Non-Stupid Internet Quizzes

All, right, forget the "what kind of candy bar are you?" stuff for a minute. Here's an interesting online test: the Multiple Intelligence Inventory. This is a serious test that asks what struck me as some fairly interesting and insightful questions and tells you about your "learning styles."

For the record, I scored highest as a:

Linguistic Learner
-likes to: read, write and tell stories.
-is good at: memorizing names, places, dates and trivia.
-learns best by: saying, hearing and seeing words.

Which is very, very definitely me.

Second-highest was:

Logical/Mathematical Learner
-likes to: do experiments, figure things out, work with numbers, ask questions and explore patterns and relationships.
-is good at: math, reasoning, logic and problem solving.
-learns best by: categorizing, classifying and working with abstract patterns/relationships.

That doesn't describe me quite as well. I'm not much for tinkering around and experimenting with things until I've gotten them figured out; I'm much happier if I can just get someone to explain how something works, instead. And I'm not super-great at math, though I suppose I'm less intimidated by it than many people. But I'm pretty good with logic. And playing with abstract patterns and relationships is fun.

On the other hand, I scored very low as a:

Spatial Learner
-likes to: draw, build, design and create things, daydream, look at pictures/slides, watch movies and play with machines.
-is good at: imagining things, sensing changes, mazes/puzzles and reading maps, charts.
-learns best by: visualizing, dreaming, using the mind's eye and working with colors/pictures.

A pretty good summary of all the things I'm really bad at, that. Well, exept for watching movies and daydreaming. I think I've got those down.

I also scored very low as an:

Interpersonal Learner
-likes to: have lots of friends, talk to people and join groups.
-is good at: understanding people, leading others, organizing, communicating, manipulating and mediating conflicts.
-learns best by: sharing, comparing, relating, cooperating and interviewing.

And high as an:

Intrapersonal Learner
-likes to: work alone and pursue own interests.
-is good at: understanding self, focusing inward on feelings/dreams, following instincts, pursuing interests/goals and being original.
-learns best by: working alone, individualized projects, self-paced instruction and having own space.

To which all I can say is, "Hell, yeah!" If you want me to learn something, back off and leave me alone to get on with it!

Indeed, none of this was anything I needed to take a test to tell me, but the part of me that likes "categorizing and classifying" found it very interesting.

This site also has a couple of other nifty little experiments you can participate in. (Note: you have to register to participate in any of this stuff, but it doesn't ask you for your name or e-mail address, just a little bit of demographic information.) One of them challenges you to figure out which of a series of "stencils" were combined to create a certain pattern (a task even my little non-visually-oriented brain didn't find too awfully difficult). The results and discussion are kind of interesting to read, if you have any interest at all in this kind of how-the-brain-works stuff.

There's also one that tests "perceptual processes in reading" by inviting you to scan a bunch of paragraphs (some of which are composed of actual, meaningful words and sentences, and some of which are just gibberish) and pick out a particular target word or string of characters. I found that one really frustrating, actually, because, as far as I can tell, when I'm presented with a block of text, my mind wants to read it. Even though the instructions specifically said just to look for the words and not read for content, the fastest and most natural and efficient way for me to look for the words was to speed-read the paragraph (albeit without worrying too much about the meaning). When I got paragraphs that were just pseudo-random jumbles of characters, I found that I actually felt kind of angry. Hey!, my brain shouted at me. I can't read this! What the hell are you trying to pull? This kind of leads me to wonder... Can most other people actually look at words without reading them? There was another little exercise on the page discussing this task, in which they present a sentence or two of text and ask you to read it and count the number of t's. The idea is to demonstrate that, when people are reading, short, common words like "the" tend not to impinge on our consciousness, and even when we're trying to pay attention to how many t's there are, we tend to miss a lot of them for that reason. Which certainly did seem to be the case for me. Here's the odd thing, though. They then invite you do go over the snippet again, and this time, they tell you, don't read it, just scan for t's. (The idea being that you'll get more t's that way, because your brain isn't reading the words as individual chunks and ignoring the "the"s.) And you know something? I can't do it. Oh, I can count t's OK, but I can't not read the words. How do you look at a sentence and just see it as a collection of letters? It's like saying to someone, "OK, now, look around you, but don't see the things in your visual field as objects. Just scan them for shapes." You can't do it! You can't not see a computer as a computer and a bookcase as a bookcase, and just pick them out as rectangles. (I mean, you can pick them out as rectangles, but you can't exactly get your brain to ignore the meaningful visual content of them, can you?) Are words different than that for most people?

Well, all right, you're probably thinking "so what?" and "who cares?" But, hey, I find this stuff interesting, anyway. Probably goes along with all that yotz about "understanding self" and "focusing inward"...