Embodied Intelligence

With a view to the Neuro Leadership Group visit to the Artificial intelligence laboratory at Zurich University this is a (very) short look at embodied intelligence. Rolf Pfeifer, who leads the AI lab, has a book on the market called "How the Body Shapes the Way we Think: A new View of Intelligence." This is fascinating insight into intelligence itself and how the body influences this.

This also highlights the direction the AI Lab in Zurich has taken and is f a fascinating approach away from thinking of artificial intelligence as number crunching computers.

The term intelligence itself is incredibly hard to pinpoint. How can we describe or even think of programming something like common sense - which we all know but find it very hard to describe in clear cut terms. Artificial intelligence initially went the path of computing power and many believe it was just a question of computing power and logarithms. Yet that is not what humans are, we are living, breathing beings and our intelligence has evolved with us as beings rather than as algorithms. This means our intelligence is inextricably linked to our bodies. Our whole way of thinking is confined to our body and its functions and limitations. Terms: walk, see hear, eat, smell, taste and other sensory and actions words are embedded in our language. Indeed as many body language experts will notice our body language is also expressed powerfully in the words we choose e.g. to take a stand. To take a stand refers to standing - which we implicitly understand to be strong - a picture jumps to mind.

This in the context of artificial intelligence raises many questions then and recent approaches and those of Rolf Pfeifer have evolved around, amongst others, developing robots i.e. with bodies. This many believe is the path towards getting to the heart of intelligence and developing more "intelligent" systems that can interact with the world in a better way.

At the same times it raised many questions about our body. We know that the body affects the mind and that the body can "think" or operate independently i.e. walking is a result of interactions and properties of muscles and tendons meaning that not every movement is processed by the brain: there will be automatic elastic reactions, etc. Indeed a lot of locomotion is processed in the spine rather than in the brain (headless chickens running around demonstrates this). Research has shown that the skin reacts quicker than the brain to fear and many other interesting aspects including the concepts of a brain in the stomach and in the heart. The stomach has a network of neurons that communicates with the brain and 95% of all the serotonin in the body is produced in the gut. The heart has also been shown to have its independent neuron system.

So in short - I said I'd keep it short - when we think of intelligence we need to think of the whole body and the way we as humans interact with the world. I approach this in my workshops though focusing on brain structure I like to remind everybody that we cannot separate the brain from the body - it is one interlinked unit.

I am looking forward to the visit to the AI lab to see how precisely they are approaching the issues of intelligence and the body. Fascinating!