Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know by Angus Fletcher

Our brain can think in data, abstractions, exceptions, and action. Moto stands for motor intelligence that runs our brains synapses. When neuron A extends a path to neuron B it’s thinking A leads to B. This allows moto to act smart in ways that logic can’t. Our tool for training moto is story. Story is a sequence of actions where one causes the other. Story thinking differs from deduction, interpretation, and critical thinking.
There is a long list of famous people inspired by Shakespeare who filled his plays with strange exceptions. His characters acted innovatively, not statistically. They broke old patterns, creating original rules. Stories work because they break the rules. Optimization can improve existing things but it cannot create original ones. Generative AI will never revolutionize the rules of art, technology, or anything. It is at best, half intelligent. The logic half is accelerated while the innovative half is lobotomized.

Naturalism is natural history’s deeper scientific root. It is the careful observation of natural rarities driven by curiosity and imagination. Angus took a break to attend Yale to get a PhD in literature. He wanted to know more about Shakespeare, the king of stories. Project Narrative at Ohio State University is the world’s leading academic institute for the study of stories. They funded Angus to start his lab to expand his research.
Pixar, it turned out, was using a version of Shakespeare’s method. It was rejecting standard plots in order to risk experimental story structures like the ones they used in “Toy Story” and “Up”. As part of his consulting work, Angus taught that strategy was the story of what organizations wanted, operations was what the organization was doing, and marketing was what they wanted people to think they were doing. In successful organizations, all three stories align. Shakespeare’s method uses imagination to create new options rather than relying on rational decision-making based on data. Imagination can invent plans that math and data can’t

This quiz will allow you to find out how strong you are at each of the four primal intelligences: intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. It will tell you your leading primal power and your limiting primal power. You can also take it at his website, see below. This is much easier.

This is a review and summary of the book. It also contains exercises to help you develop the the primal powers along with innovation, resilence, decision-making, communication, coaching, and leadership. There is also a list of Angus’ other publications on this topic.

Angus is a professor of story science at Ohio State University’s Project Narrative. He has done ground-breaking research into primal Intelligence with the U.S. Army Special Operations. People such as Brené Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, Marin Seligman, and Antonio Damasio speak very highly of his work. His website is angusfletcher.com contains a free diagnostic test you can take.