#599： The Physical Intelligence That Helps You Take Action
Episode Stats
Summary
You ever wonder why you don t walk into walls? How you know you have to step gingerly on ice? How do you decide whether you can or can t scale a certain rock? Well, my guest today says the answer lies in our special sense of bodily know-how. His name is Scott Grafton, and he's a neurologist and the author of Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and Mind Guide Each Other Through Life.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You ever
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wonder why you don't walk into walls? How you know you have to step gingerly on ice?
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How you decide whether you can or can't scale a certain rock? Well, my guest today says
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the answer lies in our special sense of bodily know-how. His name is Scott Grafton and he's
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a neurologist and the author of Physical Intelligence, the Science of How the Body and Mind Guide
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each other through life. We begin our conversation discussing how physical intelligence is the
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mutually responsive interaction between your body and your mind that allows you to interact
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effectively in the world. Scott then explains how our mind and body work together to build
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our conception of space and that without this ability, we couldn't create an area of operations
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in which to take action. We then discuss how our mind and body communicate with various types
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of terrain, how we can lose that ability by limiting our movements to simple, safe environments,
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and how that may explain why old people fall down more. We then discuss how problem solving
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can be a very physical activity and whether the feeling of fatigue is more of a matter
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of the body or the mind. And we end our conversation discussing ways you can keep your physical
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intelligence sharp as you age. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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So you just came out with a new book called Physical Intelligence, the science of how the
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body and the mind guide each other through life. Before we talk about the book, let's
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talk about your background. Because you're a neuroscientist, but it seems like you've focused
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on how the mind and body interact with one another.
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Right. My background is actually, I started as a neurologist and went to medical school,
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have taken care of a lot of patients with neurologic problems. And when you do that, it's hard
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to separate mind and body. Patients come in with problems that are centered in the brain,
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but really it's, you know, the problems involve both mind and body inevitably. And so just being
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a clinician and working with patients, you know, you invariably think of the whole person
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and that just kind of frames the way you see the world. And then I got into brain imaging
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and was sort of an early pioneer and using functional brain scans to understand how the
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brain works. And there too, you know, it's kind of amazing. You're looking at these images of
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brains of living people thinking and doing things. So again, you kind of get this holistic view of
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the person, both in terms of what they do and sort of how their mind is working.
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So you've seen firsthand Descartes' error, right? The separation between mind and body.
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Yeah, I see that as, you know, that's just, to me, that's an illusion created by the way our,
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we use language and the way we, our mind creates concepts. We create concepts of objects
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and things like bodies, and we create very different kinds of concepts that are more abstract,
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like minds. And those inevitably get sort of separated at the almost categorical level,
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but they're, they're never really actually separated in a brain.
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And as we'll see in our conversation, what I thought was really interesting about this book
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is you, you'll show how, we'll talk about how the mind influences the body, but also the,
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how the body influences the mind. And it's just almost this cycle. You can't even disconnect
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All right. So let's talk about this idea of physical intelligence. What do you mean by that?
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Well, this is the art of manliness podcast. So if you think about manliness sort of as a,
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as a setup here, you know, one of the, one of the core ingredients I think of,
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you know, manliness sort of classically defined as action, right? You know, a man of action or
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the concept of what makes a person great in some sense is what they do, how they, the actions they,
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they enable and the things they do in their world. And physical intelligence is just the underbelly
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of that. It's the, it's the underpinnings you need to actually get things done. We don't have a,
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we don't have a manliness area in our brain. We don't have a isolated action area in our brain.
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We have lots and lots of parts or systems that together allow us to do great things with our
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bodies, both, both sports like activities or, you know, sort of extravagant physical behavior,
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but also just creative things, you know, building a house, pouring a slab of cement, whatever it is,
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that's, that's the stuff of physical intelligence.
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Well, speaking of physical intelligence and manliness, what I love about this book is that
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you explore these ideas of physical, these different concepts of physical intelligence by
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taking readers along with you on a backpacking trip you did in this year in Nevada's. And this
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isn't just like a stroll, like the way you describe it sounds very strenuous, very hard, very perilous.
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Before we get into why you chose that as sort of a framework for explaining these concepts,
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talk about how did you get into backpacking personally? How long have you been
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Oh, I started high altitude mountaineering and rock climbing in high school. And by the time I was
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16, I was like climbing the face of half dome and, and was really an enthusiastic climber.
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And there was a decision point where, you know, are you going to become a climbing bum or a dirtbag
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climber? Are you going to go to college and go off to medical school? And I chose the latter. And I've,
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I've kind of missed the dirtbag life ever since. So that's, that's a real dualism for me. And so the
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way I get, you know, to, to be a really good high altitude climber or any kind of rock climber,
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you got to put a lot of time in it. And so as I grew older, I, I swapped in walking in the wilderness
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for sort of the more extreme kinds of climbing is I think what I savor the most is just being in very
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And so why did you decide to use, you know, frame your book and explain these concepts
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with this backpacking story. Physical intelligence is one of those sort of magic capacities we have
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that's just sort of automatic and operates under the hood. And we don't have much conscious access
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to the, to the bits that, that are needed for physical intelligence. And so I wanted to create
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a setup where I'm in a place that's very demanding physically, that there's risk and that the
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problems, the physical problems are really clear and they're unclouded by conversations with other
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people, social media, technology. It's just pure raw human in the world. And that's, that's a nice
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place to just reveal kind of what physical intelligence is and also sort of what we evolved
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And I think one of the points you make about physical intelligence at the beginning of the
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book is that physical intelligence really is what, I mean, oftentimes we think of what makes us human
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is that we think, but a big part of what makes us human is our ability to act in the world and
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That's right. Just talk to anyone and say, what's the most satisfying thing you've done or
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experienced in the last month. And invariably it'll be something they did physically.
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It doesn't have to be, you know, a superhuman feat or extreme sports. It could just be, you know,
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I remember my daughter in middle school, she made a birdhouse in woodshop.
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She couldn't have been happier. Right. I mean, it was, she was so satisfied with that activity
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compared to anything she'd done in terms of schoolwork. So yeah, that's the stuff that really
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it's the salve that makes us happiest. It's kind of, that's what we evolved from, right? We didn't
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evolve to sit around and talk or read books. That's icing on the cake. We evolved from rough
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and tumble environments where we had to find food, build shelter, and find our way through vast,
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rough environments. And we did that up until very recently, only about, you know, a thousand years ago.
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So the first concept you explore in physical intelligence is our ability to construct a
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sense of space. And as you said, physical intelligence is one of those things that it's
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going on under the hood. We often don't even think about it. We don't even know what's going on. And
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this, this chapter on how we construct space around us, I mean, it kind of blew my mind because
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you talk about what's going on all the same time to give us an idea of what's in our environment.
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Right. A good example of this would be, if you think of a worm crawling towards some food,
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it has no sense of space. It just has some sensors that are drawing its movements towards that food.
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Now I can say to you, okay, I want you to think of how you would walk across the room.
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So you've immediately created an operational space, the size of the room. But then I can say,
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think about walking to the other side of the house, think about walking across the street,
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thinking about, think about walking across to the other side of the city you're in, right?
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Just in those moments, you've expanded your operational space. You can mentally stretch out
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and construct any of those volumes of space and then plan and organize your action inside that
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volume. It's, it's amazing, right? That you could do that.
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And when you have to do it, right? It's just as a, just as a search and rescue team doesn't just
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willy nilly wander into a, the wilderness looking for someone, they, they create a map and they lay
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out a grid and they say, this is, this is what we're going to do here. We're going to, we're going
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to first set constraints on the space we want to work in. We do this all the time mentally when we're
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moving and acting in our environments. And the example you gave in the, in the,
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in this chapter is about just being in a tent. You're down for the night and you talk about how,
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what's going on in your mind as your, your mind's figuring out what to pay attention to and what not
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to pay attention to. So you could hear rustling and like your mind automatically knew it was like,
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well, that's not a bear. It's probably just a raccoon. Like how, how does, how's our brain able
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to do that? Well, if I, I wish I knew, you know, it's funny. We can, a lot of this is phenomenology
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we can describe and we can measure in the lab, but there's still a lot of magic about like how
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brain circuits actually calculate and what the computation is inside the head that allows us
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to do this, what the algorithms are that enable this capacity. We know we have it.
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So at a certain level, we really understand a lot. We know a lot about how the brain can zoom and
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filter and narrow in attention. We know far less about how it expands attention, how it can become
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more vigilant and bring in actually more information in these wild environments.
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So as a neurologist, you've probably seen people who've lost this ability.
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What happens to those individuals? Well, the most dramatic example is patients with
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focal damage to the right brain, posterior right brain develop what's called neglect. And the word
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neglect's a little bit misleading. What they'll do is ignore, unconsciously ignore the left side of the
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world. And it can be quite severe. I refer to it as the most severe cases. It's like a black hole
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space simply isn't created in the left side of their environment in their mind. And so if you're
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standing there talking, if you're on the left side of their bed talking to them, you don't exist.
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And then you walk around to the right side of their bed and they go, oh, hello, how you doing?
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You're there, right? So literally on one side of the bed, there is reality for them. And the other side,
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there is no reality. There is no nothing there. And there's variations of this. And there's minor
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forms that are more subtle. It's been called neglect for over 50 years, but it's not like
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they're intentionally neglecting that space. They can't cook it up in the first place.
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So that just tells you, you know, at some point you got to make space, right? You got, if you're
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going to do this stuff we do, you know, as humans, one of the very first steps is making some kind of
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sense of space. Because if you don't make it, you don't interact in it. You don't reach into it.
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It's just not there. You don't move anywhere near it. The other thing about space I think
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that's really important to remember is there's a very strong argument in sort of the cognitive
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literature, cognitive developmental literature, that it's the way when you're a baby and then a
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child and you're moving through space, it's your understanding of what you can do in space
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that really shapes much of how you think. In other words, we think spatially.
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Right? If I think about relationships between ideas, I can kind of put them in a row spatially
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and organize them in my mind and space. You know, people like Einstein are, you know, are well known
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to have sort of thought through their ideas in terms of spatial relationships, physical, spatial
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relationships. So much of how we construct the world is spatial.
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And is it, because you're talking about some people can have these problems where they just
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go completely blank on a certain side. Is it possible for this ability to, you know, make
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space in our mind? Can that be dulled from just not using it on a regular basis?
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I don't know. You know, I think most of, well, what gets dulled is our sort of ability to control how
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we're going to use attention in our environments. We're pretty good at cooking up space in our minds,
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but sort of the next step is where are you going to, where are you going to place your attention?
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And that actually can get dulled, or it can get distracted, or it can never develop well in the
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first place. And then you get attention deficit disorders and things like that. And clearly
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meditation and mindfulness and doing things in wild environments all train us to be more disciplined
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So another idea you talk about with physical intelligence is that our, both our mind and our
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body, we might not even know this when I think about it, but we're kind of communicating with
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the environment around us. And I use communicate like in quotation marks, but like you talk about
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this idea of affordances, like an object or a surface can have an affordance. And that tells
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something to our mind and body. I thought this was really interesting. Can you elaborate on this idea?
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Yeah. So for surfaces, I was thinking about, here's a good example. If I think everybody's familiar
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with the half dome in Yosemite Valley, it's this big granite dome and there's the, there's the
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vertical face, but then there's the rounded faces on the side and the hiker's route goes up the,
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the rounded side and the surface, it's just smooth granite and it gets steeper and steeper and steeper
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until, and you're walking up this. And there's a, there's a point at which you begin to doubt
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whether your feet will even stick anymore because it's getting so steep. Can you continue to walk up
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this slope? And it gets scary because you're way off the deck and that's an affordance. It's,
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it's your relationship with this slope and it's, it's as pure and simple as it could be.
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Can you maintain footing and continue up this dome? Now on flat surfaces, you can think about,
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you know, icy surfaces or, or slopes that are covered with marbly round rocks, things like that.
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Can you maintain your footing? So those are, those are kind of surface ideas. And then the more sort
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of elaborative version of the same thing was, can you fit between two trees? If you're just walking
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along and there's, as you're in a dense forest, can you squeeze between two trees? That's an
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affordance. That's an opportunity. It's, it's this idea that the environment creates what's possible
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and what's impossible for you. We don't accidentally walk into trees and then around them. We, our mind
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unconsciously and seamlessly, you know, just recognizes this is an obstruction. This is something I cannot get
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through. And it's, it's, it's looking for opportunities in the environment that it can
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accomplish or it can, you know, can get through. It's a little bit like a kayaker who's weaving
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through the gates, right? They're just seeing these, the gates are opportunities for how they're going to
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move in their environment. And we do this all the time, seamlessly. And if you don't have that,
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you walk into walls, you, you don't understand the three-dimensional relationships between objects,
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just something on the floor in front of you can completely stymie your ability to move forward.
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So it's, it's an essential capacity and vision, and it's almost completely ignored in neuroscience.
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What we look at is how we recognize objects or how we name things or how we categorize things,
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but there's very little work on how we understand the 3d world and navigate through it physically.
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So, I mean, it sounds like you can be more adept with some affordances than others. I mean,
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for example, you know, the mountaineering, you probably recognize affordances there,
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like on the mountain that some person who's never done that before would, they wouldn't be able to
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recognize that. Totally. This is, you know, this is, if you think about what are the ingredients
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that make a great athlete or a person adept at any skill, we always think about sort of the motor
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side of it, you know, like how, how graceful are they at movement, but just as important is their
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really precise knowledge about what's possible and what's impossible to do. You know, downhill skier
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knows really well, what kind of slopes require, what kind of movements, what's possible, what's
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impossible. And as you develop experience, all those affordances evolve with you. Yeah. Climber,
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climber sees opportunity that, uh, you know, a novice just doesn't even know exists. You know,
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they see handholds that we don't see and so forth. So we all do this through experience. We,
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we completely change how we understand and perceive opportunities in the environment.
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And then something you highlight in this book, that this ability to recognize affordances,
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this can actually dull. And it might explain like why old people fall down a lot as they get older.
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Right. So this is, this is a radical departure from sort of the medical model that's out there right
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now, which is the reason people fall is because they can't see they're weak or they have problems
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with the balance organs, right? So it's either they can't sense or they can't, or they're weak,
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but lots of people fall down that are strong. They can see and have good balance. So why are they,
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why are so many people falling? Remember falling is the number one reason people go to emergency
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rooms and it's, it's old people, young people, everybody's falling down all the time. It's amazing
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how many people fall. Probably every listener you have has fallen in an awkward circumstance
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somewhere along the way. And so you have to think there's something else going on that's,
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it's making us fall. And the affordance ideas is really that you get rusty, right? And that's true
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with climbing. You know, if you've been a climber for a while and you go away from it, you don't know
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what's possible anymore. You've got to relearn what kind of handholds work for you, what kind of
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footholds work. If you haven't been walking much, it's amazing. You actually kind of lose your skill
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simply walking, right? And then, and so you become more vulnerable to, to, you know, like a crack in
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the sidewalk. You're more likely to trip on that. I mean, just really simple little things can fool us.
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So it, it actually leads to sort of a radical view about what to do with aging, which is kind of the
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opposite of what a lot of people have recommended. People say, well, you got to be super safe. You
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shouldn't go on anything rough. You should only be on surfaces like, you know, linoleum floors like
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you'd find in the local mall, uh, so that you absolutely minimize your risk of tripping on
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anything. And the affordance idea would actually kind of argue the opposite. It would say throughout
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life, especially as you age, you should continue to constantly challenge yourself, you know, given
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your strength and vision, which you have on the roughest surfaces you have, you should be out
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walking on gravel roads. You should be in, you know, on trails rather than perfectly smooth sidewalks,
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you know, change it up. The more variety and complexity there is in the kinds of surfaces you're
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walking on, the more adapted you are and the less likely you fall. You know, I always like
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to think of those, you know, a hundred year old Greek ladies on the islands going up and
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down the cliffs. No problem. I seem to be living forever and not falling at all. You know, they're
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there, they're perfectly adapted to these really wild environments. And the rest of us kind of
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forget about how valuable that is. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our
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sponsors. And now back to the show. And as you said, this doesn't just happen to old people
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happens. I mean, you're starting, I guess you're seeing a lot of young people because they're not
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engaging with complex environments outdoors. They're just, all they see is their house and
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maybe the playground asphalt and the school floor and that's it. And then they encounter some sort of
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weird affordance. They don't know how to deal with it. And they, they fall down and spring a wrist.
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Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, the reality is everything we learn motorically, we're also kind
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of unlearning, not completely. Like, uh, you know, once you learn to ride a bicycle, you know how to
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ride a bike. But if you haven't ridden a bicycle in 10 years and you get on a bicycle, you're a little,
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actually, if you measure the person's movements, they're a little sloppy at it at first to take some,
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there's relearning, there's constant forgetting and relearning and, you know, adding grace and
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elegance to, to, to any kind of action or, or movement. So it's really important, I think, to,
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to continue sort of this kind of general physicality throughout life.
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Now that makes me think of when I remember when I was a kid, you know, I, some of the, I was thinking
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about some of the crazy stuff that I was doing on my bike when I was like seven, eight, nine,
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like going up big dirt ramps and just flying. And I think about doing that now, I would be,
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I wouldn't do it. I was, I could not do this. I would not know how to like handle the slope.
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What should I do? I think it's a perfect example of not using it and losing it.
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Oh yeah. It's, it's, we're constantly losing it. I have a, it's subtle. You, you know, the basic
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skills and the basic motor programs for the actions, they stick, but the, the, the elegance
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of the action is, is really vulnerable, right? And if you stop doing it, you lose that grace
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So another idea of physical intelligence is idea of body schema. Is that how you say it?
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Body, okay. Body schema. What is body, body schema?
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It's really your map of where you are right now. Where's, you know, if you were to draw a picture
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of your posture right now, what's that posture, right? To do anything, you got to know, to do
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anything physical, you have to know your posture. So you need a way of tracking that. And it's a hard
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problem because you're this mushy three-dimensional object is constantly changing its posture. And it's
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the sensors for tracking this are very noisy. They're easily fooled. So it's, it's a real
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hard problem for the brain to keep track of simply the posture. And it's another one of
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these things that you would think, well, that's just kind of, we have that, we map it. We're
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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.
00:29:01.460
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
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
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.
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
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?
00:42:20.560
Before we get to that, I want to mention the Barclay Marathon.
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.
00:43:32.940
In the best possible way. Yeah, they're really testing themselves in a profound way.
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
00:44:55.200
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
00:45:14.220
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.
00:45:41.680
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
00:46:00.400
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:46:03.840
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