Book Review-Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton

This book would never have been on my radar because I would never have thought to look for something in this area. Luckily for me, I was listening to a Vern Gambetta podcast and Vern recommended this book very highly because he said he’d learn a lot about the connection between the body and the mind, which helped him in his coaching and training. Indeed, anything Vern recommends, especially about training, I take very seriously. I am glad that I took heed  because this was a vastly different book than what I had expected about an area that I really had put very little thought towards.

The smaller title of the book is The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. Indeed, this book lays out the symbiotic relationships that we do not directly think about when we think about using our bodies.  We certainly do not think about how the mind enables and affects the body and vice versa.

Scott Grafton Is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also an avid hiker and outdoorsman. He states in the introduction that: To study the mind without the body ignores the greatest pleasure of being alive: experiencing the world directly, as we perform and create.  He follows his own advice when he laid out the book, he describes a trip that he took through the California desert as the backdrop of this exploration through all the mind-body connections, the Physical Intelligence of the title.

The tone of the book is strictly business. There are ten chapters in all, each of the  ten chapters are filled with research result summaries. He buttresses the research results with anecdotes from his lifelong hiking experiences as well as vignettes of this hiking trip in the California desert to illustrate the main points. He can get a little pedantic at times but then again that is a quality, because no time is wasted as he directly supports much of what he has to say in a clinical manner.

He goes into great details on how some of the research has been done to explain how each mind-body connection functions theoretically, and he cites study after study the support the theory. He further illustrates his point by supplementing it with his own experience, thereby creating a small example for the reader to digest simply. He explains the experiments that were conducted to determine that the theories were plausible and viable, he does so with the seriousness of a researcher and he points out the difficulties inherent in conducting the studies and he also points out the pitfalls that could sidetrack the studies.

It is not easy reading because it is not lighthearted, and it is not written for entertainment. It is written to inform; it is written to get the readers to think about the possibilities that are there for us to consider in these mind-body connections. I must admit that I struggled with the first few chapters as I lacked the  fundamentals to fully comprehend the connections. When he moved on to the topics in which he employed the much more familiar feedback control system language, my interest soared, and I was able to understand the topic and the mind-body connection more easily. Once I got to that part of the book, I began to understand some of the framework that the neuroscientists had created to explain the connections.

One unique feature about this book that I had first struggled with but now I completely appreciate, is the fact that the author wrote what he had to say in ten chapters and ended the book. He did not try to write a deep summary of what he had to say because he had already said it in the book. Initially I felt the book ended rather abruptly, but then as I thought about it, I appreciated the fact that he told you what he was going to tell you in the introduction, he told you in the ten chapters, and then he stopped. Nothing wasted.

I will be rereading parts of this book in the future as I will be reexamining these mind-body connections in my effort to understand the physical intelligence for my own specific purpose. It was a great recommendation from Vern and I am grateful for this book.  It is one of those serendipitous things in life where you do not know what you do not know until you learn about it.