A KEY
Cinemorphic/Creative - Play Intelligence can be used to formulate and amplify other forms of intelligence, because the practitioner can write one or more of the other forms into their new character script and then consciously develop it/them via the various Cinemorphic techniques. Cinemorphics can be the stage, the playing field, upon which the “New Forms of Intelligence Game” can be re-framed and played out.
FORMS OF INTELLIGENCE
(All of the forms are important for Cinemorphics but, particularly Narrative, Play and Creative…see below)
First, Howard Gardner’s categories…
The Nine Types of Intelligence
By Howard Gardner
1. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”)
Designates the human ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef. It is also speculated that much of our consumer society exploits the naturalist intelligences, which can be mobilized in the discrimination among cars, sneakers, kinds of makeup, and the like.
2. Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”)
Musical intelligence is the capacity to discern pitch, rhythm, timbre, and tone. This intelligence enables us to recognize, create, reproduce, and reflect on music, as demonstrated by composers, conductors, musicians, vocalist, and sensitive listeners. Interestingly, there is often an affective connection between music and the emotions; and mathematical and musical intelligences may share common thinking processes. Young adults with this kind of intelligence are usually singing or drumming to themselves. They are usually quite aware of sounds others may miss.
3. Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (Number/Reasoning Smart)
Logical-mathematical intelligence is the ability to calculate, quantify, consider propositions and hypotheses, and carry out complete mathematical operations. It enables us to perceive relationships and connections and to use abstract, symbolic thought; sequential reasoning skills; and inductive and deductive thinking patterns. Logical intelligence is usually well developed in mathematicians, scientists, and detectives. Young adults with lots of logical intelligence are interested in patterns, categories, and relationships. They are drawn to arithmetic problems, strategy games and experiments.
4. Existential Intelligence
Sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence, such as the meaning of life, why do we die, and how did we get here.
5. Interpersonal Intelligence (People Smart”)
Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand and interact effectively with others. It involves effective verbal and nonverbal communication, the ability to note distinctions among others, sensitivity to the moods and temperaments of others, and the ability to entertain multiple perspectives. Teachers, social workers, actors, and politicians all exhibit interpersonal intelligence. Young adults with this kind of intelligence are leaders among their peers, are good at communicating, and seem to understand others’ feelings and motives.
6. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”)
Bodily kinesthetic intelligence is the capacity to manipulate objects and use a variety of physical skills. This intelligence also involves a sense of timing and the perfection of skills through mind–body union. Athletes, dancers, surgeons, and craftspeople exhibit well-developed bodily kinesthetic intelligence.
7. Linguistic Intelligence (Word Smart)
Linguistic intelligence is the ability to think in words and to use language to express and appreciate complex meanings. Linguistic intelligence allows us to understand the order and meaning of words and to apply meta-linguistic skills to reflect on our use of language. Linguistic intelligence is the most widely shared human competence and is evident in poets, novelists, journalists, and effective public speakers. Young adults with this kind of intelligence enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing crossword puzzles.
8. Intra-personal Intelligence (Self Smart”)
Intra-personal intelligence is the capacity to understand oneself and one’s thoughts and feelings, and to use such knowledge in planning and directioning one’s life. Intra-personal intelligence involves not only an appreciation of the self, but also of the human condition. It is evident in psychologist, spiritual leaders, and philosophers. These young adults may be shy. They are very aware of their own feelings and are self-motivated.
9. Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”)
Spatial intelligence is the ability to think in three dimensions. Core capacities include mental imagery, spatial reasoning, image manipulation, graphic and artistic skills, and an active imagination. Sailors, pilots, sculptors, painters, and architects all exhibit spatial intelligence. Young adults with this kind of intelligence may be fascinated with mazes or jigsaw puzzles, or spend free time drawing or daydreaming.
OTHER FORMS…
Emotional Intelligence
In 1983, Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences[9] introduced the idea that traditional types of intelligence, such as IQ, fail to fully explain cognitive ability. He introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included both interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people) and intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations).[10]
The first use of the term "emotional intelligence" is usually attributed to Wayne Payne's doctoral thesis, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence from 1985.[11][citation needed] The first published use of 'EQ' (Emotional Quotient) seems to be by Keith Beasley in 1987 in an article in the British Mensa magazine.[12] However, prior to this, the term "emotional intelligence" had appeared in Beldoch (1964),[13] Leuner (1966).[14] Stanley Greenspan (1989) also put forward an EI model, followed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1989).[15] The distinction between trait emotional intelligence and ability emotional intelligence was introduced in 2000.[16]
However, the term became widely-known with the publication of Goleman's Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ[17] (1995). It is to this book's best-selling status that the term can attribute its popularity.[18][19] Goleman has followed up with several further popular publications of a similar theme that reinforce use of the term.[20][21][22][23][24] Goleman's publications are self help books that are non-academic in nature.[25]
To date, tests measuring EI have not replaced IQ tests as a standard metric of intelligence.
Narrative Intelligence
Narrative intelligence is the ability (or tendency) to perceive, know, think, feel, explain one's experience and influence reality through the use of stories and narrative forms.
The Power of Story - The Story Paradigm
In the field of co-intelligence, stories are more than dramas people tell or read. Story, as a pattern, is a powerful way of organizing and sharing individual experience and exploring and co-creating shared realities. It forms one of the underlying structures of reality, comprehensible and responsive to those who possess what we call narrative intelligence. Our psyches and cultures are filled with narrative fields of influence, or story fields, which shape the awareness and behavior of the individuals and collectives associated with them.
Non-Dual Intelligence
Non-dual intelligence is the ability to perceive, know, think, feel, explain one's experience and influence reality through via the non-dual realization.
Play Intelligence
James Findlay
Play intelligence is best understood from a position of unlearning what we already know about play and intelligence. Our knowledge about these two concepts may be advanced, normal, or mere opinion. But in all cases, as adults, in learning something new, we need to free up previously “learned” knowledge, opinions, habits, emotions, cultural distortions etc, so that we have the “open” space to understand something new.
The theory defines intelligence in a manner which will radically challenge our world view. Furthermore, it informs educational researchers and the general public of the importance of play.This is the only concrete model in the world which demonstrates the relationship between play and intelligence called “The Meta model”. Pioneering and innovative new research into Play Intelligence may turn out to be the most important theory on intelligence yet.
The Theory of Play Intelligence explains and demonstrates:
- The building blocks behind play, intelligence, and human abilities.
- The science of play and intelligence.
- The importance of play for improving many of the brains functions.
- The importance of playing with our newborn child.
- How to improve human abilities.
- Why it is important to introduce or reintroduce play in schools.
- Learn to create play in different environments.
- Effective ways in solving problems.
- How to play with stress in stressful environments.
- The higher values of play.
- How to learn, and increase memory.
- how to tap inner human resources to improve our lives.
- How to improve intelligence.
Play Intelligence:
- Shows the general scientific relationship of play and intelligence
- Confirms the recent play research on neuroscience and the brain.
- Explains the importance of the “code of play” between mother and infant.
- Demonstrates the relationship of play to human abilities.
- Gives meaning to the influence of play in education, society and culture.
- Provides a series of examples of how to play under stressful situations.
- Explains how to meta communicate with their environment.
- Outlines how to contact the essential element of play within oneself and others.
- Explains the interconnectedness of play in thoughts, emotion, and environment.
- Creates a new world view of intelligence and play.
Creative Intelligence (Bruce Nussbaum)
The book…pub. March 2013
Offering insights from the spheres of anthropology, psychology, education, design, and business, Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, a leading thinker, commentator, and curator on the subjects of design, creativity, and innovation, is first book to identify and explore creative intelligence as a new form of cultural literacy and as a powerful method for problem-solving, driving innovation, and sparking start-up capitalism.
Nussbaum investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their creative intelligence — CQ—and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. Ultimately, Creative Intelligence shows how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original and highly social.
Smart and eye opening, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire illustrates how to connect our creative output with a new type of economic system, Indie Capitalism, where creativity is the source of value, where entrepreneurs drive growth, and where social networks are the building blocks of the economy.
Nussbaum, teacher, journalist, and editor, began covering design and innovation in the 1990s and indicates he and others in the first decade of the twentieth century moved beyond “design thinking” to explore creativity. Listening to his students prompted him to consider creativity “as something you might train for, as a skill that could be accessed.” Advising the need for “a new way of thinking, communicating, and creating,” the author offers “Five Competencies of Creative Intelligence,” which include “Knowledge Mining,” or using our own experiences and aspirations to envision new companies and technologies; “Framing,” or being aware of our own view of the world so that we can compare it to the views of others; and “Playing,” because Nussbaum suggests a playful mindset leads to a willingness to take risks, explore more options, and navigate through uncertainty without fearing failure. He concludes, “The biggest challenge we face is our own fear of creativity . . . . We can all be creative.” Thought-provoking insight on the important topic of creativity. --Mary Whaley
The truth about talent: Can genius be learned or is it preordained?
As children sit their GCSE exams, Matthew Syed argues that we are foolish to believe excellence is only for the few
Friday 06 May 2011
The ideas of Darwin have made an almost total conquest of modern consciousness. The theory of natural selection; the idea that individuals fail or flourish by virtue of inherited characteristics, has been a triumph, commanding the assent of both scientists and laymen alike.
But Darwinism, in a process almost too imperceptible to notice, has shaded into a rather different, but no less dramatic, proposition.
It is the idea that heredity not only explains the variation in such simple traits as height, eye colour and the like, but also the vast differences we see in mathematical, scientific, sporting and musical prowess. It is the view that excellence hinges, in large part, on the right genetic inheritance.
Talent is the word we use to rationalise this idea; the notion that brilliant mathematicians, scientists, sportsmen and musicians are born with excellence encoded in their DNA.
It is an idea that seems to follow naturally from the tenets of Darwin, but is also bolstered by the evidence of our own senses.
When we see a great golfer hitting a 200-yard fade or a maths whizz mentally processing a multi-digit calculation, we infer that they must have been blessed with skills way beyond our own. It boils down to the assertion that excellence is reserved for a select group of individuals; winners in a genetic lottery that passed the rest of us by.
But what if this seductive idea is all wrong? What if our deepest assumptions about success in education and sport – indeed, in life itself – are misconceived? What if talent is not just a meaningless concept, but a corrosive one; robbing ourselves and our children of the incentive to work hard and excel?
This is a particularly pertinent question right now with GCSE exams just weeks away. Could it be that the very idea of talent is holding back our children and damaging performance not just in exams, but in school generally?
Could it be that we need to debunk the talent myth, in order to fulfil our potential and that of our children?
After all, what is talent? We certainly think we know it when we see it. As the director of a violin school put it: "Talent is something a top coach can spot in young musicians that marks them out as destined for greatness."
But how does the director know that this performer, who looks so gifted, hasn't had many hours of special training behind the scenes?
How does he know that the initial differences in ability between this youngster and the rest will persist over years of practice? In fact, he doesn't, as many studies have demonstrated.
A ground-breaking investigation of British musicians, for example, found that the top performers had learnt no faster than those who reached lower levels of attainment. Hour after hour, the various groups improved at almost identical rates. The difference was simply that top performers had practiced for more hours. Further research has shown that when top performers seem to possess an early gift for music, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home by their parents.
Precisely the same insight is revealed by looking at child prodigies; boys and girls who reach world class levels of performance in their teens. At first sight, they seem to have been blessed with amazing skills; abilities that have enabled them to take a shortcut to eminence. But a closer inspection reveals a very different story.
Tiger Woods, for example, was considered a miracle golfer when he became the youngest-ever winner of the US Masters in 1997.
"The most talented player of all time," was one assessment. But now consider that Woods was given a golf club five days before his first birthday; that by the age of two he had played his first round; that by five he had accumulated more hours of practice than most of us achieve in a lifetime.
Far from being a golfer zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practise, Woods is someone who embodies the rigours of practice.
The same insights apply to mathematical "prodigies".
Rudiger Gamm, a German able to find the quotient of two primes to 60 decimal places, was once described as a "walking miracle" by one science magazine. But now consider that Gamm devotes his life to maths; that he practises for at least four hours every day; that he relentlessly and obsessively learns number facts and procedures.
His excellence is not hardwired – it emerged through practice.
The illusion of talent arises because we only see a tiny proportion of the work that goes into the construction of virtuosity. If we were to examine the incalculable hours of practice; the thousands of baby steps taken by world-class performers to get to the top, the skills would not seem quite so mystical or so inborn. Indeed, extensive research has shown that there is not a top performer in any complex task who has bypassed the 10 years of hard work necessary to reach the top.
So, does this imply that "ordinary" people could perform amazing feats with sufficient practice?
Could those who flunked maths O-Level really compute multi-digit calculations like Gamm?
As long ago as 1896, Alfred Binet – a French psychologist – performed an experiment to find out. He compared two calculating prodigies with two cashiers from a department store in Paris. The cashiers had an average of 14 years' experience in the store, but had showed no early gift for maths.
Binet gave the prodigies and the cashiers identical three- and four-digit multiplication problems and compared the time taken to solve them.
What happened? You guessed it: the best cashier was faster than either prodigy for both problems. In other words, practice, on its own, was sufficient to bring "perfectly normal" people up to and beyond the remarkable speed of prodigies. The conclusion is inescapable. As Professor Brian Butterworth of UCL, the world's foremost expert on mathematical expertise, has put it: "There is no evidence for differences in innate specific capacities for mathematics."
None of this is to deny the notion of heredity or the principles of Darwinism. The evidence shows that some kids start out better than others, whether at maths, English, golf, whatever. But, the key point is that, as the number of hours devoted to practise escalates, so the relevance of these initial differences melts away. Why? Because, over time, and with the right kind of practice, we change so much.
It is not just the body that changes, but the anatomy of the brain. A study of London taxi drivers, for example, discovered that the area of the brain governing spatial navigation is substantially larger than for non-taxi drivers, but it did not start out like this; it developed with time on the job. Similarly, maths prodigies do not just use conventional neural networks when making calculations. They also use a system of the brain implicated in episodic memory (this is the immensely powerful memory used to store autobiographical experiences).
In the ancient world, when our ancestors had little time for anything beyond the minute-to-minute demands of survival, heredity mattered a lot.
Today, where it is not only possible, but often obligatory to devote half a lifetime to a specific but complex area of expertise, heredity matters less and less. Specialisation has been the game changer, but our ideas about success remain in the ancient past.
It is how hard we work and the opportunities we are gifted which determine excellence.
None of this would matter terribly much if the question of talent was merely theoretical. But it is so much more than that. It influences the way we think, feel and engage with our world.
It determines almost everything, from the way we respond to challenges to the way we react to failure.
To see how, consider someone who believes excellence is all about talent (labelled the "fixed mindset"). Why would she bother to work hard?
If she has the right genes, won't she just cruise to the top? And if she lacks talent, well, why bother at all? And who can blame a youngster for this attitude, given the premise?
If, on the other hand, she really believes that effort trumps talent (labelled the "growth mindset"), she will damn well persevere. She will not see failure as an indictment, but as an opportunity to adapt and grow. And, if she is right, she will eventually excel.
What a young person decides about the nature of talent, then, could scarcely be more important.
Think how often you hear people (particularly youngsters) saying: "I lack the brain for numbers," or "I don't have the coordination for sports." These are direct manifestations of the fixed mindset and they destroy motivation. Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, do not regard their abilities as set in genetic stone. These are the people who approach tasks with gusto. "I may not be good at maths now, but if I work hard, I will be really good in the future!"
So, how do we orient ourselves and our children to the growth mindset?
How do we unlock the power of motivation, particularly with exams around the corner? A few years ago, Carol Dweck, a leading psychologist, took 400 students and gave them a simple puzzle. Afterwards, each of the students were given six words of praise.
Half were praised for intelligence: "Wow, you must be really smart." The other half were praised for effort: "Wow, you must be hard-working." Dweck was seeking to test if these words could make a difference to the student's mindsets. The results were remarkable. After the first test, the students were given a choice of whether to take a hard or an easy test. A full two-thirds praised for intelligence chose the easy task: they did not want to risk losing their "smart" label. But 90 per cent of the effort-praised group chose the tough test: they wanted to prove just how hard working they were. Then, the experiment gave the students a chance to take a test of equal difficulty to the first test. What happened?
The group praised for intelligence showed a 20 per cent decline in performance, compared with the first test, even though it was no harder. But the effort-praised group increased their score by 30 per cent: failure had actually spurred them on.
And all these differences turned on the difference in six simple words spoken after the very first test.
"These were some of the clearest findings I've seen," Dweck said. "Praising children's intelligence harms motivation and it harms performance."
It is not difficult to figure out why. It is because intelligence-based praise orients the receiver towards the fixed mindset; it suggests to them that intelligence is of primary importance rather than the effort through which intelligence can be transformed. This reveals a radical new approach to the way we engage with children and each other: that we should praise effort, not talent; that we should teach kids to see challenges as learning opportunities rather than threats; that we should emphasise how abilities can be transformed. Experiments have shown that when parents and teachers adopt this approach – and stick to it – the results are remarkable.
This is particularly important with exams looming. With the motivation that emerges from a belief in the power of practise, youngsters can really boost exam performance. In an experiment at Stanford University, for example, students were encouraged towards the growth mindset in a workshop.
At the end of term, these students earned significantly higher grades than the control group.
The key thing is to keep striving. As Thomas Edison put it: "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward".
It is a message that should be stapled to the wall of every school in the country.
'Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice' by Matthew Syed is published by 4th Estate
