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What we currently call “critical thinking” is limited and inaccurate. It considers only one layer of intelligence. The cognitive, dissection-based process that breaks ideas into parts, checks logic, and evaluates claims. This definition misses the body’s connection-based intelligence’s incredible value in critical thinking. Which asks how our current focus connects with reality.

The salience network is important in this discussion because it explains how a person decides what matters. In a domesticated system, salience is trained toward external authority: grades, diagnoses, instructions, metrics, approval, productivity, and correct answers. Education conditions the mind to treat system-defined signals as important and not to trust their own experiential knowledge. Before domestication of intelligence the salience network included the environment and lived reality in critical thinking.

Schooling, medicine, mental health systems, workplace discipline, and now AI all participate in salience rerouting. They train people away from connection-based intelligence and toward externally managed interpretation. The result is a professional class that has often lost access to self-direction, threat calibration, desire, environmental awareness, macro-pattern recognition, and natural sociability, then mistakes that loss for authority. Because their own salience has been narrowed to binary judgment. The can only see the outcome as correct or incorrect, compliant or noncompliant, normal or disordered. They cannot recognize intelligence that exceeds the cognitive-based system. The impact on our children, particularly the the most sensitive children, negatively. They are punished, labeled and shamed when they externalize the higher intelligence capacities domestication has stolen from everyone else. The system is not discovering deficiency in these children; it is projecting an inversion of the capacities it has lost. The very traits it labels as deficits are the traits humanity needs to adapt to the change ahead.

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In this episode of The Gifted Creative Podcast, I offer a forward-looking perspective on how we will come to understand the intelligence of the body.

Our current view of the body’s non-linear, connection-based intelligence often limits it to relationship intelligence—a narrow lens. However, emerging science in embodied cognition and research from Caltech on the body’s billion-bit processing capacity suggest that our somatic intelligence is far more expansive.

Through personal stories and six years of research, I explore why I believe body-based intelligence is the foundation for everything we need to navigate the future.

Looking to be Cultivated Instead of Dissected?

• Join our free Creative Collective. www.CreativeIntelligenceInstitute.ca or www.CreativeIntelligenceInstitute.eu
• Consider taking the Gifted ND holistic intelligence test to assess how much of your somatic and creative intelligence you’ve preserved. Its free and the results will surprise you. www.GiftedND.com

Further Exploration:

1. Embodied Cognition:
   • Look into the work of Alva Noë (Out of Our Heads) or Andy Clark (Supersizing the Mind), who argue that cognition is deeply tied to the body and environment.
   • Explore Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind for a foundational take on embodied cognition.
2. Caltech’s Research on Body vs. Mind Processing or Caltech’s work on interoception and the body’s role in decision-making.
3. Somatic Marker Theory (Antonio Damasio)

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What is Creative Intelligence?

Creative Intelligence is the ability to understand the whole picture—enabling you to create, navigate, or adapt what is needed. It is the integrated intelligence of mind and body, a concept that was erased when philosophy embraced Cartesian Dualism.

Creatives require greater depth and breadth to grasp what others accept without question. We don’t settle for understanding until a certain threshold of clarity is met. This approach feels healthy and normal, yet our systems discourage and pathologize it.

Creatives don’t struggle to understand our systems; their dysfunction is clear. The impasse we face is that we cannot fix these systems because we overvalue narrow, detail-focused perspectives. These perspectives cannot address big-picture fractures. Meanwhile, the voices that could offer solutions are pushed to the margins, where they lack the power to be heard.

Whole picture seeing creatives are not valued in our systems despite the system's clear messages they need them. So myself and other creatives have joined up to create a place where they are valued and that value is understood and cultivated.

That place is called the Creative Intelligence Institute of Canada. www.CreativeIntelligenceInstitute.ca

A place where we are researching, cultivating and creating a new understanding about what our native intelligence really is. If you are a creative consider joining our creative collective. It's free to join and connect with other creatives.

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