Tapping into your body's intelligence

Book review of The Power of not thinking: How our bodies learn and why we should trust them

In western thought, there has always been a dualism between the mind and the body. Descartes, who famously said, “I think, therefore I am”, accorded primacy to the mind and regarded it as the fount of knowledge and rational thought. The body, in his view, is much less significant. In fact, he believed that the body’s sensory organs, and the signals they emit, impede rational decision-making.      

    

Though less dominant, there is another school of thought called phenomenology. Its leading light, the philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty, argued that the body, too, is a source of intelligence. Just as the