You may wonder if anyone can put together singular links, or if certain people are better at it than others. Spoiler alert, yes, anyone can. However, since there are many different kinds of brains, some people are better at making certain types of connections than others.
Harold Gardner, developmental psychologist, researcher, and educator, formulated the theory of multiple intelligences, which has some things to say about the topic. According to Gardner, people have different ways of processing information and different ways of understanding the world. Diverse minds possess diverse intelligences.
Gardner identified eight types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.
If you consider the minds of the people you know, you’ll be able to see examples of this empirically. One person may be a natural with numbers; another is an intuitive athlete; one can navigate physical places as if guided by an internal GPS; another can make musical sounds out of any object they encounter.
Different people have different ways of seeing things, different ways of interpreting what they see, and different ways of interacting with the world around them. What one person considers tremendously difficult, another sees it as a piece of cake, and vise versa.
Any person’s mind will possess multiple types of intelligence in varying degrees. Some areas may be highly developed while others are completely lacking. Importantly, these types of intelligence are not mutually exclusive.
A useful paradigm may be to think of each category of intelligence on a scale of zero to ten, with each existing independently of the others. So, for instance, your brother the gym teacher may score an eight in bodily/kinesthetic intelligence, six in interpersonal intelligence, five in spacial intelligence, etc.
This may go a long way to explaining why he always seems to clash with your uncle at holiday gatherings, who scores much lower in those areas and higher in others. If each of their minds were represented as a circle on a Venn diagram, the two circles would hardly overlap at all. In your family example, Thanksgiving awkwardness stems from neurodiveristy.
Different minds make different types of connections. An individual with high linguistic intelligence may effortlessly link words to form puns, poems, and prose. Someone with high spacial intelligence may connect design elements to create unique structures. Interpersonal intelligence may allow someone to recognize social dynamics and connect relationships between different parties, making that person an excellent negotiator. Someone who has high intrapersonal intelligence understands her own emotions, thoughts, motivations, and feelings.
Importantly, we’re not just talking about different types of intelligence. We’re also considering how different combinations can allow different types to complement one other. For instance, think of how the architect with highly developed spacial and interpersonal intelligence instinctively understands how a public space could facilitate large amounts of traffic, or how the artist with high linguistic and musical intelligence could become a crafty songsmith.
But Gardner is just one of several researchers who have categorized different cognitive styles. Another is Temple Grandin, the scientist, animal behaviorist, and subject of the eponymous television film. Grandin identifies three different types of thikers: visual, pattern, and verbal. Additionally, within the visual thinkers, she notes there are object visualizers and spacial visualizers.
Object visualizers have a keen ability to notice and recall intricate details of objects. Think of two people who visit a place together, and later one of them remembers ten times as many characteristics as the other. That’s the object visualizer.
Spacial visualizers think primarily in terms of relationships and configurations. Their affinity leans more towards dynamics and systems. They are quick to learn how parts fit together to make the whole machine run.
Like Gardner, Grandin suggests that cerebral processes include ranges of development in different categories. Rarely do they include hyper-development of one area at the expense of all others.
However, such people considered to be savants do come along once in a very long while. Consider the blind British pianist Derek Paravicini. He has shown an ungodly ability to replicate extremely complex musical pieces after hearing them just once. Not only could he play the pieces in their entirety, but he could also play the different parts as they were performed by the different instruments in an ensemble. Again, all this after hearing the piece just once.
Yet despite his musical abilities — after all, he can sing songs with perfect pitch — he has extreme learning difficulties and challenges in language and verbal communication.
Coming back to the question of singular links, Derek Paravicini’s mind may be uniquely gifted at spotting connections in music. At the same time, he would probably be less effective spotting connections in the domains of linguistics, spatial relations, interpersonal or intrapersonal dynamics and elsewhere. That’s just not how his brain is wired. Different finds for different minds.