Embodied, Adaptive Intelligence

Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read

Hi Reader!

Have you seen the news about rogue AI (among other concerning news)?. It's a real concern, and a bit of a dilemma for me. On one hand, i find that automating certain tasks is very usef

ul - especially when it comes to doing tedious repetitive tasks, or even to speed up research. Admit it, how many of you were directed here by Chat or Claude? On the other hand, I find it worrying how easy it is to delegate our thinking to AI. The better these systems become at mimicking human language and interaction, the more we forget that they are not intelligent.

Musings

Let's get something clear, and I mean to offend. Language and rationality is NOT intelligence. You can be extremely adept at manipulating language, high-level concepts and ideas, and still have the day-to-day intelligence of a rock. Vice versa, you can have limited language or cognitive skills, and still exhibit deep and rich interpersonal intelligence and creative problem solving. People who experience intense trauma know all too well what somatic dissociation feels like - and how hard it is to come back from it - while some people don't even realize they are escaping their bodies.

An AI can write you a beautiful paragraph about grief but can't really extend compassion. It can explain pain but not the emotional experience of being in pain all the time, it can recognize the linguistic patterns of anxiety, but it has never ever felt fear - precisely because it does not have a body to feel with. Importantly, it has never felt joy, delight, the pure pleasure of being well inside your skin.

We tend to associate intelligence with thinking, reasoning and language. But cognition does not happen in an isolated brain floating somewhere above the neck. Real human intelligence is a creative process woven from multiple threads that include embodied sensation, perception, emotion, cognition and movement. Experiencing is done through the body. Our brains are continuously receiving information from the heart, lungs, gut, muscles, immune system, hormones and sensory systems, integrating those signals with memory, context and information from the outside world. Internal bodily signals contribute to emotion, motivation, perception, decision-making and our very sense of being a self. In other words, your whole body thinks.

I've written about this in the past (see here). What I want to add today is that there is a risk that AI is becoming another way for us to numb ourselves, to avoid ourselves. If every uncomfortable feeling can be explained away or solutioned away by a sycophantic robot, you don't have to feel it. You start to bypass the extraordinary biological, embodied intelligence we evolved over millions of years.

Some things require more than information or language. Human beings regulate through other human beings: through faces, voices, timing, movement, touch, smell, sound, shared attention and the (deeply) complicated yet wonderful reciprocity of being in relationship. Even when AI language feels empathic, the relationship remains profoundly asymmetrical: you arrive with a living body and something at stake; the machine does not.

So before asking what something means or what you should do about it, notice what you already know. Before asking what you should feel, feel what is already there. Before delegating an important health, relational or emotional decision to a machine, bring the question back into your body, and, whenever possible, into relationship with another human being.

Trust me, your life will be all the richer for it. Ultimately, this is what we all want: rich, multi-layered, experienced lives. Warts and all ;)

🎁 NeuroSomatic Practice of the Week

View the Practice

🧠 NeuroMinute...

This week, I wanted to tell you about something I'm working on (yes, it's a book! I really needed a new project 🤪).

We spend much of our lives trying to become stronger, calmer, happier, healthier, more resilient, as though these were qualities we could acquire once and for all. But life isn't static. It beckons us to respond to change, uncertainty, loss, opportunity, illness, relationships, parenthood, aging, and countless unexpected turns that continuously reshape who we are. The question is why do some people learn and adapt, while others become stuck in patterns that shrink them?

Over the past twenty-five years, I've been exploring that question from two seemingly unrelated worlds. As an international climate adaptation specialist, I've helped countries design strategies to strengthen the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and institutions to adapt to a changing climate. As a NeuroSomatic practitioner, I've worked with children and adults whose brains and bodies were trying to adapt to pain, anxiety, trauma, developmental differences, illness, and the ordinary challenges of being human. The more I observed these systems, the more I realized they were governed by remarkably similar principles. Living systems don't thrive because they avoid disruption. They thrive because they continually learn, reorganize, and adapt.

In the book I hope to explore what I call Embodied Adaptive Intelligence: the dynamic capacity of the brain and body to perceive, learn, reorganize, and adapt throughout life. It will not be another self-help tool for managing stress or fixing yourself. It seeks to present a different way of understanding health, healing, and human potential. I hope to draw on neuroscience and what we know about learning systems, philosophy, biology, movement science, and of course lived experience.