The physical roots of intelligence

There’s an interesting little snippet in the Boston Globe today:

Perhaps heartfelt decisions are smarter than we think. A team of psychologists in Germany [Werner, N. et al., ”Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated with Benefits in Decision-Making,” Psychophysiology] asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the decks with better returns. It seems that people who are in touch with feedback from their own body have an easier time learning from positive and negative experiences.

I was talking about something similar in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True (I’ll let you know when the podcast goes online). She asked me about writing as a spiritual practice and I explained …

Posted at 9am on Sep 27, 2009 | 18 comments
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