- Courting Context
- Posts
- The Alchemy of Embodied Uncertainty
The Alchemy of Embodied Uncertainty
Why our best thinking happens when we embrace the unknown with our whole selves
THE MIT STUDY: FIRST PASS MATTERS
Big cog energy.
Zombie work.
Barely even present.
Hardly in my body.
Too much of work today feels like this. We’re starting to see why.
The first time I became aware of this study was this Slashdot headline on my feed:
“MIT Experiment Finds ChatGPT-Assisted Writing Weakens Student Brain Connectivity and Memory.” Unfortunately clickbaity headline, but after reviewing the actual report I was properly convinced.
Before, I’d been defaulting increasingly often to tasking AI with creating templates, frameworks, initial briefs, outlines: the bones. I figured that by drawing from as many patterns and formulas that were available, narrowed with focus from my input prompts, I’d be setting myself up for success with the best possible starting point. Decent logic, right?
But what I was routinely encountering was a sense of disconnectedness, feeling dissociated from the work and the process and the output, like a soulless version of Mad Libs. Filling in the blanks isn’t really fulfilling.
The MIT study offers some answers. Student brains lit up the most (with more active cognitive processing across more areas) when they made a fully human first draft of an essay without any assistance. Groups using search engines first to write their essays showed weaker connectivity and memory than the human writers, but the students who turned to ChatGPT first had the dimmest brain activity and across fewer regions of the brain.
The “tech” you reach for on your first makes all the difference.
Interestingly, the tech you reach for next can also make a big difference, because the study also found a scenario that promoted even more brain connectivity and memory recall and the best essays: when students wrote a fully human essay first, followed by a ChatGPT pass at the end.
In fact, this better-together two-step of human-first-LLM-next performed even better than the fully human alone category, which itself performed better than the search engine-first writers, who performed better than the ChatGPT-first writers. Hence the clickbaity but on-point headline: the LLM-firsts had the lowest cognitive activity and performed worst with recall and comprehension.
In other words, students that spent more time literally sitting with the question in their heads performed better at scale than students who reduced that question-in-head time either by search engines or ChatGPT.
What if our human gifts have less to do with mental effort, and more to do with embodiment, the depth and duration and default designs with which we process information throughout and within our entire body?
What if by focusing too much on what the brain is doing we’re failing to notice everything else the brain could engage with?
BEYOND THE BRAIN: THINKING WITH THE WHOLE BODY
More recently, I had the good fortune to win a virtual pass to Afternow, an exceedingly good AI event curated by Andus Labs which was stuffed with incredible presentations (and a rollicking chat room to boot) including one featuring Dr. Natalia Kos’myna, the research scientist at MIT behind this very study. During her presentation she shared even more data and insights from her work, and also gave a truly futuristic demonstration of a robot programmed to move according to cranial EEG data output. (I’m still processing that demo: we are at the point in our timeline where we can move robots with our minds through an interface that’s cheap and easy to buy online and some programming. She moved a robot with her mind, y’all.)
During this presentation Dr. Kos’myna emphasized the findings of an earlier study comparing brain activity between different note-taking methods: writing vs typing. You’re probably familiar with the takeaway: when it comes to stuff you want to remember, you’ll have better success writing it by hand instead of typing it out. I usually heard about this study framed and aimed at students as they began showing up to class with more laptops than notebooks so when I went back to school for the CFP(R) certification education requirements I found myself spending extra for new pens and paper. I am an obnoxiously fast typist so there was also the consideration of how loud and distracting that could be for others, but mostly I wanted to set myself up for success to truly absorb information that was a complete 180 from getting my Philosophy degree, a whole lifetime ago. I feel like it worked.
But why would something that takes so much more time and effort yield better results than adopting technology specifically intended to reduce time and effort wherever possible?
Then on a recent WBUR podcast with Dr. Kos’myna she is joined by Barry Gordon, Director of the Cognitive Neurology and Neuropsychology Division at Johns Hopkins University. They all seem to speak about this phenomenon as mental effort, the mind doing some of the work or all of the work. Here’s how Gordon replies when the interviewer asks what exactly is the brain doing when we are writing?
First of all, hopefully you're thinking about what you're going to say and hopefully you're taking time to think about it. Because, you know, that's what people do more when they're writing perhaps than when they're speaking. And then, what are the actual mechanics?
What words are you selecting? For example, Madame Bovary, the author of Madam Bovary, was famous for having, Flaubert, was famous for having spent the day trying to think of the right word to use in his novel. That's a lot of work and that shows in the brain. The brain in many ways is like a muscle.
Actually, many of the same things that work with training, work with the brain, or seem to work with the brain. Namely, you have to use it or lose it. You have to have it not too easy, not too hard, but in the right medium, or middle, to do it, to build up strength. And you have to spread it around, use a lot of different muscles so that everything is engaged together.
And when you do that, whether it's by printing, typing, writing, handwriting, or for that matter, even dictating your thoughts, you're engaging lots of different processes, you're engaging your general thinking, you're engaging the word choice, you're engaging how is this going to play? Is it going to make my point?
Does it mean anything? You're going back and forth in your head. And that back and forth, all those things are involved. Everywhere around your mind.
Muscle metaphors and exercise examples set a clear theme; Gordon even goes on to use the word “embed” three times throughout the entire interview, a telling motif.
This is when I began to feel something crystallize: despite the repetitive reliance on words like mind and brain, even his explanations seemed to acknowledge the brain as but one piece of meat nestled in a whole ecology of bone and gristle, hormone and lymph, tissue and nerve.
ECOLOGIES OF EMBODIED THINKING
Our minds do not operate in a vacuum, much as western science operates or implies. Journey along paths of disability justice or spiritual inquiry and you’ll learn how what we think of as a brain is in fact a lot more like a bodymind, a territory of assembled parts and pieces operating in concert. Or, if you like, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Humans have feelings — our meat suits are uniquely suited for crying and laughter and everything in between. And that emotional data isn’t junk noise. A great deal is the inheritance of generations of ancestors and the epigenetic distillation of lifetimes, whether we realize it or not. And we default to this authority more than we think, every time we make a gut choice or decision based on vibes or entertain existential dread.
What if what makes the human experience unique from machines has everything to do with our meat? Neuropsychology already tells us our emotional states can switch on or off our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system states, two distinct operating systems that can have us seeing and acting out of complete self-interested survival, or engaging with the world with curiosity, wonder, and generosity.
We have many biochemical explanations as we understand hormones and endocrine systems; we are exploring more about inflammation and lymph as we face more autoimmunity as a species than ever before; and for the fluently woo we have heart coherence and morphic fields and quantum consciousness and unseen spirits, all of which can have a huge influence on our thinking, all well beyond the boundaries of our brain.
Whether we’re sitting (or struggling) with a question, or enlisting body parts specifically in the process (via handwriting), what if the main advantage of fully human meat-first thinking is thanks to embodiment processes essential for deep learning, authentic creativity, and meaningful engagement with others and the unknown?
The researches get so close to this; the Flaubert example in particular is so demonstrative. When you imagine Flaubert spending the day trying to think of the right word to use in his novel, is he spending the entire day at a desk, calmly thinking, quill in hand? Or is he tearing that quill to shreds, getting up, moving around, tearing out his hair, taking a walk in the garden, leaving for the cafe for a snack?
The WBUR podcast reached out to Audrey Van Der Meer, a researcher and professor of neuropsychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for more insight on handwriting research. Here’s how Van Der Meer described a recent study with students:
“They were wearing one of our characteristic electrode nets. Consisting of 256 sensitive electrodes sewn together as like a hair net on their heads, and they were playing the game Pictionary. So we presented Pictionary words on a large screen, and they were supposed to either write the word by hand, draw the word by hand, or type the word on a keyboard. And we recorded their ongoing brain activity while they were performing those tasks.”
The host summarizes findings in the context of the podcast: brain activity as recorded on an EEG show the number of brain functions, visual processing, sensory motor integration, and the motor cortex are notably more engaged when writing by hand. She also cites the personal nature of handwriting, and the cultural value and heritage of handwriting — both of which are decidedly more emotional than rational in quality.
Towards the end of the episode, Dr. Kos’myna makes this revelation:
“Dr. Gordon actually alluded to brain only group, and we actually don’t report this in the paper, but they provided us with so many details, verbatim details about their essays. We didn’t even ask for those, but they almost all quoted essays fully, because they were so engaged in the topics. They wanted to share their opinions just based on one question, like, why did you pick up this topic? People do want to share. That was definitely not the case with the ChatGPT group.”
The human-first group was engaged. I might have chosen the word “passion” to acknowledge the force of emotion in fueling that engagement, compared with 15% of participants in the ChatGPT group said they didn’t feel any ownership towards their essays.
Big cog energy.
TOOLS, TOUCH, AND TOLERANCE
When I went back to school for my CFP® certification with handwritten notes instead of a laptop, I also relished a rare opportunity to really go ham on some fancy pens again. That had always been my favorite part of back-to-school shopping growing up because I appreciated curating a diverse pouch of writing instruments. I found that I could write differently depending on whether I was holding a #2 wooden pencil vs a mechanical pencil: the former felt more scratchy on paper and the constant sharpening felt scratchy and I would write quickly enough to warrant regular pauses to stop and re-sharpen before continuing.
Discovering mechanical pencils was like driving an automatic after years of stick shift: with less friction I felt like the lead could fly even faster, but I had to compensate for the speed with a lighter hand and mindfully rotating as I would often wear hard slants in the lead tips after a while. Moving to pens demanded a psychological leap of confidence: far more permanent, completely un-erasable, I found myself writing with a different kind of pace, a more measured dose of care with an instrument of higher stakes. For some reason my brain felt like blue ink was a little kinder and first-drafty than black ink, the most final, full stop color of them all.
I used to describe this phenomenon with a visual metaphor: imagine that words are like birds, floating in the air all around you, every single possible word that could ever exist at any given time. Some group together in thoughts or ideas; some words are large and slow and blunt and easy to pick out. Others are more elusive, iridescent, teasing with occasional shimmers while slithering along a faster-flowing current than its fellows. Particular words felt more or less prone to capture depending on my chosen instrument (pen vs pencil) or intended usage (spoken vs written).
But something interesting happens when we frame this metaphor in the context of speaking vs writing. Today, especially in our short-form video saturated landscape, we’re much more accustomed to a faster pace with than writing. Sometimes when we’re talking it just makes more sense to go for the low-hanging-fruit, the words that are easy to reach because they’re big and familiar and plentiful. But when we’re writing we can slow down and watch for the right word, even if it does take us all day.
Both are embodied experiences, but writing introduces technology (writing instruments) in a way that isn’t present with speech, which makes the quality of each embodiment different.
What gets lost as we add tech to our thinking, even at an analog level?
Author Maggie Jackson might suggest it has to do with uncertainty, more specifically our tolerance (or intolerance) to it. On a recent podcast she explores the many shapes of uncertainty, priming us to “… understand that it comes in different forms, and it’s a kind of a space of possibilities that takes on different characteristics depending on what’s happening in our world.”
In other words, uncertainty is extremely contextual by definition. Uncertainty can be receiving a life-altering health diagnosis. Uncertainty can look like choosing between ice cream flavors on your lunch break. Uncertainty can be what kind of car to buy. Enormously varying levels of degree, stakes, urgency, and even emotional tenor based on our perceptions and relationships to certain threats.
But then Jackson drops a really juicy morsel: uncertainty can also be curiosity driven, infused with just wanting to know. She cites the example of writing a research paper: rather than starting out a research topic with an I’m going to prove this or I already know this type of mindset, curiosity driven uncertainty might adopt a more receptive posture, like let’s see what the research says about it.
FEAR, EXCITEMENT, AND AROUSAL
This is where emotional intelligence really delivers an edge, because knowing the difference between uncertainty and fear makes all the difference.
Jackson reminds us:
It’s a mistake to conflate fear and anxiety with the discomfort of uncertainty, literally at the physiological level. We often get uneasy when we’re unsure… you’re working at the edge of what you know. But that is actually a state. The unease of that state is what scientists now call “good stress” — it’s called arousal.
So uncertainty, as one neuroscientist told me, is literally the brain telling itself “There is something to be learned here.”
Now, our heart might raise, we might sweat a little, we might be uncomfortable at the edge of what we know, but that’s different than fear…
Anxiety is basically a fear of the unknown, and when you give yourself over to fear, you’re also instigating a kind of stress response, but the stress response is distinct form the arousal of uncertainty.
When we’re fearful, the higher order centers or networks of the brain actually begin to shut down…. You’re going into survival mode….
So for us to understand when people begin to understand the distinction between fear and uncertainty, it’s liberating. Suddenly the world opens up and you can begin to see that curiosity and that wonder and those pathways rather than the shutting down that we all know is related to fear.
Of course there are different shapes of fear and there are legitimate occasions warranting survival mode front and center. But knowing the difference is the first step to learning how and when one can lean away from fear and into uncertainty with curiosity and what Jackson calls a near superhuman state of awareness within arousal.
By leaning into uncertainty, Jackson says, we are more likely to pick up on the nuances and the shifts in the environment. Engaged with uncertainty, we enter arousal states that sharpen our more subtle perceptive senses. We become more able to notice things we might not have otherwise — potentials, possibilities, seeds that spark something greater.
One way to practice leaning into uncertainty, one granular way to avert fear?
Focus less on the outcome. Stop time-traveling to the near future and remain in the present, in your body, to remain alert to what’s happening here and now, something Jackson refers to as being “wakeful.” It’s the classic self-fulfilling prophecy: when we focus too much outcomes we are focusing less on what is available in the present moment to meaningfully affect that future outcome.
Her work shows that one proven treatment for diagnosed anxiety revolves around building tolerance around uncertainty, which boils down to one’s ability to see uncertainty as a challenge instead of a threat.
You start small: ordering something different the next time you eat out. Simple, daily exercises to just try out the unknown. Delegate more at work, and home: let kids pack their own suitcase. Cede some control. Jackson cited researchers in Ohio State who task their younger participants with this tolerance-building skill: answer your phone without caller ID.
What does thinking about that caller ID challenge feel like in your body right now? (What might that say about your current uncertainty tolerance levels?)
Now we have ringtones, but before it was only The Ring
Creating more opportunities to engage with uncertainty at tolerable levels and in digestible degrees are how we test our ability to work at the edge. Statistically speaking, doing this begins to build data that paints uncertainty in a more neutral palette, not always the disaster we fear. We also learn how to manage disasters when the stakes are a little lower, learn how to adjust our expectations and behavior going forward, and return to a good baseline.
We learn how good productive arousal can feel when it’s not fear-based anxiety, and how this arousal heightens our senses in unexpected ways.
Jackson’s own initiation into uncertainty was through open water swimming. She speaks about it beautifully in the interview, but you know what got me? What an embodied initiation she had, not only in the full-body coordination swimming as an activity requires, but the open-water quality of it: all of this occurring literally and fully embodied within raw nature.
In describing the uncertainty that makes open water swimming so great, she brings us back around to technology:
It’s partly that you don’t know because you can have an app and look at the app at your house and it tells you the wave height and it tells you the, you know, mathematical modeling about what the ocean’s doing. But you get down there and you get in there and 20, 30 minutes later all the conditions have changed! So your’e working at the edge. Another way to put this is that scientists now think that one of the foundational aspects of our cognitive lives is something called predictive processing… we live our lives predicting, expecting, assuming, because that’s how we can seamlessly operate.
But when a gap opens up between expectation and experience, that’s called a prediction error in the brain: our brain waves really pick up on this gap, the uncertainty. And the prediction error is part of what instigates all those stress responses.
We as creatures, as a species, are extraordinarily sensitive to uncertainty. The brain picks up on ambiguity on surprise, on anomaly of grammar. One scientist studies this through telling people a phrase through headphones: ‘Very Happy War.’ By the time a listener is two words in they are expecting words like child or party, but the last word sparks something in the brain akin to uncertainty that jolts you out of your assumptions.
And so it’s important to realize that we inhabit the world of our past knowledge. Most of our first reaction in routine situations, our first thought that comes to mind is based on what we already know. That’s what the gut instinct is: it’s basically a kind of template of what you know laid onto the world that you can predictably expect. But that’s why I keep talking about being at the edge because when you are facing a prediction error, experiencing that unease of certainty, you’re working at the edge of what you know.
That’s where the opportunity occurs.
That’s where you can then begin to move forward into the unknown with curiosity and wonder and openness.
FALLING WITH STYLE
Wakefulness, Jackson says, is about seeking questions: welcoming and reveling in failure, errors, dead ends, detours. Being present at the edge. Holding space for the unknown not with fear, but something with more heart. More body. Like flirting, and dancing. During the Making Sanctuary course last year, one participant, a professional dancer described his profession as merely “falling with style.”
My years doing improv comedy remain the best uncertainty resilience practice I’ve ever experienced. Looking back, I can see hours spent practicing fully embodied group engagements with the unknown, encountering modern-day koans such as Listen Like a Thief and Hold On Tightly, Let Go Lightly. This practice is where I learned to see every mistake as magic, an opportunity, a gift.
It may seem cringe to include acting experience on my resume and online CV as I continue to secure steady employment and healthcare coverage during this historically uncertain time. The truth is, I’m waiting for the right employer to recognize how much these skills and experience matter right now.
Jackson’s podcast ends with research only in the last 15 years that have discovered a new higher echelon of expertise, called “adaptive.” As it turns out, adaptive experts spend more time diagnosing problems or situations than even novices do. They explore multiple options about what’s going on in a difficult situation — not routine situations, but where something’s ambiguous or surprising, when they need to work at the edge. And adaptive experts take time to test and evaluate.
Jackson offers one last tip that listeners can use in their own lives to become adaptive experts: “By taking time when you hear the signal of uncertainty, or feel that unease of uncertainty, taking time to inhabit the question. And that really does distinguish mediocre from excellent performers.”
Inhabit. Embed. Embody.
If humans are at our very best when we’re most embodied:
Can you learn to notice when you feel more or less embodied?
What can you practice to think with more of your body, more fully in your body?
What activities or environments take you out of your body? What is your thinking like in these states?
The next time you work on something meaningful, what could it look like to reach for your body first, before AI or any other technology?