forth by Dr. Joy Paul Guilford and take to heart his belief that there is another level of intellectual abilities up and above what he proposed in his Structure of Intellect model. I believe that what we will find is that there are higher intellectual abilities that are compounds of the basic intellectual abilities. I also believe that we will continue to learn more and more about the biological basis of personality and temperament and the correlations with specific intellectual abilities.

Therein is the decision…do I use my time and this space to relate the basics as I see them or to seek out and find existing and forthcoming research that address intelligence and personality? I can’t see a $ sign on either road and so the choice comes down to what motivates me the most…being another voice that guides others in a similar quest or a trailblazer of sorts who helps hack through the bushes and possibly discover something of value to myself and possibly others.

With machete in hand I turn and take a mighty swing…

Psychologists can’t agree on it. People make assumptions about it all the time. It is a very complex issue.

No one is just “smart” or “stupid.” Like most labels that are applied to human beings, these two describe aspects of a person, not the whole person. Smart at what? Stupid at what? High IQ? Low IQ? What are we really trying to say with these descriptors?

Does a smart person excel at every mental task? No. Multiple Intelligence theorists (Guilford, Gardner) split thinking/mental processing into different components. And since there is no absolute scale for “smartness”, our intelligence is relative to others’.

What objective measures of intelligence do most people use? IQ. Maybe school grades, which are actually measures of performance across a range of intellectual abilities and are skewed by values, interests and motivators. We don’t really have many widely used objective methods for determining one’s mental abilities.

Think about it this way. If someone is described as being physically strong, what are we talking about? Their arms? Legs? Chest? Back? Combinations of muscle groups? Is the strongest man the one that can dead lift the most weight? Is it possible for a strong man or woman to be weak in one of their muscle groups?

I believe that our minds operate like our muscles. We are born with a certain brain composition that provides the foundation of our relative strengths and weaknesses, our smarts and our stupids. External or environmental factors (injury, diet, etc.) can impact the development of our brain (or muscles.) Training and practice can improve our latent abilities, within a predetermined range.

How does one get stronger? One way is to exercise the specific muscle. Another way is to use the muscle in conjunction with other muscles on a regular basis. Is it likely that once adulthood has been reached that our muscles will increase in strength without regular use? No, it may in fact atrophy and decline into weakness. So, if our brains work under a similar principle, then regular use or specific exercise should improve our mental abilities. The challenge comes in when we try and isolate a specific mental ability. Want to become more creative? Trying to improve your memory? Want to think more logically? Even these are brain “groups” rather than individual intellectual abilities.

Think about “smart” people you know that can’t read a map, make stick figures for drawings, or can’t remember where they parked their car. A few minutes of thought will verify that you already understand this principle relating to intelligence. It may take longer to identify your own mental strengths and weaknesses. And once you do, what next? I like to ask people what they would do if they found out that they had a mental strength that was in the 99.999 percentile. Would they feel smarter? Would they seek ways to take advantage of it?

I guess it depends on how smart they are.

For the past several years (off and on) I have had the opportunity of working with models of personality typing/temperament and intelligence. As a result, I’ve become very aware of how each of us is multi-faceted, replete with strengths and weaknesses, unique individuals that have tremendous untapped potential, buried deep in the ignorance of one’s own brilliance.

To a programmer the term intunique refers to an unique integer, a useful tool for creating formulas. I’m hi-jacking the term for my own use and defining it as that unique intelligence that we all possess. Turn it around a bit and you get intunique.

Most of my background with multiple intelligence theory can be traced to Dr. Joy Paul Guilford’s Structure of Intellect. I admire Dr. Guilford’s perseverance in developing his theory, especially given the limited computing power that he had available. Much to the chagrin of his devotees, I think he missed a few points here and there and I have my own spin on them.

The same holds true for the personality typing system that I like to teach. Its pedigree includes Don Lowery’s True Colors, which owes much to David Kiersey, the Myers-Briggs duo, and Jung. I’ve changed Don’s approach here and there to fit my view on things.

The entries in this blog will generally be about intelligence, personality, or our intunique. Over time I hope to publish some tests and exercises that will help people see themselves (and others) in a new light.