I am truly grateful to all of the following for their generous help – of many different kinds – in the shaping and writing of this book: Miles Barker, Ian Barnes, Stephen Batchelor, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Valerie Bonnardel, Fritjof Capra, Malcolm Carr, Margaret Carr, Art Costa, Matthew Crawford, Jean Decety, Thomas Fuchs, Howard Gardner, Gabriel Gomez, Stephan Harding, Paul Howard-Jones, Jean Knox, Michael Leunig (sorry that Mr Curly didn’t make the final cut), Terry Locke, James Pennebaker, David Perkins, David Perry, Rolf Pfeifer, Graham Price, Greta Raaen, Richard Sennett, Louise and Guy Thwaites, Tamar Tolcachier, Harald Traube, Maria Alessandra Umiltà and Michael West. Sometimes just a fleeting conversation, which they may not even remember, sowed a seed that germinated over time into a frond or a branch of this book. I am honoured to have known two titans in the fields of embodied cognition and systems thinking who are no longer with us: biologist Brian Goodwin (a colleague at Schumacher College in Devon) and Francisco Varela – the only person I have ever met who could talk European phenomenology, neuroimmunology and Tibetan Buddhism fluently, and at the same time. It will be obvious that I have been deeply swayed, in addition, by the pioneering work of researchers such as Lawrence Barsalou, Andy Clark, Hugo Critchley, Chris Frith, Arthur Glenberg, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Anil Seth and Timothy Wilson.
Much thinking about real-world intelligence was stimulated by discussions with my (now ex) colleagues at the Centre for Real-World Learning at Winchester: Janet Hanson, Ellen Spencer, Jenny Elmer, Roberto Webster and especially Bill Lucas. My friends Sebastian Bailey, Steve Brickell, George Chamier, Judith Nesbitt and Jonathan Rowson were all heroic in offering to read an earlier draft, despite their own backlogs and busy lives, and in providing sometimes painful, but always useful and perceptive, feedback and suggestions. Many thanks to Heather McCallum and her colleagues at Yale for taking the book on, and again for much good advice that has helped to improve the book enormously. And to one anonymous reviewer for gentle and penetrating comments that really helped. Judith Nesbitt gets a lot of points for allowing me to colonise the dining table for long stretches without (much) complaint, and generally cutting me a good deal of slack, and offering continual support, during the writing.
*****
Permissions to reprint extracts from copyright material:
from ‘To be of use’ from Circles On The Water by Marge Piercy, Copyright © 1982 by Middlemarsh, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency. All rights reserved; from ‘A Poet’s Advice to Students’. Copyright © 1955, 1964 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1958, 1965 by George J. Firmage, from A Miscellany Revised by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.