Tapping into your body's intelligence

Book review of The Power of not thinking: How our bodies learn and why we should trust them

In western thought, there has always been a dualism between the mind and the body. Descartes, who famously said, “I think, therefore I am”, accorded primacy to the mind and regarded it as the fount of knowledge and rational thought. The body, in his view, is much less significant. In fact, he believed that the body’s sensory organs, and the signals they emit, impede rational decision-making.      

    

Though less dominant, there is another school of thought called phenomenology. Its leading light, the philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty, argued that the body, too, is a source of intelligence. Just as the arms of an octopus have neurons and can think independently of its brain, human body parts are also repositories of intelligence. Car driving, for instance, is the result of coordinated action by several body parts and is, after some practice, carried out without conscious thought or attention (hence independent of the brain). Typing, cycling, and several other activities become automatic after a while. The author calls this form of intelligence “embodied intelligence”. According to him, it is acquired by interacting with the real world and through experience and practice. In this book, he makes a strong case for utilising this type of intelligence to the fullest.  

In this age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, corporations are increasingly relying on data for decision-making. There is a growing belief that if one can gather enough data and apply enough computing power to it, one can predict consumer behaviour accurately. The author, an anthropologist by training, believes executives should not base their decisions on data alone. Instead, they should step out of their cloistered offices and have immersive experiences in the real world. Combining the two approaches will enable them to make better-quality decisions.  

The author tells the story of Duracell executives who spent several nights in a camp within a national park. Amid the bitter cold, desolation, and discomfort, they experienced for themselves the extent to which campers rely on the batteries made by their company to not give out at a crucial juncture. Facebook executives similarly spent time among users in developing countries and experienced the excruciatingly slow data speeds with which they have to contend. This led to the invention of Facebook Lite. 

An interesting point Simon Roberts makes in his  book is that big data and artificial intelligence are likely to be more effective in relatively stable environments. They may not work as well in highly unstable, irregular, dynamic and chaotic environments, where it is harder for computerised systems to capture all the variables and respond to them. Take one example. Google’s Deep Mind team applied artificial intelligence to its server farms, a stable and regulated environment, and succeeded in reducing its cooling bill by 40 per cent. A similar experiment tried out by the Portland Public Schools System was a failure because children left windows open and fiddled with the thermostats in their classrooms. The authorities had to soon bring the human janitor back. They realised that with his years of experience he understood the quirks of the situation and could handle them better than an automated system.  
 

The Power of not thinking: How our bodies learn and why we should trust them 
Author: Simon Roberts
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Price: Rs 310 (Paperback on Amazon.in)

A crowded road, too, is a highly chaotic and dynamic environment. A trained human driver is able to perceive these changes and respond to them in real time. Computer-based systems are having a harder time doing the same, which is why despite the vast resources and the best minds being dedicated to the endeavour, fully reliable automated vehicles have yet to see the light of day.

The bottomline, according to the author, is that human champions may lose to raw computing power in a rule-based game like chess. But the human body is far better placed to cope with situations that require dealing with ambiguity or call for intuitive judgement. He asserts that in the face of advances in big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, we should not lose faith in these unique human abilities.           

Most readers may not find much to take away from the early chapters where the author outlines the historical debate about the superiority of the mind versus the body. After all, most people don’t necessarily believe that one is superior to the other. Most of us probably believe that the two are inter-dependent systems. Most readers may also not have much of a quarrel with the author’s assertion that our body parts have an intelligence of their own. 

It is when the author comes to how the concept of “embodied knowledge” can be applied to various fields that the book comes into its own. The common thread in the numerous examples cited in this part is that instead of depending just on data and surveys, executives, creative designers, and even policymakers need to experience the real world to be able to produce superior outcomes.