As most readers know, I have not worked actively on “MI theory” for many years. And yet, it is very often on my mind and I try to monitor scientific findings that are relevant to the theory.
I am a regular reader of Science, the premier scientific journal in the United States. In a recent issue (7/31/20), there were actually three articles that are relevant to the theory.
“Inside the Paleolithic Mind”
A tool made 1.75 million years ago represented a technological breakthrough. The author infers that the maker, homo erectus, devised a distinctive flaking technique that allowed him (or her) to butcher animal carcasses with precision.
MI Implication: Spatial and bodily intelligence (emerging a million years before human language)“Autobiographical Subnetworks”
There are nine subnetworks within the default-mode network that deal with autobiographical memory and other types of internally oriented cognition.
MI Implication: Intrapersonal intelligence, clearly a distinct area of cognition“This Man Can Read Letters But Numbers Are A Blank”
A patient with brain damage was able to read regular prose but could not read numbers, though he was still able to do mental arithmetic and perform other mathematical operations.This case brought me back to my earlier work in neurology and neuropsychology, where we observed the dissociation between reading numbers and words. (See The Shattered Mind: The Person after Brain Damage).
MI Implication: Linguistic intelligence is dissociated from logical-mathematical intelligence
In my 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, I describe the development of MI theory, while conceding that it is certainly not the final word in the study of intellect. But neither, I emphasize, can those who posit a single kind of intelligence explain these dissociations—psychological, neurological, and chronological.