9 Types Of Intelligence (March 18, 2024)

We all know that one kid who barely ever studies (allegedly) and aces every test without any problems. Society calls these students intelligent, but is that really the case? What is intelligence in the first place? And, is there really more than one type of intelligence?

Some of these questions must have been on the mind of the American psychologist Howard Gardner (although I don’t know that, but let’s just say that is the case). After doing some research he devised his “theory of multiple intelligences”. And, you won’t believe it (or you haven’t read the title yet) but by that theory, there are 9 types of intelligence.

What are those 9 types of intelligence and how can I use them to shorten my studying time?

Good question. After all, there is not much point in learning about this unless you use it in some way. I guess you can always try to impress someone with your knowledge so there is that added bonus. But, besides that, you can actually use this theory to boost your studying.

To learn how to do that, let’s first check out those 9 types, shall we?

Here is a list of all of them:

Naturalist intelligence
Musical intelligence
Logical-mathematical intelligence
Existential intelligence
Interpersonal intelligence
Bodily-kinetic intelligence
Linguistic intelligence
Intra-personal intelligence
Spatial intelligence

You can guess what most of them are by their name, but let’s expand on that a bit more.

Naturalist intelligence

You can say that people with naturalist intelligence would be very good at surviving in the wild. They have the ability to distinguish between differences in objects and changes that are happening around them.

Musical intelligence

Having high musical intelligence means you are very good at things to do with sound. If you play an instrument and have high musical intelligence, you’re probably quite good at playing by the ear.

Logical-mathematical intelligence

People with high logical-mathematical intelligence have strong abstract thoughts and reasoning. They are good at considering hypotheses, carrying out calculations and quantifying data.

Existential intelligence

If you have high existential intelligence you are a good philosophical thinker. People with high existential intelligence have a sensitivity towards the deep questions of life.

Interpersonal intelligence

People with high interpersonal intelligence are often good at communicating effectively with others. They have high empathy and do particularly well in socially oriented work.

Bodily-kinetic intelligence

People with high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence are good at manipulating their bodies to achieve what they want. These people are often good at sports and are also good at copying movements they’ve seen.

Linguistic intelligence

People with high linguistic intelligence are good at using and manipulating the medium of language. They tend to pick up new words and languages quicker than others. People with a high linguistic intelligence tend to have a broader vocabulary than average.

Intra-personal intelligence

People with high intra-personal intelligence are good at understanding their feelings and thoughts. They are good at intrinsic motivation (motivating themselves from the inside out without any visible/physical reward).

Spatial intelligence

People with high spatial intelligence are good at things that require mental manipulations of physical perspectives. Spatial reasoning, image manipulation and even graphic and artistic skills are often well developed in people with a high special intelligence.

This was a quick explanation of all 9 types of intelligence. If you want a more in-depth explanation you can read it here. If watching a video is better suited for you go here.

* * * * *

Now that we are done with the introduction of all 9 types, let’s find which one is yours.

Just one moment!

What are we going to do when we find out what your type of intelligence is?

That may seem like a simple question to answer, but it isn’t. If you think that you should change your way of studying to be more in line with your type of intelligence you would be half-right.

Can relying on your type of intelligence be a bad thing?

Let me make an example for you:

After finishing some “What is your type of intelligence” tests (or quizzes) you find that you have high logical-mathematical intelligence and low linguistic intelligence. Assuming this is correct (I can’t guarantee the quality of any of the results you get) the next thoughts you might have are:

“I have high logical-mathematical intelligence, so I should work with numbers and stop working with anything regarding linguistic intelligence”.

There is so much wrong with this way of thinking, so let’s go over it and see what the problem is. If you start thinking that you have high logical-mathematical intelligence you might start labeling yourself as a logical-mathematical person.

What is so wrong with that?

The labels I hate the most are the morning and evening person. It’s because the morning person thinks he can’t do anything significant in the evening and ends up wasting time doing something he doesn’t even care about. Swap morning with evening and you get the evening person.

So if you label yourself as a logical-mathematical person you will start to pay less attention to anything that is not connected with that identity.

Rather, it is better to think that you have a higher logical-mathematical intelligence, compared to other types. With this, you acknowledge your strength, while not making your whole identity revolve around it.

The second problem is the “stop working with anything regarding linguistic intelligence” part. This part is exactly the same as the previous one just in the opposite direction. You label yourself and work around that label.

Just like in the previous situation, the key is to acknowledge that your linguistic intelligence may be lowered compared to others. Assuming that this is even true (again, I don’t know how true the results are), in the worst-case scenario you might have to put in more work than others to achieve the same results.

That outcome is far better than abandoning anything related to linguistic intelligence.

Now that I think about it, why do you think the results from intelligence tests could be wrong?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I don’t put a lot of trust in quizzes that people do online. And before anyone tells me that quizzes on the internet don’t count as real “tests”, am I supposed to go to some intelligence laboratory to have my intelligence tested?

Anyway, if those tests don’t do much (let me say that this is my opinion, if they work for you that’s great), how do you find out your intelligence type?

Pick something to learn and test it with each intelligence type.

I can’t guarantee any results, but you might get some unexpected benefits. If you don’t believe me, here is a song made to make you memorize the first 100 digits of pi. You can see how someone can use their musical intelligence to remember numbers.

If you want an example from personal experience here you go (this one is a bit embarrassing, but I will tell the story for your sake):

When I first heard about 9 types of intelligence, I found a link to a quiz to see what type of intelligence I have. This was in my younger days, so my English was subpar, to say the least (English is my second language, so if you read something I wrote and thought “wtf is this”, now you know why that happened).

I had to go to Google Translate for every other question, so I just gave up and decided to try something on my own. I tried to do something related to every type of intelligence and see what happens.

That’s when I got to the Bodily-kinetic intelligence. With my limited English skills, I thought that I should move around while I study to remember better (bear with my younger self, please).

Surprisingly it actually worked (or so I think 😃). And it worked especially well when I had to memorize information like names of countries or cities. Believe it or not, I still walk around my room when I have to memorize something.

Takeaway from the story: You never know if something can help you with your studying unless you try it. So if you have some spare time, try to learn in some other way you haven’t tried before. And if you don’t have spare time, make some spare time(I know that you look at your phone way too much, there is your spare time).

Remember:

There are 9 types of intelligence:

Naturalist intelligence
Musical intelligence
Logical-mathematical intelligence
Existential intelligence
Interpersonal intelligence
Bodily-kinetic intelligence
Linguistic intelligence
Intra-personal intelligence
Spatial intelligence

Play around with your type of intelligence to improve your studying, but don’t let it become your whole identity.

Try to learn something by learning it with each type of intelligence and you might get some unexpected results.