KQ=KinestheticQuotient=PhysicalIntelligence.pdfVIP

KQ = Kinesthetic Quotient = Physical Intelligence By Thomas Myers | ? 2005 All rights reserved We are all familiar with IQ – the intelligence of our brains, and were getting more familiar with EQ – being emotionally intelligent. But there is a third body-wide intelligence, KQ, which is not even mapped yet – the intelligence within our bodies. This intelligence is not only poorly understood, it is being sapped further from our culture every day by the forces of somatic alienation. We have so little contact with the natural world these days – we walk in man-made shoes on artificial surfaces, we sit to work, we sit to learn, we sit to be entertained. Physical education as we know it is built on principles suited to an industrial age: repetition and competition prepare you for the assembly line and the economic race, but the 21st century – the information age – is going to require a new physical education. Even the old one is slipping away from schools daily, without being replaced, or rather it is replaced in the kids timetable with video games. Meanwhile, stress (really distress) is the most ubiquitous disease of the era. Stress is generated by a constant disparity between the world as we believe it to be in our inner pictures and the world as reported by our senses. Given that our bodies are designed and prepared for (and havent changed much since) the Neolithic Era of 70-15,000 years ago, those of us in an urbanized environment (and I count myself among those even though I live way out in the country) are in a constant state of stress. Managing this disparity between our animal insides and our acculturated veneer is perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century because our responses to war and the environment rest on this Catch 22: we cannot escape our animal selves, on the one hand, and our attempt to robs us of that innate intelligence. Rather than using religion to try to transcend the animal self, I propose that we mi