The flower of multiple-intelligence theory bloomed and, as well as verbal and numerical intelligence, several other types were established. There was personal intelligence (the ability to get on with people and be your own best friend); physical intelligence (the ability to be an all round healthy individual); sensual intelligence (the ability to use all your senses); spatial intelligence (the ability to negotiate three-dimensional space and handle moving objects); creative intelligence (the ability to think flexibly at speed, originally and with volume) and spiritual or ethical intelligence (the capacity to have compassion, love and concern for others). The recent idea of “emotional intelligence” would be part of personal and spiritual.

Our notions of how to teach and nurture intelligence are also changing. The global education system was based on industrial and military revolutions: people were trained to obey and to remember things needed to survive in the factory and in the military. We are no longer in that age, nor in the information technological age that followed.

Many schools are now embracing the intelligence revolution, teaching children first how to learn and then what to learn. A child in school now is going to be a worker. In the future, they are going to be an intelligent.

Use Your Head by Tony Buzan, Mind Set, £9.99

The big brains on the big question

Baroness Greenfield
Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and director of the Royal Institution

Intelligence comes from the Latin root intelligere, of understanding. Just because I know a fact doesn’t mean that I can put it into a context. The more intelligent someone is, the more they can see a fact in terms of other things. The greatest form of intelligence is someone who can make big links between different contexts, such as the scientist F. M. Burnet, who applied the principles of evolution to the immune system. IQ tests might measure agility, the ability to see a fact in an abstract sense, but it doesn’t require a person to see the full background or to have an understanding of history, say, or economics.

Bonnie Greer
Critic and Deputy Chairman of the British Museum

A few years ago, I co-won, on a points system, a contest called “The Battle Of the Brains” as part of an Horizon series about measuring human intelligence. There were two type of tests: the regular, conventional IQ tests and the newest, more unconventional tests coming on stream. My co-winner was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology quantum physicist descended from Bertrand Russell. This alone should tell you all you need to know about measuring human intelligence: there is no fail-safe method, no definitive rule. This is simply because we cannot guarantee that our systems of measure are perfect, infallible, true for every human in every situation. Nevertheless, we still love trying to measure each other’s brain capacity. If they aren’t taken too seriously, IQ tests can be harmless fun.

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