Is Artificial Intelligence going to be the be-all, end-all for decision-making, problem-solving and innovation?  If AI is faster, more logical and more efficient than humans, why hasn’t it overtaken us already?  Is there a way for human genius to gain the edge over AI?  

Yes, AI has changed the way we’ve done things these last few years – optimizing and streamlining processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness while maximizing output and in some cases, reducing costs.  AI thrives in a production environment with defined datasets, but take away all that reliable data and introduce new variables, and it crumbles.  

AI can generate art and stories, but it does this based on the data it was fed and trained on.  It’s truly incapable of producing anything genuinely novel from outside that frame.  This means it has the potential to suffer in a self-loop of homogeneous and biased outputs over time, building towards incoherence.  

In a world that is increasingly being taken over by AI processes and outputs, recognizing and understanding this limitation is going to help human intelligence find its place and continue to thrive and evolve.  In fact, just as AI gained mainstream popularity these past few years, another type of human intelligence has captured the attention and imagination of researchers – and the U.S. Army at the same time.  

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What Is Primal Intelligence?

Ohio State University professor Angus Fletcher, along with other researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, started to investigate in 2021 something called “primordial brainpower” that reportedly drives human intuition.  Their research led them to something they call Primal Intelligence, a kind of “natural cleverness” by humans that can be strengthened through training, but which AI can’t replicate.  

Professor Fletcher describes Primal Intelligence as part of our lost nature and a key to activating intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.  The U.S. Army Special Operations then adopted primal training for its most classified units and according to Professor Fletcher, Special Operators saw the future faster, thought more quickly, acted more swiftly, and healed more rapidly from trauma.  After the Army authorized trials on civilians such as entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, managers, coaches, teachers, investors, and NFL players, they found their leadership and innovation significantly improved.  These civilians coped better with change and uncertainty, and experienced less anger and anxiety.  The Army subsequently provided primal training to college and K–12 classrooms with students as young as eight, and they reported substantial beneficial effects from the training.  In 2023, the Army awarded Professor Fletcher the Commendation Medal for his research on retraining the human mind.  

Professor Fletcher’s research has been endorsed by renowned psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors.  He has received support from major institutions such as the National Science Foundation.  He also wrote the book Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know, from which the following five key insights for sharpening our primal intelligence are derived.  

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1. Exceptional Information

Special Operators “see” or anticipate the future faster than other soldiers on the battlefield, thanks to their unusually high level of intuition.  But how does one improve their intuition? 

To begin with, you’ll need to dissociate intuition from the decades-old concept that intuition is just mere pattern matching.  The aforementioned Operators have trained their brains to find what the Army has dubbed “exceptional information.”  Succinctly put, exceptional information is an exception to a previously established rule; it’s the opposite of a pattern because it’s the breaking of a pattern.  

Young children score high on intuition but lower at pattern matching because their brains are focused more on unusual details than on familiar patterns.  Training your brain to spot exceptions rather than thinking in patterns can help improve your intuition.  

Travel or go on trips to immerse your brain in places that break the pattern of your regular life.  Reading the works of authors like Shakespeare can also help improve intuition because of characters who are exceptions to traditional narrative tropes, like Hamlet the deep-thinking action hero or the cold and scheming Cleopatra who possesses a loving heart.  Known Shakespeare readers who were able to anticipate the future by spotting exceptions range from Nikola Tesla with his AC motor, Marie Curie with radioactivity, and even Vincent van Gogh and his use of aquamarine.  

Image: Donald Tong

2. Rethinking Optimism

Optimism pushes us to take on chances which could lead to growth, but why do many people fall back into pessimism?  Why do we need to remind ourselves that optimism works better than pessimism instead of instinctively switching to the former frame of mind whenever something new or unusual comes up?  Why is optimism this fragile in our minds?  

This has something to do with how we think of optimism.  We’ve been taught that optimism is “this will succeed,” when “this can succeed” is much more powerful and stronger.  Instead of convincing us that this will succeed, we remember that we can succeed.  

Remembrance over visualization.  Special Operators call this method antifragile because remembering that one time in the past when you’ve been successful is more resilient than magically thinking of achieving success.  Building your optimism on the foundation of faith where you’ve succeeded one time no matter how many times you fail can be all you need to keep on going.  This is an improvement over being buoyed by the hope that you can succeed, but having your confidence eroded when you don’t.  

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3. Thinking In Story

In new situations with little to no precedent values (where AI falls apart), how are Special Operators not only able to pull through but also excel?  

We have to remind ourselves that the human brain features more than one type of intelligence.  While it evolved over a million years with the capacity to think logically and process data from which computers were modeled, the human brain also developed narrative cognition or simply put, the ability to think in story.  

Thinking in story means the brain sees the “movement” of story, from beginning to middle to end, with room for imagination to explore possibilities and wisdom to sensibly tie things together.  AI has the ability to generate story plots and images from datasets, but it still doesn’t read the story.  It’s still our human brains that instill story and meaning to these generated plots and images.  

High-data environment and conditions might not be conducive for thinking in story, but it finds its place in volatile and uncertain situations.  Special Operators who performed well in volatility were found to have brains proficient at thinking in story.  

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4. Empowerment Through Role-playing

Anger and anxiety are physiological indicators of a threat response.  So what’s the best way to mitigate the brain’s threat response?  Removing the threat, usually with outside force, might spring to mind but what if we tell you that conjuring a gameplan with your brain to deal with the threat is more effective?  

That’s exactly how Special Operators function.  Instead of avoiding threats, they advanced toward the threats and they do this without feeling anxious or angry.  That’s because these Operators have trained their brains to imagine plans for dealing with threats.  And they train their imagination by engaging in role-playing exercises.  

Outside of Special Operations, role-playing can be taught to regular people or students by taking part in arts and humanities activities such as theater, literature, and history.  The key is to be able to imagine oneself as somebody else in another place or situation, engaging the brain’s ability to imagine plans for handling threats.  

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5. Possibility Over Probability

How do you train people so that you produce leaders and not just managers?  Focus your training on expanding their ability to think not in probability but in possibility.  

What’s the difference?  Probability is calculated or based from past events while possibility assumes an event that hasn’t happened could happen.  Probability is employed by statistics and computer AI while possibility empowers story and imagination.  With a fundamentally different mental process involved, possibility engages original thinking, enterprise, and initiative: key mental qualities of entrepreneurs and leaders in general.  

You can expand your sense of possibility by stimulating your brain’s premotor cortex and boosting your practical imagination with realistic tales of make-believe.  The Wright brothers read the creative works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, while Special Operators prefer novels set in the near future or in a different culture.  

Image: Katrin Bolovtsova

Cascade Strategies and Primal Intelligence

Cascade Strategies has not only been advocating for the “appropriate use of AI” but has also been consistently pushing for the appreciation of high-level human thinking, especially when it comes to market research.  This research on primal intelligence underscores our stance on the irreplicable and inimitable merits of human intelligence.  We believe there are values and experiences humans bring to the table that AI simply cannot match.  We’ve always believed that breakthroughs in market research can only be unlocked only with the proper application of human intelligence.  To learn more about how our thinking can help you with your brand development and market research needs, please contact us here.

Additional Reading:

Why AI Will Never Defeat Primal Intelligence

‘Primal Intelligence’ Review: Why Brains Are Better

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