Comm. Studies and Intrapersonal Intelligence

Whether verbally or nonverbally, it's safe to say that everyone on the planet has communicated with another person in their life time. The process of human communication stands as the focus of the Communication Studies major, from one on one conversations to the mass media. Howard Gardner, a professor with a degree in cognition and education, created a theory of multiple intelligences. As a Communication Studies major, in regards to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, where the human brain divides into multiple intelligences, a Communication Studies major would need to have intrapersonal intelligence. (507)

Gardner defined Intrapersonal intelligence as "...knowledge of the internal aspects of a person: access to one's own feeling life, one's range of emotions and eventually to label them and to draw upon them as a means of understanding and guiding one's own behavior." (519). Intrapersonal intelligence may not seem like it would be the best intelligence to have as a Communication Studies major, but a lot of the time it's more important to know yourself than to know other people. The main focus of Communication Studies is, as previously stated, the study of the process of human communication, which means that a Communication Studies major would need to examine other people and them self in order to understand what was learned in class. In Communication Studies classes, we learn that the most important part of human communication and communication, in general, is the sharing of one thought from one source to another, it can be from human to human, from human to multiple humans, from human to computer, computer to human, the list goes on. The best way to understand communication though, is to put yourself in the situations ...

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...people don't think that just because someone is socially awkward or has speech anxiety, that doesn't mean that they can't study human communication. My limited interpersonal intelligence has very little to do with my ability to understand how people interact with one another, if I can't grasp a concept I simply think about how I believe I'd react in a situation that matches the concept and, because of my intrapersonal intelligence, I can easily grasp the concept that way. I have classmates who are also socially awkward and, in a class where the subject is communication, it still doesn't inhibit us from learning the material and applying it to the real world.

Works Cited

Gardner, Howard and Joseph Walters. "A Rounded Version: The Theory of Multiple

Intelligences." A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2010. 507-521. Print.