The Art of Manliness - #599： The Physical Intelligence That Helps You Take Action

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You ever

00:00:11.560 wonder why you don't walk into walls? How you know you have to step gingerly on ice?

00:00:15.380 How you decide whether you can or can't scale a certain rock? Well, my guest today says

00:00:19.380 the answer lies in our special sense of bodily know-how. His name is Scott Grafton and he's

00:00:23.700 a neurologist and the author of Physical Intelligence, the Science of How the Body and Mind Guide

00:00:28.040 each other through life. We begin our conversation discussing how physical intelligence is the

00:00:31.900 mutually responsive interaction between your body and your mind that allows you to interact

00:00:36.320 effectively in the world. Scott then explains how our mind and body work together to build

00:00:40.240 our conception of space and that without this ability, we couldn't create an area of operations

00:00:44.440 in which to take action. We then discuss how our mind and body communicate with various types

00:00:48.580 of terrain, how we can lose that ability by limiting our movements to simple, safe environments,

00:00:53.200 and how that may explain why old people fall down more. We then discuss how problem solving

00:00:57.740 can be a very physical activity and whether the feeling of fatigue is more of a matter

00:01:01.460 of the body or the mind. And we end our conversation discussing ways you can keep your physical

00:01:05.560 intelligence sharp as you age. After the show's over, check out our show notes at

00:01:09.100 aom.is slash physical intelligence.

00:01:20.240 All right, Scott Grafton, welcome to the show.

00:01:22.700 Well, thanks for having me. This is exciting.

00:01:24.400 So you just came out with a new book called Physical Intelligence, the science of how the

00:01:28.180 body and the mind guide each other through life. Before we talk about the book, let's

00:01:31.540 talk about your background. Because you're a neuroscientist, but it seems like you've focused

00:01:35.260 on how the mind and body interact with one another.

00:01:39.340 Right. My background is actually, I started as a neurologist and went to medical school,

00:01:46.540 have taken care of a lot of patients with neurologic problems. And when you do that, it's hard

00:01:51.020 to separate mind and body. Patients come in with problems that are centered in the brain,

00:01:56.860 but really it's, you know, the problems involve both mind and body inevitably. And so just being

00:02:03.040 a clinician and working with patients, you know, you invariably think of the whole person

00:02:08.480 and that just kind of frames the way you see the world. And then I got into brain imaging

00:02:14.880 and was sort of an early pioneer and using functional brain scans to understand how the

00:02:21.280 brain works. And there too, you know, it's kind of amazing. You're looking at these images of

00:02:25.980 brains of living people thinking and doing things. So again, you kind of get this holistic view of

00:02:35.120 the person, both in terms of what they do and sort of how their mind is working.

00:02:40.380 So you've seen firsthand Descartes' error, right? The separation between mind and body.

00:02:44.540 Yeah, I see that as, you know, that's just, to me, that's an illusion created by the way our,

00:02:52.640 we use language and the way we, our mind creates concepts. We create concepts of objects

00:02:59.220 and things like bodies, and we create very different kinds of concepts that are more abstract,

00:03:05.780 like minds. And those inevitably get sort of separated at the almost categorical level,

00:03:12.820 but they're, they're never really actually separated in a brain.

00:03:17.720 And as we'll see in our conversation, what I thought was really interesting about this book

00:03:20.760 is you, you'll show how, we'll talk about how the mind influences the body, but also the,

00:03:25.220 how the body influences the mind. And it's just almost this cycle. You can't even disconnect

00:03:29.580 from each other.

00:03:31.260 That's right.

00:03:32.420 All right. So let's talk about this idea of physical intelligence. What do you mean by that?

00:03:36.480 Well, this is the art of manliness podcast. So if you think about manliness sort of as a,

00:03:42.440 as a setup here, you know, one of the, one of the core ingredients I think of,

00:03:47.540 you know, manliness sort of classically defined as action, right? You know, a man of action or

00:03:53.780 the concept of what makes a person great in some sense is what they do, how they, the actions they,

00:04:02.160 they enable and the things they do in their world. And physical intelligence is just the underbelly

00:04:08.820 of that. It's the, it's the underpinnings you need to actually get things done. We don't have a,

00:04:14.980 we don't have a manliness area in our brain. We don't have a isolated action area in our brain.

00:04:21.980 We have lots and lots of parts or systems that together allow us to do great things with our

00:04:29.700 bodies, both, both sports like activities or, you know, sort of extravagant physical behavior,

00:04:36.760 but also just creative things, you know, building a house, pouring a slab of cement, whatever it is,

00:04:43.060 that's, that's the stuff of physical intelligence.

00:04:45.920 Well, speaking of physical intelligence and manliness, what I love about this book is that

00:04:49.680 you explore these ideas of physical, these different concepts of physical intelligence by

00:04:54.020 taking readers along with you on a backpacking trip you did in this year in Nevada's. And this

00:04:59.720 isn't just like a stroll, like the way you describe it sounds very strenuous, very hard, very perilous.

00:05:05.300 Before we get into why you chose that as sort of a framework for explaining these concepts,

00:05:10.400 talk about how did you get into backpacking personally? How long have you been

00:05:12.920 doing it?

00:05:13.900 Oh, I started high altitude mountaineering and rock climbing in high school. And by the time I was

00:05:22.260 16, I was like climbing the face of half dome and, and was really an enthusiastic climber.

00:05:29.760 And there was a decision point where, you know, are you going to become a climbing bum or a dirtbag

00:05:35.980 climber? Are you going to go to college and go off to medical school? And I chose the latter. And I've,

00:05:41.520 I've kind of missed the dirtbag life ever since. So that's, that's a real dualism for me. And so the 0.71

00:05:47.900 way I get, you know, to, to be a really good high altitude climber or any kind of rock climber,

00:05:53.840 you got to put a lot of time in it. And so as I grew older, I, I swapped in walking in the wilderness

00:06:00.900 for sort of the more extreme kinds of climbing is I think what I savor the most is just being in very

00:06:08.360 wild places.

00:06:10.300 And so why did you decide to use, you know, frame your book and explain these concepts

00:06:14.380 with this backpacking story. Physical intelligence is one of those sort of magic capacities we have

00:06:22.460 that's just sort of automatic and operates under the hood. And we don't have much conscious access

00:06:30.080 to the, to the bits that, that are needed for physical intelligence. And so I wanted to create

00:06:38.060 a setup where I'm in a place that's very demanding physically, that there's risk and that the

00:06:47.280 problems, the physical problems are really clear and they're unclouded by conversations with other

00:06:54.720 people, social media, technology. It's just pure raw human in the world. And that's, that's a nice

00:07:03.680 place to just reveal kind of what physical intelligence is and also sort of what we evolved

00:07:10.540 from.

00:07:12.020 And I think one of the points you make about physical intelligence at the beginning of the

00:07:15.720 book is that physical intelligence really is what, I mean, oftentimes we think of what makes us human

00:07:19.900 is that we think, but a big part of what makes us human is our ability to act in the world and

00:07:25.460 interact with the world.

00:07:27.420 That's right. Just talk to anyone and say, what's the most satisfying thing you've done or

00:07:33.580 experienced in the last month. And invariably it'll be something they did physically.

00:07:40.840 It doesn't have to be, you know, a superhuman feat or extreme sports. It could just be, you know,

00:07:47.100 I remember my daughter in middle school, she made a birdhouse in woodshop.

00:07:51.200 She couldn't have been happier. Right. I mean, it was, she was so satisfied with that activity

00:07:56.340 compared to anything she'd done in terms of schoolwork. So yeah, that's the stuff that really

00:08:03.400 it's the salve that makes us happiest. It's kind of, that's what we evolved from, right? We didn't

00:08:09.600 evolve to sit around and talk or read books. That's icing on the cake. We evolved from rough

00:08:17.440 and tumble environments where we had to find food, build shelter, and find our way through vast,

00:08:25.100 rough environments. And we did that up until very recently, only about, you know, a thousand years ago.

00:08:31.140 So the first concept you explore in physical intelligence is our ability to construct a

00:08:37.840 sense of space. And as you said, physical intelligence is one of those things that it's

00:08:40.960 going on under the hood. We often don't even think about it. We don't even know what's going on. And

00:08:45.900 this, this chapter on how we construct space around us, I mean, it kind of blew my mind because

00:08:50.840 you talk about what's going on all the same time to give us an idea of what's in our environment.

00:08:56.500 Right. A good example of this would be, if you think of a worm crawling towards some food,

00:09:03.940 it has no sense of space. It just has some sensors that are drawing its movements towards that food.

00:09:11.000 Now I can say to you, okay, I want you to think of how you would walk across the room.

00:09:16.960 So you've immediately created an operational space, the size of the room. But then I can say,

00:09:22.560 think about walking to the other side of the house, think about walking across the street,

00:09:29.200 thinking about, think about walking across to the other side of the city you're in, right?

00:09:35.540 Just in those moments, you've expanded your operational space. You can mentally stretch out

00:09:41.940 and construct any of those volumes of space and then plan and organize your action inside that

00:09:49.460 volume. It's, it's amazing, right? That you could do that.

00:09:52.140 And when you have to do it, right? It's just as a, just as a search and rescue team doesn't just

00:09:57.280 willy nilly wander into a, the wilderness looking for someone, they, they create a map and they lay

00:10:03.480 out a grid and they say, this is, this is what we're going to do here. We're going to, we're going

00:10:07.860 to first set constraints on the space we want to work in. We do this all the time mentally when we're

00:10:17.060 moving and acting in our environments. And the example you gave in the, in the,

00:10:21.560 in this chapter is about just being in a tent. You're down for the night and you talk about how,

00:10:26.980 what's going on in your mind as your, your mind's figuring out what to pay attention to and what not

00:10:31.400 to pay attention to. So you could hear rustling and like your mind automatically knew it was like,

00:10:36.860 well, that's not a bear. It's probably just a raccoon. Like how, how does, how's our brain able

00:10:41.680 to do that? Well, if I, I wish I knew, you know, it's funny. We can, a lot of this is phenomenology

00:10:49.640 we can describe and we can measure in the lab, but there's still a lot of magic about like how

00:10:56.420 brain circuits actually calculate and what the computation is inside the head that allows us

00:11:04.680 to do this, what the algorithms are that enable this capacity. We know we have it.

00:11:09.940 So at a certain level, we really understand a lot. We know a lot about how the brain can zoom and

00:11:15.560 filter and narrow in attention. We know far less about how it expands attention, how it can become

00:11:24.980 more vigilant and bring in actually more information in these wild environments.

00:11:31.640 So as a neurologist, you've probably seen people who've lost this ability.

00:11:35.740 What happens to those individuals? Well, the most dramatic example is patients with

00:11:41.400 focal damage to the right brain, posterior right brain develop what's called neglect. And the word

00:11:49.080 neglect's a little bit misleading. What they'll do is ignore, unconsciously ignore the left side of the

00:11:58.360 world. And it can be quite severe. I refer to it as the most severe cases. It's like a black hole

00:12:05.640 space simply isn't created in the left side of their environment in their mind. And so if you're

00:12:14.620 standing there talking, if you're on the left side of their bed talking to them, you don't exist.

00:12:19.900 And then you walk around to the right side of their bed and they go, oh, hello, how you doing?

00:12:24.400 You're there, right? So literally on one side of the bed, there is reality for them. And the other side,

00:12:30.500 there is no reality. There is no nothing there. And there's variations of this. And there's minor

00:12:37.660 forms that are more subtle. It's been called neglect for over 50 years, but it's not like

00:12:43.660 they're intentionally neglecting that space. They can't cook it up in the first place.

00:12:48.900 So that just tells you, you know, at some point you got to make space, right? You got, if you're

00:12:54.000 going to do this stuff we do, you know, as humans, one of the very first steps is making some kind of

00:13:00.720 sense of space. Because if you don't make it, you don't interact in it. You don't reach into it.

00:13:05.340 It's just not there. You don't move anywhere near it. The other thing about space I think

00:13:10.080 that's really important to remember is there's a very strong argument in sort of the cognitive

00:13:17.800 literature, cognitive developmental literature, that it's the way when you're a baby and then a

00:13:24.400 child and you're moving through space, it's your understanding of what you can do in space

00:13:29.380 that really shapes much of how you think. In other words, we think spatially.

00:13:35.340 Right? If I think about relationships between ideas, I can kind of put them in a row spatially

00:13:43.800 and organize them in my mind and space. You know, people like Einstein are, you know, are well known

00:13:50.540 to have sort of thought through their ideas in terms of spatial relationships, physical, spatial

00:13:56.380 relationships. So much of how we construct the world is spatial.

00:14:01.380 And is it, because you're talking about some people can have these problems where they just

00:14:07.840 go completely blank on a certain side. Is it possible for this ability to, you know, make

00:14:14.320 space in our mind? Can that be dulled from just not using it on a regular basis?

00:14:19.620 I don't know. You know, I think most of, well, what gets dulled is our sort of ability to control how

00:14:31.000 we're going to use attention in our environments. We're pretty good at cooking up space in our minds,

00:14:37.260 but sort of the next step is where are you going to, where are you going to place your attention?

00:14:42.580 And that actually can get dulled, or it can get distracted, or it can never develop well in the

00:14:50.200 first place. And then you get attention deficit disorders and things like that. And clearly

00:14:55.600 meditation and mindfulness and doing things in wild environments all train us to be more disciplined

00:15:03.760 in how we sort of allocate our attention.

00:15:06.560 So another idea you talk about with physical intelligence is that our, both our mind and our

00:15:13.420 body, we might not even know this when I think about it, but we're kind of communicating with

00:15:17.120 the environment around us. And I use communicate like in quotation marks, but like you talk about

00:15:22.760 this idea of affordances, like an object or a surface can have an affordance. And that tells

00:15:29.220 something to our mind and body. I thought this was really interesting. Can you elaborate on this idea?

00:15:33.280 Yeah. So for surfaces, I was thinking about, here's a good example. If I think everybody's familiar

00:15:40.060 with the half dome in Yosemite Valley, it's this big granite dome and there's the, there's the

00:15:47.000 vertical face, but then there's the rounded faces on the side and the hiker's route goes up the,

00:15:53.720 the rounded side and the surface, it's just smooth granite and it gets steeper and steeper and steeper

00:16:02.020 until, and you're walking up this. And there's a, there's a point at which you begin to doubt

00:16:09.180 whether your feet will even stick anymore because it's getting so steep. Can you continue to walk up

00:16:14.720 this slope? And it gets scary because you're way off the deck and that's an affordance. It's,

00:16:21.980 it's your relationship with this slope and it's, it's as pure and simple as it could be.

00:16:28.360 Can you maintain footing and continue up this dome? Now on flat surfaces, you can think about,

00:16:37.220 you know, icy surfaces or, or slopes that are covered with marbly round rocks, things like that.

00:16:45.160 Can you maintain your footing? So those are, those are kind of surface ideas. And then the more sort

00:16:51.640 of elaborative version of the same thing was, can you fit between two trees? If you're just walking

00:16:56.580 along and there's, as you're in a dense forest, can you squeeze between two trees? That's an

00:17:03.660 affordance. That's an opportunity. It's, it's this idea that the environment creates what's possible

00:17:10.480 and what's impossible for you. We don't accidentally walk into trees and then around them. We, our mind

00:17:19.420 unconsciously and seamlessly, you know, just recognizes this is an obstruction. This is something I cannot get

00:17:26.080 through. And it's, it's, it's looking for opportunities in the environment that it can

00:17:32.660 accomplish or it can, you know, can get through. It's a little bit like a kayaker who's weaving

00:17:39.020 through the gates, right? They're just seeing these, the gates are opportunities for how they're going to

00:17:43.920 move in their environment. And we do this all the time, seamlessly. And if you don't have that,

00:17:50.380 you walk into walls, you, you don't understand the three-dimensional relationships between objects,

00:17:56.740 just something on the floor in front of you can completely stymie your ability to move forward.

00:18:03.780 So it's, it's an essential capacity and vision, and it's almost completely ignored in neuroscience.

00:18:10.720 What we look at is how we recognize objects or how we name things or how we categorize things,

00:18:16.580 but there's very little work on how we understand the 3d world and navigate through it physically.

00:18:23.660 So, I mean, it sounds like you can be more adept with some affordances than others. I mean,

00:18:29.200 for example, you know, the mountaineering, you probably recognize affordances there,

00:18:33.820 like on the mountain that some person who's never done that before would, they wouldn't be able to

00:18:38.700 recognize that. Totally. This is, you know, this is, if you think about what are the ingredients

00:18:45.080 that make a great athlete or a person adept at any skill, we always think about sort of the motor

00:18:52.660 side of it, you know, like how, how graceful are they at movement, but just as important is their

00:19:00.040 really precise knowledge about what's possible and what's impossible to do. You know, downhill skier

00:19:07.780 knows really well, what kind of slopes require, what kind of movements, what's possible, what's

00:19:16.000 impossible. And as you develop experience, all those affordances evolve with you. Yeah. Climber,

00:19:22.680 climber sees opportunity that, uh, you know, a novice just doesn't even know exists. You know,

00:19:27.780 they see handholds that we don't see and so forth. So we all do this through experience. We,

00:19:33.780 we completely change how we understand and perceive opportunities in the environment.

00:19:40.280 And then something you highlight in this book, that this ability to recognize affordances,

00:19:45.500 this can actually dull. And it might explain like why old people fall down a lot as they get older.

00:19:51.060 Right. So this is, this is a radical departure from sort of the medical model that's out there right

00:19:57.380 now, which is the reason people fall is because they can't see they're weak or they have problems

00:20:02.860 with the balance organs, right? So it's either they can't sense or they can't, or they're weak,

00:20:08.800 but lots of people fall down that are strong. They can see and have good balance. So why are they,

00:20:16.460 why are so many people falling? Remember falling is the number one reason people go to emergency

00:20:21.140 rooms and it's, it's old people, young people, everybody's falling down all the time. It's amazing

00:20:26.280 how many people fall. Probably every listener you have has fallen in an awkward circumstance

00:20:33.220 somewhere along the way. And so you have to think there's something else going on that's,

00:20:38.220 it's making us fall. And the affordance ideas is really that you get rusty, right? And that's true

00:20:45.460 with climbing. You know, if you've been a climber for a while and you go away from it, you don't know

00:20:50.540 what's possible anymore. You've got to relearn what kind of handholds work for you, what kind of

00:20:54.940 footholds work. If you haven't been walking much, it's amazing. You actually kind of lose your skill

00:21:01.640 simply walking, right? And then, and so you become more vulnerable to, to, you know, like a crack in

00:21:08.080 the sidewalk. You're more likely to trip on that. I mean, just really simple little things can fool us.

00:21:14.020 So it, it actually leads to sort of a radical view about what to do with aging, which is kind of the

00:21:21.620 opposite of what a lot of people have recommended. People say, well, you got to be super safe. You

00:21:26.540 shouldn't go on anything rough. You should only be on surfaces like, you know, linoleum floors like

00:21:32.360 you'd find in the local mall, uh, so that you absolutely minimize your risk of tripping on

00:21:38.160 anything. And the affordance idea would actually kind of argue the opposite. It would say throughout

00:21:44.320 life, especially as you age, you should continue to constantly challenge yourself, you know, given

00:21:51.860 your strength and vision, which you have on the roughest surfaces you have, you should be out

00:21:57.680 walking on gravel roads. You should be in, you know, on trails rather than perfectly smooth sidewalks,

00:22:04.360 you know, change it up. The more variety and complexity there is in the kinds of surfaces you're

00:22:10.960 walking on, the more adapted you are and the less likely you fall. You know, I always like

00:22:15.680 to think of those, you know, a hundred year old Greek ladies on the islands going up and 1.00

00:22:20.400 down the cliffs. No problem. I seem to be living forever and not falling at all. You know, they're

00:22:25.720 there, they're perfectly adapted to these really wild environments. And the rest of us kind of

00:22:31.360 forget about how valuable that is. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our

00:22:35.840 sponsors. And now back to the show. And as you said, this doesn't just happen to old people 0.96

00:22:41.960 happens. I mean, you're starting, I guess you're seeing a lot of young people because they're not

00:22:45.360 engaging with complex environments outdoors. They're just, all they see is their house and

00:22:50.680 maybe the playground asphalt and the school floor and that's it. And then they encounter some sort of

00:22:56.260 weird affordance. They don't know how to deal with it. And they, they fall down and spring a wrist.

00:22:59.940 Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, the reality is everything we learn motorically, we're also kind

00:23:07.940 of unlearning, not completely. Like, uh, you know, once you learn to ride a bicycle, you know how to

00:23:13.480 ride a bike. But if you haven't ridden a bicycle in 10 years and you get on a bicycle, you're a little,

00:23:20.660 actually, if you measure the person's movements, they're a little sloppy at it at first to take some,

00:23:25.200 there's relearning, there's constant forgetting and relearning and, you know, adding grace and

00:23:33.080 elegance to, to, to any kind of action or, or movement. So it's really important, I think, to,

00:23:39.980 to continue sort of this kind of general physicality throughout life.

00:23:44.400 Now that makes me think of when I remember when I was a kid, you know, I, some of the, I was thinking

00:23:48.380 about some of the crazy stuff that I was doing on my bike when I was like seven, eight, nine,

00:23:52.280 like going up big dirt ramps and just flying. And I think about doing that now, I would be,

00:23:59.420 I wouldn't do it. I was, I could not do this. I would not know how to like handle the slope.

00:24:03.680 What should I do? I think it's a perfect example of not using it and losing it.

00:24:08.880 Oh yeah. It's, it's, we're constantly losing it. I have a, it's subtle. You, you know, the basic

00:24:15.860 skills and the basic motor programs for the actions, they stick, but the, the, the elegance

00:24:24.060 of the action is, is really vulnerable, right? And if you stop doing it, you lose that grace

00:24:30.220 very quickly.

00:24:31.420 So another idea of physical intelligence is idea of body schema. Is that how you say it?

00:24:37.000 Yeah.

00:24:37.440 Body, okay. Body schema. What is body, body schema?

00:24:40.780 It's really your map of where you are right now. Where's, you know, if you were to draw a picture

00:24:48.560 of your posture right now, what's that posture, right? To do anything, you got to know, to do

00:24:55.760 anything physical, you have to know your posture. So you need a way of tracking that. And it's a hard

00:25:00.500 problem because you're this mushy three-dimensional object is constantly changing its posture. And it's

00:25:10.240 the sensors for tracking this are very noisy. They're easily fooled. So it's, it's a real

00:25:16.880 hard problem for the brain to keep track of simply the posture. And it's another one of

00:25:22.600 these things that you would think, well, that's just kind of, we have that, we map it. We're

00:25:27.640 pretty good at it. No big deal. But it's, it's a little bit like affordance. If you think

00:25:32.140 about great athletes or a great, any kind of great physical performer, scheme is a huge,

00:25:40.760 huge piece of their skillset. It's not, again, it's not just muscles and movements. It's this

00:25:47.840 awareness of your posture and pose. Just think of, just watch some Fred Astaire videos of him dancing.

00:25:53.700 If you want to see someone with absolute perfect control over their, over their body position at

00:26:01.240 any point in a dance, you know, platform divers, you know, anybody doing anything involving gymnastics,

00:26:07.780 you know, they all have an exquisite ability to track a body pose and it's learned, right? It takes

00:26:14.200 practice and experience to, to understand what those, what, where you are in space at any given

00:26:21.060 moment in time. And that's why it's hard to like teach kids like sports movements. I know if I have

00:26:26.460 that trouble with like trying to explain to like my kids, like how to throw a ball, it's like, well,

00:26:30.500 and they, you try to tell it to them and like they, you can tell they have no idea how their body's

00:26:34.980 moving at all or they're having a hard time. Right. It's, it's absolutely true. Yet, you know,

00:26:41.000 when we talk about, you know, why is physical intelligence, you know, hard to get at, this is one of the

00:26:46.960 places that's probably the most difficult to get to, which is connecting your conscious verbal mind

00:26:54.460 with your own posture. You know, if you can look at it, but that's kind of cheating. If you were to

00:27:01.200 close your eyes and just say, where am I in space? They're really disconnected. And so you really just

00:27:07.200 have to do it experientially. Now there's exceptions to that. Like there are elite athletes,

00:27:13.720 are really, really trained athletes who really can now consciously access specific attributes about

00:27:22.800 their posture. Tiger Woods is a good example. He can, you know, at the, at the height of his back

00:27:29.580 swing, he can just stop in mid swing and just say, oh, you know, I need to just turn my wrist,

00:27:36.220 you know, or I need to raise my elbows, you know, he knows exactly, you know, kind of where

00:27:43.560 he is in the super dynamic, fast golf swing, but that's the exception, not the rule.

00:27:51.260 So it sounds like, okay, if someone thinks they're clumsy and they don't, they're awkward,

00:27:57.020 they feel awkward and they move, it's not that they're inherently like that. It's like,

00:27:59.760 they just need to practice more. I mean, it sounds like it's, it's a skill, if you want to call it that,

00:28:03.620 that can be developed. Absolutely. This is pure skill. And, you know, I, I'm in the book,

00:28:09.200 I talk about, you know, some examples of how people do this very practice really helps. So

00:28:15.700 not just doing your one sport, but shaking it up with a couple of different activities

00:28:21.420 helps sort of a, you learn body schema more globally. And that gives you some advantage.

00:28:28.540 You know, I have an example of Bronco bull riders, right. Who do yoga, you know, and it makes sense,

00:28:36.000 right. I mean, riding a bull has got to be one of the most dynamic, complicated activities we've

00:28:41.560 thought up and because it's super unpredictable, but they have to know exactly their posture and

00:28:46.680 center of gravity to stay on this bull. And so body awareness is a big piece of that skill. And so

00:28:53.280 just doing other activities where you, you enhance that, like yoga help helps them.

00:28:59.040 So yeah, mix it up, do diverse things.

00:29:00.940 Mix it up.

00:29:01.460 So one of my favorite chapters was the chapters on problem solving in bears, because we often think

00:29:08.300 of like problem solving as a, it's like a human thing and humans, you just sit down and you think

00:29:11.980 about the thing and you abstract and which, which we do, but you also make the case that problem

00:29:17.620 solving can also be a very physical activity and, and bears show us that that's the case.

00:29:24.540 Yes. There's, you, you hit it absolutely right. You know, if you say, okay, solve a problem,

00:29:29.560 you could sort of think of this like a computer program. Okay. I'm going to do some kind of

00:29:34.440 hierarchical logical dynamic programming to look for all the possible solutions and, you know,

00:29:42.060 we'll work backwards and find out the optimal thing to do. And sort of our, our war with bears over how

00:29:50.220 we store foods in the national parks shows that a lot of problem solving can be done without ever

00:29:57.660 having to do that fancy kind of logical reasoning that inside us and inside bears, there are these

00:30:06.140 sort of learning engines that through trial and error, figure out how to take care of a lot of

00:30:13.580 problems. Right. And so that chapter explores sort of the, the arms race with the bears and how each

00:30:21.080 time we think we've outsmarted them, they kind of solve the problem. Like you would think, well,

00:30:25.360 they don't have paw dexterity. So we're going to make bear boxes with funny handles. Well,

00:30:32.580 through trial and error, they just figure out how to use their hands in a new way. So they've got a

00:30:37.820 learning engine for learning dexterity with their paw that we didn't recognize existed. And we have that

00:30:45.380 same kind of learning engine so we can learn to do things with our hands as well. Or, you know,

00:30:50.920 we think, well, here's a, here's a, we'll put the food in this jar, this plastic jar. And they're

00:30:58.140 not going to have the fortitude and endurance and willingness to work at the problem long enough to

00:31:03.800 get through it. Well, yeah, some bears will just chew through these plastic containers or, oh, this has

00:31:09.860 a tiny little tab on it and it requires a sequential movement. It has to do, first it has to push this tab

00:31:16.040 and then it has to turn the top of the jar to get this thing open. Well, sure, they can learn to do

00:31:21.860 a simple two-step action like that. So each, each, each solution we've come up with, they, through trial

00:31:29.780 and error, they, they've figured it out. And that's a really powerful learning engine that's, that's

00:31:35.000 available to them. And so the chapter kind of ends with asking, well, there's a point at which bears

00:31:42.700 will get stuck, right? There's, eventually there is something special about humans that bears and

00:31:49.400 actually all the primates don't have and kind of explore that. Some people thought that the chimps

00:31:57.540 were really special in sort of abstraction that they, that they could, they had sort of, sort of a basic

00:32:06.060 form of reasoning that allowed them to go past kind of all the other species. The classic example is 0.59

00:32:13.760 William Kohler had this chimp and he hung a banana in a, in a backyard environment and there were some

00:32:22.420 boxes sitting around and Kohler watched as the chimp stacked all the boxes so he could get up high 0.99

00:32:28.740 enough to get the banana. And he said, oh, this is a, this is a fundamental kind of reasoning in primates.

00:32:34.140 It simply doesn't exist in bears, but I've seen bear, I saw a bear do this same thing in the wild

00:32:40.320 in Yosemite. It's stacked logs to, so it could get higher to reach for my food. So, so the claim,

00:32:50.540 so other primates and bears are very, very similar in what they can do in terms of problem solving.

00:32:56.960 What none of them can do is complicated sequential reasoning. So if I've got a really, if I've got

00:33:05.800 to look at a problem and let's say there's three steps, step one, step two, step three,

00:33:12.780 and the only way I can solve it is to first figure out what to, what the final action should be and

00:33:18.440 then work backwards to the first step. They can't do that. They can, they can figure out the first thing

00:33:24.800 to do, then the second thing to do, then the third thing to do through trial and error, but they

00:33:29.240 can't, they can't do the reverse, what we would call dynamic programming. They can't, oh yeah, I got

00:33:36.140 to set things up at the end and then work at the beginning. But just because we can do that,

00:33:43.080 we also problem solve like bears sometimes, right? We just sort of just keep doing different things

00:33:47.880 until we figure out how to do it and find the thing that works. Yeah. In fact, most of what we

00:33:52.920 do is that we, we, there's something we really hate actually thinking very hard about a problem

00:33:59.400 most of the time. Good example would be we're going to, we're going to have a breakfast for four

00:34:07.980 and I want to have the, the food, the coffee all out on the table at the same time. I want to have

00:34:15.240 the table set, right? I have to, I have to organize cooking the eggs and timing that with cooking the

00:34:22.080 toast and setting the table. I've got all these contingencies I've got to sort out and time just

00:34:28.560 right so that when the guests arrive, everything's ready. And most people don't think through, well,

00:34:36.280 this is how long the eggs take. This is how long the toast takes. They just kind of go for it.

00:34:41.800 They start scrambling and through lots of experience and trial and error and many breakfasts,

00:34:50.920 they kind of learn unconsciously what the right timing relationships are so that the meal all

00:34:57.980 comes out at the same time. And it seems like that's how we learn skills. I mean, I think you can

00:35:03.160 watch instructional videos and like, you know, step by step by step, but often it's just, you just have

00:35:08.320 to do something over and over again until you find that groove and you find what works.

00:35:14.000 That's right. Now, all this works great until the dimensionality gets too big. You know, if you think

00:35:22.280 about doing a task that has six steps, there's 720 possible orderings of those six steps. And so,

00:35:30.560 who's going to trial 100, 720 steps, right? So, there's some things where eventually you just

00:35:38.280 have to think about it a little bit and, you know, try to get at least some of it organized

00:35:43.840 in advance. And that's kind of what the literature is showing now. We don't think through, if it's a

00:35:49.280 big problem that has a lot of steps, we don't necessarily plan all of them, but we chunk them

00:35:55.180 into little groupings. And then we try to, just through trial and error, learn within each of those

00:36:00.780 little groupings. So, the final thing you talk about is fatigue. And this has been an ongoing

00:36:06.880 debate in medicine and science, like what causes fatigue? Because you talk about this one guy who

00:36:14.620 looked at a bird, like birds could fly thousands of miles, right? And they'd flap in their wings and

00:36:20.480 they never get tired, but a human walks a mile and they're like, man, I'm feeling chuffed here. 0.86

00:36:25.960 So, what's going on with our body and mind? Does the body get fatigued? Does the mind get fatigued?

00:36:31.360 Is it both? What's happening there? It's both. I think what's evolved in the last decade has been

00:36:40.160 recognizing that it is both. For a long time in the 70s, all the way going back to the 1920s,

00:36:48.840 I would say, we really focused on lactic acid and oxygen. The idea that you run around the track as

00:36:55.840 fast as you can, your muscles make a lot of lactic acid, you don't get enough oxygen on board,

00:37:02.400 and essentially you have these toxins circulating that your brain senses and goes, wow, you know,

00:37:09.520 I'm really overdoing it with my muscles. I need to slow it down and take a break.

00:37:15.560 And so, you generate a sense of fatigue based on sort of the pain that comes from that kind of

00:37:22.740 intense exertion. And that's true, right? That's all true. You go out to the track and you go

00:37:28.640 sprint as hard as you can, you will feel pain and you will feel fatigue. There's no doubt about it. And

00:37:33.520 you will have those, you know, biochemical changes in your bloodstream. So, we're not saying that doesn't

00:37:39.400 exist. But that doesn't explain most of the fatigue that people day to day will describe,

00:37:45.960 which is I just walked five miles through a shopping mall. I'm tired of walking, right?

00:37:53.760 What's that fatigue, right? So, it's definitely not, it's not, I don't have a ton of lactic acid built up

00:37:59.640 in my bloodstream. I haven't been sprinting through the mall. I've just been strolling.

00:38:02.880 So, what's going on there? And this goes back to, all the way back to Musso. That's the guy I was,

00:38:09.080 you know, you mentioned with the birds. Musso was in a, he's really the first

00:38:12.740 sort of neurophysiologist that ever existed. He was really struggling in the 1870s with what is

00:38:20.900 fatigue? What could this be? And he thought about it in lots of different ways, not just the chemical

00:38:27.560 way. He did think about the chemical idea. So, he did things like he made frogs really tired by

00:38:34.640 making them jump a lot. Then he sacrificed the frogs, ground them up, and injected them in dogs.

00:38:39.880 And then he claimed that the dogs got tired. Well, it's kind of a weird experiment, but it shows you

00:38:45.240 how primitive things were. But, you know, he's searching for the chemicals that could do it.

00:38:50.360 But then, ultimately, he realized that a lot of fatigue is not that. It's essentially an emotion

00:38:58.420 that the brain generates, independent of whatever the muscles are doing. And his idea was, well,

00:39:07.260 you generate this emotion to hedge your bets. It's like a governor on an engine that keeps it from

00:39:13.320 spinning too fast. And from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. The idea would be,

00:39:19.500 okay, you're a hunter-gatherer. You've just walked half the day. And you're not really sure how much

00:39:30.240 more you're going to have to walk that day. It could be a little bit. It could be a lot.

00:39:35.420 But you're going to set your defaults to assume that it's going to be a lot. And so, you always kind

00:39:41.280 of keep a lot in reserve. You don't want to blow out all your gaskets and exert yourself

00:39:49.480 to the point of true exhaustion. You always want to keep a lot in reserve because you don't know

00:39:54.540 what's going to happen in the wild. And so, your brain creates a sense of fatigue. It's an emotion

00:40:02.280 that regulates how hard you're going to go. And that assures that you're going to keep some energy

00:40:10.400 in reserve just in case. And so, we see this now. Coaches have figured this out.

00:40:17.040 And so, if you look now at sports that do require long-distance exertion, particularly like

00:40:25.280 Nordic racing, long-distance rowing, those athletes train themselves right up to their lactic acid

00:40:35.580 threshold. And then, they push themselves over long time periods past the point, far, far past the

00:40:46.540 point where they sense fatigue. They feel the fatigue, but they just learn to suppress it.

00:40:53.260 The emotional fatigue, they just suppress that. And the funny thing is, you'll see this all the

00:40:58.920 time now in races. People get to the finish line, and they collapse on the ground. And it's as if

00:41:06.900 they're trying to suppress this emotional sense all the way up to the finish line. They get to the

00:41:12.000 finish line. They don't need to suppress it anymore. And so, this emotion now just wins,

00:41:17.720 and it just throws them to the ground. But they're back. It's not like they're actually truly

00:41:22.640 exhausted, because within a minute, they're up on their feet and running around and waving to

00:41:27.020 everybody if they win the race. So, it really is a battle of multiple minds we have, one of which is

00:41:35.380 persevering and pushing us as hard as we can. And another one is creating this emotional sense and

00:41:42.920 saying, no, no, no, no, you don't want to go this fast. You want to hold some in reserve, because

00:41:48.260 we don't know if that really is the end of the race. Maybe you're being tricked, and the race is

00:41:54.160 another hour. You've got another hour to go. So, your mind's playing these games with you

00:42:00.520 all the time when you're out doing physical activities. That'd be a good race. You trick 1.00

00:42:06.840 people about the finish line, and then say, no, actually, it's the end. No, I'm joking. That'd be

00:42:11.340 very mean. What do you hope readers walk away with after reading your book?

00:42:17.440 Well, I got to go back once. Oh, sure.

00:42:20.560 Before we get to that, I want to mention the Barclay Marathon.

00:42:24.460 Okay, yeah.

00:42:25.040 Which kind of, the Barclay Marathon is one of the most ingenious races because it's an ultra run

00:42:34.900 in extreme wild Appalachian wilderness. And the athletes don't know the route until one hour

00:42:47.300 before the race. And they don't know when the race is even going to begin for the day prior to when

00:42:54.880 they all show up. So, it really plays on this idea of fatigue is an emotion. Now, we're really going

00:43:04.200 to mess them up by not letting them know where they're going to go, how far they're going to go

00:43:10.940 for, and what they need to do to plan the route until the very last second. So, they've got no

00:43:17.620 ability to mentally prepare sort of how to sort of set their expected level of what a reasonable amount

00:43:26.040 of fatigue is going to be. It's really ingenious.

00:43:29.620 I wonder who are the kind of people who sign up for that. 1.00

00:43:31.460 Oh, they're nuts. 1.00

00:43:32.940 In the best possible way. Yeah, they're really testing themselves in a profound way. 1.00

00:43:38.460 And so, after you're talking about physical intelligence and writing about it, what do

00:43:43.160 you hope readers walk away with after reading your book?

00:43:46.500 Well, I hope they go away with it realizing that, you know, it's not just use it or lose it. It's

00:43:54.160 use it in interesting ways. That physical intelligence is not the same as simple exercise.

00:44:00.780 It's really projecting yourself into really novel and interesting and challenging situations.

00:44:11.100 You know, it's the difference between getting your exercise on a treadmill and getting your

00:44:16.260 exercise on a trail in a park near your house. There's just no comparison, right? There's so much

00:44:24.220 more that comes from real physical complex and varied environments compared to sort of simple

00:44:32.860 exercise. I'm not saying we shouldn't exercise. I'm saying we should double down and make that

00:44:39.400 exercise even more interesting, even more physically interesting and demanding. And I think a person gets

00:44:46.100 far more well-being from doing that. They age more gracefully and they experience much more of the

00:44:52.920 world in a better way.

00:44:55.200 And it also sounds like even as an adult, like, try new stuff. Take up dancing, join a softball team,

00:45:01.040 like, learn a new sport. Like, don't be afraid of that.

00:45:03.500 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever your body will allow you to do, push it a little bit, you know?

00:45:10.600 Right. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn

00:45:12.940 more about the book and your work?

00:45:14.220 Well, the book's on Amazon. That's easy to find. I don't have a big social media presence.

00:45:20.280 That's fine. That's great. It's always refreshing to find people like that.

00:45:24.940 You can come to my house and talk to me or email me. Anyway, yeah, the book's on Amazon and

00:45:31.100 I've got a website for my lab and anybody can email me with questions.

00:45:36.540 Well, fantastic. Well, Scott Grafton, thanks so much time. It's been a pleasure.

00:45:39.160 Oh, you're welcome. This is great.

00:45:41.680 My guest today was Scott Grafton. He's the author of the book, Physical Intelligence. It's

00:45:45.140 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You also check out our show notes

00:45:48.240 at aom.is slash physicalintelligence where you can find links to resources where you can

00:45:52.040 delve deeper into this topic.

00:46:00.400 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

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00:46:35.520 Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast,

00:46:38.720 but put what you've heard into action.

00:46:46.100 Thank you for listening.

The Art of Manliness - April 06, 2020

#599： The Physical Intelligence That Helps You Take Action

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