In a wildly popular TED talk, the creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson jokes about the impoverished and rather distant relationship that many academics seem to have to their own bodies. Professors, those cultural epitomes of intelligence, act as if their bodies were a form of transportation for their heads: a way of getting their minds to a meeting. Robinson suggests that, if you want to observe a variety of out-of-body experience, you should gate-crash the evening disco at a conference of senior academics, “where you will see grown men and women writhing uncontrollably … off the beat.”
Exaggerated though this portrait may be, it bears some truth. Higher education had its European beginnings in the cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, and to this day bears the antiphysical marks of those religious origins — despite the appearance of engineering departments and the recent fashion on college campuses for fancy tool shops called “makerspaces.” Bodies are fallible, corruptible, irrational; they don’t offer us firm ground on which to base knowledge, action, and decision. So we should turn instead to a world of abstract and timeless verities. Reason is our highest and most precious achievement, the pinnacle of intelligence, and sober rationality brings us nearer to the divine, while the body drags us down to the world of beasts and beastliness. Students can “let off steam” on the sports field, through sex, or, indeed, on the dance floor, but physicality per se has nothing to do with erudition, or even cognition.
Recent research is forcing us to rethink that schism. The adage mens sana in corpore sano is of renewed interest to cognitive scientists, and thus to educators at all levels. We used to think of the brain as the “chief executive” of the body, but it turns out to be more servant than master. And the conventional image of a chain of processing that runs from perception through memory and thinking to decision-making and finally into action is plain wrong. The body is not just linked to our sensory and motor extremities; it is intricately involved with all stages and aspects of our intelligence. Without it, even our loftiest thoughts become less smart.
One of the best-known streams of this research comes from Antonio Damasio and his colleagues at the University of Southern California. They have shown that records of the personal significance of our experiences are distributed throughout the body, especially through the skin, the major organs — heart, lungs, stomach — and the fluid systems known as the endocrine and immune systems. When we encounter something that reminds us (often subliminally) of a previous experience, that distributed network of visceral reactivity fires up and serves to guide or steer our thoughts, reactions, and decisions. We have a kind of somatic rudder that primes us — intelligently — to refine the range of solutions and responses we consider.
The basic organ of intelligence is mind + brain + body + environment all rolled into one.
When this system of “somatic markers,” as Damasio calls them, is disrupted through injury, our intelligence falls apart. Far from being a nuisance, these feelings turn out to be essential to intelligent cognition. In a 2007 paper, Damasio and Helen Mary Immordino-Yang argue that human decisions, behaviors, thoughts, and creations, no matter how far removed from survival in the homeostatic sense, bear the shadow of their visceral beginnings. No matter how complex or abstract they become, the researchers say, our repertoires of behavioral and cognitive options continue to exist in the service of embodied goals.
In another paper, Immordino-Yang concludes, “Emotion plays a critical role in all of these stages of problem solving, helping the student to evaluate, either consciously or nonconsciously, which knowledge and skills are likely relevant. … [So] we can no longer justify learning theories that dissociate the mind from the body.”
Later research has shown that, even in people without any major injury, the degree of sensitivity to these embodied feelings affects the quality of the decisions they make. People who are better able to monitor their heart rate, for example, without any external aids or feeling their pulse, perform better in a variety of learning and decision-making tasks. Whether students care about what they are studying, and whether they feel that significance, influences what they learn, and how well they learn it. Bodies are continually embroiled in our intelligence: That’s the way evolution has designed us.
And internal awareness can be deliberately improved. So it is potentially educable. Physical disciplines, such as tai chi and yoga, that require sensitivity to subtle body states have been shown to help learning, memory, and problem-solving. Even at a simple level, the quality of the blood flow to the brain influences the quality of thinking and learning. In a recent study in the Netherlands, the speed and accuracy of thinking among a group of elderly people was found to predict their risk of heart attack or stroke, and the connection was the degree of deterioration of their cardiovascular systems: Those with weaker systems were less intellectually sharp. Similarly, in a Turkish study, the normal depth of people’s breathing was shown to correlate with measures of spatial intelligence. So it is no surprise that general exercise affects thinking and learning (though specific expertise in sports, for example, does not seem to correlate strongly with cognitive performance). Mens sana in corpore sano, indeed.
A new image of the mind-body relationship is emerging. When people began to look for a natural home of the mind in the 19th and 20th centuries, the first and most obvious place to look was the brain. This allowed the old apartheid, a division between one clever and masterful bit of the psyche, and another dumb and menial bit, controlling basic functions like breathing, to continue. Physiology courses divided the body into separate systems — nervous, endocrine, immune, sensory, cardiovascular, digestive, pulmonary — of which only the central nervous system was seen as underpinning cognition and intelligence. Now the body is being revealed as a single dynamic system in which nerves, stomach, skin, and lymph are all in constant conversation with one another. The body is the brain. The part between our ears is not the executive suite but the common room, where all the many factions of the body can resolve their concerns and a course of action can emerge (sometimes in milliseconds, sometimes in years).
In fact, the “organ of intelligence” is not even bounded by the envelope of the skin. Our systems are in direct electrochemical communication with the tools at hand, the clothes we are wearing, the people nearby. They actually become incorporated. Our bodies end not at the tips of our fingers but at the tip of the pencil or the wheels of the car. When two people are understanding each other well, their brain waves are coordinated, and their brains are predicting the ends of each other’s sentences. Mirror neurons in the cortex automatically prime us to synchronize our own bodies with what we see those around us doing. Chemical signals — so-called pheromones — influence those around us in complex ways. Bettina Pause, a German researcher who has studied pheromones for 15 years, says, “My guess is that a lot of our communication is [subliminally] influenced by chemosignals.” The basic organ of intelligence is not the conscious mind, nor even the brain: It is mind + brain + body + environment all rolled into one.
The implications of this new view of human intelligence for education, as well as for other institutions, such as medicine and the law, are only just beginning to be worked out, but they may well be seismic. If physical feelings and emotions are central to intelligent functioning, and if their contribution depends on our sensitivity to them, then physical health and interoceptive awareness are crucial to the process of learning even the most abstract material. Should there be compulsory classes in tai chi on campus, at least for those students who aspire to top grades? It will sound rather too Californian to some, but in 10 years’ time, who knows?
And if their professors turn up in yoga class as well, they could be improving their chances of tenure, or even of getting their hands on a Nobel Prize. For many years, when Nobel laureates go to Stockholm to collect their awards, they have been invited to take part in a survey of, among other things, their attitude toward intuition. The vast majority have said they value their intuition highly and could not have made the breakthroughs they did without heeding it. While gut feelings can and do lead us astray, an attitude of what you might call “skeptical respect” toward those little inklings and promptings is worth cultivating.
Sometimes feeling and emotion get in the way of learning, but often they are valuable guides, and without them learning feels pointless and mechanical. The branch of scholarship called embodied cognition may just be showing us the way back to a more integrated, and more wholesome, experience of college.
Guy Claxton is a visiting professor of education at King’s College, University of London. His new book, Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks, is published by Yale University Press.
