Creating Minds by Howard Gardner: Psychology Book Review
Howard Gardner has changed the way we think about intelligence. His seminal book, Frames of Mind, introduced the idea that the correct question we should be asking is not, “How smart am I” but rather “How am I smart?”
It was Gardner who first came up with the idea that there are different kinds of intelligence, and that we have differing gifts in all of them. In Creating Minds, he goes beyond the basic concept that he laid out in Frames of Mind, by looking at creativity through the lens of these multiple intelligences.
What he tries to do is to illuminate how specific creative geniuses in different fields used different intelligences. On the whole, the book works.
Gardner gives us, in brief, the lives of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Ghandi. In each biography, he talks about their particular gifts, especially their “intelligence,” using his own framework. This works very well with some of his subject and not so well with others.
It’s easy to get a handle on spatial intelligence with Picasso, and musical intelligence with Stravinsky, and linguistic intelligence with Eliot. It’s easy to understand how a dancer like Martha Graham has bodily or physical intelligence. But when we move into some other domains, especially the social, things get a bit murky.
The chapter on Ghandi seems to me to be in the book because it was necessary to complete the range of intelligences that Gardner had described. Part of the problem may be that political creators have to mobilize other human beings and creativity in that domain is sometimes is harder to judge and define than, for example, the ability to conceptualize a sculpture or a set of mathematical equations.
I also wish that Gardner had included some comparisons of other contemporaries in the same field in some of his stories. I would like, for example, to have seen Gandhi set against Hitler. Both were effective at mobilizing people, but they pursued very different ends. Or, perhaps we could have set Gandhi against Franklin Roosevelt or Martin Luther King, Jr.
The biggest problem I had with the book, though, was Gardner’s definition of creation as lifetime achievement. I’m not sure I’m comfortable, with the idea that the most creative people are the people who work in the same field throughout a lifetime, and make major contributions there throughout that lifetime. That certainly is one kind of creativity and it’s well represented and analyzed in this book.
We learn, for example, that most of the creative people studied by Gardner seem to move through their creative life in stages. They spend a decade or so mastering their domain and then producing great work. Then there’s another decade or so spent mastering a new aspect of the domain, followed by more creative output.
We also learn about the need for a circle of people around the creative person who provide both support and stimulation. Many times these are the unsung heroes of the genius’ career.
There are some things missing, though. There’s no discussion of folks who produce creative work in different fields.
There’s a good deal to be said for the idea that someone – such as Linus Pauling, recipient of two Nobel Prizes – who changes fields and makes major contributions in more than one field, is more creative than a person who stays in a single field. There’s something to be said for the argument that a person who is effective in many areas, but not of genius caliber in one, is as creative as the one-field genius.
Those kinds of reservations lead me to suggest that this is a much more compelling book as biography than it is as psychology. You can, if you choose, forget all of the material about what constitutes creativity and the reference to the multiple intelligences and read each of the main characters�¢ sketches as a short biography and come away with an insight into that person and his or her creative life that you would not have otherwise.
This is a good and illuminating read. It will stretch your mind and your understanding.
