Toshiyuki Shimada works with orchestra students at Norwich Free Academy last October as part of his candidacy process for director of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra.
As the lights went down to start the final ECSO concert of the season, a family of four sidled in — the way you do in a row of theater seats. Mom, Dad, brother, sister. Few children attend the nighttime concerts, but these kids were being treated to seats up front.
With the start of Mendelssohn’s “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” I could see why they chose that row. The little girl, homemade baton in hand, was conducting the orchestra in her seat.
I wish the actual Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra conductor, Toshiyuki Shimada, could have seen what was happening behind his back. The child was precisely copying his moves. When his arm stretched, so did hers – a bare quarter-beat behind. When he pointed to the horns, she did, too, even pacing the rapid but almost invisible agitation of the baton. Me, I’m grinning in the dusk.
The child conductor literally did not miss a beat. Her musical intelligence is one of her superpowers.
Behavioral science recognizes multiple categories of human intelligence. Best known is the list of intelligences identified by Howard Gardner: linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Gardner added that humans are not born with all the intelligence they will ever have. Some they acquire.
On the same weekend as the concert, The New York Times Magazine published its powerful interview with three Connecticut State Police investigators who went above and beyond their duties in documenting the carnage inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.
The article describes the trauma Sandy Hook inflicted even on veteran officers who have dealt with numerous homicide scenes. It recounts their determination to do for each of the 26 victims what they were used to doing for one at a time. No corners would be cut, even though no trial was likely; the shooter was dead and appeared to have acted alone.
The story lays out the steps the investigative team took to shield anyone who did not have to look at a scene that can never be unseen. It details their decision after the bodies of 20 child victims and their teachers had been removed that they would show then-Attorney General Eric Holder a dozen of the 1,495 photos they took and then escort him to the classrooms through hallways still littered with glass shards.
Times writer Jay Kirk wrote, that “something like destiny, however grim and profoundly unwanted, had been laid at their feet. That the country, the world, would come looking for answers was not a question. And if anyone was going to provide the answers, at least to what had happened in these rooms, it would be up to them, but only if they kept their heads.”
They did their work with a rare but critical combination of the logical/mathematical, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal human intelligences developed over their years as investigators. When told they could skip some steps because evidence was not needed for prosecution, their interpersonal intelligence told them no, the victims and their families deserve all we can do. Their intrapersonal intelligence warned each of them of the toll it was taking, but character and a sense of duty kept them going.
Their mission was to protect people from crippling horror but at the same time not to shield the public from the obscene truth of what one heavily armed intruder had done. Putting their multi-faceted intelligence at the service of a greater good, the investigative team provided lawmakers, law enforcement and justice officials with evidence that led to rapid changes in Connecticut law and — not until much more bloodshed — to a federal law that upended the stalemate on gun control measures.
Recent news about intelligence-related topics has largely focused on the expansion of Artificial Intelligence and its capacity for increasing its own scope. Journalist Scott Pelley observed on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” that he was speechless, rare for him, about the tasks AI was conceiving for itself and then carrying out. Is AI “sentient”? he asked. Does it have self awareness?
Programmers obviously can endow AI with linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial and musical intelligence. Pelley’s report includes two bots teaching themselves to play soccer, so some form of bodily-kinesthetic and inter-“personal” intelligence is involved. It would be ironic, but perfectly possible, for AI to have naturalist intelligence.
Intrapersonal intelligence, however, depends on self-awareness. If AI ever becomes self-aware, will it be inclined to put others’ good before its own? Always? Sometimes? Never? Would it undertake a task like identifying, cleansing and returning victims’ jewlery to their families with empathy or just expediency?
Will AI have joy, like the thrill of conducting scores of musicians right in front of you who don’t even know you’re there? Will it be able to pretend?
We have a lot to learn about intelligence.
Lisa McGinley is a member of The Day Editorial Board.
