Why your intuition, imagination, and emotion will outlast AI

Every once in a while, a book arrives in my inbox that forces me to rethink what I thought I knew about the human mind. Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence is one of those books. Released in August, it has already become a national bestseller — and for good reason.

Fletcher is a rare hybrid: trained as both a neuroscientist and a professor of literature, he teaches at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, the world’s leading academic center for the study of story. His previous titles — Wonderworks and Storythinking — earned him a reputation as a boundary-breaking thinker who blends science, history, and art to explain why stories matter and how they shape human creativity.

With Primal Intelligence, Fletcher goes further. Drawing on unlikely collaborations with the U.S. Army and years studying Shakespeare, he argues that our deepest intelligence isn’t computational at all. It’s rooted in intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense — capacities that modern systems of school and work often suppress, but remain essential for human flourishing.

The timeliness is hard to miss. At a moment when artificial intelligence dominates headlines — and many are anxious that machines might soon replace human creativity — Fletcher insists on the profound difference between algorithm and imagination. AI can detect patterns. Only humans can weave meaning, create serendipity, and grow wiser through story. Primal Intelligence is a reminder that our future depends on those gifts.

What follows is an edited transcript from multiple conversations with Angus over recent weeks.

Eric Markowitz: How can we think more like Van Gogh, or Steve Jobs, or Lincoln?

Angus Fletcher: First, we have to stop thinking of the brain as a computer. That’s the biggest mistake. Computers do equations. They categorize: this is a chair, that’s a chair, another chair. They’re efficient. But they can’t do story. Story is how humans think. Story is how we explain why. And that’s what lets us imagine.

When something surprises a computer, it folds the anomaly into its algorithm and smooths it out. When something surprises a human, we realize we’ve entered the middle of a story. We jump back and imagine beginnings. We form hypotheses. That’s imagination. It’s what Van Gogh did — painting the world in a way no one had seen. It’s what Jobs did when he obsessed over fonts and the feel of aluminum. It’s what Lincoln did, quoting Shakespeare in the middle of war. They weren’t crunching data; they were seeing stories.

Eric Markowitz: So narrative is the key difference?

Angus Fletcher: Yes. Narrative is what computers can’t do. It’s also why serendipity exists. Randomness is computational — mix and match, like AI. Serendipity feels connected to a larger arc. You meet the right person at the right moment; you hear the song that saves you. That’s a story re-revealing itself. A computer treats that as noise. A person senses meaning.

Eric Markowitz: Inside institutions, where does that kind of creativity come from?

Angus Fletcher: Rarely from the top. In the Army, the push came from a major in the Nurse Corps, Angela Samosorn. She wrote a scathing report: The Army claims it trains creative leaders, but it doesn’t. That cracked the door. Think Shakespeare’s King Lear: the fool is empowered to say what others can’t. Great institutions keep a space for that truth-teller. Business is similar. You told the Play-Doh origin story — wallpaper cleaner saved by a preschool teacher who saw children loved the material. Outsider perspective plus common sense.

Eric Markowitz: You’ve dug into the Army’s creativity history. What did you find?

Angus Fletcher: In 1943, the Army noticed some pilots outperformed others. It wasn’t because they followed rules better; actually, rigid rule-following got you shot down faster. The top pilots had more imagination. So the Army brought in J.P. Guilford at USC to “solve” creativity. He reduced it to two protocols: divergent thinking (brainstorming) and convergent thinking (finding patterns). That model shaped business schools, K–12 ideation, and — ironically — today’s generative AI (random recombination plus statistical convergence).

Then, in the early 2020s, the Army called me. “The more we teach divergent/convergent thinking,” they said, “the less creative our soldiers get.” So we developed a different approach, rooted in story, intuition, and action. We ran trials with senior officers across branches — logistics, medical, artillery. In under two hours we saw a standard-deviation-level bump in creative performance. You don’t get that unless the system has been suppressing something that’s already there.

Eric Markowitz: Why do systems suppress it?

Angus Fletcher: Because in the short term, efficiency beats imagination. Tacitus basically says it: Germanic warriors rushed to be first; Roman soldiers stabbed in formation. The widgets beat the leaders — until the empire can’t adapt. You see it again in the Industrial Revolution, the rise of bureaucracy, and the computer revolution. We standardize. We measure what’s easiest. In peacetime, militaries optimize for budgets; in wartime, they innovate because failure is immediate. Schools teach the “right” answer and train kids to ignore their own anomalies. Over time, we bury the maverick inside each person.

Eric Markowitz: How do we bring the maverick back?

Angus Fletcher: Growth. That’s the purpose of life. And growth means difference. Darwin noticed every child in a family is different. Life tends toward branching. But our schools and workplaces punish difference in the name of fairness and objectivity. We should do the opposite: nurture what’s unique.

Eric Markowitz: What’s the fix in education?

Angus Fletcher: Educational spaces exist to cultivate growth. Instead we measure what’s easy to measure, so we teach to the measurement. Kids learn to please the system. Then they enter work and don’t know their own story — they’re disaggregated, three people living in one head. The wisest people can narrate their entire life — mistakes included — as a coherent whole. That’s wisdom, not the accumulation of facts. Story knits the self together.

Eric Markowitz: Is physicality part of this?

Angus Fletcher: One hundred percent. The brain evolved to think in actions, not equations. Intelligence is the ability to make a plan. Great athletes, surgeons, and dancers improvise new actions in real time — their hands “decide” before language. That’s imagination in motion. The more actions you’ve done, the more actions you can imagine.

It’s why craft matters. I watched an artillery instructor hand new majors a piece of Play-Doh after fifty minutes of the Army’s text-heavy slides and say: “Communicate one idea you just learned with this.” Panic at first. Then something opens. Motor systems engage; questions get better. When we make something, we connect emotion to output. Spreadsheets sever that feedback loop; craft restores it.

Eric Markowitz: Where does intuition come in?

Angus Fletcher: Children are masters of it. There’s a study from Ohio State: Parents and kids looked at “mutant” animals. Parents were faster at categorizing; kids were better at spotting exceptions — “that one’s different.” Intuition is the ability to see what’s special about everything. Adults lose it because we’re trained to label. I tell a story in the book of two plastic spoons. My infant daughter could tell the difference instantly between the one I’d been feeding her with and the “identical” replacement. We laugh at that, but she’s right: they’re not identical. Our job is to retain that sensitivity and pair it with judgment.

Eric Markowitz: How can we recover intuition?

Angus Fletcher: Art, travel, craft, movement, and time in nature. Anything that trains attention on what is unique rather than what is generic. In meetings, I often start with something that breaks the spreadsheet trance — have people call out something special in the room or in someone else’s contribution. It reminds everyone that we’re alive, not just executing a process. And it gives permission for maverick ideas to surface without shame.

Eric Markowitz: What about language versus story?

Angus Fletcher: Language is efficient — good for standardizing chairs into “chair.” Story is older than language by hundreds of millions of years. It’s the brain’s way of modeling cause and effect through time. Words encode systems, but story encodes meaning. Kids without language — like your infant — aren’t trapped by labels. They experience wall as wall, not as “wall.” That immediacy is a gateway back to intuition.

Eric Markowitz: You’ve compared our AI moment to the Middle Ages. Why not the Enlightenment?

Angus Fletcher: Because the Middle Ages were driven by the same logic/data fantasy we have now. Theologians imagined: put perfect data (Scripture) through perfect logic and you’ll get the mind of God. Today’s version is: pour massive data through algorithms and you’ll get omniscience. It didn’t work then. 

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The Renaissance happened when logic broke, on contact with reality — telescopes showed a different sky; new medicines worked; Shakespeare healed people with plays. We needed imagination again. We still do. And yes, medieval culture produced apocalyptic thinking. We’re living through a similar fever — everything feels catastrophic. The antidote is not more logic. It’s better stories, enacted through wiser action.

AI can be useful. But it can’t do narrative. It can’t explain why. It can’t feel. It can’t experience serendipity.

Eric Markowitz: Let’s talk stakes and time horizons.

Angus Fletcher: Biology runs on the grandchildren principle. Success is not what benefits you or even your children; it’s what benefits your children’s children. Neuroscientifically, the further you push your mind into the future, the more anxiety you generate. The deeper you look into the past, the more awe you feel. That should tell us something about how the brain wants to work.

Eric Markowitz: I’ve been traveling extensively to meet with some of the oldest businesses in the world, and they all seem to place tremendous value on apprenticeship. Do you believe that’s a lost art?

Angus Fletcher: It’s essential. Life is not The Matrix. You can’t download wisdom. You need years of situated learning — time to understand your environment and yourself. Apprentices aren’t expected to “produce value” for a decade. They’re expected to grow. We confuse schooling with preparation. Then we throw people into roles and punish them for not being wise on day one. Apprenticeship — of the craft and of the self — is how you cultivate judgment.

Eric Markowitz: And emotion?

Angus Fletcher: Emotion is intelligence. It tells you what matters. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes are feeling made visible. Jobs’s insistence on elegance was emotional, not merely aesthetic. Lincoln’s cadence works because it moves hearts before it moves minds. Our systems treat emotion as distraction. But you can’t be wise without knowing what you love, what you fear, what you’re willing to endure. Emotion prioritizes attention.

Eric Markowitz: You’re emphatic that you think about individuals, not systems.

Angus Fletcher: Always. Systems will follow if enough individuals recover their human intelligence. My daily test is simple: did I help someone grow today? Did I spot and celebrate a difference? Did I invite a maverick to speak? Did I move my body, make something with my hands, read something that surprised me? Those are small acts, but they add up. They’re the opposite of anxiety-doomscrolling.

Eric Markowitz: Last one. What do you want Primal Intelligence to do for readers?

Angus Fletcher: We only get one life — maybe 70 years if we’re lucky. Too many people are spending those years anxious, angry, alienated. I want them to feel joy. To feel whole. To know their story. To trust their intuition. To use their imagination. To let their uniqueness grow. If we build schools and workplaces that nurture those things, we’ll live better lives.