Can you visualize moving a couch through a doorway without physically touching it? How does a hockey legend like Wayne Gretzky predict where players will move on the ice?
According to Howard Gardner, spatial intelligence involves recognizing shapes, manipulating them mentally, and navigating surroundings effectively. This intelligence appears in various professions, from artists who visualize their creations to athletes who anticipate movements in their environment.
Read on to understand how this fascinating intelligence develops and functions in our everyday lives.
Howard Gardner on Spatial Intelligence
According to Howard Gardner, spatial intelligence is a type of physical intelligence that allows you to recognize shapes and manipulate them in your mind (for instance, when you imagine rotating a couch to figure out if it will fit through a doorway), and to navigate your surroundings.
Unlike conceptual intelligences, spatial intelligence doesn’t have a specific language or set of symbols associated with it. However, any representation of shapes and forms—from a child’s drawing to a complex blueprint or schematic—could be considered a way of recording and sharing spatial information.
(Shortform note: Another important aspect of spatial intelligence is the ability to understand your surroundings as a whole, and to predict how they will change. Adam Gopnik, a writer and avid sports fan, says that hockey player Wayne Gretzky exemplifies spatial intelligence (rather than bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, as one might expect). He says that Gretsky’s exceptional performances came from his spatial and situational awareness: Gretzky could predict well in advance how the other players and the opposing goalie would move. As a result, he was able to easily skate past defenders and shoot past the goalie. This ability led to Gretzky being the highest scoring NHL player of all time as of January 2025.)
Gardner points to visual artists (painters, animators, and so on) as an example of people who largely rely on spatial intelligence for their work. In order to create a work of art, the artist must first be able to picture it in detail—all of the shapes and forms the piece will consist of, and how they’re arranged in relation to each other. The artist must then be able to reproduce that mental image using whatever medium they work with.
Furthermore, people who are exceptionally skilled in the visual arts—such as the Renaissance-era sculptor Michelangelo—are often called artistic geniuses. This highlights that such people have exceptionally high levels of spatial intelligence.
(Shortform note: Gardner said that intelligences are abstract concepts, not tangible and measurable things. Using famous artists as examples of spatial intelligence emphasizes this point: What people call “genius” often reveals more about their own time periods and values than any universal standards of intelligence (spatial or otherwise). For instance, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were widely recognized as geniuses during their lifetimes for their considerable spatial intelligence (though that term wasn’t used at the time). However, Vincent van Gogh’s unique way of seeing and portraying the world was almost universally rejected during his lifetime, and people didn’t widely call him a genius until long after his death.)
Gardner says that the development of spatial intelligence follows a distinct trajectory through childhood. Initially, infants explore their environment through simple actions such as crawling, observing, and touching objects. By age three or four, children develop the ability to form accurate mental images. After that, they can learn to manipulate those images mentally, without the need to physically move or change the objects. For example, a roughly five-year-old child playing with building blocks may be able to first picture what they want to build, then accurately reproduce that image using the actual blocks.
(Shortform note: As with conceptual intelligences, there are ways to keep developing your spatial intelligence throughout your life—and many of them are quite enjoyable. Some effective ways to train your spatial intelligence include solving puzzles, playing video games such as Minecraft or Tetris, and doodling in a sketchbook. All of these activities help you practice visualizing shapes, mentally manipulating them, and arranging them to match an image in your mind.)
Finally, spatial intelligence is associated with specific areas of the brain, particularly the back regions of the right hemisphere. Researchers have found that a person’s spatial reasoning can be impaired by brain damage to those areas, while their other cognitive abilities remain intact. Likewise, people in cognitive decline often retain fundamental spatial skills—such as their ability to recognize objects and move through their environment—even as they lose other faculties.
(Shortform note: As with many of the other forms of intelligence discussed in the book, more recent research has shown that spatial intelligence is not as localized in the brain as Gardner believed. For instance, one meta-analysis (a study of numerous other studies) published in 2018 found that spatial information processing activates a neural network distributed across both hemispheres that includes areas at the front, sides, back, and—to a lesser extent—the interior of the brain.)
