[MUSIC] As we saw in our previous session, there is a problem if we equate genius and intelligence. If we measure genius by an IQ test. The IQ test proves to be too limited. That point of course was famously made by my friend professor Howard Gardner at the Harvard School of Education way back in the 1980s. Professor Gardner has written a number of great books on the topic of the mind and intelligence, as you can see on the screen there. But he is most famous for being the first to articulate a broad typology of intelligence simply called Multiple Intelligences MQ's. According to Gardner's model, there are eight of them as you can see by the next slide. Mathematical intelligence, verbal intelligence, visual, kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and naturalistic. These are not a genius types but rather types of personal skills or aptitudes. Let's work through them in order with some examples. Mathematical-logical, Here we find mathematicians, physical scientists, statisticians and economists. People who used or use quantitative skills every day such as Albert Einstein, Ada Lovelace and Stephen Hawking. Verbal-linguistic, great writers and perhaps great orators. I'm thinking here of the pros and nonfiction fields and will get to the novelist in a moment. I know Shakespeare wrote mostly fiction but his use of the english language is so overwhelming he can't be excluded from the category of those with verbal linguistic intelligence. Virginia Woolf was also a great writer of nonfiction and so was politician Winston Churchill. Which of these three linguistic geniuses, Shakespeare, Wolf or Churchill won a Nobel prize for literature? Winston Churchill. Visual-spatial obviously, here we have painters as you can see on the screen as well as sculptors, fashion designers and architects. Bodily-kinesthetic, dancers and choreographers such as Martha grammar here, but also actors like Meryl Streep and Daniel Day Lewis. Who use facial expressions and body language to convey emotions when tied to social issues such as civil rights. A powerful performance seen by millions can change societal thinking. Musical, not only Mozart and Beethoven of course, but also the Beatles, Lin Maranda and Kanye West. Someone like West Bridges categories because of the introspective nature of their rap poetry. Intrapersonal, I believe that Howard Gardner originally called this intrapsychic personal the capacity to evaluate one's own psychic state. Perhaps, the capacity to imagine being inside the mind of another. Again, Shakespeare could imagine the minds of others better than anyone. Almost all novelists among many, I could just pick Nobel prize winners, Toni Morrison for example, they do this particularly well, as do analysts and psychologists such as the famous Sigmund Freud. Interpersonal, here, I would include political leaders like King and Gandhi, societal transformers like Nobel peace prize winner Mother Teresa. And possibly military leaders like Napoleon and Eisenhower who had the capacity to organize and motivate the troops. With interpersonal, we entered the realm of EQ an Emotional Quotient. Empathy with other people, the capacity to read other people, and to perhaps to motivate and lead them. Finally, naturalist intelligence. This was a category Gardner thought of late in the game and added it as a late entry eight category. Those with a capacity for exceptional observation in the biological sciences. Naturalist intelligence allows us to value geniuses such as biologist Charles Darwin, anthropologist Jane Goodall and Nobel winning microbiologist, Jennifer Dowd. But the important point is this IQ tests measure only the first two of these multiple intelligences. But how do you test for other intelligence? Can we test for creativity, for example? Well, there are creativity tests called divergent thinking tests. They begin to probe one's capacity for combining disparate concepts which goes to the very heart of the creative process of creative thinking. Here are a couple of examples of questions from a creativity or divergent thinking test. For each of the figures you are given, draw another more elaborate figure, incorporating what you see in the box. Here's one possibility. I think you'd have to be rather creative to think of such elaborate drawings. Here are some verbal thinking problems. The first ask you to link disparate things. Start with the top group, group 1. Common word here is ball. Now, the bottom group, group 2. The linking word is bird producing birdcage, snowbird and birddog. The second type of test challenges you're an illogical imagination. The more uses you can think of for a brick or for a paper clip, the more creative you are deemed to be. Well, these sorts of divergent thinking tests embrace a larger spectrum of human intellect and creativity. But how would you test for perseverance? Test someone like Darwin, send them sailing around the world and tell them to come back in five years, we don't have time. How would you test for the capacity to deal with failure? Give everyone a test and fail to see how they react. Every genius has to deal with failure. Einstein never did come up with a way to prove his hypothesis of a unified field across all matter in the universe. Edison failed more than 10,000 times before finding the perfect substance for the filament of a light bulb, carbonized bamboo. But he said quote, I haven't failed, I have simply found 10,000 things that don't work, end quote. In her 2008 commencement address at Harvard University JK Rowling, who has sold more books than any other writer in human history, extolled the virtues of failure. And emphasized the importance of the imagination and of passion in life. At her website, she has listed five personal qualities necessary to succeed as a writer, curiosity, self discipline, resilience, courage, and independence. If those personal enablers seem important to a genius like Rowling, why not construct a test to measure them. But this would require a far more expansive sort of college admission test than the SAT. In the US, or the Gaoqiao that's used in china. Instead of the limited SAT test, we need a more expansive Genius Aptitude Test, we'll call it the GAT, GAT. The GAT would come with subsections resulting in scores called MQ's, Multiple Quotient. Among them, the PAT Passion Aptitude Tests, the CAT, Curiosity Aptitude Tests, the SCAT Self Confidence Aptitude Test, the FAT Failure Aptitude Test and the WHAT Work Hard Aptitude Test. Sounds strange and far fetched but coming up with a more flexible, nuanced and holistic test, assaying multiple queues for admission to college is going on at this moment in the State University of California system and elsewhere. Up to this point, we have been talking only about tests, tests which are finished in a couple of hours. But what do we use to evaluate performance, future success and or genius? That happens over a long haul, over a long period? Well, we have courses and we have grades. All students through high school and university and even through graduate schools, receive a grade at the end of the course. Courses usually last anywhere from a month to four months. Our grades a better predictor of success and or genius than IQ scores in the SAT. Grades would seem to be a better measure of things because they assay a person's capacity for hard work, perseverance, the capacity to learn from failure. But even grade point averages can be inaccurate indicators because they don't factor in the degree of difficulty of a course, or the extent to which a course takes a student out of their comfort zone. Jack Ma knows this. Today, Jack Ma is the most successful and best known among Chinese entrepreneurs, but Ma didn't do well on standardized tests. On his first taking of the math portion of the Gaoqiao. Out of 120 questions, he answered only one, I repeat one correctly. On the second taking of the test, he upped his score, but only to 19 of 120, on the third try he passed. Maybe this explains the skepticism of Ma, the archetype of the entrepreneurial genius about numerical scores and grades. As he once told his son, quote, you don't need to be in the top three in your class, being in the middle is fine so long as your grades aren't too bad, only this kind of person has enough free time to learn other skills, end quote. That would seem to be true so long as you are curious and a hard worker. Jack Ma's skepticism about getting straight A's or first or honors in the British system of education, is shared by the Wharton Business School professor Adam Grant, who's written several thought provoking books on creative thinking. Grant has said quote, academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills or social emotional and political intelligence. Yes. Straight A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is really about finding the right solution to a problem, it's more about finding the right problem to solve end quote. Again, finding the right solution to a problem is essentially what goes on an IQ test. By implication, Grant seems skeptical about the uniform predictability of both grades and standardized testing. Most geniuses and certainly most geniuses in the distant past, most geniuses didn't go to college Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison hundreds of other geniuses. They learn everything pretty much on their own. And for those who did get a formal college education, males like Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson, we don't know what grades they received. We only have grades for geniuses for more modern times from the second half of the 20th century onwards. How well did our geniuses do? Well, a mixed performance here. Some were stars and some were not, among the stars Marie Curry top in her class at age 17. Sigmund Freud, summa **** laude of his high school and Robert Oppenheimer's, summa **** laude at Harvard with the highest honors than ever awarded. Jeff Bezos was summa **** laude at Princeton. On the other hand, Charles Darwin's early academic record was so poor that his father predicted that he would become a disgrace to his family. Winston Churchill was such a dismal student at Prestigious Harrow school that he marched absolute last, dead last in his class and the entire school at public processions. Churchill admitted that, quote, where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or could not learn, end quote. The aforementioned JK Rowling, confessed to, quote, a dismal lack of motivation at university, her undistinguished record. The result of, quote, spending far too long in the coffee bar, writing stories and far too little time in lectures, end quote. In 1900, Albert Einstein graduated 4th in a class of five physicists at the Zurich Polytechnical Institute. Steven Jobs headed GPA in high school of 2.65, Thomas Edison proudly proclaimed, I didn't graduate at the head of my class, I graduated at the foot, actually, didn't graduate at all. Most notably Pablo Picasso, quote, displayed according to a childhood friend, displayed only the profoundist indifference to formal education especially towards words and numbers. He wanted only to scribble on all the papers on which he could lay his hands, end quote. As to quantitative ability, some minds see the world differently. Picasso saw symbolic numbers as literal representations, a two as the wing of a bird or a zero as a body. Both standardized tests and grading, would have failed to identify all such geniuses. Obviously, the problem with standardized testing and to a lesser degree with grading is that it results in too many false positive high scores such as the louis term in kids with the very high IQ's, who ultimately disappoint. And too many false negatives, those who are initially overlooked, like Churchill, Rowling, Picasso and Darwin. But for reasons we will go into managed to make good. So, if it's not test scores and grades alone, which metrics will allow us to predict and encourage exceptional accomplishment? Let's turn to a guest to help us answer this question.
