How do you decide if you can ride through a snowstorm? How fast are you prepared to head into that tricky off-camber corner? Can you strip your bike down by the side of the road, identify a problem, fix it and reassemble the bike? When was the last time you discovered a shortcut on your enduro bike through a gnarly bit of overgrown country?

 

Neuroscientist Scott Grafton, director of the Brain Imaging Center and co-director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies at UC Santa Barbara calls the ability to tackle these things ‘Physical Intelligence’ in his new book Physical Intelligence: The science of thinking without thinking.

 

“Skills such as these,” he writes, “are informed by ‘physical intelligence’: the components of the mind that allow anyone to engage with and change the world.” He points out that finding that shortcut, for example, demands vigilance, courage, and the ability to keep your wits, particularly at that moment of self-doubt when the journey seems more like a longcut than a shortcut.