Physical Intelligence

Elegantly written and deeply grounded in personal experience—works by Oliver Sacks come to mind—Physical Intelligence gives us a clear, illuminating examination of the intricate, mutually responsive relationship between the mind and the body as they engage (or don’t engage) in all manner of physical action.

Ever wonder why you don’t walk into walls or off cliffs? How you decide if you can drive through a snowstorm? How high you are willing to climb up a ladder to change a lightbulb? Through the prisms of behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience, Scott Grafton brilliantly accounts for the design and workings of the action-oriented brain in synchronicity with the body in the natural world, and he shows how physical intelligence is inherent in all of us—and always in problem-solving mode. Drawing on insights gleaned from discoveries by engineers who have learned to emulate the sophisticated solutions Mother Nature has created for managing complex behavior, Grafton also demonstrates the relevance of physical intelligence with examples that each of us might face—whether the situation is mundane, exceptional, extreme, or compromised.

SCOTT GRAFTON holds the Bedrosian Coyne Presidential Chair in Neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center and codirector of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies. He lives in Santa Barbara.

Introduction ix

1 The Space We Create 3
2 Surfaces 25
3 Shaping the Self 51
4 The Hidden Hand 81
5 Pulling Strings 101
6 Perspectives 125
7 Learning to Solve Problems 147
8 Purpose 165
9 Costs 187
10 Of One Mind 207

Acknowledgments 225
Notes 227
Index 251