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It's been almost 17 years since the Harvard psychologist published the groundbreaking "Frames of Mind," which argued that intelligence doesn't come in a single flavor, but in several -- seven, in fact. He contended that our test-obsessed, hierarchy-happy culture has elevated logical and linguistic intelligence above the musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intra- and inter-personal intelligences. In other words, we value the capacity to turn a phrase or solve a problem more than the ability to execute a pirouette, exhibit perfect pitch or make a new friend, although the latter activities are just as cognitively challenging.

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century By Howard Gardner Basic Books, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Gardner's theory was a huge hit in education circles, and its precepts have been applied in hundreds of classrooms and school districts around the world. The idea has also entered the public discourse, influencing our debates on school curriculums and standardized tests. Now Gardner has returned to stake a claim for multiple intelligences in the coming century -- a time, he says, when we'll need all the brainpower we can muster. "Intelligence Reframed" is a progress report on how we've assimilated the concept of multiple intelligences.

Sitting in his publisher's Manhattan office, the cordial, slightly rumpled professor spoke with Salon about why IQ tests are inadequate, why he doubts there's a spiritual or a moral intelligence and why we may radically change our thinking about the kind of people we consider intelligent.

Much of your latest book is devoted to explaining and defending the theory of multiple intelligences. Has it become a kind of Frankenstein, a monster that you have to spend all your time managing and controlling?

I don't spend all my time managing and controlling it, and I give myself some points for that. No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three other people in our field. So when you suddenly find the world catching on to something you did, it's tempting to devote yourself to it and be afraid to change your mind about it because you'll lose your industry.

I've tried very hard not to commodify multiple intelligences. There are hundreds of products such as CD-ROMs and summer camps based on the idea out there, but I don't endorse any of them. And I avoid singling out people whose work I don't like -- with one exception. In Australia, they had an educational program in which they linked each of the intelligences to a particular ethnic group. I thought that was heinous, and I went on television and said so.

Most academics are naive in thinking that their ideas won't be noticed, and if they are noticed, they'll be understood correctly. Boy, have I been disabused of that notion. One of the purposes of the book is to address some myths that have proliferated around multiple intelligences, such as a single "approved" educational approach based on multiple intelligences theory. In some cases, the myths are ones that I propagated. In the naive view, a theory is something that's created at one time in one space, and remains static. In fact, the theory has changed enormously in terms of my own understanding of it.

The big news in this book is that you've added an intelligence to the list, one that you call the "naturalist intelligence," the ability to recognize and classify features of the environment. What led to that decision?

I was giving a speech to specialists in the history of science at Harvard, and one of them said, "You'll never explain Darwin with your theory." And he was right. So I spent the next several years reading about how people recognize patterns in nature, how they discriminate among living things and things that are inorganic but natural, like rocks or clouds. All of the intelligences have to be traced back to life on the savanna a couple hundred thousand years ago, because we evolved for a very different kind of world than the one we live in now. We had to decide what to eat and what to avoid because it was poisonous, what to chase and what to run from. If we couldn't make fine distinctions in the natural world, we'd be done for.

One speculation I make in the book is that our current consumer culture may be based upon the naturalist intelligence. A consumer culture assumes that we can tell one sneaker from another, the taste of one kind of coffee from another -- and if we didn't have a naturalist intelligence, we couldn't do that.

You considered adding a spiritual intelligence, but ultimately decided against it. Why?

The more I investigated spirituality as it's used in our society, the more I became convinced that even if it's terribly important, it's not an intelligence. Spirituality is just a mess intellectually. If you go into a bookstore and look at all the titles labeled "spiritual," they range from total nonsense to very serious literature about religion and contemplation.

The study of spirituality does bring up an interesting phenomenological issue: What does it mean to be in a spiritual state? Many people would say that what's important about spirituality is the feeling that comes with it. The problem is that we don't know how to measure people's feelings because they're not quantifiable.

In mathematical intelligence, for example, we're interested in how well people can compute. How they're feeling at the time is irrelevant. They could be feeling lousy or wonderful -- it's how well they compute that matters. When you start making a subjective feeling part of the definition, it gets very slippery. Can people be spiritual only if they feel a certain way? If David Koresh feels that way, does that make him spiritual? If the pope doesn't, does that make him unspiritual? So it's very hard to find dry land, and scientists are looking for dry land.

But you think that one aspect of spirituality -- the contemplation of existential matters -- may qualify as an intelligence?

Existential intelligence denotes our capacity to ask very big questions about the meaning of life and death. We know that people all over the world ask these questions, and art, religion, philosophy, mythology are all efforts to deal with them. Even kids ask them, sometimes directly, sometimes through storytelling and play. Most of the intelligences are linked to tangibles like objects or other people, but existential intelligence deals with intangibles.

When I reviewed existentiality in terms of my criteria for an intelligence, the one point on which I was dissatisfied is that we haven't found a part of the brain dedicated to dealing with these questions. So I say that I think there are "eight and a half" intelligences.

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