Delving Into Physical Intelligence by Mark Hatmaker

Neuroscientist, Scott Grafton, has gifted the empirically thoughtful and scientifically literate a volume that is chockful of provoking information.

The book, Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life, makes a case that smashes a bit of that Cartesian duality mind-body separation nonsense that many armchair philosophers wheedle and wrangle over till the cows come home.

Mr. Grafton, warns that perhaps the cows will never come home if we stay mired in “This is mind stuff” and “This is physical body stuff.” He demonstrates more than capably and quite convincingly that we need to recognize that mind directs the body [no argument there I wager] but also what makes up a large part of our mental intelligence is how the body bolsters and interacts with the mind even in areas you might have formerly considered mere intellectual matters.

The volume is full of provoking/enlightening observations throughout. 

Let’s have a look at a few of these.

The author on ADHD…

“Furthermore, there are weaker connections among the salience network and cognitive control and the dorsal attention network.25 In this light, the inattentive boy is not abnormal, in need of Ritalin or a psychologist. He is a well-adapted young member of his species, not yet sufficiently muscular or skillful to be independent. Situate him in a prehistoric setting and it would be critical for him to be vigilant for hazards in his environment.”

He makes the case for increasing physical strength and/or increasing a perceived valuable skill to mitigate the effects of a so-called malady that may be nothing more than an adaptive response. 

[Of course, these short excerpts are insufficient. I supply them so that the curious may be sparked to read on their own.]

The author is not just a neuroscientist, he is also an avid outdoorsman and alpinist. He offers a prescription to increase both our physical and cognitive intelligence, it is, more time outdoors, and some of that time [periodically]perhaps alone, off the grid, with an element of danger. This prescription holds water with the training for “Vision Quests” as part of life in most all indigenous cultures.

And those familiar with the “Nature is not smooth” dictum will find much food for thought here.

“When I go into the mountains alone, the dynamics of the environment and potential hazards are, respectively, relatively slow and easy to predict. Nevertheless, I need to be vigilant. I don’t know what will happen around me, but I have to find some way to predict what might. Rocks move, trees fall, snow avalanches, ice breaks, winds gust, snow bridges collapse, horses kick, bears move in, rattlesnakes shake. The stakes are high. If I miss something, I can end up in a real pickle. Of course, if you live in the mountains, this ability to monitor the environment and predict what might happen is learned naturally through lifelong experience. However, most of us enter into risky environments like this only rarely, swiftly transitioning from safety to the unknown. How do we train our attention and state awareness so that they are sensitive to threat or danger, particularly when we spend most of our time in our predictable suburban or urban environments? In the modernized world, team sports afford a way. The ability to expand attention to a larger operational game space can dramatically augment performance. Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest hockey players of all time, was known for his astounding onice situational awareness. One might think that he was very good at quickly zooming attention to different points on the rink. However, in his own words, whether he was skating with the puck or not, over a lifetime of practice Gretzky taught himself to not focus on specific features in the games, like the uniforms of teammates or opponents. Instead he relied on quick glances to pick up colors and designs, just enough to update an ongoing mental map of the game. Gretzky has been quoted by sports pundits as saying, “If you ask a 50-goal scorer what the goalie looks like, he’ll say the goalie’s just a blur. But if you ask a five-goal scorer, he’ll say the goalie looks like a huge glob of pads. A five-goal scorer can tell you the brand name of the pad of every goalie in the league. I’m seeing the net, he’s seeing the pad.”26 Gretzky thought his ability came about as a survival skill. “When you’re 170 pounds playing with 210-pound guys, you learn to find out where everyone is on the ice at all times.”27 When star athletes are constantly shadowed and checked, they are forced to keep their eyes open and head up, and they naturally develop an acute awareness of their surroundings. They are forced to monitor the periphery—i.e., the background—far more than their competitors.”

This fascinating discussion of how awareness is trainable also holds the kernel of help for those suffering from PTSD.

“There is a long-standing debate about whether the capacity for situational awareness in athletes like Wayne Gretzky is learned or a genetic gift. The most compelling case that vigilance and a widened sense of awareness can be learned is readily demonstrated by combat-experienced soldiers. A few years ago, I ran a brain imaging experiment that sixty-five U.S. Army officers participated in. All of them had been on multiple tours of duty and had seen extensive combat. They were back in the States training new recruits in their lessons learned. Normally, work at the UCSB Brain Imaging Center involves a lot of undergraduates and nerdy graduate students. Things were dramatically different around the center when very large, intense army officers started showing up. What everyone on the project noticed was the officers’ habitual scanning of the environment. They would systematically gaze at locations around the courtyard outside the lab that an undergraduate wouldn’t even notice. Their continuous, automatic vigilance is a clear adaptation of physical intelligence, inculcated in them both formally and through hard-fought experience. There is also an emerging theory that too much of a good thing can lead to dysfunction. Specifically, there is strong evidence that many (but not necessarily all) veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder have persistent and maladaptive vigilance as demonstrated by a difficulty in disengaging or releasing spatial attention.28 In the same veterans, MRI measures of functional activity across the brain show that they have stronger connectivity between the salience network and the two attention networks, perhaps revealing an inflexibility in the way their brain regulates dynamic activity across these networks. This theory has led to innovative clinical trials that focus on training methods that modify a PTSD patient’s control of attention. This could be done either by training attention in a general way or, alternatively, by desensitizing a veteran to threatening or nonthreatening stimuli.29 Results so far suggest that the greatest benefits come from interventions that improve the patients’ overall control of attention, rather than training that teaches them to ignore or attend to particular threats.”

This fascinating sojourn into the seemingly razor-thin difference between meditation [inward directed] and directing the sensorium [outward directed] echoes the differences between indigenous “spiritual” practices which use outward-directedness and more modern religious tactics which are often inward contemplation. [See the “Suakhet’u Program” for specifics on engaging the sensorium and outward-directedness.]

“For those who don’t play team sports or wander in the wilderness, there are other avenues for enhancing awareness and vigilance. The closest urban experience might be mindfulness training, whether this is accomplished through formal meditation or closely related techniques that seek to create the sense of being present through body-scan awareness exercises, sitting and walking meditations, mindful eating, and mindful movement such as yoga. At first blush, this choice of training might seem a bit paradoxical. Mindfulness exercises are performed in some of the least threatening environments ever created (temples, monasteries, salons, retreats). How could quiet meditation lead to keener awareness or vigilance in harsh, sometimes violent environments? There are several competing theories about why such training works. One idea is that this type of training can lead to improved ability to control attention, particularly focused attention, via the salience network. Many sects of Buddhism and styles of meditation are built on focusing the mind on a single thought or point in space. For example, a common Buddhist meditation method teaches people to consistently focus attention on one thing over sustained periods of time. This can be one’s breath, a feeling, one’s heartbeat, or even something external. Try this, and you quickly discover how easily attention wanders. The challenge is to detect the wandering and refocus. In theory, with enough practice, a meditator develops a relatively effortless ability to regulate attention, whether by detecting distractions, letting go of them, or getting back to the object of focus. For many other practitioners, there is a complementary form of meditation, called “open monitoring,” where the aim is to be in a continuous attentive state, monitoring everything that occurs without focusing on anything in particular.31 In this way, the use of an object as a primary focus is replaced by effortless sustained awareness without explicit selection. A core feature of open-monitoring meditation is “reflexive awareness,” presumably a state that allows for a stronger sensitivity to natural phenomena, richer emotions, and more active thought. Mindfulness training is similar in providing the means for people to increase awareness of their surroundings, to be in the moment. The techniques of open-monitoring meditation and mindfulness are probably as close as one can get to the vigilant mental state that emerges in the wild. Unlike focused attention, where the environment is largely filtered out, here there is room for a person to take it all in, to experience her environment without prejudice.”

This extract allows an empirical comparison.

“A growing scientific literature is establishing fascinating similarities between modern meditation and mindfulness techniques and the mental states associated with heightened vigilance. The physiology of the brain in open-state meditators has been recorded by electroencephalograms. Their meditation is accompanied by very high-frequency rhythmic brain activity, particularly between parts of the salience network and the sensory cortical areas.32 Experiments in mindfulness training have recruited people with high levels of psychological stress resulting from unemployment and other life challenges. In one study, participants underwent three full days of mindfulness training and were compared to a control group at the same retreat who were taught relaxation techniques.33 Those with mindfulness training demonstrated far greater clinical benefit with reduced stress. Notably, a comparison of brain scans measured before and after mindfulness training showed a strengthening of functional connections between areas involved in cognitive control, salience, and the ventral attention networks, changes that did not emerge from relaxation techniques alone.”

It is also noteworthy that drugs or alcohol can relax but as they do not add control of attention the relaxation effect is only while under the influence of the substance. 

Whereas, attention control can be moved into the 24/7.

The author speculates here, but it seems wise speculation.

“The great irony, of course, is that as a species we did not evolve to meditate or to be mindful. These are recent cultural inventions. There is simply no survival advantage to sitting and contemplating the universe. So, from an evolutionary perspective, what is the vacuum that people are filling with their mindfulness and meditation? I believe that it has become a proxy for a desired mental state that cannot be easily triggered in modern environments and that normally arises when people deal with natural unpredictability. In this light, the meditator is using extensive training to reboot intrinsic cognitive abilities but doing so in modern safe contexts. Go to the mountains and these abilities arise on their own.”

Ponder this passage regarding movement on a mountain trail and ponder the sameness of everyday life.

“The path is cruelly monotonous, with little variation in step, steepness, or pace. The same muscles drive for each step. This is the kind of regularity that wears a person out, that makes him notice the weight of his pack and the discomfort of the tiniest pebble in a shoe. Between occasional vistas, the trail required that I keep an eye on the same dull view of the ground below. That is the trade-off of a well-groomed trail. It allows speedy travel, at the cost of enjoyment. One feels like a forlorn pack mule in this setting.”

Again “Nature is not smooth” have we made life too smooth to be engaged? Do we require endless distraction to simply get a shadow of engagement?

“Once free of the trail I found I was a bit clumsy for the first mile or so, easily tripping or misstepping. It took time to adjust pace and balance in this rough-and-tumble landscape, to find my “sea legs.” Unlike on the groomed pack trail down below, no two steps were alike; every muscle was being used. Vision had to be allocated more dynamically, quickly shifting between the ground in front where I would land my next step and the landscape far ahead, to plan a route over an increasingly ragged terrain. There were constant route choices as I weaved around crags, up bluffs, and over small streams. A slope might be too slippery, a cliff too tall, or bushes too thick. I soon had my rhythm back, delighted with the task at hand. The complexity of the terrain enforced absolute concentration at each moment; it was the essence of what pop psychologists have referred to as “flow state.” Unlike the pack trail, there was nothing dull or monotonous. Off-trail rambling is primordial, a physical skill we have used for as long as we have been a species, and showing it off can still be immensely pleasing.”

I’ll allow a few more of these passages to tumble out to better seat his argument.

“To move through the world like this as one desires, the mind has to recognize what is possible or impossible. It takes some effort to grasp how acutely the brain tracks the surfaces of the physical world, the literal hard constraints that limit what is possible. And there are loads of these surfaces. Imagine taking a walk through a majestic California redwood forest. What do you see? You might describe a few of the trees, the noise of the birds, unusual ferns, or a cloud in the sky. These verbal descriptions tend to revolve around the objects of the forest. Now close your eyes and continue your stroll. As you take a few more steps, other features of the world take hold: the exact positions of all the trees near your path, the slope of the trail, obstructive rocks, looming branches, and the sheen on the ground from raindrops that make the trail slippery. These features are totally absent from the conscious narrative of the world you were creating just a minute earlier. Some features, like slipperiness, aren’t even objects. Most of these new elements are built from surfaces, textures, and edges that define action boundaries. Together, they set very hard limits on what you will be able to do. You can’t walk through trees, your foot needs to be elevated over the rocks in the path, you’ll want to avoid stepping on ice, and your head needs to duck below a limb. These surfaces are essential features that anyone must sense if they want to move through any landscape.”

“Eyes open, you can run down the trail and, with little awareness or effort, readily maneuver through an endless array of surfaces requiring specific actions—for instance, hopping atop rocks or lunging through deep snow. The surfaces constantly require on-the-fly adjustments so your feet end up in the right spots. This unconscious side of sensing, the one that takes in features in the world to allow you to move through it or on it, constitutes a fundamental kind of “action perception.”*1 The philosopher Jakob von Uexküll was the first to recognize the close connection between what is perceived and what is possible when, in 1909, he coined the term “Umwelt.”2 He realized that space itself is weighted with meaning that profoundly shapes an organism’s behavior. Both a person and a squirrel will track spatial distances and textures as they navigate through the world, but they construct a profoundly different sense of meaning from those features, leading to a very different understanding of what their physical environment is.”

“When I take city friends into the mountains I need to remember that many have never traveled on foot through complex terrain. They can have enormous difficulty wending their way across steep slopes or rough ground. They have little if any knowledge of what their body can do in a natural environment, no sense of how to move in this jiggered landscape. Clinging to bushes or rock walls, they don’t know what is sticky or slippery, when a ramp is too steep, or how much they can trust their own feet to hold them up. Years of experience on these surfaces, experience that amounts to not much more than walking in a lot of weird places, allows me to see this terrain in an entirely different way.

“Ironically, city friends who are clumsy at something as simple as walking in the wilderness are often superb athletes, many of them exceptional downhill skiers. They have learned a completely different space of affordances.”

A Key Sentence.

“Physical ability instantly changes perception of an action opportunity.”

We are wise to keep the following in mind when we approach a new task and stop before competence with a shrug and “Aw, I’m not good at this.” As a toddler you were a more tenacious warrior of try try try, remind yourself of that and get back int touch with it.

“A young toddler walks 2,368 steps and experiences seventeen falls per hour as he or she tests out the environment and learns what is possible.”

An exceptionally useful passage for all ages.

“Each day two hundred and thirty-five are fractured among the over-sixty-five U.S. Medicare crowd.26 Recent estimates from the same cohort suggest that a bone is broken in only one-tenth of ground-level falls, giving an indication of how hard it is for older people not to fall down at some point. The causes of ground-level falls vary, with most of the medical field focusing on declining vision, impaired balance, and diminished strength with aging. These pernicious declines undermine a person’s willingness to walk, particularly outside the home, further deconditioning them and exacerbating the risk of a fall. So it has been that the main strategies to combat falls have been cataract surgery, balance training, and strengthening exercises, all of which lead to a little less falling down in the elderly.27 But there is a new movement in physical therapy and rehabilitation medicine that thinks this is not good enough. There are simply too many people still falling down who have good vision, balance, and strength. There is a new view that asks whether a person at risk of falling still has knowledge of her own affordances—that is, knowing what she can or cannot do. On the positive side, when an individual’s physical capacity is diminished because of old age, there can be a well-calibrated diminution in her perceptions of action possibilities. For example, as people grow old, their estimation of whether they can make it up a flight of stairs is reduced.28 Fortunately, in these cases, the action perception and physical ability are well matched. However, there can also be dramatic mismatches between what a person thinks she can do physically and what her aged body is actually capable of. This disconnect between self and the world is a kind of disembodiment, with a person becoming a brain in a jar, as it were.29 Like one of Karen Adolph’s toddlers, older adults overestimate their ability to stand on an incline or to clear an obstacle. They also fall down stairs and off ladders more frequently.30 To counteract this mismatch, there is increasing recognition that lifelong physical experience is essential to maintain an intuition of what is possible and that one of the best ways to achieve this is by regular walking in complex terrains. Walking out of doors, with the attendant complexity of movement over varied surfaces, remains one of the most effective methods for reducing the risk of falls from aging.”

I repeat, “Nature is not smooth.”

“After every ice storm, the number of calls to emergency medical services nationwide jumps by a third. During the winter months, fracture rates reliably climb by a third. When questioned, most of the slippers admit to seeing the ice in front of them but wrongly assumed the surface was a familiar affordance that they can handle. The epidemic of ground-level falls reveals how detached people can become from some of the most elemental affordances of the natural world. Living indoors, testing the elements only intermittently, people quickly become rusty at moving through natural settings. The affordances of nature are singular; they demand the kind of practice that cannot be replaced by the “physical fitness” achieved in gymnasiums. Fortunately, all of us are endowed with a brain that can readily learn to recognize the action-relevant possibilities of the natural world.”

“Novice hikers underestimate the amount of visual scanning required to navigate off of trails. The National Park Service and experienced mountain guides have many stories of hikers who fail to watch where they are going and who simply walk off a cliff. The theft of visual awareness by mobile phones has amplified the problem, with regular reports, particularly along the bluffs of the University of California campuses perched above the Pacific Ocean, of a texting student plunging to his or her death.”

An observation rife with utility.

“One of the appealing ideas that emerges from the theory of synergies is that it provides a way for anyone to quickly build new movements from old ones. At the same time, it is possible the brain is actually making entirely new synergies to use as building blocks. These possibilities are hard to detect in actions with the hands, which are quite good at making novel individuated movements. A better way to see how synergies appear or are combined with learning is with a task involving most of the body. Andrew Sawers had the great idea of measuring activity of sixteen leg and trunk muscles in people as they learned to walk on a balance beam.22 The clever part of his experiment entailed recruiting both ballet dancers and untrained novices. The dancers were really good, all with more than ten years of experience, and some were members of the company of the Atlanta Ballet. Not surprisingly, the dancers were better at walking along a narrow beam. The question is why. Zooming in on their muscle patterns, he found two possible explanations. First, dancers had more muscle coordination patterns—that is, more muscle synergies to work with compared to novices. Second, they were more adept at using each of their different synergies to manage this new physical challenge. The results raise the question, How much dancing does it take to build these added synergies? In another study, Sawers had a small group of patients with Parkinson’s disease take tango lessons for three weeks. As with many other emerging studies, the dance lessons for these patients were particularly effective at improving balance and gait performance.23 Again, the question is why. In this case, after only three weeks the patients showed no evidence of new muscle synergies. Rather, they were better at recruiting the ones that were already available. Although it is possible that the disease may slow the ability to make new synergies from scratch, a more likely explanation would be that it takes months to years to do so. As we age, there is a propensity to not capitalize on all of the available synergies to control even the simplest of movements, like pointing at a target24 or rising from a sitting position.25 It’s probably wrong to think these changes occur simply because the body is old. Rather, physical inactivity with aging is likely to be a major culprit. Inactivity is recognized as a significant risk factor for changes of synergies that lead to increased slips during a walk as well as reduced ability to catch oneself during a fall.”

Keen natural navigators take note and be prepared for an unasked for Mark-Analogy at the end.

“Debates have raged as to whether this kind of autonomous guidance without an underlying map of some sort is possible in living creatures. In theory, the math that describes this kind of control says that it is possible, at least under ideal conditions.2 However, theory doesn’t always capture reality. The matter was recently tested under natural conditions when the researcher Jan Souman took hikers into the dense Bienwald of Germany. He challenged them to simply walk in a perfectly straight line without the aid of a compass or map.3 He tracked their course through the woods by GPS and found that on a cloudy day, the hikers would quickly start to zigzag. Eventually, they began to walk in circles about a half kilometer in diameter. He repeated the experiment at nighttime in the Sahara Desert. Here too, the hikers lost their sense of direction and ended up walking in circles. Thus, while theory says it is possible to autocorrect, in the real world people are profoundly bad at keeping themselves pointed in one direction if left to their own egocentric frame of reference. Look a little bit harder at the math and the reason why becomes clear: feedback control can be exquisitely sensitive to noise. For this kind of pure guidance, just a little bit of noise drastically alters the ability to detect changes of direction.4 A walker is full of noise. Noise in the neurons in her brain, in the amount of her muscle activations, and noise in all her sensing organs. Detecting a change of direction when under self-guidance is riddled with uncertainty. Even if an error is detected accurately, there is always some uncertainty in the estimates for how much to compensate. The math predicts there will be both over- and undercorrections: zigzagging to stay on course, amplified by just a bit of noise. This can be seen in Souman’s plots of his participants wandering through the woods and across the desert. They zigzagged back and forth by as much as one hundred meters as they tried to keep on a straight line. That is a lot of slop! Because each new adjustment adds more slop, the errors accumulate, one bad adjustment after another. All those errors don’t cancel one another out. Assuming even a modest amount of noise, positional uncertainty becomes so large that a purely self-guided walker is almost guaranteed to become lost. Any sort of bias to the right or left and a circle is inevitable. You can test this yourself. Find a quiet large field, blindfold yourself, and try to walk in a straight line. Make sure you can’t use environmental sounds to guide your directionality. You will soon be walking in a tight circle.”

Humans require keen observation and the taking of constant bearing to stay on course. 

Flag that attention and we go in circles in the physical world. 

I ask, is the cognitive world any different? Without goals, a game plan, targets to shoot for, targets that we calibrate and re-adjust for on a regular basis do we simply go in cognitive circles in everyday life, thinking variations on the same thoughts with merely new memes from social media and varying names/hot-takes from current events plugged into a “Fill-in-the-blank” template?

We do remarkably well, even preternaturally well when we learn to look outside ourselves.

“The only way out of this predicament is to incorporate knowledge of the world from which you can create a frame of reference based on something besides the self. Once the traveler can find a way to use the features of the world, the math for staying on course, even in the face of noise, starts to work out beautifully.5 Zigzagging diminishes, errors don’t add up, and those that occur can be corrected quickly. The risk of going in a circle disappears. It can take remarkably little evidence for a person to capitalize on a reference frame anchored in the external world. The subtleties of this skill were an inspiration for Charles Darwin, who was enthralled by the ability of native tribes to extract seemingly invisible cues from barren environments to guide their way.6 He read about these skills in the detailed writings of the polar explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel and considered them evidence for a particular kind of instinct.”

On the value of seeing the overall landscape and not settling for the landmark or conspicuous event.

“The rectilinear grid does the best job of overcoming noise and allowing a person to relocate herself if she gets off track. This can be tested in the lab by placing participants in a virtual city. They can be tasked to build a 2-D square grid map in their mind by means of exploration and experience. Alternatively, they can be told to find their way by going from landmark to landmark.9 When participants used a mental grid map as the primary reference frame, they were able to maintain a much better overall sense of relative direction no matter where they were on the map. They had a big-picture understanding. Those who build a reference frame out of landmarks alone were only good at pointing to the location of the last landmark.”

“The reference frame a healthy person prefers determines more than just his mode of navigation, it profoundly shapes the very essence of how he understands and interacts with the world. Mentally making a grid map with many fine details takes cognitive effort and it is a practiced skill. Skipping the effort of creating a mental map can lead to a myopic comprehension of the environment. The insidious tendency to use landmark navigation as a quick fix is exacerbated by modern technologies. Cell phones and GPS with their precise coordinates trick a person into thinking she has an understanding of the grid. But a pair of coordinates on a map does not make spatial knowledge. Spatial relations, particularly in natural settings, are absent on tiny mobile phone maps, denying the user a big-picture understanding of the way the terrain imposes risks, opportunities, or constraints on movement. One simply obeys the GPS or text instructions like a dog on a leash. I’ve come across many hikers who relied on text instructions as directional vectors, only to pay a big price. The instructions are simple enough: at the first junction turn right, at the second junction left, then another left, etc. This is beacon navigation at its most basic level. Imagine what happens when they park at the wrong trailhead or accidentally miss any one of the many junctions that serve as beacons. Deep in the back country I have been asked by confident hikers, “Where’s the waterfall?” They are convinced there will be one just around the corner and are stunned when I tell them the closest one is actually a dozen miles away, in a completely different watershed. They don’t even know they are lost and they have no alternate point of reference that is built bottom-up, from the landscape itself. Knowledge comes from the clever combination of all the reference frames, including the details of waypoints, directions, landmarks, and the entire grid.”

Again, hard not analogize between physical navigation and our cognitive circles. That is the point of the book. Do we think better or become more at ease in our souls if we adopt [return] to the evolved way of internal and external navigation/intelligence?

Advice for hiking well, and perhaps life. Slow down but go longer.

“The trade-offs between effort and reward become obvious for anyone deciding what to bring on a hiking trip, whether to the wilderness or to a local park. When I prepare for a mountain adventure, I stuff my backpack with food and gear. Each pound of weight undermines a little bit of the stability of walking and increases the cost of transportation. Even so, a little more weight might allow for a delicious dinner or even a cocktail. Is the extra burden worth it? Vigor offers an alternative consideration: sometimes it is invaluable to be able to go farther faster and lighter, particularly to gain access to remoteness. Is the vigor worth it? Would I have a better time hiking like the tortoise or the hare? In the end, the answer in my case is simple. Bring better food and a cocktail and move like a tortoise. The reason has to do with the shape of the human body and the almost magical biomechanics of bipedal walking. On flat ground a person can readily carry up to a third of her body weight almost indefinitely with only a small increase in the cost of transport or perceived effort. Still, walking is only efficient when slow, and that efficiency quickly declines as a person speeds up.35 And walking fast feels like work. Even the best long-distance hikers will admit that their success is not because they walk much faster than normal, it is because they walk for more hours each day.”

On fatigue being both a physical state and a cognitive state. We can hack the mental state to increase physical endurance.

“Remarkably, it really wasn’t until this past decade that fatigue researchers seriously reconsidered how the brain could produce this intense emotion. And with that, the biggest breakthrough was seeing the proactive nature of fatigue, which anticipated rather than reacted to the state of the body. To see how easily fatigue can behave as an emotion, do some self-experimenting and manipulate your own mind to overcome it. For example, listening to music can greatly reduce your sense of fatigue.8 Every exercise gym in the world is pumping in tunes to make you work longer and harder. One of the most insightful emotional manipulations of fatigue is to use a clock that runs too slowly.9 The slow clock can trick you into dampening the development of fatigue. The clock effect is particularly important because it shows unequivocally that the brain is making a prediction about how long a physical activity should take for you to finish. In this light, fatigue is an emotion that is used to regulate both intensity and expenditure over some underlying period of time so that you can reach a particular goal with some reserve and without injury.10 One can see this predictive calculus at work when an athlete is told to just run, without any idea of how long he will have to go. With this uncertainty, he will pick a conservative pace until he becomes aware of the finish, at which point he will accelerate.11 Mosso was right. Fatigue is a strong emotion meant to keep a person from hurting himself. What Mosso failed to recognize was that the feeling is proactive: the brain anticipates the future and uses a powerful emotion to regulate intensity of effort.”

Two more observations from the good doctor.

“I had beaten myself up for a long week in a very rough world. Despite that, I had a sense that the week had already been worth it, that I was healthier and stronger, both cognitively and physically. I had taken a path toward well-being that is profoundly different from what I was accustomed to back home. There, I would have to stay fit with boring exercise. Fat would have to be shed through strict food choices. And if I am to believe the advertisements, the well-being of my mind would have to be preserved by exercising my cognitive skills with tedious computer games. None of these strategies make sense in the wilderness. For me, this divide between the physical and the cognitive, as well as the emphasis on training rather than engagement, describes a condition of modern society that saddens me, as it does not allow for the holistic recognition of the unity of a person’s feelings, thinking, and physicality.”

And…

“What particular engagement works best remains to be seen. However, from large-scale meta-analyses of aging it appears that physical engagement, particularly walking outdoors, is one of the top performers in sustaining cognitive health.”

A staggeringly interesting book. If you made it to the end of this likely you will find it the same.

I’ll end with a quote that Dr. Grafton began his with.

“The more space and emptiness you can create in yourself, then you can let the rest of the world come in and fill you up.” —JEFF BRIDGES

[“The Suakhet’u Program” details the outward directed cognitive tactics as advocated by the Good Doctor.]

[For techniques, tactics, and strategies of Rough and Tumble Combat, Old-School Boxing, Mean-Ass Wrestling, Street-Ready Frontier Scrapping & Indigenous Ability culled from the historical record see the RAW Subscription Service. http://www.extremeselfprotection.com