Brains Beat AI Every Time

Your brain is so much cooler than you even thought, OMG

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Musings
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Everything you need to know

Brandy's Musings

I LOVE THIS BOOK! It's just amazing and fab, and I even wrote a book review about it--here is a snippet of that (posted to WSJ):

"The Army recruit looked out over a lengthy obstacle course of logs and ropes. Between him and success was a simple rule: ring a bell at the end of the course before time expires. If you don’t, you fail—pack your bags. There was just one problem. The recruit simply wasn’t fast enough to get through the obstacles in time. He didn’t want to quit, and he didn’t want to fail; he needed a plan and was thinking fast. The rationale behind the course wasn’t can you jump over a log. The Army wanted to test his ability to overcome challenges and achieve an objective. So, when the clock started, the recruit ran around the obstacles instead, ringing the bell in record time.

This isn’t the way to make friends in the military—or at least, not usually. “At any other military school,” writes Angus Fletcher, head of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, “the recruit would have been disciplined for insubordination.” But this was the Army Special Operations unit, and he’d reminded them of something important, even crucial: in the real world, there are many paths to a goal, and those who succeed tap into something beyond black and white rule-following. They have creativity and flexibility; they have something that Fletcher calls primal intelligence. It evolved with us and it’s something no artificial intelligence can ever master.

Curious, intriguing, and accessible, PRIMAL INTELLIGENCE argues that “You are Smarter than you Know.” Angus Fletcher’s book begins almost like fiction, with a colonel on a mission; “he’d parachuted onto a thousand targets, from coconut Pacific reefs to concrete Persian palaces,” and in March 2021, he “dropped into Ohio State.” His secret objective: investigate a rumored discovery about the “primordial brainpower that drove intuition.” If true, then the Army wanted it, because each year, new recruits seemed worse and worse at the kind of thinking that keeps people alive on the battlefield. Fletcher calls it Primal Intelligence, part of our lost nature and key to activating intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense. The colonel called it the answer to making soldiers think faster, act wiser, and even heal from trauma more quickly. I confess, it’s hard not to be skeptical of something that makes such enormous promises. Yet the Fletcher lab would earn a medal in 2023 for their groundbreaking research—a handbook—this book—for retraining the human mind..."

AND NOW: for a show that will make you think differently!