On his book A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory
Cover Interview of February 03, 2021
In a nutshell
A Synthesizing Mind is my intellectual memoir. It’s a
‘memoir’ in the sense that I reflect on my life; it’s ‘intellectual’ in that it
focuses chiefly on my life as a student, researcher, writer, mentor, and teacher.
But there’s plenty on my own personal development as well. Starting with the intellectual:
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by the human mind. Indeed,
over half of my many books contain the word ‘mind’ in the title. But until
recently, I have focused on ‘minds’ in general or on the minds of other persons—young
children, students, political leaders, creative geniuses in the arts and
sciences, etc. In this book, in contrast, I focus on my own mind—which I
conclude is a synthesizing mind. More on that later.
Back to my life. I begin with an account of growing up in
Scranton, Pennsylvania at the same time as Joe Biden—in fact we are the same
age. I describe the many influences on my early life—my Jewish parents escaping
from Nazi Germany in the nick of time, arriving in New York City with only $5 in
their pockets; the death of my (highly gifted) only sibling, when my mother was
pregnant with me, and the resultant feeling that I was a ‘replacement child’—indeed,
for a while, according to them, the only entity that kept my parents alive.
In
those early days, I acquired my love of music, my fascination with the written
word, and various compensations for a potpourri of visual problems. I speculate
about the sources of my most enduring intellectual interests, as well as my critical
attitude toward psychological tests. I describe valued mentors, as well as
tormentors and anti-mentors. Most important, I detail how I became fascinated
by the human mind—to whose study I’ve devoted my scholarly life.
Why, nearing my 9th decade, did I feel the need to
understand my own mind? Because I realized that my theory of ‘multiple
intelligences’—for which I am best known—does not explain well my own ways of
thinking and performing. I am, and since early childhood have been, a
synthesizer. I read (and observe and converse) widely; I reflect on this
information and try to ‘connect’ the dots; I discover new questions and ideas,
and try to integrate them with one another and with what I had earlier thought.
I arrive at a major question or project and bring all of that accumulated
information to bear on it. I organize and re-organize that information multiple
times. I try out the tentative syntheses on friends and friendly critics. And
at last, I go public, typically in a book form—though I have also written
hundreds of blogs and well over 1000 scholarly and more popular articles.
So that’s my synthesizing mind. But I agree with the Nobel
Laureate in Physics Murray Gell-Mann, who once said: “In the 21st century, the most
important kind of mind will be the synthesizing mind.” In the memoir, I
describe how that mind works. But I also claim that psychology has largely
dropped the ball on how synthesizing operates; and that’s because it’s too
unwieldly a capacity to simulate in a laboratory experiment or to probe via a
short answer test. Accordingly, in the concluding chapters, I offer my own
primer on how to develop and educate a synthesizing mind.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
A Synthesizing Mind is my intellectual memoir. It’s a ‘memoir’ in the sense that I reflect on my life; it’s ‘intellectual’ in that it focuses chiefly on my life as a student, researcher, writer, mentor, and teacher. But there’s plenty on my own personal development as well. Starting with the intellectual: Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by the human mind. Indeed, over half of my many books contain the word ‘mind’ in the title. But until recently, I have focused on ‘minds’ in general or on the minds of other persons—young children, students, political leaders, creative geniuses in the arts and sciences, etc. In this book, in contrast, I focus on my own mind—which I conclude is a synthesizing mind. More on that later.
Back to my life. I begin with an account of growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the same time as Joe Biden—in fact we are the same age. I describe the many influences on my early life—my Jewish parents escaping from Nazi Germany in the nick of time, arriving in New York City with only $5 in their pockets; the death of my (highly gifted) only sibling, when my mother was pregnant with me, and the resultant feeling that I was a ‘replacement child’—indeed, for a while, according to them, the only entity that kept my parents alive.
In those early days, I acquired my love of music, my fascination with the written word, and various compensations for a potpourri of visual problems. I speculate about the sources of my most enduring intellectual interests, as well as my critical attitude toward psychological tests. I describe valued mentors, as well as tormentors and anti-mentors. Most important, I detail how I became fascinated by the human mind—to whose study I’ve devoted my scholarly life.
Why, nearing my 9th decade, did I feel the need to understand my own mind? Because I realized that my theory of ‘multiple intelligences’—for which I am best known—does not explain well my own ways of thinking and performing. I am, and since early childhood have been, a synthesizer. I read (and observe and converse) widely; I reflect on this information and try to ‘connect’ the dots; I discover new questions and ideas, and try to integrate them with one another and with what I had earlier thought. I arrive at a major question or project and bring all of that accumulated information to bear on it. I organize and re-organize that information multiple times. I try out the tentative syntheses on friends and friendly critics. And at last, I go public, typically in a book form—though I have also written hundreds of blogs and well over 1000 scholarly and more popular articles.
So that’s my synthesizing mind. But I agree with the Nobel Laureate in Physics Murray Gell-Mann, who once said: “In the 21st century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesizing mind.” In the memoir, I describe how that mind works. But I also claim that psychology has largely dropped the ball on how synthesizing operates; and that’s because it’s too unwieldly a capacity to simulate in a laboratory experiment or to probe via a short answer test. Accordingly, in the concluding chapters, I offer my own primer on how to develop and educate a synthesizing mind.