Practical
You like making things happen. You have the capacity to sort things
out and are often called on to fix, mend, or assemble things. Where
others talk about what needs to be done, you prefer to get on and
do it. You enjoy difficult or stressful situations because of your abil-
ity to come up with workable solutions. When things go wrong you
are continually thinking of useful ideas to help others. You like to
explain by doing. You constantly want to put theory into practice.
You may well enjoy gardening and DIY. At school you enjoyed prac-
tical subjects. In domestic life you are the person who is happy to
spend hours assembling flat-packed goods of all kinds. As a child
you were always taking things apart to see how they worked. You
enjoy seeing the inner workings of many items.
(This intelligence has been suggested by various thinkers,
including Charles Handy and Robert Sternberg.)If linguistic and mathematical intelligences were the key ones for
the twentieth century, there is a strong case that emotional, social,
and spiritual intelligences will be critical in the twenty-first century.
To power up your mind fully, of course, it will be helpful for you to
seek to develop all your intelligences, and, of course, your ability to
learn how to learn.
By now, you might be wondering whether these different
kinds of intelligence relate to different areas of the brain. The
answer to this is that they don’t. The brain, as you are discovering,
is almost infinitely plastic and flexible.
Although we now know that certain aspects of the brain are
largely responsible for specific activities, for example Wernicke’s
and Broca’s areas for language and a small area in the temple for an
aspect of musical appreciation, we also know that these areas are
probably only part of a much more complex pattern of brain activ-
ity. In other words, you cannot do a map of the brain that correlates
with intelligences.
Clearly, as we grow up, we discover that we have these intel-
ligences in different states of development. Some of us are musical,Harnessing Your Creativity 157