How to Get Smarter by Hacking Your 9 Types of Intelligence
The secret to improving your mind is to strengthen all areas.
Unless you are reading this article by candlelight, you can thank Humphrey Davy, Warren de La Rue, and Joseph Swan. But you have probably only appreciated the man who never invented the light bulb — Thomas Edison.
Edison gets the lion’s share of credit because he took an imperfect design and perfected it. Before Edison, light bulbs consumed too much electrical current, making them impractical for indoor use. So Edison took a faulty design, and with the right materials (a carbonized bamboo filament) and the right distribution (Edison Electric Light Company), he brought light to the masses with the first incandescent light bulb.
We tend to picture Edison as a scientifically gifted man, but if you pigeonhole him into one type of intelligence, you will misunderstand why he succeeded where others failed.
“One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius”
— Simon de Bovier
Humans have been trying to codify intelligence for centuries. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Spearman developed a range of aptitude tests that reduced intelligence to a numerical score called the…