God Made Us Different

God Made Us Different with Dr. Jan Bedell

Podcast #10

Intelligence comes in many forms. In this episode, Dr. Jan explores Dr. Howard Gardner’s identification of many different ways in which a person can be intelligent. Besides your specific “IQ smarts,” you may also have kinesthetic, spatial, musical, logical/mathematical, linguistic, naturalist, interpersonal or intra-personal intelligence. Most people have a combination of several of the intelligences, but God made us different for a reason. Our differences make the world go round. It would be very boring if we were all the same and many needed jobs would go unfilled. The different intelligences also may influence a person’s learning style. However, just as we discussed in the learning styles episodes recently, you have to have an organized brain that is functioning optimally or symptoms of learning struggles and learning challenges start to appear. Many symptoms on the ADD/ADHD, CAPD, dyslexia and even the autism spectrum checklists (or tests) come from not being able to fulfill your giftedness in a particular intelligence because of a disorganized brain.

Handout – ways-we-are-intelligent-handout

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Key Points: God Made Us Different

The brain has to have good working pathways to be able to receive, process, store and then use information. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different social and personal skills. See the Brain Training handout associated with this podcast for a more comprehensive list.

A short list of brain levels and their responsibilities:

Pons – empathy, bonding, attachment, social cues, moral choices (note: extra work at this level is extremely helpful for adopted children).
Midbrain – immune system, controlling anger, motivation, impulse control, memory for learning.
Cortex – formal reasoning, thinking before acting, test taking, eye/hand coordination for sport.

In her book How Am I Smart, Dr. Kathy Koch breaks these intelligences down into very understandable stories that demonstrate: word smart, logic smart, picture smart, music smart, body smart, nature smart, people smart and self-smart. This book can be very encouraging to you and your children.

Also included here is a Ways We Are Intelligent handout with details of each of the intelligences.