How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them

Many of the action's humans perform?without “thinking” can’t yet be replicated?by artificial intelligence.

Driving a car demands a range of complex skills and situational awareness. No one can teach the routine aspects of starting a car, backing it out and shifting gears from a text or verbal instruction. Learning to drive requires that you experience driving. You can observe an experienced driver from the passenger seat, but eventually you must take the wheel, feel the road,?practice changing gears and apply?the brakes yourself. To learn to drive, you must engage your body and your brain – your senses as well as your common sense.

“Peer into the boot of an autonomous vehicle, and you will see how much computing power they require. A car that’s full of computers is a good reminder of how much intelligence is required to drive a car.”

You know you’ve mastered driving when you no longer have to think about what you’re doing – when the act of driving becomes automatic. But if learning how to drive ended there, artificial intelligence (AI)?could master it. AI hasn’t done?so yet?because driving demands the ability to recognize patterns, process them in milliseconds and respond to them almost immediately?to avoid a collision. Driving can take?place in a wide range of precarious weather conditions and?involves other drivers, pedestrians and animals who?can behave unpredictably. Your experience as a driver equips you to manage these challenges. Firms with the biggest budgets and best developers still cannot encode algorithms to?cope with every potential driving situation.

As with the complexities of driving, much of the world you encounter daily is messy, unpredictable?and chaotic. Many developers and investors believe massive data will soon allow AI to model these?environments and function in them as well as, or better than, humans. To date, however, AI and big data only succeed in environments created for them. For example, AI?can impressively control the temperature and spot problems in a?modern Google server farm. But when a 75-year-old high school with obsolete windows and decades-old boilers?replaced its janitor’s duties with automatic sensors, it turned?out that the new technology couldn’t match the janitor’s skill in understanding the?building’s distinct and complex characteristics.

Western dualism created a dichotomy?between mind and body,?limiting the idea?of “thinking” to the?brain.

Seventeenth-century French philosopher?René Descartes conceived of the notion of Cartesian dualism, the idea that mind and body operate separately. He helped usher?in the “Age of Reason” and is widely considered?the father of modern philosophy. His?views?have?shaped?Western thought?for centuries. Cartesian thought regards the body as a thing the mind animates; adherents believe the human body’s?intelligence is mechanical, like a wind-up toy. Its philosophy dismisses senses and emotions as unreliable inputs to be suppressed, so you can?think rationally using your separate and superior brain.?This worldview initiated the scientific method, experimentation and evidence-based thinking.

“It is time to stop neglecting the role the body plays in our acquisition of knowledge and explore how it is that brain and body combine to deliver what we regard as human intelligence.”

Descartes’?ideas have prevailed for centuries and have led to many human achievements, including the invention of computing. But human intellect is not purely a product of the?brain,?nor can?a set of predefined instructions or principles direct your thinking or actions. Rather, your body’s?engagement?with your surroundings forges?your comprehension of the world. During these interactions, your body?and brain gain knowledge. Descartes was wrong to argue?that the body merely provides sensors for the brain – according to his?renowned dictum, “I think, therefore I am.”?Instead, regard your body as the source of much intelligence.

Big data?offers information?detached from experience and context.

Algorithms that process?massive amounts of data?can detect patterns and make predictions, even about when and where a crime might occur.?To give accurate meaning to data?outputs, though,?analysts must place data in real-world experience and context.

Today’s students will face stark competition from advanced AI. The intelligence at which humans excel – embodied knowledge?– gets put aside in schools in favor of rote memorization and information storage, the type of intelligence at which machines prove more capable than humans. Many schoolchildren?don’t apply?much school-based?learning. Indeed,?most traditional education takes place in classrooms, in silence, without the sensory involvement of doing and experiencing things.

“Sight, sound, touch, smell and taste are progressively downplayed as children move through education, despite the fact that they comprehend the world with these senses.”

And it’s not only children who learn with their senses. Consider your experience?at?a music concert; you probably “felt” the music more than you analyzed it. Your body might move with the music and the thousands of other bodies in the audience. You can only gain this?bodily input through feeling and experience.

Though you may have to follow a recipe to cook a new dish for the first several times, eventually?you can make it?on your own, even while talking on the phone or?watching TV; your body knows how to cook it. Indeed, much of what you do every day occurs without much conscious thought. You live much of life from experience and routine – from embodied knowledge.

Acquire embodied knowledge through observation, practice, improvisation, empathy and repetition.

Through this?combination of experiences, you learn and remember with your body and its senses. Once learned, application of this knowledge requires little thought.?As an artist, for example, you no longer think about how you paint, which frees your mind to think about what you want to?paint and the vision you want to express.

“The observation that it is hard to reproduce in a robot the fine motor skills of even a young child serves as a reminder of the abilities that bodies display.”

Embodied knowledge is acquired through the following five methods:

• Observation – You do not observe only with your eyes.?You?experience what you study with your whole body. When you learn a skill like hitting a tennis backhand, watching an expert player helps you imagine your body making the same movements. You can almost feel your grip and hear the sound of the racket hitting the ball. This multisensory experience?triggers the same reactions in your brain and body as when you actually hit the ball.
• Practice?– You don’t learn to ride a bike by watching others ride.?Acquiring new skills like skiing or sailing demands experience, practice, observation and instruction. With more experience and practice, you can do the activity without thinking and become an expert.
• Improvisation – AI may dominate the most complex games humans invented, such as chess and Go, but these games have rules and boundaries. Life doesn’t.?In a world where seemingly anything can happen at any time, the ability to learn through trial and error, spot patterns and make judgments based on incomplete information proves?crucial. Firefighters, for example, learn to sense when a house or building will collapse based on patterns they learned over time – they can “feel it.”?
• Empathy – To learn how another person uses a tool or navigates the world, go beyond reading about it?or talking to them. Involve?all your senses to?live what they experience.?Mirror neurons in your brain allow you to share others’ feelings by reading their expressions or postures. You send and receive most of the language of empathy through your body rather than through words.
• Retention –?Often, when you taste or?smell, memories flood your mind, demonstrating that recollection?resides in your body as well as in your brain. Muscle memory permits you to do many things without much thought.

Develop a superior strategy by gathering insights from emotions?and embodied?knowledge.

Firms invest large sums to collect and crunch data that might predict market futures, but?the stock market rises and falls as much on emotion as?reason.?Many leaders believe that with sufficient data, they can figure consumers out, but data alone never tell the whole story. Businesses that rely only on data become detached from the lives and experiences of their customers. Through experience, decision-makers can utilize their data in appropriate context to derive potent insights.

“A shared experience creates the grounds for not just knowledge but strategy itself to become embodied rather than a document gathering dust on a shelf.”

When leaders at Duracell wanted to understand the market for their products among outdoor adventurers,?their marketing executives flew to California and went camping for three days.?They?pitched?tents in the dark, cooked?in the rain and slept?in a range of temperatures; the marketers?experienced?with their bodies how campers use and rely on their products. The resulting campaign was one of the most successful in Duracell’s history.

Facebook’s success in emerging markets derives in part from its engineers spending time in rural India. They accessed the same?phones and connectivity – even once they were back in Silicon Valley – as?users in the developing world.?Procter & Gamble revamped its line of organic and sustainable products according to its developers’ experiences using?prototypes at home.

“Statistics can tell a good story, but they have a limited ability to tell a nuanced human story.”

As business leaders often over-rely on numbers, so do policymakers. When they participate in simulations, such as being a refugee for a weekend, their perspectives shift dramatically. After experiencing some of the daily deprivations refugees face, policymakers ask more intuitive questions and explore a wider range of solutions. Similarly, after a 2,000-mile journey through the American west, famed economist?Larry Summers realized that knowing and understanding the economy depends not only on sound data analysis?but also on immersion in the towns, streets and people of the economy.

Create great products by harnessing insights gleaned from visceral experience.

Pixar produces?a blockbuster with nearly every movie it makes.?Staff members visit the places its?movies depict, be it the mountains and plains of Wyoming or the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris. Pixar employees do this to taste, smell, touch, hear and experience the environments they want to reproduce in their movies, resulting in?detailed animation that delights viewers. A smudge on a stove or the way a particular cloud looks makes Pixar’s?movies “feel right.”

“It is only through visceral involvement that we are truly able to learn and understand.”

When Motorola set out to design a phone for the world’s underserved markets, its designers traveled to the favelas?of Brazil. Designers met with users who showed them why some features worked, and others didn’t, such as an overly complex and impractical means of sending an SOS over the phone. This “bodystorming” led to the design of a product?that outsold every other phone in the firm’s history.

AI?and robotics?can?advance through experiential learning.

Attempts to mimic the range of human intelligence and basic human motor skills through data processing have failed. Developers now understand that for AI?and robots to advance, they?must learn as humans do, through experience of the world.?

“We are frequently told that machines and AI are about to change the world forever, but we should take comfort from the idea that our embodiment is what makes our intelligence hard to reproduce.”

For some tasks, this approach has already succeeded. AI that learns through repetitive?practice and trial and error –?rather than from data crunching –?has defeated humanity’s?best players of?its most complex games. But for most real-world tasks, humans retain the advantage. AI may never master the level of improvisation that human driving demands, nor?the fine motor skills needed to collect, process and learn?from real-world experience.