Multiple intelligence
by JJ

I have heard that "all multiple are highly intelligent." Generalizations about multiples are as dangerous as generalizations about any group ("all southeast asians are good at math.")

That being said -

I think higher focus (and possibly motivation) can be mistaken for intelligence as well.

About a year and a half ago the system was changing careers and went to a career counsellor. As an experiment Teresa took along a few different pens and rather than trying to work through all the tests (there was a full day of aptitude and ability testing) she let other people take the parts that interested them. The testing environment was very flexible in that one could chose the order of the tests, and take breaks between any of them for any length of time.

The result may have been impressive for a single person, but it threw the _career_ exercise off as it failed to provide any direction in which to go. If a work environment weren't full of various power dynamics, expectations of consistency, phone calls, meetings, etc., it's possible that the system would be able to rotate tasks. However from a career testing perspective it would have been better if the people who usually go to work had completed the tests. Not a very smart use of the career counselling time, one might say.

If integrated I suspect there is a drop in overall "intelligence" because what we call intelligence is generally aptitude or ability for a prescribed series of tasks over a period of time during a test or a performance. Without being able to switch to someone who essentially hasn't been distracted by the other tasks and who has fresh energy and focus for each section I suspect we would test lower.

People - "people" often being the first therapists who wrote about their multiple clients and who, I believe, are really responsible for the "intelligent child" concept in the multiple ethos - who make these judgements on collective intelligence may have been influenced by their desire to see _one_ person. If one person could do x, y, and z, then s/he must be very intelligent. However if you approached the task from the idea of examining a group of people and each person did 20% of the tasks, they would be closer to average. Once again the bias of the tester influences the results.

In other words, if we reject the concept of one person/many alters we may have to reject the concept of many alters/one high intellect.

Intelligence is still a fuzzy concept in any case.