Field Notes #3: Beyond the Brain: The Wilds of a Deep Intelligence

We live in a culture obsessed with the brain. And there is no doubting the dazzling intelligence and adaptability of the brain. But what if this neuro-centrism is blinding us to a vast, wild intelligence operating throughout our entire bodies? After all, the brain is part of the body, and the body is not just a meat-wagon for neural genius, is it? And even when we expand beyond the brain to include the wider nervous system — the enteric system, peripheral nerves, spinal networks — we’re still privileging one particular type of cellular communication (electrical/neural) over all the other sophisticated information processing happening throughout the body. After sharing my thoughts on healing and assemblages in Field Notes #2, I was asked about the deeper foundations of my reflection. So let’s dive into what it really means to think beyond the brain.

The Tyranny of the Neural

Our cultural fixation on the brain and nervous system isn’t just a scientific preference. It’s a form of biological hierarchy, and it actually mirrors other systems of dominance. Just as we’ve privileged mind over body, reason over emotion, and human over nature, we’ve elevated neural networks above all other forms of bodily intelligence. This isn’t neutral description: it’s a choice about what kinds of knowing get to count as real. And that has real world consequences lying far beyond the focus of this particular reflection. But think, for just one moment, about how disembodied ‘masculine’ reason and ‘white’ ‘civilisation’ (always privileging reason) have enacted hierarchies on the world in the name of ‘superior’ intelligence. In reality, perhaps the only ‘superior’ aspect at all (if we can call it superior in any meaningful way) was the capacity to organise violence.

Consider how we still talk about the body: muscles ‘obey’ brain commands, organs ‘respond to’ signals, tissues that ‘receive’ information. This very way of speaking positions the nervous system as commander-in-chief while everything else plays supporting roles. The hidden wilds of intelligence beyond this hierarchical organisation are, however, quite simply amazing.

The Intelligence You Never Knew You Had

Your immune system remembers every pathogen you’ve encountered, learning and adapting its responses over decades. It can distinguish ‘self’ from ‘non-self’ with extraordinary precision, coordinate complex responses across multiple organs, and pass its knowings down to your biological offspring through epigenetic mechanisms. This is sophisticated learning and memory that operates independently of neural control.

Did you know that your muscles actively secrete over 650 different signalling molecules called myokines, communicating directly with your brain, liver, bones, and fat tissue? Did you know that your muscles participate in regulating mood, metabolism, and cognitive function? Did you know that your muscles communicate information about the space your body is in, actively? Did you?

And are you aware that your gut processes information not only through its own extensive neural network (the enteric nervous system), but also through complex interactions with trillions of bacteria that influence mood, behaviour and decision-making?

Are you aware that your fascia—the connective tissue wrapping every muscle, organ, and bone—demonstrates remarkable intelligence? It’s ‘piezoelectric’, generating electrical signals in response to mechanical stress. It adapts its structure based on how you move and how you hold tension. It’s a continuous communication network throughout your body, potentially storing and transmitting information in ways that we’re only beginning to understand.

Questioning ‘Systems’ in Favour of ‘Assemblages’

But here’s where it gets even more interesting: maybe thinking in terms of separate ‘systems’—nervous, immune, muscular, fascial—is also part of the problem of reductive, inaccurate thinking and speaking about the body. When you feel anxious, is that a neural event, an immune response, a muscular pattern, or a hormonal cascade? The divisions are artificial. Anxiety emerges from dynamic relationships between all these processes, not from any single ‘system’s’ activity. So, what if instead of systems, we start to think in terms of ‘assemblages’—temporary configurations of multiple dynamics that come together to produce particular capacities? Your ability to sense safety in a room, for example, emerges from neural processing, but also from muscular tension patterns, immune readiness, breathing rhythms, fascial sensitivity, and even microbial activity — and all these things co-emerge. The wild intelligence of the body is distributed across the whole assemblage, not located in any single ‘component’.

The Politics of Distributed Intelligence

Recognising distributed intelligence has profound implications for how we approach healing, education and social change. If intelligence is genuinely distributed, then working with muscular patterns, breathing, immune function, or social relationships becomes just as valid as changing our thoughts or addressing our neural patterns. And just as valid as ‘nervous system regulation’ work. Healing itself becomes something far broader, more inclusive, more radical. There’s a kind of individualism buried in brain-centred thinking. But if intelligence emerges from assemblages—the whole game changes. And, in reality, as a matter of lived fact, assemblages include our  relationships, environments, microbial communities, and much more besides. Bodies, after all, are porous. Healing might require changing not just individual neural patterns but the broader assemblages we’re part of—our relationships, built environments, economic conditions, political structures and social atmospheres. We might have to think beyond ‘little me’. And to do more than think, by the way, because distributed intelligence leads us towards more embodied ways of knowing, too.

Toward Embodied Ways of Knowing

Perhaps most importantly, recognising distributed intelligence invites us to trust forms of knowing that don’t depend on cognitive analysis. The gut feelings, muscular intuitions, energetic shifts, and atmospheric sensitivities that so often get dismissed as ‘unscientific’ might actually be sophisticated forms of information processing that cognitive analysis is too slow or narrow to capture. This view of ‘what’s here’ doesn’t mean abandoning critical thinking, mind you. Far from it. But what it does invite is a broadening and deepening of how we define intelligence to include the vast, wild collaborative intelligences that our bodies already and always are. Yes, the brain is vitally important. Yes, it is amazing. Yes, it is brilliant. But it is one participant in a much larger conversation — it shouldn’t be the dominant organ imagined to ‘control’ everything else. Because, it simply doesn’t. And when we start listening to the intelligences (plural) of our muscles, organs, tissues, fascia and more  we discover non-cognitive, non-neural, immensely ancient and vital capacities for knowing and responding that transform what it means to be human at all. I don’t know about you, but I find that immensely exciting.