I minored in psychology when I went to journalism school, and while those teachings have been hugely helpful to me in my career (dissecting research studies, understanding psychosexual phenomena, etc.), they’ve perhaps been even more useful to me in my personal life.
I remember sitting in the back of a lecture hall one sleepy morning, having chosen that far-away seat on purpose so the professor wouldn’t see me scrolling through Reddit or Twitter. (Bad girl.) I looked up mid-lecture to find that the instructor was explaining the theory of multiple intelligences. My eyes widened and I switched tabs to my note-taking app, suddenly desperate to absorb what was being taught.
What I didn’t appreciate, at the time, was that this professor had a pretty leftist, intersectional, progressive view of what intelligence is and how it functions. I’d just thought she was lecturing about boring brain stuff (god, if I ever have to hear another goddamn explanation of what the amygdala does…), but I realized in that moment that she was imparting something much more useful: an entirely new way of thinking about a trait I considered of utmost importance.
See, I’d always been one of those snobs who prefers to date smart people, whatever the hell that even means. I even identified as sapiosexual for a time, which I now understand is a weirdly appropriative term that misidentifies an elitist, often classist and racist preference as a sexual orientation. But I’d had reason to question the simplicity of that viewpoint in recent years. For instance, I’d dated a few people in high school who had various combinations of ADD, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, so I’d come to understand (far too late; mea culpa) that misspelled texts and showing up late to dates did not necessarily mean a person lacked intelligence or respectfulness. But I did not have a concrete, scientific way of thinking about this revelation until that lecture on multiple intelligences.
