Physical Intelligence
The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Elegantly written and deeply grounded in personal experience—works by Oliver Sacks come to mind—Physical Intelligence gives us a clear, illuminating examination of the intricate, mutually responsive relationship between the mind and the body as they engage (or don’t engage) in all manner of physical action.
Ever wonder why you don’t walk into walls or off cliffs? How you decide if you can drive through a snowstorm? How high you are willing to climb up a ladder to change a lightbulb? Through the prisms of behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience, Scott Grafton brilliantly accounts for the design and workings of the action-oriented brain in synchronicity with the body in the natural world, and he shows how physical intelligence is inherent in all of us—and always in problem-solving mode. Drawing on insights gleaned from discoveries by engineers who have learned to emulate the sophisticated solutions Mother Nature has created for managing complex behavior, Grafton also demonstrates the relevance of physical intelligence with examples that each of us might face—whether the situation is mundane, exceptional, extreme, or compromised.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grafton, director of UC Santa Barbara's Brain Imaging Center, explains the "components of the mind that allow anyone to engage with and change the world" in this thoughtful debut. He uses both personal experience solo hiking and camping adventures in California's High Sierra region and medical and scientific case studies to illustrate his points. To explain "body schema," the map of the body that the brain maintains to control posture and movement, Grafton uses examples of how it can malfunction, such as in people with epilepsy, one of whom reported, just before an attack, feeling "herself become smaller and smaller." To probe the subject of "self-guidance navigation," he describes relying on limited external cues to get himself out of a potentially treacherous hiking environment. The book's concepts aren't always intuitive, but Grafton does his best to employ understandable examples, such as cooking breakfast as an instance of "hierarchical reinforcement learning," or fixing his camp stove as an illustration of motor control. This is a well-written introduction to what's going on when one performs everyday but deeply complex actions, such as walking, which "demonstrates a beautiful calculus that the brain endlessly performs to inform movement."
