The Goosebump You Can't Code

I was on my morning walk when I remembered a short video of Jacob Collier — the musician who thinks about music the way physicists think about light, in frequencies and harmonics that most of us can’t hear. He was talking about something Quincy Jones once told him.

You can’t write a goosebump.

You can’t think your way to one. You can’t plan it, engineer it, prompt it into existence. A goosebump comes from somewhere else entirely — from the gut, then the heart, then the head. It arrives before language does. It moves through the body like weather. And by the time your conscious mind catches up and asks what just happened?, the knowing is already there. The goosebump knew first.

I stopped walking when I remembered that. I’ve been circling this for months — the kind of knowing that matters most right now, and how badly we’ve been trained to dismiss it.

We have built an entire civilisation on the premise that the head is the pinnacle. Rational thought as the highest form of knowing. The scientific method as the gold standard for truth. Economics modelled on rational actors making rational choices. Education systems designed to train the mind, measure the mind, reward the mind — while the body sits in a chair for twelve years, learning to be quiet.

Descartes split mind from body in the seventeenth century and gave the split a slogan: cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The body became a vessel. The mind became the self. And for 400 years, Western thought has largely operated inside that frame — treating embodied experience as noise to be filtered out on the way to clear reasoning.

That hierarchy was always wrong, I believe now. I started reading about why — about what the body actually does when it “knows” something before the mind catches up.

In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described a patient he called Elliot — a man whose surgery to remove a brain tumour had damaged the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region that integrates emotional signals into the decision-making process.[1][2] Elliot’s intelligence remained intact. He could reason brilliantly, list every option, analyse every problem. He could not choose. Without what Damasio called somatic markers — the sweaty palms, the tightening gut, the faint unease that steers us away from bad options — every choice carried exactly the same weight: none. “The cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning,” Damasio wrote, “made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”[1][3]

Damasio’s conclusion: emotion and reason are not opponents. They are partners — and the body provides signals that rational thought cannot generate on its own.[4] The mind needs the body to feel its way through a world that pure logic renders flat.

That partnership is the first crack in the hierarchy. The next one goes deeper.

A few days before I saw Collier’s video, I watched a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson saying something that scared him.

His biggest fear for democracy, he said, is that the people in power no longer understand the scientific method. They can’t distinguish opinion from science. And when that distinction collapses — when we lose the shared understanding that science is a process, not a product — then anyone with a loud enough voice can reshape reality.

He’s right. That fear is valid. And I sat with it for a while, because I respect it deeply.

But I also kept coming back to another thought on that walk: the scientific method, for all its rigour, has consistently failed to move people on the things that matter most. Climate. Democracy. Trust. Polarisation. The information was always there. The data was clear. The peer-reviewed papers stacked up like bricks. And almost none of it changed how people actually felt, voted, or lived.

Science communication researchers have been dismantling the assumption behind this failure since at least the early 2000s. They call it the information deficit model — the belief that public scepticism stems from a lack of information, and that filling the gap with more facts will produce acceptance.[5] By 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had consolidated decades of evidence into a single conclusion: the model “frequently does not hold.” People rarely make decisions based on scientific information alone — “they typically also take into account their own goals and needs, knowledge and skills, and values and beliefs.”[6]

The deficit model wasn’t just wrong in the details. It was wrong about what kind of creatures we are. People process the world through the felt channel first — through identity, belonging, and story. The rational channel comes second, if it comes at all.

The gap between what science knows and what moves people to act has never been an information problem. It is an embodiment problem — and closing it requires a different kind of knowing entirely.

Eugene Gendlin, the philosopher and psychologist, spent decades studying why some therapy patients improved and others didn’t. The difference had nothing to do with the therapist’s method or the patient’s diagnosis. It came down to whether the patient could access what Gendlin called the felt sense — “an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time — encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.”[7]

The felt sense is not an emotion. It is not a thought. It is a bodily awareness — vague, pregnant with meaning, always more than any attempt to express it verbally.[8] The philosopher Michael Polanyi called the same territory tacit knowledge — “we know more than we can tell.”[9] A cyclist can’t explain how they balance. A doctor recognises a condition before they can name the diagnostic criteria. The body understands things the mind takes years to articulate.

Gendlin took this further. We don’t live by our five senses alone, he pointed out. “We can sense the space behind us, although we don’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch it.” But that sense of the space behind you is not just space — it is your situation. “You are feeling the people sitting behind you. You can feel that if you whipped around and stared at them now, it would make you and them uncomfortable.”[10] The body reads the social field before the conscious mind begins to analyse.

This is the third epistemology: a kind of knowing that the Cartesian tradition dismissed as noise, as mere feeling, as something to be overcome on the way to real understanding. Gendlin and Polanyi upend that hierarchy. The felt sense reaches social truths, aesthetic truths, moral truths that rational analysis consistently misses. Four centuries of dismissing it as ‘mere feeling’ haven’t made it less real — only less practiced.

I experienced this most directly recently while filming a short documentary about a woman named Henrietta. I asked her what freedom means. She started to answer, then paused. A long pause. And then this quiet laugh — almost a gasp. “Wow.” That’s all she said. Wow.

In that moment, I felt the entire film swing into focus. The story wasn’t in her answer. It was in the pause. In the two seconds where she went somewhere inside herself that I couldn’t follow — and came back changed. Everything I needed to know about her relationship with freedom was in her body in that moment, not in any sentence she could construct. Gendlin would have recognised it immediately: a felt sense forming, carrying more than language can hold.

The astronauts on the Artemis II mission described something analogous at planetary scale this month. Frank White first experienced the insight in 1971, on a cross-country flight, gazing down at the Earth below. He spent years interviewing astronauts about similar experiences, and in 1987 he published The Overview Effect, coining the term for the cognitive shift astronauts report when seeing Earth from space — a sudden, overwhelming sense of the planet’s fragility and interconnection that no briefing document could produce.[11][12] Victor Glover, the Artemis II pilot, captured it live on camera: “From up here, you also look like one thing. Homo sapiens is all of us.” His voice cracked.[13] He didn’t argue for unity. His body showed it.

Henrietta in a room in Freetown. Glover in orbit above the Pacific. The scale is different. The mechanism is the same. A body encounters something that exceeds language, and the knowing arrives whole — before any framework can contain it.

AI is absorbing the other two kinds of knowing — and doing it well enough that the difference becomes urgent.

Rational knowing — the ability to reason, analyse, synthesise, draw conclusions from data — is exactly what large language models do. They do it faster than we do, with more data, and without getting tired. Research from 2025 confirms what practitioners already feel: routine reliance on AI shrinks idea diversity and reduces critical thinking.[14] We become, in Advait Sarkar’s phrase, “intellectual tourists in our own work.”

Social-narrative knowing — the ability to construct stories, frame arguments, trigger emotions, shape identity — is what AI is learning to do next. Synthetic influencers already populate social media feeds, indistinguishable from human creators.[15] We are discovering how much of what we called “storytelling” was really pattern and architecture — and how little audiences care whether the source is human, as long as the mirror works.

But the deepest function of storytelling has never been activation. It has been meaning-making — a process that requires lived experience, a teller working through their own relationship to the truth they’re sharing. AI can trigger an emotional response. It cannot mean something by it. That distinction is where the human remains.

I noticed the shift in my own work. I’ve spent the last few months building an AI agent system — 25 specialised agents that handle research, organise databases, draft content, process voice notes. It works extraordinarily well. And the more I build it, the clearer it becomes what it can’t do. It can structure. It can compress. It can find patterns across hundreds of pages of text. What it cannot do is sit across from Henrietta and feel the weight of her pause. There is a moment in every interview, every film shoot, every walk through a neighbourhood in Nairobi or Freetown, where the body registers something — this corner, this light, this person’s face — before the analytical mind has any idea why it matters. No database contains what happens in that moment. No training run can replicate the weight of a specific corner, a specific quality of light, a specific face — registered by a body that has learned to pay attention.

Tristan Harris framed the deeper risk: when AI replaces cognitive labour at scale, we don’t just lose jobs.[16] We lose the practice of thinking — the daily exercise that keeps the muscle working. If decision-making depends on the body’s emotional signals, then outsourcing more cognition to machines doesn’t just make us lazier thinkers — it weakens the feedback loop between body and mind that sound judgment requires. The somatic markers atrophy from disuse.

As machines absorb the propositional and the narrative structure, embodied attention becomes what no algorithm can offer. A filmmaker who feels the room shift. A teacher who reads a student’s posture before the student speaks. A friend who sits with silence instead of filling it. These capacities resist automation — not because they are mystical, but because they require a body that has been somewhere, felt something, and learned to notice.

So what do we do with this?

I think we should start by taking embodied knowing seriously — epistemologically seriously, not just as a wellness add-on.

The morning walk is the practice I know best. It generates connections that twelve hours at a desk cannot produce — and I don’t think that’s incidental. Gendlin would call it creating the conditions for a felt sense to form: the body in motion, the mind loosened from its usual grooves, the world arriving through the senses instead of through a screen. The voice note I record while walking isn’t capturing what I think. It’s capturing what I know, in a register that sitting still can’t access. The idea for this essay didn’t come from reading. It came from remembering Collier’s words while my feet were moving and my chest was open to the cold April air. The goosebump had already written the essay. The words spent the next two weeks catching up.

The body of course isn’t always right. Gut feelings are also where bias lives — the snap judgment about a stranger, the fear response that narrows instead of opens, the intuition that feels true and turns out to be prejudice wearing the costume of instinct. The question isn’t whether embodied knowing is infallible. It isn’t. The question is whether we can learn to listen to it with the rational mind — as Damasio’s partnership model suggests — rather than dismissing it or surrendering to it uncritically.

I thought about something on another walk a few weeks ago that keeps coming back to me. “We will all become artists.” Not artists in the gallery sense — not painters or performers. I mean something broader: people who bring their whole selves into what they make. People whose work comes from a unique perspective, a unique set of lived experiences, a unique way of connecting things that no one else would connect in quite the same way. When AI handles the compression — the efficiency, the repetitive cognitive labour, the grind — what remains for us is the part that was always the most human. The open exploration. The embodied encounter with the world. The capacity to notice what nobody else notices because nobody else has your body, your history, your particular way of standing in a room.

Prompt engineering won’t be the scarce skill. Attention and presence will. The kind you can’t fake: sitting with another person and noticing the pause that carries more weight than the words.

I got home, took off my shoes, felt the weight of my body on the chair. The essay was already somewhere between my ribs and my throat. Then I stood at my desk, opened the computer, and felt the familiar narrowing. Screen. Cursor. The shift from full-body sensing to just-my-mind, fitting what I’d felt into structures and sentences, switching things off to make room for rigour.

I don’t have a clean resolution for this essay. I’m not sure I want one. The goosebump and the rigour are both real. They’re partners, and the interesting place to be is in the tension between them — where the body knows something the mind hasn’t caught up to yet, and you have to decide whether to trust it.

Henrietta’s pause. Glover’s cracking voice. The cold April air pulling an idea out of my chest before my mind had words for it. None of these resolve the tension between the goosebump and the rigour. They sit inside it — and they’re richer for refusing to.

Maybe the question for this moment — for this strange, compressed, AI-saturated, screen-mediated moment — is simpler than we think.

What does your body already know that you haven’t let yourself feel?

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[1] Damasio, A. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam, 1994. As cited in: “How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life,” Science of Us / The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-man.html

[2] “Somatic marker hypothesis,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

[3] Bechara, A. & Damasio, A.R. “The somatic marker hypothesis: A neural theory of economic decision,” Games and Economic Behavior 52(2), 2005. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825604001034

[4] “Descartes’ Error,” Wikipedia. See also: Damasio, A. Descartes’ Error, Chapter 11 — on Hume’s overcorrection and the partnership model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes’_Error

[5] “Information deficit model,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model

[6] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda. National Academies Press, 2017. Chapter 2: “Moving Beyond the Deficit Model.” https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/23674/chapter/2

[7] Gendlin, E. Focusing. Bantam, 1978. See also: “Felt Sense,” International Focusing Institute. https://focusing.org/felt-sense/felt-sense

[8] “Focusing (psychotherapy),” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing_(psychotherapy)

[9] Polanyi, M. The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press, 1966. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html

[10] Gendlin, E. “When You Feel the Body From the Inside, There Is a Door,” lecture transcript. International Focusing Institute. https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2232.html

[11] “Overview effect,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

[12] Frank White. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. Houghton Mifflin, 1987. See also:

https://frankwhiteauthor.com/

[13] Beckerman, G. “What the Astronauts See That Trump Cannot,” The Atlantic, April 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/04/what-astronauts-see-trump-cannot/686720/

[14] Aleksic, A. & Sarkar, A. “AI Is Changing How We Talk and Think,” TED Tech. https://share.snipd.com/episode/bd8f38cd-bf20-4ce4-807d-9d56c11b057a

[15] Warzel, C. & Hsu, T. “Your Favorite Influencer Might Be AI,” Galaxy Brain. https://share.snipd.com/episode/57c1b6ec-95ff-42c3-973a-b9d1586abda4

[16] Tristan Harris on Modern Wisdom #1079. https://share.snipd.com/episode/2eca7151-32e7-4e7a-9b7c-0a38764cb345