Synthesizing Mind

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner looks back on how his own thinking took shape, from a bookish boyhood through a restless college career and a drifting stint as a graduate student, before he arrived at a professorship at Harvard. He examines the mentors who shaped him, including Erik Erikson and Jerome Bruner, and the colleagues he worked alongside, such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. Gardner also recounts an amusing episode in which Groucho Marx turned down an invitation to speak with Harvard undergraduates, preferring to focus on earning a living.

The book revisits the work that made Gardner's name, especially Frames of Mind, which set out his theory of multiple intelligences. That theory challenged the dominance of IQ testing and spurred new ideas in classrooms, museums, and parenting guides. Across his career Gardner has studied the minds of ordinary people as well as particular creators and leaders, and here he turns that lens on himself.

He concludes that he has a synthesizing mind, one able to take in experiences and evidence from many fields and points of view. He points to historian Richard Hofstadter, naturalist Charles Darwin, and critic Edmund Wilson as thinkers who worked in this way. Gardner argues that this kind of mind matters a great deal today and suggests how it might be developed in people.