(no subject)

[ewx]

Alledgedly I'm an "interpersonal thinker". It says:

Interpersonal thinkers:

• Like to think about other people, and try to understand them
• Recognise differences between individuals and appreciate that different people have different perspectives
• Make an effort to cultivate effective relationships with family, friends and colleagues

Other Interpersonal thinkers include:
Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, William Shakespeare

Careers which suit Interpersonal thinkers include:
Politician, Psychologist, Nurse, Counsellor, Teacher

(The quiz is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/thinker_quiz/index.shtml)

Comments

[mpinna.livejournal.com]

According to this I also am like Mother Teresa. Don't really see it myself...

[ottah.livejournal.com]

At least my chosen career came up under the jobs to do...so at the BBC think that I should be a (student vet) nurse - hurrah, I was really worried there for a minute.
As long as I don't ever have to be a politian :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It's the horns.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. It gave me two thinking styles - Linguistic and Logical-Mathematical.

I'd personally be quite surprised if those two occurred separately at all often, though.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

It gave me Logical-Mathematical on it's own. (But I did enjoy languages at school)

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. Just out of interest, how do you react to Lojban, if you're allegedly logical-mathematical, but not linguistic?

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Well, after a moderately brief look, then I'd say that it looks very interesting and the kind of thing that I would learn if I ever had the tuits to do so (such as someone organised a class* for it). But that I doubt if I would ever get too good at it.

*I've been to classes in Elvish and in Welsh too!

[j4.livejournal.com]

I was linguistic but not logical-mathematical...

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

It gave me Spatial and Logical-Mathematical, and not Linguistic. Even though I have a PhD in linguistics :-)

[gerald_duck]

You don't have to be something to be an expert on it.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

It presumably helps, though - or why would they give "suggested careers" for people who think in particular ways? (The suggested "linguistic" jobs are much closer to jobs I've actually done than the "spatial" or "logical-mathematical" jobs.)

[k425.livejournal.com]

That's because yer actual linguistics is really looking at patterns and so on, which is spatial, and if you're into syntax and so on it's definitely logical-mathematical. I think they were considering 'linguistic' to be 'about words'. My father-in-law was convinced I had a spatial/mathematical thinking brain and was interested by the fact that I was a linguistics student. I think you need that kind of brain to be able to look for the underlying rules and patterns.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

But I hate syntax! I find it incredibly boring. I wish modern academic linguistics wasn't so obsessed with syntax. I like sound change and inflectional morphology and detecting inherited relationships between languages, and lexicostatistics, and things like that.

I agree, though, that there may be a mismatch between this quiz's idea of "linguistic" and academic linguistics. I suspect some of the questions I gave negative responses to would have contributed to me not coming out as a "linguistic thinker", for personal social reasons rather than anything to do with my analytical approach to things. For example, the question about whether you like to tell stories in groups, or something like that - I gave a very low response to that one, because I'm just too shy to want extended conversational turns in groups.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Phew! I'm not the only syntax-disliking linguist around then! In fact, we seem to have some similar interests (although I'm not sure about lexicostatistics) - many of which come down to 'finding patterns'.