Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - Understanding Physical Intelligence

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Most of us think of intelligence as something that happens entirely in the brain. But there's another kind of intelligence that lives in your body. It's what allows you to ride a bicycle years after your last ride, catch a ball without calculating its path, type on a keyboard without looking, or instinctively keep your balance on uneven ground. Scientists call this physical intelligence, and it's far more important to your everyday life than you may realize. According to my guest Scott Grafton, your body and brain are constantly working together in ways you're barely aware of. In fact, many of the skills you rely on every day don't come from conscious thought at all—they come from this remarkable partnership between mind and body. Modern life, however, may be working against us. As technology makes more of our daily tasks easier and more automated, we may be losing opportunities to develop and maintain the very abilities that help us navigate the physical world. That has consequences that go well beyond athletic performance. Scott Grafton is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the book Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life (https://amzn.to/3aiI4dm). Listen as he explains how physical intelligence shapes the way we learn, move, solve problems, and interact with the world—and why challenging your body may be one of the best things you can do for your brain. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty, an $84 value, and AirDoctor’s 30-day money back guarantee WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less.  QUINCE: Elevate your everyday. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠https://Shopify.com/realm⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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of us spend hours staring at screens and moving less than ever before, understanding and improving this ability may be more important than you realize. That's why today's SY-S-K trending topic is understanding physical intelligence. Here to explain what physical intelligence is, how it works, and how you can make yours better, is neuroscientist Dr. Scott Grafton. It's a fascinating discussion which we'll get to right after this. At Desjardin Insurance, we know that when you own a nail salon, everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected.

Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. You have something called physical intelligence. Some people call it muscle memory. So when you learn to ride a bike or play tennis, the next time you do those activities, you don't have to start all over again learning how to ride a bike or play tennis.

That ability stuck with you. That's your physical intelligence. And there's more to it than that. Scott Grafton wrote the book on physical intelligence. In fact, his book is called Physical Intelligence, the science of how the body and mind guide each other through life. Scott teaches neuroscience at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he is director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center.

Hi, Scott. So explain a little more about what you're talking about here with physical intelligence. What I'm talking about has been all the complexity it takes to move in the world. And most of it's stuff we absolutely take for granted. walking is a big one, walking on surfaces is a huge issue. It's just how we acquire skills and deafness and coordination and grace and how we actually in our minds calculate efficiency. All these are things that are really intrinsic to physical intelligence and key ingredients.

And where does physical intelligence come from? We're sort of a weird species now in that You know, we came from rough and tumble histories up until about a thousand years ago. There were no sidewalks. There were no roads. It was a rough environment that we moved through. And that's what we've been really evolved and designed to do, is handle complex natural environments. And you put us in those environments, and we're a beautiful species.

We actually do really, really well. Any one of us can get up if we don't have a physical injury. Any adult can get up right now, walk out the door, and walk a marathon. They can walk 26, 30 miles, nonstop, no problem. That's just, it's built into us. And yet we've sort of forgotten that. Now the only people who we think of as being physically capable are either exercise nuts or elite athletes. When in fact, these are ingredients that are all of us.

We're all actually incredibly physically intelligent. Any of us can learn to play a musical instrument pretty well. Same with a lot of sports, craftsmanship skills, things like that. We're all pretty good at that. We're also really good at unlearning things. We're really good forgetters physically. And if you don't believe me, if you're living in an icy environment, every winter that first day when there's ice on the sidewalk,

Everybody forgets the number of arm fractures skyrockets. Everybody's falling down, left and right, as soon as the weather gets bad. So we're always doing this learning. We're always doing this forgetting. And that's really important if you're going to plan strategies for healthy aging and healthy fitness. You know, we're in a culture now where we think that health comes from a treadbush. or a stationary bicycle. And granted, that's better than nothing, right?

But that's not really what we evolved to do. Nobody evolved to jog on a treadmill. We, as a species, we're really designed for complex physical engagement. So when I think of physical intelligence, what immediately came to mind when I saw this topic was riding a bike. Because when you learn to write a bike, you never forget pretty much how to ride a bike. Is that physical intelligence? Oh, absolutely.

And there's multiple levels. There's the basic program for riding a bike. And that never goes away. But the reality is, if you haven't been on a bike for 10 years, at sort of a more subtle level, if you look carefully, there is some physical intelligence that does require relearning. You've got to tune yourself up a little bit to fit that bike to sort of match what it needs you to do.

And so even though you remember motor programs and skills, you always need to tune them up a little bit. Even our walking, you know, each time you take steps, you're sort of micromanaging your cadence, your stride length, so you can be maximally efficient in each of your movements. So you know how to walk, but at the same time you're always adjusting. It's the same with the bicycle. Why do you think this is important to talk about it?

I mean, it's interesting, but it is what it is. Why is physical intelligence a topic for discussion? We're in a society right now where we're really focused on a fear of dementia and forgetting. But if you actually look at disability that patients have, it's overwhelmingly dominated by inabilities to move. So anything we can do to recognize the intelligence that creates movement and the strategies we can adopt to preserve movement become really important. And that's no matter how old you are, whether it's a little kid with a muscular dystrophy

or an old person with the stroke. So that's sort of the disease perspective. And then in the health perspective, for those of us who are just trying to stay healthy and strong, physicality, especially in complex environments, is incredibly beneficial for our mind, emotion and well-being. And so understand, this is a big question right now? Why is it that a walk on the beach through a bumpy terrain is a thousand times more satisfying than a walk, you know, on a concrete sidewalk through a suburb, right?

If we can't explain sort of the, both the pleasure and the mental health benefits you get from those natural environments, we are where we are allowed to be our normal physical selves, you know, we're kind of missing something. You sometimes hear trainers, physical trainers, talk about muscle memory. Is that the same thing as physical intelligence? The muscles have no memory. And so they're being really sloppy in their terminology. And it's a shorthand. And it confuses people because your muscles are as dumb as a brick. I mean, they'll get stronger and they'll get quicker, but they don't remember movement. Your brain in your spinal cord where you remember your movements. And what they're really talking about is kinds of movements that your brain has programs for that are incredibly automatic.

So riding a bicycle is a motor memory, right? I don't need to engage my cognition, my thinking mind to really manage that. What happens is your brain is designed in a clever way in that you've kind of set up these firewalls so that your mind. actually doesn't have your conscious mind doesn't have very good access to a lot of your movements doesn't have access to your control of blood pressure either or heart rate if it did you might accidentally kill yourself tinkering around just by thinking too much so we we protect ourselves in some ways by with these firewalls and the other thing does is it allows us to walk and think at the same time right that's a beautiful thing i can stroll down the street and have a conversation and not have to

micromanage what my legs are doing. So that's all in the realm of muscle memory. And athletes and trainers are always trying to essentially improve the fluidity and grace and precision that's inherent to whatever motor program they're interested in. Is there any sense that a championship golfer who has this great golf swing is any different than anybody else, he just has managed to just figure this out. Or, I mean, are people different? Or does everybody have the same potential of physical intelligence?

I like to joke that everybody can get a B plus in any physical activity if they work at it hard enough. To get an A or an A plus, you're usually then hoping you've got big lungs if you're bicyclists or strong hands if you're a climber or what have you right or you're tall play basketball right there's some things that are clearly going to be genetic but that doesn't mean the rest of us cannot do that activity all of us can learn to play basketball and most of us can learn to play it pretty well you know okay uh that that's the neat thing about us as a species it's not again it's not the elite athletes that create physical intelligence it's the fact that that

that all of us have this incredible capacity to learn physical skills up to a pretty good level. And then you hope you've got the genes if you want to do a sport to take you the last, you know, nine yards. I'm speaking with Scott Grafton, who teaches neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And he's author of the book, Physical Intelligence, the science of how the body and the mind guide each other through life. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account.

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It just takes a while to get back in the groove, but it doesn't take them a while to get. They step on the ice and off they go. They're also, don't be fooled, they're also warming up a little bit. They just get there quicker because they're younger. There's a really neat, one of my favorite studies that looks at sort of this idea of tuning up comes from a foot race in the Swiss Alps

where they, it's a five-day foot race around Mount Blanc. It was a crazy distance, 270 kilometers or something like this. And these guys had a great idea, these scientists, they recorded people's running efficiency at the start of the race. They had a treadmill and oxygen measuring systems and everything, and they sort out how efficient they're running is. They run for five days. At the end of the five days, they put them back on the treadmill and they measure their efficiency again. And even though they just ran five days straight, they're actually. more efficient at the end. And these are already elite runners. You know, they're already

best runners you can imagine. But even they are always getting a little bit better, right? It's really a neat observation. Since you've looked pretty deep into this whole idea of physical intelligence, what lessons can we learn? What can we do different? What can we do with this in life? What's the takeaway? The one thing I really came away with after working through this idea was that simple learning isn't good enough. We are really built to take on complex physical problems. That's what we're designed for, and that's where we learn the best. And so if a person does want to do try something new, they should complexify it at any level, at any skill level.

So it's not just about practicing and learning to play one song on a new musical instrument. It's learning to play it in varied ways or playing varied songs or playing with varied instruments. It's not just about taking a simple walk in the park on a paved path. It's about taking that unusual shortcut through the woods where suddenly now you've got to navigate a little bit, your whole sense of awareness in the environment changes, your ability to duck under brain, is now in demand, you've got to step over boulders. All that complexity that you find in nature is incredibly valuable for you to stay flexible, to stay strong, and to stay sort of physically adept in whatever you're going to do.

That's interesting because usually you think, well, the best way to learn anything is to simplify it, not complicated. And we know that's not true in the laboratory. There's a beautiful example. It's called the contextual interference effect. This is just jargon. But if I have you, let's say, learn, if you go to the batting cages with the baseball bat, and I say, okay, I want you to learn to hit sliders, fast balls, and changeups.

And I can control the pitching machine either of two ways. The first way, I give you all the sliders, and then I give you all the fastballs, and then I give you all the changeups. At the end of each of those blocks, you're going to be really good at hitting each of those versus a pitching machine where you don't know what's coming on each throw. You get the same number of total pitches and the same proportions, but it's random. At the end of that practice section, you're really frustrated. You don't do very well.

It doesn't look like you're very good at hitting any of them. And the learner goes away very frustrated. And so the coaches will tend to have people train. under what we call blocked conditions. We'll just give you the sliders first, then the changeups and so forth, because everybody's happier at the end of that training session. But wait, come back the next day,

and let's just have you hit against any of those three pitches, and we'll tell you what the pitch is going to be, right? Doesn't matter. You can do it blocked or random. Well, the people who practiced under random conditions are going to be much, much better at hitting those balls. So the varied practice is incredible. frustrating. The complex hard practice torments us, but that's where the learning, the real learning

that stays, that sticks. It's really a really strong effect. It works for problem solving. It works for language learning. It works for over, there's probably over 100 experiments with different kinds of physical skills that show this effect. So it's sort of a universal feature of skill learning, varied practice is enormously better. How does this idea of complicating things that practicing things in a more complicated way is better, how does that fit in with the theory that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book, that you need to put in 10,000 hours, that to get good at anything, you have to put in 10,000 hours? A colleague and I want to write a chapter called How to Practice 10,000 hours and never get better.

The idea being, you know, there's smart practice and there's dumb practice. And if you look at professional musicians and you look at how they practice, they don't practice any of the easy stuff. They only practice the stuff that's really frustrating. They're smart. And all of us need to sort of remember that when we're learning new skills. But does practicing the hard stuff, if you're a musician, for example, and you're trying to learn hard stuff, does it make the easy? stuff easier? Oh yeah. And it's sort of nested. What you're learning in the hard stuff is the phrasing and the tempo and the, you know, the intricacies. That spills, again, it's this idea of

generalization. It'll generalize into more rudimentary kind of movements. But obviously you have to put in the time. You've got to put in some time and the more time the better, right? Yeah. You have to do something. Right. You can't, yeah. You have to put some time in. And you have to put a lot of time into it, but there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours. And obviously, 5,000 hours of smart practice is going to be better than 2,000 hours of smart practice. You're going to get even farther along in what you're trying to accomplish. But there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours, I don't think. You said in the beginning that we've evolved to live in kind of a rough and tumble world

and that a walk on the beach or a hike in the mountains is more satisfying than a walk on a treadmill because we're designed to do it in a more difficult way. But that's not the way things are going. Our technology is making life easier and easier. We're moving into a period in our evolution where we're more and more in megacities and man-made environments that are incredibly smooth and incredibly easy to navigate in from a physical standpoint. And it's the antithesis of sort of what we evolved to be able to do. And I think it's an interesting experiment to see whether we're going to be really healthy in these kinds of environments or not.

It's going to be a real challenge. There's nothing in the virtual technologies right now that's even close. to emulating what we do in natural environments. And so we're putting ourselves at great risk from a health standpoint in the kinds of environments we've created for ourselves and our kids. Because it's too easy. It's too easy. That's right.

Well, think about that. Because you look back at civilization and it's all been about making it easier, making it more convenient. technology that's what technology is yeah and and that's great you know it's great for saving time but if if you're if you're one of your interests is your own health and well-being that's working against you but how do we know that what's an example of that in real life you know we're starting to think about that from an aging perspective a good example is in early phase studies coming out of We now know that if you're in a nursing home and that nursing home is next to a park that has

undeveloped pathways on it, you're going to live longer than if your nursing home has lots of nice city streets and sidewalks to walk on. There's something about the natural environment and the roughness that actually provides health benefit. That's the hypothesis. Now, we've got to lock this down with better studies, but that's the basic idea that's being chased right now. Well, I like this discussion because this whole world of physical intelligence really operates under the radar.

We don't think about it. We just do it. And it's interesting to understand how it works, why we do it, and how to do it better. Scott Grafton has been my guest. He teaches neuroscience at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He's director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center. And he's author of the book Physical Intelligence, the science of how the body and mind, guide each other through life.

There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Scott. Thanks. This has been a pleasure and a great opportunity to talk with you. And that concludes this week's SYSK trending episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening today

to something you should know.