'The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind," Winston Churchill once said. Perhaps it is not surprising to see Howard Gardner quoting him approvingly. Professor Gardner holds the chair in cognition and education at the Harvard graduate school of education and has been a prominent analyst of the human mind for 20 years.

His 1983 publication, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, started a debate on human intelligence that continues to this day. Gardner argued that, rather than looking at intelligence as a single quality or capacity, we need to consider eight or nine kinds of intelligence that, in his view, people are capable of displaying. Psychologists and educationalists have been having a jolly good row about that one ever since.