What is IMIT?

The Inborn Multiple Intelligence Test draws on two different things: published findings you can look up, and a framework that proposes how to read a person. This page sets out both, and keeps them apart.

If you are reading this with other tabs open, this is the page that tells you which is which.

How to read this page

Every section below opens with one of these three markers.

  • Established Published, and cited by number. Stated as fact because the source states it. Open it and check.
  • The framework's account What the IMIT framework holds, in its own terms. Setting out a proposal is not the same as backing it.
  • General background Ordinary orientation. Nothing else on this page depends on it.

Every source in the list at the foot of this page was opened and read on 17 August 2026. Where we could not find a source, the claim is not on the page. That is why this page is shorter than some of the others you have found.

What is the multiple intelligences framework?

Mostly the framework's account The history of the list is established and cited. What each one is held to be is marked as the framework's account.

Howard Gardner is a psychologist. In 1983 he published Frames of Mind,1 which argued that one number on one scale describes a person poorly, and that it is more useful to describe several separate capabilities.

The idea is taught in education courses. Northern Illinois University's guide to it is free to read.2

Seven, then eight, and one candidate

The 1983 book set out seven: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.1

It did not stay at seven. Gardner later concluded that a naturalist intelligence "merits addition to the list of the original seven", which makes eight, and it is the only addition he has settled on.3 A further one, existential, he has treated as a possible extension and never definitively added.32

Almost everywhere else you will see a flat nine. You can check that against the tabs you already have open, and it takes about a minute.

The count is unsettled because the man who proposed the framework kept arguing with it in public. A theory its own author keeps revising is alive rather than a slogan, and that is a point in its favour.

The framework's account

What each one is held to be

The framework holds that a person is better described as a profile across several intelligences than as a single score, and that everybody has some of each. The counts and dates above are established. These descriptions are its own.

The original seven

  1. LinguisticWords, spoken and written. Reading, writing, explaining, and remembering how a thing was said.
  2. Logical-mathematicalNumber, pattern, and reasoning in steps. Testing an idea against a rule.
  3. SpatialSeeing in three dimensions. Layouts, routes, and how a thing looks once it has been turned around.
  4. MusicalPitch, rhythm, timbre. Hearing structure inside sound and reproducing it.
  5. Bodily-kinestheticUsing the body with precision. Learning a movement by making it rather than by being told it.
  6. InterpersonalReading other people. Mood, intention, and what will land with this one and not that one.
  7. IntrapersonalReading yourself. Your own state, your own limits, your own motives.

  • Added later, the eighth

    Naturalist Noticing and sorting. Living things, materials, and the differences between one kind of thing and another.

  • A candidate, not a ninth

    Existential The large questions. Meaning, mortality, and why anything is here at all.

These are capabilities, not preferences and not personality types. Section 05 comes back to that, because it is the thing most often got wrong.

Sources for this section 1. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 1983 2. Northern Illinois University, CITL 3. infed.org, on the naturalist addition

What is dermatoglyphics, and where did it come from?

Established Every statement in this section is published and numbered.

Dermatoglyphics is the study of the ridged skin on the fingers, palms, toes and soles: the raised lines that leave a fingerprint. It is an old field with a documented history, and that history is worth having straight, because much of what is said about fingerprints in advertising is not in it.

  1. 1823

    Purkinje classifies the ridges

    Jan Evangelista Purkinje published the first systematic classification of the papillary ridges of the hand.4

  2. 1892

    Galton establishes individuality and permanence

    Francis Galton's Finger Prints established that the patterns are individual and that they persist through life, and set out the first arch, loop and whorl classification.5

  3. 1926

    The word itself

    Harold Cummins and Charles Midlo, anatomists at Tulane, coined the term dermatoglyphics.6

A 2018 review in the Canadian Medical Association Journal is the best short account of what happened next.7 It is candid about both halves of the story: the genuine clinical work, and the ambitions that ran ahead of the evidence. If you read one link on this page, read that one. It is not written to sell you anything, including this.

The clinical literature, and what it is actually about

There is a real, peer reviewed medical literature on dermatoglyphics, and its subject is worth being exact about. From the 1970s, studies recorded associations between particular hand features, among them ulnar loops, the single transverse palmar crease, the atd angle and total ridge count, and chromosomal and developmental conditions.8910

The hand was used then as one input in deciding which patients to send for cytogenetic analysis.

Where this page stops

That literature is about congenital conditions. It is not about intelligence, aptitude, personality or career, and it is not offered here as though it were. IMIT is not a medical or diagnostic test. Nothing on this page describes a way to detect, rule out or identify any condition in a child. If you have a concern about your child's health, development or learning, that belongs with a doctor or a qualified psychologist.

Sources for this section 4. Purkinje, 1823 5. Galton, Finger Prints, 1892 6. Cummins and Midlo, 1926 7. CMAJ, 2018 8. Pediatric Research 9. Clinical Genetics, 1973 10. Dermatoglyphics in Medicine

How do fingerprint ridges form?

Established Two sources, both published and both readable in full. The week numbers below come from them and from nowhere else.

This is the settled part of the subject, and it is more interesting than the advertising around it. A fingerprint is not printed on a baby. It is grown, over about four months, and the order is known.

Before any ridge exists, small swellings called volar pads rise on the fingertips, the palm and the sole. They subside again before the ridges start. Where a pad stood, a pattern forms. Where none stood, the ridges run parallel. The pads are obligatory: the pattern is a record of a shape that was there and then went away.1112

The order of events, by week of gestation

  1. Week 7 to 8

    The volar pads appear

    Swellings rise on the fingertips, the palm and the sole. There are no ridges yet, anywhere.

  2. Week 10

    The pads regress

    They flatten back into the hand. Their height and position at this moment is what the pattern is later shaped around.

  3. Week 13

    Primary ridges begin

    On the fingertips, on the ground where the pads were.

  4. Week 16

    Sweat glands emerge

    Out of the deepest part of the ridges. This is why a fingerprint can be left on a glass at all: the ridges carry the pores.

  5. Week 17

    Primary ridge formation is complete

    From here the work is reinforcement, not design.

  6. Week 17 to 24

    Secondary ridges proliferate

    A second set forms between and beneath the first, thickening the structure.

  7. Week 24

    Dermal papillae begin

    The interlocking pegs that anchor the ridged skin to the layer below. The arrangement is now set.

After that, nothing about the pattern changes. The hand grows and the ridges grow with it, the way a drawing on a balloon gets larger without becoming a different drawing. The pattern on a child of three is the pattern on the same person at fifty. A cut heals back into the same arrangement unless it goes deep enough to destroy the layer underneath.11

The window this shares with the brain

The skin and the nervous system are not separate projects. Both come from ectoderm, the outermost of the three germ layers the early embryo is built from, so they develop on overlapping schedules.

Ridge formation runs at the same time as the formation of midline brain structures of that same ectodermal origin. Cortical synapse formation runs from roughly week 14 to week 27, which overlaps the ridge window in the timeline above almost exactly.1112

That overlap is real, and it is the honest version of the connection every page in this business reaches for.

The framework's account

What the framework does with this

Practitioners in this field work from that window. Their reasoning is that the pattern is fixed before birth, that it is therefore not a product of schooling, upbringing or mood, and that whatever it reflects, it reflects something inborn. That is what the word inborn is doing in the name of the test.

Where this page stops

Two things happening in the same window, out of the same tissue, is not one of them reading the other. The next step, the one almost every page in this business takes, is to say that the ridge pattern therefore reports the structure of a particular brain. We cannot show you a source for that, so this page does not say it. Shared origin and shared timing are what the two papers below support. That is where this page stops, and it is further than it looks.

Sources for this section 11. Glover et al., Cell, 2023 12. Journal of Forensic Dental Sciences, 2020

How is the brain organised?

General background School biology, at about that level. No source, and nothing else here rests on it.

The brain has two hemispheres joined by a thick bundle of fibres, and each is described in four lobes: frontal for planning, judgement and movement; parietal for touch, position and spatial sense; temporal for hearing, language and memory; occipital for vision.

That is a map of a building, not an account of what happens inside it. Functions are shared across it, and a map this coarse cannot support a conclusion about one person. It does not follow that anybody is a "left brained" or a "right brained" sort, and this page does not say so.

Is a multiple intelligence a learning style?

Established, with one marked exception On the record, in the words of the man who proposed the intelligences. The framework's own account is marked separately.

No. Gardner has said in print that the multiple intelligences are not learning styles, and that treating them as though they were misreads his work.13

People have preferences about how they take things in. One would rather read it, one would rather be told it, one would rather do it once with their hands. That is a preference about method.

An intelligence, in section 01, is a description of capability. A preference is a description of method. This page keeps the two apart for that reason.

Carry that with you. It is the most common error in material about fingerprint assessments. If a page hands you one of the intelligences relabelled as a learning style, it has made the mistake its own source objects to, and it is fair to wonder what else on it was never checked.

The framework's account

Acquiring style, as the framework describes it

Separately from the capability profile, practitioners describe an acquiring or intake style: whether a learner leans toward seeing, hearing or doing, and sometimes whether they work better on one thing at a time or on several. The framework treats this as working method and keeps it apart from the intelligences rather than mapping one onto the other.

Where this page stops

Whether teaching a child in their stated preferred mode improves what they actually learn is argued over in education research, and we do not have a source here that we would be willing to put a number beside. So this page does not claim it. A preference is a useful thing for a parent to know about their own child. It is not a prescription for a school.

Source for this section 13. Gardner in The Washington Post, 2013

What are IQ, EQ, AQ, CQ and SQ?

The framework's account Vocabulary belonging to the field, so you know the words when you meet them. Not measured quantities.

Five abbreviations turn up together in this field. They come from different places, and they are not one instrument with one scale.

IQ Intelligence quotient
Reasoning and problem solving. The oldest of the five, and the only one most families have heard of.
EQ Emotional quotient
Recognising and handling feeling, in yourself and in the people around you.
AQ Adversity quotient
What a person does when something goes wrong. Whether they stop, or work round it.
CQ Creativity quotient
Making something that was not there before, rather than selecting the best of what is already on the table.
SQ Social quotient
Moving among other people. Cooperating, negotiating, and reading a room.

Where this page stops

Of the five, IQ has a long history of standardised measurement behind it, and EQ has some. The other three borrow the word quotient without the standardised scoring that is what gives IQ whatever meaning it has. Calling something a quotient does not make it a measured quantity. This page does not present any of the five as one, and does not attach a number to any of them.

References

The point of this page. They open in a new tab, so you will not lose your place here.

  1. Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. 1983.

    The book itself. Not free to read online; widely held in libraries and in print.

  2. Northern Illinois University, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. "Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences."

    niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/gardners-theory-of-multiple-intelligences.shtml

  3. infed.org. "Howard Gardner, multiple intelligences and education."

    infed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/

    Carries the "merits addition to the list of the original seven" line on naturalist, and Gardner's position on existential.

  4. Purkinje, Jan Evangelista. 1823. The first systematic classification of the papillary ridges.

    Historical work, in Latin. We have no stable free copy to link to; it is described in the CMAJ review at reference 7.

  5. Galton, Francis. Finger Prints. 1892.

    Out of copyright and widely scanned. Establishes individuality and permanence, and the arch, loop and whorl classification.

  6. Cummins, Harold, and Charles Midlo. 1926. Anatomists at Tulane University; coined the term dermatoglyphics.

    Described in the CMAJ review at reference 7.

  7. CMAJ, 2018. "Secrets in fingerprints: clinical ambitions and uncertainty in dermatoglyphics."

    cmaj.ca/content/190/19/e597

    The balanced account. Read this one.

  8. Pediatric Research. "Palmar Dermatoglyphics of Down's Syndrome: Revisited."

    nature.com/articles/pr197317

    A congenital condition. Not about intelligence.

  9. Deckers. Clinical Genetics, 1973.

    onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-0004.1973.tb01164.x

    A congenital condition. Not about intelligence.

  10. "Dermatoglyphics in Medicine."

    ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5076085

    A review of the clinical use of hand features. Not about intelligence.

  11. Glover, James D., et al. "The developmental basis of fingerprint pattern formation and variation." Cell, 2023.

    cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00045-4

    The current account of how the pattern forms, and one of the two sources for the shared ectodermal origin in section 03. Free to read in full.

  12. Journal of Forensic Dental Sciences, 2020. "Dermatoglyphics: A Concise Review on Basic Embryogenesis."

    journals.lww.com/jfds/fulltext/2020/12020/dermatoglyphics___a_concise_review_on_basic.7.aspx

    Where the week by week sequence in section 03 comes from, and the second source for the shared ectodermal origin.

  13. Gardner, Howard. "Multiple intelligences are not learning styles." The Washington Post, 16 October 2013.

    washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/16/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-are-not-learning-styles/

    In his own words.

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