AI tools can process massive amounts of data, but they lack the human brain’s capacity for intuitive understanding. A new book explores how our “primal intelligence” — combining intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense — is what makes us smarter than we know.
Article contents:
- Introduction: The story of the creative recruit
- What is primal intelligence?
- The problem with modern education: Thinking like a computer
- The four primal powers: Beyond logic
- How to retrain our minds: The solution is in stories
- AI vs. the human brain: Who sees the horse running?
- Beyond the closed course: Why AI fails in real life
- Conclusion: Sharpening our innate human intelligence
Introduction: The story of the creative recruit
An army recruit looked at the obstacle course made of logs and ropes. Between him and success was a simple rule: ring the bell at the end of the course before time ran out. There was only one problem: he wasn’t fast enough. He didn’t want to give up, and he didn’t want to fail; he needed a plan. So when the timer started, the recruit ran around the obstacles, ringing the bell in record time.
In any other military school, as Angus Fletcher writes in his new book «Primal Intelligence», the recruit would have been punished for disobedience. But this was the Army Special Operations unit — where elite troops are trained — and his superiors reminded him of something important: in the real world, there are many paths to achieving a goal, and those who succeed tap into something beyond blindly following rules. They have creativity and resilience; they have what Mr. Fletcher calls «primal intelligence», which is «a natural intelligence that artificial intelligence cannot replicate».
What is primal intelligence?
As Mr. Fletcher describes it, primal intelligence is a part of our lost nature and a key to activating intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense. It is the ability to act intelligently with little, or even no, information. This intelligence has evolved with us and is something that AI is «mechanically incapable» of mastering.
The problem with modern education: Thinking like a computer
For two decades, as Mr. Fletcher writes, we have witnessed «college students performing better on standardized tests while struggling more with real-world tasks». People seem more susceptible to authoritarian schemes and less capable of distinguishing reality from magical thinking. After defining intelligence as «logic», we inadvertently turned education into endless data extraction. Logic, at its core, is mathematics — it is a formula that only works when there is data to input. This is the entire mechanism behind algorithms and computer science. We have become so accustomed to thinking of logic as the primary good that we lose sight of the obvious problem: data, by definition, is known information. It cannot lead to innovation — and it cannot tell you what to do when the future is unknown.
The four primal powers: Beyond logic
To address the darkness of unstable worldly existence, as Mr. Fletcher writes, our brain had to develop mechanisms to act intelligently with minimal information. The brain possesses an illogical intelligence, consisting of four «primal» powers:
- Intuition: To perceive the hidden rules of the world.
- Imagination: Which creates the future.
- Emotion: Which aids in personal growth.
- Common sense: Which acts wisely in the face of uncertainty.
In our modern educational system, these powers have been marginalized, often relegated to underfunded humanities programs or eliminated entirely.
How to retrain our minds: The solution is in stories
The solution, Mr. Fletcher tells us, is storytelling — many of the stories mentioned in the book come from Shakespeare. It can be difficult to understand how a play like «King Lear» could impress the military or retrain surgeons and teachers, but it comes down to narrative perception. This is, in part, the ability to see the «movement» of a story — from beginning to middle to end — and to imagine unknown possibilities.
AI can steal data sets from stories and recycle them into plots, but Mr. Fletcher is careful to remind us that the computer still does not «read» the story. We are the ones who read it. We are the ones who take a mixture of words and imbue them with meaning. Mr. Fletcher uses motion pictures to illustrate his point: if you ask AI to generate an image of a running horse, it will do so using bits and bytes of data, static images pushed together for us to see. It is our brain that sees the horse running; we write the motion and the story onto the abstract data.
Beyond the closed course: Why AI fails in real life
In this way, our primal intelligence allows us to see beyond what is to what might be, discover new ways to ask «why» and «what if» questions, and recognize exceptions and opportunities. And this brings us back to the recruit: why did the obstacle course exist? What was it testing? What if we analyzed the test differently? After all, success is often about avoiding obstacles in the first place. Computers may be good on a closed course, as defined by past data sets, but in real life, where we cannot predict the future based solely on the past, AI «crashes».
Conclusion: Sharpening our innate human intelligence
Through an abundance of examples from history and the present, alongside scientific discoveries and practical findings, Mr. Fletcher helps us see what we are capable of — and how to sharpen our innate human intelligence. The book is a call to reevaluate the powers that made us human in the first place, and a reminder that the smartest machine is still located between our ears.
