THE EMBODIED LIFE
SELF, SPIRIT AND SOCIETY
Gone is the central executive in the brain – the boss who organises and integrates the activities of multiple special-purpose sub-systems. And gone is the neat boundary between the thinker (the bodiless intellectual engine) and the thinker’s world. In place of this comforting image we confront a vision of mind … not limited by the tenuous envelope of skin and skull.
Andy Clark1
So here I am. I am a body. I am a body that is not so much a lump of too, too solid flesh, topped with a mind, but rather a swirling flux of information streams. These streams have both internal (e.g. gut) and external (e.g. eyes) origins, though they interweave so quickly and thoroughly that it is impossible to separate them out and say ‘who I am really’, or what ‘the real world’ looks like, or ‘who started it’. ‘Who I am’ is already deeply influenced by messages coming in through eyes and ears, nose and tongue and skin. I am, through the body, intricately embroiled in the environment, both physical and social, and it in me. And the world, as it appears to me, is already deeply tinted and flavoured by my own values and history. We are built to be chameleons, taking on the colours of the world in which we find ourselves; and also decorators, designing and annotating the world to which we then respond.
Even to speak of ‘having a body’, or of something occurring in or to ‘my body’, is to misrepresent the situation; it is to insert the thinnest but most insidious of wedges between the body and a hypothetical owner or driver. Even to write – as I was just tempted to – of ‘the world around me’ or ‘my environment’ is to presume that Me and the World I Inhabit are separate, or at least separable, and this is simply incorrect. That’s what the science of embodiment tells us. However deeply embedded these dualistic habits are in our language and thought, they are crude and often misleading approximations to our real nature. Our common sense about ourselves is not innocent or transparent. Identifying with the image we see in the Cartesian mirror has consequences, and not all of them are good, or even neutral.
I am a body that unfurls sometimes into mind-like thoughts and experiences of various kinds, as well as into bodily actions like reaching for the salt or changing the subject. Some of these experiences I treat as being (more or less reliable) depictions of the World Around Me. Some of them I interpret as being reactivated records of my past, or images of desired or dreaded futures. Some of them are diffuse, like the feeling of being off-colour, or of having forgotten to do something. Some materialise as well-formed trains of thought, or blinding insights; others seem to lurk in the wings of consciousness: mental marginalia such as inklings and hunches. And I treat some of these more shadowy backdrops to consciousness as aspects of my self: the feeling of witnessing a performance, or intending an action, or resisting a thought. Sometimes these fronds of consciousness co-occur, and then I have the impression of a self thinking, or planning an action, or rehearsing a move, as if one frond were the cause or controller of another. But really, the ‘I’ is as much an upwelling from the interior as the thought or the action itself. I am a body–mind–context constellation, ever changing and ever welling up. And so, I think, are you.
What happens if we try to take this alternative view of ourselves ever more seriously; if we move along a path from understanding it to accepting or agreeing with it, to believing it, to embodying it? Could ‘being an embodied and extended system’ become not just an idea or a spur to daily walks but a lived experience – and, if so, what difference would it make to the way we perceive and act and think? And beyond that, what difference would it make to the social world and its institutions and practices? Would embodied education, embodied law, embodied politics, embodied religion, even embodied medicine, be different from the schools, law courts, senates, churches, mosques and hospitals that we know? To do justice to these questions would take another book, but in this final chapter I am going to let my hair down a little and play with some possibilities.
Embodied lifestyle
Seeing that the dynamic communication system of the body is vastly more complex than the conscious mind can capture might lead me to adopt a humbler tone in the way I think about my health. Health is a function of the entire embodied and embedded System, but my conscious mind is often preoccupied with a superficial jumble of folklore, old wives’ tales and the media’s latest tips and ‘findings’ about aspirin or statins. (Consciousness often incorporates a clutter of knowledge and opinion that bears only a loose relationship to the felt truths of bodily experience, yet may stride forward and take precedence.) So I might decide it is smarter to take time to tune in to the subtle groundswell of bodily feelings and sensations, rather than espouse the latest nostrum (whether it emanates from an Ayurvedic guru or a professor of oncology).
And, to complement this, I might develop greater acuity about exactly when and where conscious, deliberate reasoning is the best tool for the job, and when it isn’t. I’ll notice that to think and argue explicitly requires the world I am thinking and talking about to be pretty simple and clear-cut. Rational thinking is like juggling: you can only keep so many balls in the air (and lawyers and professors can cope with not many more than your average bear). If the world is amenable to such simplification, well and good – but mostly it is not, and then the application of deliberate reasoning becomes Procrustean: much of what is complex and intertwined has to be lopped off or ignored to fit the format of rational comprehension and discourse. So it is no wonder that such debates – like the one I watched on television last night about the pros and cons of Scottish independence – regularly become a slanging match between apparently intelligent people who deploy every trick in the rhetorical book to make a ‘telling point’. Truth and its pursuit are the first casualties of such rhetorical warfare. As Wittgenstein might have said, whereof one cannot speak clearly and logically, thereof one must bumble – speaking hesitantly, humbly and perhaps poetically. Or not at all.
Intelligence often grows out of a patient willingness to say ‘I don’t know’ and abide in uncertainty. So, in the face of a decision that is important but not urgent, I might try to learn to slow down, pay attention to the faint forming of a felt sense in my midriff or my throat, and see if I can allow the unfurling or the welling up to happen at its own pace, so that I don’t skip vital steps and foreclose on the meaning prematurely. In general I might take a growing interest in intuition: signals that emerge from my dark depths in the form of physical promptings, inklings, hunches and images. I do not have to ‘buy’ them unquestioningly, any more than I have to buy the economic forecasts produced by high-powered computerised reasoning; but I might discover that they have a greater value and validity than the Cartesian model allows.
I might grow to be less troubled by some of the apparently weird or inconsequential stuff that wells up into consciousness, trusting that (provided my Sub-Systems are reasonably well integrated) I am not ‘going crazy’; that these puffs of black smoke are just by-products of my system cleaning and conditioning itself, in exactly the same way that my printer, at seemingly random moments, emits a range of grunts and clanks as it engages in a mysterious operation which it calls ‘aligning’. There is a calm in accepting Pascal’s dictum that ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’ (and so do the larynx, the lungs and the gut).
Knowing that I automatically become part of a Super-System with the people around me, I might become more gentle and tentative about passing judgement and attributing blame. Both your and my behaviour emanate from the dynamics of this larger system and cannot be accurately attributed to either one of us alone. So, as you and I embody this appreciation, our disputes take on a different tone and we are both participants and explorers, trying to see why this intricate Super-System which we created, and which now creates us, behaved in the harsh or apparently self-defeating way it just did.2 If I see myself as a ghostly mind, it is easy to feel that I am an isolated and self-contained individual: a localised bubble of consciousness. But if I am a body, first and foremost, then I am already deeply connected. Once I really get that mind is the conscious accomplice of the body, not its governor, I can’t avoid seeing myself as an aspect of the wider body social and body politic.3 As cells are to the physical body, so people are to the larger ‘corporations’ to which they belong. Embodied implies embedded.
I may generally become more open to – less surprised by – my variability as I move from context to context. The Cartesian model installs in me the sense of an unwavering core that I take for The Real Me, within which, and up to which, I have to live. Whatever is inscribed within the charmed circle of this ‘identity’, that is not just who I am but who I have to be, and so various forms of sclerosis must ensue. If (like the sclerotic heart) I insist on marching to my own tune, rather than rocking and rolling with the shifting currents of the Super-System of which I am a part, that’s not integrity, it’s stupidity. There is no need to be at odds with myself whenever I catch myself acting ‘out of character’. If my actions and experiences arise, moment by moment, from the whole body–mind context that underpins me, why should I be alarmed if, on some occasions, I manifest differently from ‘usual’? Finding myself in a novel situation, I am bound to surprise myself. It is perfectly natural.
If the essence of my personhood is not just logical thinking and abstract articulation, my very sense of self will shift. Reasoning and dispassionate debate are relative cultural newcomers and they grew out of deeper, older forms of intelligence that were intimately connected with bodily capacities, bodily needs and bodily feelings, and with the challenges and affordances of the material world. Perhaps I’ll grow to feel more of a fluid unity, and identify less with the cacophony of competing voices in my head.
And finally, dying might be easier if I deeply felt myself to be an embodied System within wider Systems: a transient manifestation of a confluence of forces, many unknown and/or beyond my control, rather than that solitary bubble. Giving up the comforting illusion that there is a Happy Hunting Ground in the sky where I shall play peacefully for eternity, I might feel unafraid of being, as the mystics say, simply a dewdrop slipping back into the ocean, in need of no more comfort than a deep acceptance of coming home.
So much for the individual experience of being an embodied, embedded being. But what about public life?
Education
Education in general would have to change if a unified body–mind–context view of ourselves were to supplant the opponent dualisms of Cartesian Man. (Many feminist writers have pointed out that the disembodied intellect is very lopsidedly masculine.) As I said earlier, schools rest on a Cartesian view of intelligence. The ability to manipulate abstract and Platonic entities like ‘prepositions’, ‘parabolic curves’ and ‘Newton’s Laws of Motion’ counts for more, in school, than the ability to make an old engine run sweetly or to decorate a house beautifully. So Maths and English and Physics are called ‘hard subjects’, are given more time, and carry more weight on your child’s CV than Home Economics and Metalwork. Despite repeated attempts to redress the balance, ‘vocational’ or ‘technical’ education is still widely seen as what you do if you are not ‘bright enough’ to do well at English, Maths or Science. Attempts to raise the esteem of Hairdressing or Motor Mechanics by bulking them up, like supermarket chickens, with watered-down injections of theory, are ineffective, and deeply misguided, because they reinforce the very assumption that needs to be challenged: that mind-stuff – ‘book-learning’ – is necessarily harder and better than body-stuff. The education of touch and smell, of visceral awareness and subtle grip, doesn’t form a big part of the school curriculum. If a teacher asked her pupils if they were aware of their heartbeat, and whether they would benefit from being more aware, she would be thought very weird.
It was claimed by Sir Christopher Frayling, when Rector of the Royal College of Art in London, that the original ‘3 Rs’ of schooling in Regency England were Reading, Reckoning and Wroughting (making things), but that, around 1807, Sir William Curtis ditched wroughting and elevated writing to an ‘R’ of its own, thus further downgrading the manual and practical.4 In commenting on this retrograde move, Professor Bruce Archer, also of the Royal College of Art, noted that ‘modern English has no word, equivalent to literacy and numeracy, meaning the ability to understand, appreciate and value those ideas which are expressed through the medium of making and doing. We have no word, equivalent to Science or the Humanities, meaning the collective experience of the material culture.’ Yet many scientists value highly this physical and material sensibility. I once heard the venerable scientist and bioengineer Heinz Wolff talking about his working methods. He was discussing the important role that old-fashioned metal Meccano had played in his development as a scientist, and suggested with some passion – and a strong German accent – that ‘it is as important for young people to become manipulate as it is to be articulate’. So maybe we can look forward to an enlightened society in which manipulacy is talked about and valued as highly as literacy and numeracy.
This hierarchy of esteem cannot be justified on the grounds of utility. Being able to recite the rules and categories of grammar does not make you a better writer. Learning how to solve simultaneous equations does not make you a better all-round thinker and problem-solver. And, beyond basic arithmetic, statistics and probability, more complex maths can best be learned when you need it (as I and many others have done). There is no practical justification for inflicting trigonometry on everyone. The fact that a few youngsters love it, and that it perfectly fits the Platonic mould, are inadequate arguments for making it universal. The hierarchy persists because the mind–body split, and its inequities of esteem, persist. Not just inequities but iniquities. Because Descartes had no way of understanding the cleverness of bodies and brains, and we still follow his model, thousands of young people who are good with their hands and feet, but not so good with equations or apostrophes, have been led to think that their talents and interests are second-rate, demanding, perhaps, of hard work and practice, but not requiring much in the way of genuine intelligence.5
Politics and law
Cartesian education induces changes in young people that carry through into their working lives and thus can influence the way our public institutions work. Let me give you just one (slightly controversial) illustration from the United Kingdom. In his books The Making of Them and Wounded Leaders, psychotherapist Nick Duffell reports detailed case studies of the psychological effects of boarding school on children’s visceral and empathic sensibility – especially if they are as young as seven or eight when they are sent there. It is a British tradition, which continues to this day, to send boys (and some girls) to boarding schools, many of whom will emerge as cultural leaders in the media, the judiciary, the armed forces, the City and, especially, in government. The current British Prime Minister (David Cameron) was seven when he became a boarder, and around two-thirds of his cabinet have a similar background.
Their overt education is highly intellectual and analytical. Years are spent honing the skills of comprehending and critiquing knowledge, and of constructing convincing arguments on paper and in debate. In seminars and tutorials at university these skills will be refined even further. This intensive apprenticeship in the etiquette of rationality produces what the French call a déformation professionnelle: not just a set of skills but an attitude towards life that depends on and privileges those skills.6 Duffell claims that this bias is accompanied, in many boarders, by a serious dampening of interoception. ‘Children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives,’ he says. The pressures of being a young boarder (as I was myself) may require you to learn how to pretend convincingly and continuously that you are not upset, scared or homesick, for to do so risks looking ungrateful to your parents, who are spending lavishly to buy you this privileged education, and ‘babyish’ to your peers, who will eagerly pounce on anyone who displays such weakness. I still remember with shame doing nothing to stop a night-time posse of ten-year-olds peeing on the bed of that term’s designated runt, a poor boy we called ‘Barmy’ Wright – with Barmy in the bed. Many of us were too frightened it would be our turn next to say anything. As many studies of deception have shown, the best way to lie to others is to lie to yourself; self-deception – denying the very experience of those tell-tale feelings of weakness – is the trick to learn.
The emphasis on sport in such schools can cut both ways, as far as the development of intelligence goes. Attitudes of resilience, fortitude, hard work and practice, as well as camaraderie and teamworking, are self-evidently valuable resources. Yet – as with the ballet dances Nina – that determination may depend on neglecting ‘inconvenient’ messages from the body, whether of muscle strain or tiredness, or of other competing values or needs. Visceral processes (as we saw in Chapter 6) can be dampened, through the use of muscular tension, and disconnected neurochemically from the central somatic processes that bind together feeling, action and perception. And the habitual attenuation of bodily processes can have a powerfully negative effect on social and emotional intelligence, as well as on cognition. It would seem a gross exaggeration to claim that we have been accepting, as leaders, people systematically trained to lack the deepest kind of intelligence there is. Yet a recent letter to The Observer, signed by many leading psychiatrists, psychotherapists and neuroscientists, expressed exactly this concern.7
*****
The Cartesian model shapes personalities, and also, over time, shapes professional practices themselves. Legal and political proceedings claim to respect only rational argument based on objective evidence – though they routinely admit the use of a wide variety of rhetorical tricks that bear no relationship to rationality. At High Table and in the Debating Chambers of government and law, decisions depend a great deal on who can mount the most persuasive (or least refutable) argument, or twist the arms of colleagues most successfully, and not on who can bring us closest to the truth or to wise judgement. Speaking from the heart, perhaps with a large reservoir of relevant experience, in a way that touches people and reminds them of deeper values and considerations, has had no formal place in such proceedings, and is often treated as embarrassing.
The inadequacy of cleverness is regularly on display in the ritualised rhetorical warfare of the law court. Everyone has to pretend that non-verbal signals, gut feelings and years of experience are of no account, while sophistical wordsmiths try to bamboozle jurors into making their preferred decisions. Points are scored when a seasoned expert is tripped up by a tricky question. Decisions that make no sense from an embodied perspective – such as whether someone was in their ‘right mind’, or ‘knew what they were doing’ – are treated with a farcical degree of seriousness. Just as swearing on a bible should carry no weight in a post-supernatural world, neither should much of what is now an anachronistic judicial process.
In other societies, less infatuated with the ideal of dispassionate reason, important decisions are approached differently. In traditional Maori culture, the weight that is given to someone’s thoughts on a matter depends largely on their mana, and this reflects their experience, their reputation and their personal and physical bearing. Someone with high mana speaks with an integrity that seems to emanate from a deeper, more embodied centre of knowing than merely the articulate intellect. In Maoridom there is faith that a gathering can be helped towards a wise, humane and inclusive resolution of an issue by the words of such a person more effectively than they can by clever verbal combat. The frequent fallibility of the adversarial judicial system, and the equally frequent silliness and superficiality of political debate, have certainly given me and many others cause to doubt the Cartesian systems we have inherited.
If wise judgement turns out to be very different from the lawyerly arts of sophistry and spin, who we consider fit to govern us will have to change. And these changes would obviously be resisted by those who, as Machiavelli put it, have done well under the old dispensation. Those who (like me) are good at reading, writing and reasoning will be rattled by the removal of the taken-for-granted linkage between their intellectual talents, their social esteem and their income.
People would need to be governed and motivated differently if prowess at reasoning were no longer considered the epitome of intelligence. One of the unquestioned values in many contemporary societies is social mobility. The desire to ‘better yourself’ – to ‘do better’ than your parents – underpins both education and the economy. But the magnetic pull of ‘betterment’ is usually towards mind-work and away from body-work. Around the world, the kinds of work that people aspire to, and those that are best paid, tend to be those that seem to require mental rather than physical skills. Shuffling paper in a clean shirt in a run-down government office is presented as a more honourable, because more intelligent, way of earning a living than working on the family farm or caring for young or old relatives. As Matthew Crawford, author of The Case for Working with Your Hands, says, ‘it is a peculiar sort of idealism that insistently steers people towards the most ghostly kinds of work’.8 There are whole societies that pride themselves on outsourcing any form of manual labour, from making coffee to building skyscrapers, to immigrant workers, and in which the insignia of ‘success’ are fine white garments that demonstrate the ultra-cleanliness of the micro-world you inhabit. In such societies, the idea of embodied intelligence could be completely, and dangerously, revolutionary.
Medicine
Even medicine has come to see the body as a collection of parts or symptoms which can be treated individually as one mends or replaces the parts of a machine. As I age, I can take pills for my blood pressure, pills to lower my cholesterol, pills for a headache, pills to shrink my prostate gland, pills to ward off an attack of gout and pills to try to deal with that persistent cough. My sneaking suspicion that these conditions might be interrelated, that a more systemic approach might be called for, is not something that my GP can address. The medical and pharmaceutical industries’ ability to understand how all my different drugs might interact is almost non-existent. They talk of ‘side-effects’ as if these were somehow technical problems they just haven’t quite managed to fix yet, rather than systemic effects: desperate attempts by a whole body to deal with a complex pharmaceutical onslaught it does not physiologically recognise and for which it has evolved no armoury. Conventional medicine has hardly begun to explore what it grandly calls ‘poly-pharmacy’. Even the gruesome term ‘multi-morbidity’ – suffering from several conditions at once – betrays the medical profession’s inability to think systemically about the body. Many elderly people may be suffering from just one thing, old age, a common condition with multiple symptoms, which contemporary ‘Western’ doctors, for all their sophistication, simply do not know how to conceptualise other than as a collection of separate disorders with a pill for each. Old age is not an acceptable cause of death on an English death certificate; the doctor has to latch on to a single specific thing – in my father’s case, ‘Parkinsonism’ – out of dozens of interlinked changes, to make death conform to this fragmented medical model.9
Even the body of the physician is treated as an irrelevance. She has her intellectual knowledge and her technological resources; what more could she want? The Cartesian approach to medicine has no way of incorporating good old-fashioned ‘clinical judgement’ or of admitting the validity of other, more bodily, ways of knowing that do not rely on numbers and machines. And in a litigious world, if something goes wrong you are much better off with a computer print-out of a lab test than a defence of ‘thirty years of experience’. The research is clear: experience manifesting as intuition has real validity, and it can also be wrong – just as rational analysis of a spreadsheet can give a stupid answer. The fallibility of ‘gut feelings’ is a reason not to ignore them but to tread cautiously and to try to understand better whose intuition is more likely to be valid when, and why. But you can’t teach clinical intuition in a one-semester course, or assess it with a multiple choice test.
Even in this small discussion, by the way, we can see how the Cartesian worlds of medicine, education and the law lock together into a self-reinforcing system that validates reason and neglects the body. A specific example concerns midwives who, for the reasons cited, are increasingly reluctant to act on their intuition. An experienced midwife may well have a hunch about when a home birth is going well enough, despite a complication, to continue, and will judge if and when the ambulance needs to be called. But increasingly she may override her intuition that all will be well and call the ambulance ‘just in case’. The evidence is that midwife-assisted home births are at least as safe as, and often safer than, hospital birth, and that, despite all the fancy machinery, there has been no overall improvement in birth outcomes over the last thirty years. The widespread use of foetal heart monitors during labour, for example, has resulted only in more Caesarean operations, not in better outcomes. An authoritative review in The Lancet concluded:
For low-risk mothers, there is a good case for a return to the traditional method of intermittent auscultation [listening to the internal sounds of the mother’s body with a stethoscope] with its lower false-positive rate, lower incidence of intervention, and opportunity for greater contact between the maternity care staff and the mother.10
In an embodied world, intuition born of experience would have its proper place, and medical students would be taught more about both the benefits and the fallibilities of their own intuition: when to heed it, and how, over time, to improve its quality. They would also be trained more effectively in the old-fashioned arts of inspecting, listening to and, very importantly, touching (‘palpating’) and smelling a patient’s body and its products. A great deal can be learned by listening carefully to the sound quality of a baby’s cry or of an old man’s creaky knees, by smelling a patient’s breath, or by inspecting the consistency and colour of someone’s urine or stools.11 The idea that such intimacy with your patent is distasteful and, worse, unreliable, is a modern aberration that medicine would do well to overcome. It is not that machines don’t tell you useful things; of course they do. But they offer only one source or type of information, and there are other, more somatic ones that it seems just plain stupid to ignore.
Screens and the body
Our emotional and social intelligence suffers if we ignore our bodies. Digital communication is fine, and fun, but if we cannot touch and smell the people we are with, a good deal of value is lost. A study found that American college students are less empathic than they were just a few years ago. They are less likely to agree with statements like ‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me’, and ‘I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.’ The authors of this study note that there could be several reasons for this. Much digital media content, from internet porn to casual ‘sexting’, is aggressive and disparaging. It is harder to connect with and be influenced by other people’s distress if you have become cumulatively desensitised, and also if you cannot see the immediate hurt in their posture or hear the tremor in their voice. One of the authors of the study, Edward O’Brien, puts it like this. ‘The casual relationship people have with their online “friends” makes it easy to just tune out when users don’t feel like dealing with others’ problems and emotions. As these social media relationships consume more and more of our time, it’s easy for this online behaviour to bleed into everyday life.’12 It could also be that our hand-held devices encourage a disposition towards fast reaction, and thus limit our bodily involvement. Antonio Damasio has found that our higher emotions such as empathy or compassion require biological processes that are inherently slow. It takes seconds, not milliseconds, for such feelings to germinate and unfurl within us. So chronic speediness could be reducing our emotional register in damaging ways.13
Just adding emoticons doesn’t cut it; we are not evolved to have the same visceral reaction to ☺ or ;-( as we do to photos of real people smiling and weeping. Clever designers are doing their best to reconnect our smartphones with our bodies. You can buy a Bluetooth-enabled Hug Shirt that will respond to certain messages on your phone by contracting and giving you a friendly squeeze. But – forgive me if I sound old-fashioned – I don’t think it would be quite the same somehow…
A lot of companies now have had to ban smartphones from meetings as a result of the destructive effects of what they call ‘continuous partial attention’. Smart devices are a mixed blessing, it seems; they can augment our intelligence, and they can also make us dumber. The more time we spend looking at our screens, the less we may be watching other real-life human beings reacting in subtle ways in real time to the world around them, and gradually learning to tune our own resonances to those frequencies. As Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University, says, ‘The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to “read” the behaviour of others, they are all thumbs.’14
The current obsession with digital technology raises a number of such concerns, and they are coming at us so thick and fast that research cannot document which are real problems and which are new forms of perennial moans about the decline of the young. Screen life is sedentary. Yes, you can do physical exercise or play virtual golf with your Wii, but the vast majority of screen life requires fingertips and eye muscles only. The body’s massive musculature is trivially engaged. Does that matter? Screen life is sensorily impoverished. It offers sight and sound, but – with the exception of the tapping of keys (and the Hug Shirt) – nothing solid and smelly, tickly and tasty in the way that real life is. Computers lead us to concentrate more and more on the two evolutionarily younger senses, sight and hearing, and to withdraw attention from the others. Are we being numbed as well as dumbed down by our machines? And, when so much information can be accessed and stored at the click of a mouse, does the opportunity to offload memory have consequences for the way we think and the quality of the ideas we generate? Does screen life risk encouraging us to be merely well informed rather than creatively intelligent? Time will tell; but there is enough evidence to suggest that these are serious questions, not to be lightly dismissed as a nostalgic knee-jerk reaction of the elderly.15
One symptom of dissatisfaction with screen life is a resurgent interest in physical pursuits and accomplishments. There is, I sense, a New Materialism around: one which is not about shopping and displays of conspicuous consumption, but about the pleasures of making and moving, from quilting to skateboarding, and much in between. Indeed, it seems that the more the digital world takes hold, the stronger, for many of us, is the reaction to get back from the virtual to the substantial, from the symbolic to the concrete: from mind to body.
Stanford University, I’ve heard, has instituted a compulsory course for new students in architecture, engineering and medicine that requires them to strip down and rebuild a bicycle, or build a model aeroplane from scratch. Of course, all Stanford students arrive with impressive school grades, but these have often been found to mask a deep lack of physical problem-solving ability and common sense. Intellectual accomplishment is no guarantee of practical intelligence. In a similar vein, one of the most heavily oversubscribed courses at MIT is MAS.863. It is called ‘How to Make (Almost) Anything’. This is its description.
This course provides a hands-on introduction to the resources for designing and fabricating [things]: machining, 3-D printing, injection moulding, laser cutting; PCB layout and fabrication; sensors and actuators … wired and wireless communications. This course also puts emphasis on learning how to use the tools as well as understand how they work.
Amongst the ‘brightest’ students in America there is, apparently, a huge hunger for working with physical material and making real things that really work.
More broadly, the Maker Movement is rampant in many countries of the world, providing free access to both traditional and digital workshops (called Hackerspaces or FabLabs) for people who want to make anything from a bird-box to a dancing robot. FabLabs are available in cities across the planet from Lafayette to Milan to Shanghai. Makers are also putting pressure on manufacturers to make things that are easier to repair. Mister Jalopy, the pseudonym of a maker guru in Los Angeles, has developed a ‘Maker’s Bill of Rights’ (the full manifesto can be found at www.makezine.com). It includes:
•Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included with everything
•If it snaps shut, it shall snap open
•Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons
•Individual components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable
•Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought
Makers are fond of quoting Marge Piercy’s evocative poem ‘To be of use’. It includes the lines:
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies …
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.
Gever Tulley’s ‘Tinkering School’ is a summer camp in the US. He guarantees to anxious parents that they have no need to worry: their child will come home covered in bruises and scratches. His much-watched TED talk is called ‘Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Child Do’. They include playing with fire, owning and using a penknife, and making and throwing spears. If we don’t let children do these things, Tulley argues, they grow up alienated from their physicality – and they don’t develop an intelligent appreciation of danger when it comes their way. He shows slides of Inuit toddlers using razor-sharp knives to cut whale blubber – having already learned key maxims of safety such as ‘Always cut away from you’ and ‘Don’t press too hard’. Tulley now runs Tinkering workshops for software designers at Adobe HQ in San Jose to help them get closer to the hands-on experience of their customers. He was brought in after the Adobe VP for design, Michael Gough, saw the effect of Tinkering School on his own children. Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design course at Stanford, says, ‘A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation. But you can’t simulate everything … All your intelligence isn’t in your brain. You learn through your hands.’16
In all the excitement about the affordances of the digital world, we must not forget that it has limitations, and it has its casualties. Yes, you can save money by outsourcing the interpretation of X-ray scans to India, but there is much skilled, satisfying, necessary work that cannot be done down a wire or via a satellite – because it requires skilled muscles and refined sensibility. You might be able to use your smartphone to record a TV programme while you are waiting in the departure lounge for your homeward flight, but a Beijing plumber is no use to you if your London sink is blocked. A stylist in Melbourne cannot cut your hair. A childminder in Phnom Penh can’t look after your baby. While many jobs can be automated or outsourced, the need for physical strength and intelligent hands is not going to die out.17
The casualties? Automation is, without question, depriving many people of the visceral satisfaction of baking a good loaf of bread or assembling a real car. Sociologist Richard Sennett has studied the changing fortunes of a bakery in Boston. Back in the 1970s the work was hard, you had to get up early, people got burnt, but there was a sense of communal pride in a delicious, beautiful batch of focaccia. There was craft: the flour varied in texture, so an experienced baker, feeling the flour in his hands, would make an adjustment to the amount of oil added or to the baking time. By the late 1990s, there were a lot of part-time workers who hardly knew each other, and computer-controlled machines that just had to be fed bags of ‘croissant mix’ when the appropriate icon blinked. The environment is safer now, but it is craftsman-hostile, because human craft is neither needed nor possible, and so no pride ensues. All the intelligence has been appropriated by a machine. But if the machine breaks down, there is hardly anyone left who actually knows how to make bread. One old Italian man said to Sennett: ‘I go home, I really bake bread: I’m a baker. Here? I just push buttons.’ As Sennett’s work powerfully attests, this loss of pride in craft knowledge, and of a satisfying sense of belonging to a skilled community, is a personal tragedy, but it is also, writ large, a social, even a global issue. The demeaning of work, and the estrangement from first-hand contact with real material, has demonstrable costs. Greater ‘productivity’ comes at a high price – though it is not one you can easily factor into your spreadsheet.18
If I can come back to the point at which I started this book: this cost is largely unacknowledged because the Cartesian world does not recognise the sophisticated intelligence of manual work. Matthew Crawford, in The Case for Working with Your Hands, nails this point. ‘The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.’19 The more body, the less intelligent is an idea that still pervades public consciousness. But the dimensions intelligent–unintelligent and intellectual–practical do not map neatly on to each other.
Physical work can demand the highest intelligence – and not only (as we saw in Chapter 10) in the esteemed professions like medicine, engineering or architecture. Peter King is both a shop-class teacher and a practising car mechanic in Colorado and a friend of American educator Art Costa. Costa has done brilliant work on unearthing the ‘habits of mind’, as he calls them, which underpin intelligence in many different spheres. King loves his work as a mechanic but he also feels rather sheepish about it. He recognises that all the habits of mind that Costa talks about – problem-solving, checking accuracy, persisting in the face of difficulty, creative thinking and so on – are present in his work. Yet he still catches himself categorising ‘mechanics’ in general as unintelligent people. He wrote to Costa:
How hypocritical is it of me to think that mechanics are stupid when I’m one myself? My passion is fixing my car, making it go faster and better. So how could I think badly about mechanics? Well, it’s that little thing called ‘peer pressure’. My parents, friends and the majority of people look down on people who fix cars. So I look down on myself. I hide my hobby like it was a crime.
People don’t realise the massive amount of problem-solving power it takes to fix someone else’s mess. Don’t get me wrong; there are definitely bad mechanics. That’s why I fix my car myself. But all those habits of mind you talk about – those ‘characteristics of intelligent behavior’ – they are all there in what I do.
We are all ‘mechanics’ in a way. It’s just that some of us get our hands greasy.20
Conversely, the world is full of mediocre mind work. Matt Crawford describes the time he was employed writing brief summaries of academic articles, mostly on subjects he knew precious little about: anything from classical philology to microbiology. He thought he would be using his brain, but it turned out he was to use a formula that meant he did not require any understanding of what he was reading. His quota, after a year, was 28 articles a day. That’s 14 minutes per article. He was a ‘knowledge working’ skivvy, on $23,000 a year. British journalist Giles Coren recently described his own similar work. ‘I just sit and Google. It’s terrible. I wish I was a fireman.’21
Real-world intelligence
If you want to teach a computer to play chess, or if you want to design a search engine, the old model is OK. But if you’re interested in understanding real intelligence, you have to deal with the body.
Rolf Pfeifer22
So finally, let me come back to my guiding word, intelligence. It’s a tricky word because it is part hypothetical entity, part value judgement, and part a history of acrimonious debate. Of the last I shall say nothing here: that history is already well digested and rehearsed.23 Its residue is a widespread view of intelligence that is too narrow and too intellectual; too focused on, and too in awe of, the kinds of problem-solving that professors of philosophy do, and, reciprocally, neglectful and disdainful of the intricate, situated thinking that happens every day in motorcycle repair shops, hospital wards and restaurants. Abstract reasoning is a useful element of intelligence but it is not the whole thing, and the ability to deploy such reasoning judiciously, in the mêlée of a busy café or shop, requires powers that the professor may well lack. IQ tests commonly fail to predict the intelligence of people’s performance in real life, and where abstract reasoning could be used, it is often found to be more elegant and reliable to make use of ‘tricks of the trade’ rather than working things out from first principles.24 We should remember, too, that the conception of what counts as intelligent differs widely between societies. In some societies, intelligence is inextricably linked with kindness and social grace, for example. In others, it includes the ability to remember the complex myths of the society and to retell them with accuracy and flair.25
As a starting point for the development of a science of embodied intelligence, let me offer this. Intelligence is getting things done that matter to you. It is finding good resolutions of those three sets of factors: your concerns, your capabilities and your circumstances. And to do that well, you need your body, and you need the kind of broad, detailed integration of its messages that gives rise to conscious awareness. In routine situations we rely, quite rightly, on habit and precedent. It is intelligent of me to operate on automatic pilot most mornings as I prepare to go to work. Intelligence is what allows effective, economical, elegant and appropriate interaction with the world. It is intelligent to accumulate a wide repertoire of such routines.
And it is intelligent to detect nuances of situations that might signal whether they are routine or not. One is often going to ‘guess wrong’, go with habit, and find that the habitual response is inadequate and something more creative or customised is required. Often the momentary conjunction of Needs, Deeds and See’ds does not fit any familiar mould, and then effective action requires a form of intelligence called ‘thinking on your feet’ or ‘floundering intelligently’. And this is different from IQ. We saw earlier that Google is not impressed by people’s track records of success, but is equally sceptical of high IQs. Laszlo Bock, the senior vice-president in charge of ‘people operations’ – the head of HR – says: ‘For every job the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning agility. It’s the ability to process on the fly.’ Behind the ability to learn quickly lies what Bock calls ‘intellectual humility’. You have to be able to give up the knowledge and expertise you thought would see you through, and look with fresh eyes. People with a high IQ often have a hard time doing that. They are certainly no better than average at tolerating uncertainty, or being able to adopt fresh perspectives.26
Learning agility relies, especially in situations of emergency, disruption or seeming chaos, on finding a way through what had seemed to be intractable. It involves integrating and reconciling all the different pulls and pushes, and this needs careful orchestration by those areas of the frontal lobes that specialise in prioritising, sequencing, keeping on task and dealing with conflicts and glitches. In tricky situations many processes have to interlock and self-organise, modulating activity throughout the rest of the brain and the body, to achieve the best resolution possible. Secondary concerns and activities get muted or deferred; a particular subset of affordances is highlighted; actions that might be useful are fired up and ready to go; attention is swivelled to potentially relevant parts of the world; parts of the memory networks judged to be relevant – possible precedents and resources, for example – are primed.
This network of self-triggering inhibition and regulation is often referred to in psychology as the Central Executive, or Working Memory, but, as we explored earlier, it does not involve a separate kind of intelligence that sits outside the rest of the body-brain; it just operates (principally) at the junctions where all the loops of information come together. These processes do not inhabit a separate ‘place’ in the brain where things are ‘sent’ for special attention. Indeed, intelligence does not reside in any single cognitive faculty – certainly not in the specialised tool called ‘conscious, disciplined reasoning’. It resides in systemic processes that involve resolution, reverberation, integration and balance. Intelligence is the orchestrating and conducting of a whole ensemble of influences which include, essentially, those of the body; and, through the body, those of the external world. Lumping all these processes into two baskets called System One and System Two doesn’t get us very far.27
*****
A lot has been written in the last twenty years about different kinds of intelligence. We have had emotional intelligence, practical intelligence and ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’ intelligence, along with a host of others.28 Many overlap a little with the territory of this book. But there is one key difference: these ‘intelligences’ are usually presented as part of a larger portfolio of separable psychological faculties. The most well known of these systems, Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), offers eight different kinds of intelligence, of which the bodily and the emotional are two. The intelligences are presented as distinct, complementary and equally valuable, and people can be described in terms of their profile of aptitudes and preferences across the range of intelligences on offer. This refinement is a major improvement on the monolithic idea of intelligence that underpinned IQ.
The view from the new science of embodiment, however, suggests that these intelligences are not separate, and they are not of equal value. It is not that some people have a lot of ‘musical intelligence’, while others are high on ‘logical-mathematical’, and that makes for a rich and diverse world. My claim is more radical than that. It is that practical, embodied intelligence is the deepest, oldest, most fundamental and most important of the lot; and the others are facets or outgrowths of this basic somatic capability. Emotional intelligence is an aspect of bodily intelligence. Mathematical intelligence is a development of bodily intelligence. To identify ‘bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence’ just with what top gymnasts and artisans have is to miss the fact that, at a deeper level, this one intelligence is in fact the root system on which all the others depend. I don’t want to flatten out the hierarchy of esteem that puts Pure Mathematics at the top and Woodwork at the bottom; I want to turn it on its head. A revised understanding of the relationship between body and mind is absolutely key to the development of intelligence per se.
Last word
I think it is time to reclaim the concept of intelligence from the abstract world of disembodied symbols and propositions, logical arguments and rigorous deductions, and proclaim its wider relevance to the challenges and complexities of everyday life. To deal well with life’s demands requires a full body – not just for getting around and implementing actions, but because a well-integrated, well-tuned, highly resonant body is itself the organ of intelligence. The brain plays an important part in that integration, allowing loops of information from the skin and the spleen, the hands and the heart, the gut and the gullet to be brought together in fruitful discourse. But without all those loops carrying fast-changing information about what is possible and what is desirable, and without the constant conversation between all the far-flung outposts of the body, the brain would not be intelligent at all. It is only as good as the intelligence it receives. The condition of my body, and of my awareness of its humming, shimmering activity, constantly modulates my ability to be smart.
And through the body, we are deeply connected with and constituted by the world around us. The tools and resources we use literally become incorporated into the body’s working definition of itself. Our bodies actually vibrate with each other so that individual Mes begin to dissolve into a larger resonant system called Us. Embodied cognition teaches us to notice that we are much more ecological and social than the Cartesian doctrine has led us to believe.
Somewhat similar images of the human body, its connectedness and its capacity for intelligence have been with us for millennia, of course. You can find such sentiments in the writings of poets, sages and physicians down the ages. But only now do they have the imprimatur of science, and in a global culture that reserves a special place of respect for scientific knowledge, that is important. I do not want this book to give any succour to lazy New Age thinking that muddles up grains of truth with bucketloads of magic and mythology. I have been at pains to point out that gut feelings and intuitions have some important validity, but they are no more immune from interrogation than are the pronouncements of a prophet. But if this book has helped to deepen and enrich our understanding of what and who we are, and of a kind of intelligence that has more to do with practical wisdom than with intellectual cleverness, I shall be well pleased.