Spatial Intelligence Quotes

The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm.

[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence” go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.

Cheng Xin gazed up at the giant black columns reaching into space. They lifted up the domed sky and seemed to turn the universe into a Palace of Death. Is this the ultimate end for everything? In the sky, Cheng Xin could see the end of the columns. She pointed in that direction. “So the ships entered lightspeed at the end?” “That’s right. These are only about a hundred kilometers high. We’ve seen columns even shorter than these, presumably left by ships that entered lightspeed almost instantaneously.” “Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?” “Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers.” “Zero-Homers?” “They’re also called Resetters. Maybe they’re a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don’t know exactly who they are, but we’ve confirmed their existence. The Zero-Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden.” “How?” “By moving the hour hand of the clock past twelve. Take spatial dimensions as an example. It’s practically impossible to drag a universe in lower dimensions back into higher dimensions, so maybe it’s better to work forward in the other direction. If the universe can be lowered into zero dimensions and then beyond, the clock might be reset and everything returned to the beginning. The universe might possess ten macroscopic dimensions again.

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.

As Kiefer et al. note, again in an insult to clear languaging, “The capture of visuo-spatial attention by unconscious stimuli likewise was shown to depend on the match between the stimulus feathers and a fitting top-down search template.”17 In other words, some things have to be believed to be seen or, another way of putting it: if you assume something is not there, then, to you, it won’t be.

Matter and mind have this in common, that certain superficial agitations of matter are expressed in our minds, superficially, in the form of sensations; and on the other hand, the mind, in order to act upon the body, must descend little by little toward matter and become spatialized. It follows that the intelligence, although turned toward external things, can still be exerted on things internal, provided that it does not claim to plunge too deeply.

Interestingly, attentional override can also occur without actually focusing the eyes on a single object; you can do it just as well with what some people call luminous eyes, or soft-focused (peripheral-like) vision. It is not necessary to look directly at something to see more deeply into it. As gating researcher Martin Eimer notes . . . Attention can be voluntarily directed to specific objects and locations within the spatial field independent of overt eye movements. Stimuli at attended-to locations are detected with higher speed and accuracy as compared to stimuli presented outside the attentional focus.9

SOMETIMES ON A PORCH in June, a girl begins to plunk her banjo; and after a spell of stillness, while the sound travels down their ear crinkles into their inmost feeling-chambers, the music starts to dance the people passing by. They toss like puppets on a bouncing sheet; like boys without a boat; they swing like weeds in the wind; they leap heptangularly about, dancing eccentric saltarellos, discovering that their springs are not so rusty. For even if you have built masterful aspen castles in your mind, have toppled whole forests to throttle the writhing elements into a liveably serene personal pond; if you have longtime sculled your ingenious fins to withstand the tumble-crazy currents; there is music that will dissolve your anchors, your sanctuaries, floating you off your feet, fetching you away with itself. And then you are a migrant, and then you are amuck; and then you are the music’s toy, juggled into its furious torrents, jostled into its foamy jokes, assuming its sparklyblue or greenweedy or brownmuddy tinges, being driven down to the dirgy bottom where rumble-clacking stones are lit by waterlogged and melancholy sunlight, warping back up to the surface, along with yew leaves and alewives and frog bones and other strange acquisitions snagged and rendered willy-nilly by the current, straggling away on its rambling cadenzas, with ever-changing sights—freckled children on the bank, chicken choirs, brewing thunderclouds, june bugs perched in wild parsley—until it spills you into a place whose dimensions make nonsense of your heretofore extraordinary spatial intelligence.

According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.37 A study of Albert Einstein’s brain revealed that he had large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number.38 Gay men are likely to have a smaller third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus, a nucleus known to have a role in sex differences.39 And convicted murderers and other violent, antisocial people are likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs decision making and inhibits impulses.40 These gross features of the brain are almost certainly not sculpted by information coming in from the senses, which implies that differences in intelligence, scientific genius, sexual orientation, and impulsive violence are not entirely learned.

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.

Lesser Avatar of Nidhogg Nidhogg, the serpent that gnaws on the World Tree’s roots, was the first Planeswalker. His powers started as the ability to store Yggdrassil’s root and earth in subdimensional spaces. After absorbing enough of the great tree’s power, he transcended into a four-dimensional being with the power to move freely through space but not time. As a lesser avatar, the wyrm is no Planeswalker but has the power of spatial creation and manipulation. Until she masters her powers, the wyrm can only create sub-dimensional, vacuum-filled spaces. Sucking living entities into the space will satiate her almost endless hunger and add to her intelligence. However, a small mana pool limits how often she can use the ability. Would

The old man held out a paper scroll, not mere parchment. It was a clear sign of wealth and status. Not every noble family could afford to use paper for invitations. The very fact that Hadjar was being visited by the clan’s attorney, and not by a simple servant, spoke volumes. “Thank-” Hadjar reached out, almost closing his fingers around the scroll, but the old man suddenly loosened his grip. Caught in the wind, the invitation, decorated with monograms and tied with a scarlet ribbon, fell to the dirt at Hadjar’s feet. The old man didn’t apologize. He stood there, with his hand still outstretched, a sneer on his lips, radiating complete confidence in his superiority. A clear example that old age didn’t mean one also gained intelligence or wisdom. He’d lived long enough for his hair to turn gray, but not long enough to acquire a brain. He didn’t even realize how simply and blatantly he was being used. Hadjar, just as the old man had expected, bent down to pick up the invitation, dusted it off, and held it without putting it away in his spatial artifact, as was required by etiquette. “You didn’t have to bow to me, young man,” the old man grunted. This was quite a serious insult. Being the personal disciple of a great hero made Hadjar equal in status to the senior heirs of aristocratic families. He was at the very top of the social structure of Dahanatan. But Hadjar didn’t really care about any of that. The power he possessed was insignificant in his opinion, and ever since he’d eaten those first scraps in Primus’ dungeon, he’d stopped caring about whether he was a Prince or a circus freak. Titles didn’t matter. The important thing was that the old man was a servant, and Hadjar was almost an aristocrat. The lawyer’s words were akin to the old man throwing a glove in Hadjar’s face. Hadjar looked behind his visitor, at the dark carriage emblazoned with the white coat of arms of the Predatory Blades clan. Brustor would have to try a little harder. So far, his provocations weren’t even a match for the insults that Hadjar had received during his meetings with Emperor Morgan. Shocking the old man, Hadjar bowed deeply. “Only a silly young man,” he said, straightening back up, “doesn’t feel respect toward someone whose hair is whiter than his.

Gardner's intelligences are: 1. musical-rhythmic, 2. visual-spatial, 3. verbal-linguistic, 5. bodily-kinesthetic (athleticism, dancing, acting), 6. interpersonal (or "social" intelligence), 7. intrapersonal (or self-knowledge), 8. spiritual (think Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, for example), 9. moral (ability to solve problems within a moral and ethical frame, think King Solomon), and 10. naturalistic (knowledge of nature, plants, animals, and the sorts of things one might need to know to survive in the wilderness). p124

The IQ test was supposed to measure your capacity to think and learn and therefore to predict your success in school. However, contemporary psychologists have debunked this whole idea of a single capacity called intelligence. You have not one but at least seven intelligences, according to Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. • Linguistic intelligence • Logical-mathematical intelligence • Spatial intelligence • Musical intelligence • Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence • Intrapersonal intelligence (knowing yourself) • Interpersonal intelligence (knowing other people)

Become aware of the physical distance and spatial orientation that you experience while in the company of others. Being empathetic and sensitive to a person’s physical comfort zone can have a huge effect on the way in which you are received and perceived.

The Warm Welcome of Hospitality. Walt Disney World is the epitome of world-class customer service. Employees must be hyper-vigilant of spatial orientation to engage, impress, and interact with guests. For simply being near a guest, employees are trained to: • Make eye contact and smile. • Greet and welcome each and every guest. • Seek out guest contact. • Provide immediate service recovery. • Always display appropriate body language. • Preserve the “magical” guest experience. • Thank each guest and demonstrate that appreciation.

In the legend of Camelot, King Arthur gave consideration as to how his knights might be positioned spatially to impart a message of power and status. He decided they would have their meetings at a round table, which meant that they were all considered equal and there was no “head of the table.” He built a league based on equality and mutual respect to unify and fortify the power of teamwork.

The word nature has many senses; but if we preserve the one which etymology justifies, and which is the most philosophical as well, nature should mean the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mother, the great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light. If we take the word nature in this sense, it may be said that Lucretius, more than any other man, is the poet of nature. Of course, being an ancient, he is not particularly a poet of landscape. He runs deeper than that; he is a poet of the source of landscape, a poet of matter. A poet of landscape might try to suggest, by well-chosen words, the sensations of light, movement, and form which nature arouses in us; but in this attempt he would encounter the insuperable difficulty which Lessing long ago pointed out, and warned poets of: I mean the unfitness of language to render what is spatial and material; its fitness to render only what, like language itself, is bodiless and flowing,—action, feeling, and thought. It is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are fascinated by pure sense and seek to write poems about it are called not impressionists, but symbolists; for in trying to render some absolute sensation they render rather the field of association in which that sensation lies, or the emotions and half-thoughts that shoot and play about it in their fancy. They become—against their will, perhaps—psychological poets, ringers of mental chimes, and listeners for the chance overtones of consciousness. Hence we call them symbolists, mixing perhaps some shade of disparagement in the term, as if they were symbolists of an empty, super-subtle, or fatuous sort. For they play with things luxuriously, making them symbols for their thoughts, instead of mending their thoughts intelligently, to render them symbols for things. A poet might be a symbolist in another sense,—if he broke up nature, the object suggested by landscape to the mind, and reverted to the elements of landscape, not in order to associate these sensations lazily together, but in order to build out of them in fancy a different nature, a better world, than that which they reveal to reason. The elements of landscape, chosen, emphasized, and recombined for this purpose, would then be symbols for the ideal world they were made to suggest, and for the ideal life that might be led in that paradise. Shelley is a symbolic landscape poet in this sense. To Shelley, as Francis Thompson has said, nature was a toy-shop; his fancy took the materials of the landscape and wove them into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape; he traced out its unrealized suggestions; transformed the things he saw into the things he would fain have seen. In this idealization it was spirit that guided him, the bent of his wild and exquisite imagination, and he fancied sometimes that the grosser landscapes of earth were likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, of some restlessly dreaming power. In this sense, earthly landscape seemed to him the symbol of the earth spirit, as the starlit crystal landscapes of his verse, with their pensive flowers, were symbols in which his own fevered spirit was expressed, images in which his passion rested.

During the third consultation, Dr. Kline talked about the research of Dr. Hans Asperger from a clinic in Vienna, which was not well-known yet but intriguing. Some personality traits of Bobby aligned with certain symptoms described in his papers, and the fact that the child’s father was almost fifty when he was conceived... “Are you suggesting that Bobby is mentally retarded?” “Oh, no. He’s a normally developed boy intellectually. Quite sharp in some aspects. He has a good visual memory and spatial perception. It’s the emotional intelligence where we encounter a problem.

Knowing how people are going to react given their current state of mind or recent experiences is critically important. Looking at ways to determine possible outcomes or reactions given current context (and emotional state) will help to deliver the message in the right way at this particular time. You can’t expect to get the emotional side of things correct all the time because of our irrational behavior and unexpected randomness. But, we can try to show some real empathy in our engineered solutions.

Imagine being able to inquire directly to the asking price text of a home itself what the mortgage and down payments would be. Tomorrow’s calculators and configurators are hidden within our most common information forms today - text.

improved intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence help individuals to develop better peer relationships and engage in collaborative work with better engagement or more productively. Clearly the existence of different forms of multiple intelligence highlight the functions of different parts of the brain as well as integrative operations of some of these functions (Siegal, 2011; Siegel, 2015); for example, linguistic and logical processing involves the left hemisphere, while the spatial and musical functioning mainly uses the right hemisphere (Silverman, 2002).

Another type of categorisation some psychologists have come up with is to differentiate the learning styles of individuals as auditory-sequential learning and visual-spatial learning (Silverman, 2002; Webb et al., 2005).

the left hemisphere of the brain is more specialised in processing linguistic and sequential information, while the right hemisphere is better in dealing with visual and spatial information. In other words, learners with the preference of auditory-sequential style predominantly use the left hemisphere, while the learners with the visual-spatial preference mostly use the right hemisphere.

two-thirds of the population possess primarily auditory-sequential characteristics, while the other one-third has predominantly visual-spatial characteristics.

findings that visual-spatial learners, or creative/gifted learners, as they are highly likely to be categorised, are more likely to develop negative images of themselves as well as of society at large, when their requirements/values/ideals and preferences are not met for a prolonged period of time.

Using the characterisation of left and right hemispheric functions of the brain (Silverman, 2002), we can infer that concrete experience and active experimentation tasks mainly use the left hemisphere of our brain, while reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation activities use the right hemisphere; former functions may require detailed descriptions and a sense of time, while the latter probably needs to understand the big picture in the process of integrating and may not need to be concerned about the time or sequencing. In other words, we can infer that those who prefer auditory-sequential learning may prefer the concrete experience and active experimentation stages of the Kolb cycle, while visual-spatial learners may prefer the reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages.

Auditory-sequential learners are able to engage in learning despite emotional setbacks, while the learning of visual-spatial learners is heavily dependent on emotional stability.

relation to mathematical abilities, visual-spatial learners are better in mathematical reasoning, while auditory-sequential learners are good in arithmetic.

visual-spatial learners have a tendency to be categorised as gifted and creative individuals who usually show a very high level of emotional and other sensitivities.

visual-spatial learning styles, do not do their best in timed tests and/or multiple-choice question tests, especially if not appropriately constructed (Silverman, 2002). These students are usually better abstract thinkers, and the said type of assessment would, in many cases, not test their abilities appropriately (mostly they are set purely as memory recall test or at least students’ approach them in that way especially because of the time constraints).

The concrete experience stage of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle plays a predominant role in didactic approach, as learners are expected to hurriedly absorb information into their heads through sensory cortex, mostly by auditory means. There will be less time, if at all, expended on reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages. All the learners are expected to commit the information divulged to memory in an identical manner promoting conformity ahead of creativity (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2016); there will be no encouragement for unique, personalised knowledge creation internally in the head of the learner. Further, the teacher demonstrates an authoritative role, resembling knowing everything (as an omnipotent god) and attempting to fill the empty heads of students with something disregarding the notions of social-emotional learning altogether. Didactic teaching-learning environments have a negative impact more specifically on visual-spatial or creative/gifted learners, firstly because they usually resist authoritarianism, possibly due to their higher sensitivity levels, and secondly because they tend to grasp knowledge slowly in a deeper sense via reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation phases; visual-spatial learners will be more relaxed and emotionally stable in a nonauthoritative environment with an appropriate pace of presentation that would help them to think/reflect/conceptualise in pictures and objects than pure auditory means.

In relation to these learning styles, psychologists have also identified other associated psychological, neurological, and personality characteristics. The students with preferences for the auditory-sequential learning style are more inclined to have extrovert personalities, while the students who prefer the visual-spatial learning style are inclined to possess introvert personalities. Extrovert personalities are more outgoing, engage in discussions, and respond easily, even with relatively unknown people, and they enjoy social activities with a large number of participants. On the contrary, introverts prefer attending to things on their own with less interaction with others, especially with relatively unknown people, and dislike social activities with large attendance. Auditory-sequential learners are good in analysis and pay more attention to specific detail; they approach solving a complex problem by dividing it into smaller parts. On the other hand, visual-spatial learners are good synthesisers, who can relate different perspectives to form an answer and are better at seeing the big picture or are holistic. As we would expect, auditory-sequential learners deal better with the concept of time and are better organised, while visual-spatial learners are relatively less competent with the concept of time. Auditory-sequential learners think in words and are better in rote memorisation; visual-spatial learners think in pictures and need to relate contextual meanings with pictures and, as a result, struggle with rote memorisation. That is, auditory-sequential learners have better auditory short-term memory, while visual-spatial learners have better visual long-term memory. Further, since they think in pictures, visual-spatial learners take a relatively longer time to process and relate information to contexts; once they do that, this contextual information is retained longer in memory.

Another problem with building knowledge bases is that they can work only in highly interpretable settings. This property is embedded into the inherent nature of knowledge bases, as humans construct them with their semantic insights. While an interpretable knowledge base might seem to be a virtue at first glance, it is also a problem because many intelligent decisions made by humans cannot be easily enunciated in words. For example, a chess grandmaster or an expert player of the game of Go might sometimes be unable to concretely explain why they choose a particular move, beyond the fact that their experience from previous games translates into an intuitive but hard-to-enunciate understanding of favorable spatial patterns. Trying to handcraft this type of intuitive knowledge into a semantically interpretable board evaluation function is often a source of inaccuracy, as it misses the intangibles in the decision-making process.

Which was not very smart. Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s—the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recombinant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.

The Marland definition of giftedness (page 499) broadened the view of giftedness from one based strictly on IQ to one encompassing six areas of outstanding or potentially outstanding performance. The passage of Public Law 94–142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in 1975 led to an increased interest in and awareness of individual differences and exceptionalities. PL 94–142, however, was a missed opportunity for gifted children, as there was no national mandate to serve them. Mandates to provide services for children and youth who are gifted and talented are the result of state rather than federal legislation. The 1980s and 1990s: The Field Matures and Provides Focus for School Reform Building on Guilford’s multifaceted view of intelligence, Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg advanced their own theories of multiple intelligences in the 1980s. Gardner (1983) originally identified seven intelligences—linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (see Table 15.2). Describing these intelligences as relatively independent of one another, he later added naturalistic as an eighth intelligence (Gardner, 1993). Sternberg (1985) presented a triarchic view of “successful intelligence,” encompassing practical, creative, and executive intelligences. Using these models, the field of gifted education has expanded its understanding of intelligence while not abandoning IQ as a criterion for identifying intellectually gifted children. A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) described the state of education in U.S. schools as abysmal. The report made a connection between the education of children who are gifted and our country’s future. This commission found that 50 percent of the school-age gifted population was not performing to full potential and that mathematics and science were in deplorable conditions in the schools. The message in this report percolated across the country and was responsible for a renewed interest in gifted education as well as in massive education reform that occurred nationally and state by state.

The curious thing was that not a single experiment had ever suggested a link between listening to Mozart’s music and increased infant intelligence. The closest an experiment had come to making this connection was a 1997 study, again by Rauscher, that demonstrated a relationship between piano lessons and improved spatial-reasoning skills among preschoolers.

seven fundamental principles of design: 1.​Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device. 2.​Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state. 3.​Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control. The conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results. 4.​Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible. 5.​Signifiers. Effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible. 6.​Mappings. The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity. 7.​Constraints. Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.

Each person has a unique mixture of intelligences, or ways of understanding the world—linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, musical, physical

1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited. 2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.

But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo’s straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call “spatial intelligence”; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary; but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, “It is only with Leonardo25 that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination

Intelligence can also be broken down in terms of the skills that constitute it. One theory breaks it down into three separate skills: language ability, the speed and ability to perceive the world accurately, and the ability to manipulate spatial images in one’s head. Another theory goes even further, arguing that there are eight distinct dimensions that underlie intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalist, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.