POWER OF NOT THINKING

Humans are capable of far more than we are currently led to believe. We just have to stop thinking and start trusting our bodies. Have you ever relied on your hand to remember your PIN rather than your memory? Have you acted out a golf swing before tee-ing off, or listened to your gut when making a big decision? In this radical and insightful book, leading business anthropologist Simon Roberts breaks down the revolutionary idea of embodied knowledge - how information is unconsciously picked up by our body for use in every facet of our daily lives. Seems obvious but the pandemic and Covid makes this book's principal argument, that our bodies are essential to how we experience and understand the world, even more pertinent. In the book we will encounter people from Silicon Valley developers 'body storming' to act out how cutting-edge technologies will work, an ambassador who hitches rides with hauliers to understand how frictionless trade between Britain and Europe works, and a charity worker who puts people through a 'refugee simulation' in Davos to teach them about the experience of displaced people. We will discover how architects learn about ageing by putting their bodies rather than their minds to work, and in a Californian national park encounter business executives camping for a week to immerse themselves in their customers' world. The author designed and participated in several of the experiences he uses to tell the story of how people develop embodied knowledge. His book is a positive argument that our bodies are immensely powerful tools for understanding and making sense of data when we engage directly in other people's worlds from direct experience. Imbue your numbers with meaning and be confident in your judgement and learn the way in which our body acquires, retains and employs information we can learn to trust. 328 page paperback.