The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility by Waqas Ahmed

Author:Waqas Ahmed [Ahmed, Waqas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology, Self-Help, Science, Learning, Expertise
ISBN: 9781119508489
Google: N5RxDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07MFRKJ4R
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-02-10T23:00:00+00:00

General vs. Multiple Intelligences

Human intelligence is multifaceted and multidimensional — it comes in many forms.

— Ken Robinson

Anna Maria van Schurman was exceptionally intelligent. A woman in a man’s world, she was known in the 18th-century Netherlands for her monumental work Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from her Intellectual Circle, which made her one of the foremost feminist intellectuals of her time.

She graduated with a degree in law from the University of Utrecht (she was the only female student at the university and attended lectures behind a veil). As a theologian, she produced many works including De vitae humanae termino, on the respective roles of God and the physician at the end of human life, and became a prominent member and writer for the newly emerging Labadie Protestant movement.

Schurman was also an exceptionally multi-talented artist — an engraver, glassmaker, sculptor (wax, wood and ivory), portrait painter and calligrapher, with many of her works still in existence. She also had a flair for languages and was known to be proficient in 14, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic and Ethiopian. She also wrote poetry in a number of languages, and her compilation Opuscula hebraea, graeca, latina, gallica, prosaica et metrica (‘Little works in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, prose and poetry’) was widely read by scholars of the time.

Schurman was clearly a woman of multiple talents. But did these derive from an extraordinarily high general intelligence, or did she simply have certain intelligences related to the areas she excelled in? A long debate as to whether intelligence is common to all fields (or cognitive tasks) or if there are multiple types of intelligence, each representing distinct cognitive abilities, has occupied psychologists for decades.

The Theory of General Intelligence first appeared in the early twentieth century, developed by English psychologist Charles Spearman, who noted from his research that children’s performance ratings across school subjects that appeared unrelated were positively correlated. He reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general cognitive ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tests. He concluded that all cognitive performance could be conceptualised in terms of a single (core) general ability factor (which he labelled g) and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors.

This theory has subsequently been developed into a model that represents cognitive abilities as a three-level hierarchy, where there are a large number of narrow factors at the bottom of the hierarchy, a handful of broad, more general factors at the intermediate level, and at the apex a single factor, the g factor, which represents the variance common to all cognitive tasks. If this theory is right, it suggests that polymaths are individuals with an exceptional general intelligence, which in turn allows them to be versatile and excel in various (theoretically all) domains, even if they require different cognitive abilities. Moreover the diversity itself can enhance one’s general intelligence. According to a recent study at the University of Toronto, for example, IQ test scores of six-year-old children significantly improved after receiving drum lessons.

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