At a recent meeting the university’s president urged me to pick up a copy of Angus Fletcher's book Primal Intelligence. He’d been speaking about the ways in which much of what academia measures as achievement or ability is not well captured when it comes to actual potential for success, so I was already intrigued. When I heard that Fletcher is a Story Scientist who leads a university center called Project Narrative, I knew I had to learn more.
I read Primal Intelligence over the weekend — it's only about 300 pages, and quite accessible in its prose style. I appreciate Fletcher's main thesis that whereas we are used to measuring intelligence as the ability to apply logic (adeptness at which is thought to be demonstrated through standardized test proficiency), the brain's real power is turning a challenging world into story. “Primal intelligence” is therefore for Fletcher shifting combinations of intuition (power to spot exceptions to rules), imagination (power to invent new plans rather than follow standard operating procedures), emotion (power of personal direction, learnt from good and bad experience), and commonsense (power of analyzing a situation non-statistically and matching action to context). I like this expansive way of framing potential and admire that its nexus is what Fletcher calls “storythinking.”
Primal Intelligence is a thought-provoking mass-market book that combines some neuroscience with a version of narrative studies. The argument can at times be implicitly anti-education, stating that to their detriment schools reduce knowledge to logic and data analysis and call that learning. Such a reductive process isn't even close to what happens in the humanities -- disciplines built upon the strengthening of all four of the "primal" intelligences. In fact Fletcher admits that his research was in the end less influenced by his lab work on neurons and synapses than his doctoral work on Shakespeare.
Over the weekend I’d had a conversation with a friend about how anger often flares up between parent and child at times of transition to make good-byes practicable (I see this on ample display, for example, at college move in day: there will be a hearted and wholly unexpected argument over socks, or folding sweaters, or extension cords). This morning I was therefore thinking about Fletcher’s brief but insightful discussion of ANGER, that ambush emotion 😡
Fletcher argues that anger is not the opposite of fear but its partner in the fight-or-flight response. Fear arises when the brain sees no path forward. Anger flares when the brain believes there is only one viable road and that way has been threatened or blocked. Anger concentrates energy and can make decisive action possible in a time of crisis. But its strength is also its danger: by convincing us of singularity, that only one possibility to move towards exists, anger can make us rigid, unable to adapt as circumstances change. Anger blinds us to the fact that in life inevitably a multiplicity of futures are actually available.
Fletcher suggests treating anger not as a command to push harder, but a sign that flexibility and imagination might better serve the moment. Anger’s remedy is expansion of the sense of the possible, the thinking through of manifold roads and destinations. Its possible to retain the focus and determination that anger provides while regaining the option to change course.
Anger erupts from the paucity of an imagination locked on a single future. Befriending anger means sitting with the feeling, and reminding yourself that many futures are available, that many paths to lead to fulfillment.
Anger is an invitation to self-knowledge as well as expanded horizons. That seems like a lesson for our times.
