I have no doubt that the most prominent intelligences in business, academia, education, media, manufacturing, banking, politics, that is, the Pillars, are the linguistic and the mathematical-logical, or a mixture of both (which I will call L+M/L from now on for convenience).
They are deemed to be so important that there are conditions that are diagnosed for those who struggle in both, called dyslexia and dyscalculia. If, (nowadays anyway) either are diagnosed at a young age efforts are made by teachers and psychologists to assist those affected so that they will not be disadvantaged in reading, writing, numeracy and mathematics, exams and in life in general.
There is not, however, (to the best of my knowledge) an equivalent condition for not being good at sports or music, or caring for others, or even spatial awareness. Nor is someone offered psychological assistance if they are not good at those things.
This is, of course, because such attributes are not deemed by the educational institutions – that are influenced hugely by the Pillars – to be essential to one being independent, getting a job, and having a successful life, whereas literacy and numeracy are. (I’m not saying that being bad at sports, music etc. are conditions that should be diagnosed – I’m merely pointing out the Pillars’ bias in this respect).
Following approx. 20 years of formal education, almost all of it immersed in the world of L+M/L, our processing speed in both develops considerably. The years of studying, interspersed with exams, is the equivalent of the practice, practice and more practice that I described in the previous post.
After all, we are naturally endowed with L+M/L skills (or we wouldn’t have thrived in school) and then they are reinforced as being of great importance all the way through our education – almost to the exclusion of all the other intelligences, many of which will be seen as non-essential, or at least of lesser importance.
However it is the slowness of processing in L+M/L (akin to my slowness of processing in sports) that cause many people to lose out on mainstream education, and end up with lower marks in academic subjects and subsequent exams.
In my days in school such children often ended up at the back of the class, and eventually dropped out of school. Thankfully, in most schools nowadays pupils who are not L+M/L inclined have other options to choose from and manage quite well. (I still contend, though, that those who excel in the L+M/L end up in the more important jobs and eventually dominate the world that we live in as they rise through the ranks in the Pillars).
Now it is a well-known fact that children who have a lot of worries and high anxiety are not as good at concentrating and learning in general – so we have many children who are endowed with high natural L+M/L but do not learn, or concentrate, because there might be so much going on at home.
Or there may be children very highly developed in other areas e.g. musical, spatial or bodily/kinesthetic but their inability to have the patience and concentration to learn results in continuing frustration and eventually anger.
If you have clicked on or looked up the link about the different intelligences above, (and if not, here it is again) you will have read about interpersonal intelligence.
This is the ability to form relationships with others and be empathic. This is an important one because of how highly we esteem relationship – a root foundation – in our lives in general.
Sometimes children have a low natural ability in this and it may be a bit of a worry for parents and other adults responsible for their development when they are young. But with understanding, affirmation, and appreciation of their gifts in other areas (as well as acceptance), it is not usually a problem in their lives as they are growing up.
But if the child’s lack of natural ability is combined with low self-esteem resulting from insecure attachment and the effects of trauma it is a different story – very often the child will believe that good relationship is okay for others but not for her – bringing on a lot of distress and deepening the low self-esteem.
So our speed of processing of information depends not only on our natural tendencies or gifts, but what we make of those natural gifts, (i.e. our success in translating our gifts into behaviours that are advantageous to ourselves).
And what we make of them depends on our emotional wellness.
It is emotional wellness [1] that gives us the discipline and patience to use the information that we are processing (or have processed) to attain our goals. This is the same whether it is L+M/L, musical, bodily, interpersonal etc. gifts/talents that we are endowed with.
For example if I wasn’t emotionally well enough to have the patience to practice music my musical information processing speed would probably not increase as much as someone of equivalent talent who does have the patience, no matter how gifted I was.
When working with young people in distress I met many who were very naturally talented and highly creative in many fields but did not have the emotional wellness to accept the discipline that is a necessity for success in those fields.
[1]. Once again I refer to Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence which is well worth a read.