Patty Van Cappellan, social scientist at Duke University, studies movement synchrony—the phenomenon of moving together with others. Motor synchrony can be found in many settings, but paradigmatically lies at the heart of ritual and religious practice. In worship, we stand together, kneel together, sing together, pray together, dance together. And, it turns out, movement synchrony has positive social benefits: it can make us feel more connected to and in harmony with each other. The upshot: many religious practices have a measurable prosocial psychological benefit.

David Desteno, psychologist at Northeastern University, likewise studies the psychological and social benefits of religious practice. He provides the thoroughly embodied example of the Jewish mourning practice of sitting shiva:

They sit on low stools or on the ground, and . . . if you’re sitting on the floor or on very low stools, it’s uncomfortable for your knees and back. The mourners do this, and they get up to meet people to come in. So what you’re doing is having frequent onsets and offsets of minor discomfort. There’s new neuroscience work that shows increases in onsets and offsets of minor discomfort . . . reduced grief and rumination.

Again, our embodied religious practices provide a measurable psychological benefit.

The reductivist’s way of understanding these phenomena: that embodied religious practices express more disembodied forms of intelligence. That sitting shiva expresses and helps alleviate the kind of higher-level grief that can be captured by a psychological battery. That singing together benefits us because of the prosocial and measurable feelings it produces.

The expansive way of understanding these phenomena is that embodied religious practices are forms of intelligence in their own right. That singing and dancing and kneeling enact rather than merely express social cohesion. That sitting shiva is itself an expression of grief, not merely a psychological hack for dealing with it. That embodied forms of religious intelligence evolved with and were honed alongside the more cognitive forms of religious intelligence—cosmological arguments and hermeneutics and theology.

It shouldn’t be surprising that we can look to religious practices to resist reductive views of intelligence in favor of more expansive views. In religious practices, and especially in liturgical religious practices, we see our cognitive, embodied, and emotional intelligence coming together. We recite creeds and hear sermons. We stand and kneel and bow and raise hands. We sing in unison and stand transfixed in the presence of something greater than ourselves.

Reductive approaches to intelligence can handle the creed, but stand flummoxed in the face of kneeling. Or, more accurately, can understand kneeling only in terms of the psychological benefits it confers. But anyone who practices a religion will tell you that the reductivist’s approach misses the point. That intelligent engagement with liturgy is cognitive and emotional, embodied and abstract. Altogether and all at the same time. That liturgy expresses and hones intelligence. And that the various facets of intelligence cannot be readily separated from each other, except when considered at a distance.

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It shouldn’t be surprising that we are tempted to a reductivist view of intelligence. This view is infused throughout twenty-first-century life. It underlies the widespread acceptance of “artificial intelligence” as a proper designator for Chat-GPT and Claude and Gemini. An AI, after all, may excel at analyzing databases and producing prose. But it cannot go in for a layup or run a scale on a guitar. Or hold a pencil in its mouth. Or flinch in reaction to a hot stove. Seen through a reductivist’s approach, after all, we could describe these limitations as simply being limitations of an AI’s ability—AI cannot do all the things that humans can do—and the functions of an AI therefore being genuine achievements of intelligence. Seen through a more expansive approach to intelligence, however, these limitations are precisely limitations of intelligence: an AI mimics merely some aspects of human intelligence (predictably, the quantifiable, computational ones), but fails miserably at replicating others.

The reductivist approach to intelligence likewise underlies the ways we carve up society, using the so-called intelligence quotient (IQ) to categorize and rank intellects. The fact that an adept woodworker or professional athlete can have a “low IQ” should (but doesn’t) strike us as ridiculous, given the intelligence manifested by both. Indeed, this reductive evaluation grows from the same set of assumptions with which we began—the idea that an athlete or musician can fail at a task by “overthinking” it, the implication being, of course, that mastering one’s body is not itself a kind of thinking.

Our reductive approach to intelligence—the idea that I should prioritize quantifiable forms of intelligence over all others; the idea that human intelligence can be understood from a narrow, empirically-polite view—also leads us to conclude that our bodies are things to be mastered rather than understood and lived in. That I should monitor my sleep rather than learn to recognize the signs that I am well-rested. That I should focus on tracking steps rather than taking hikes. That I should count calories rather than eat meals with friends.

And this distorted view of intelligence, most perniciously, underlies the widespread idea that any kind of diminished cognitive ability—whether conferred by disorder or trauma or developmental stage—somehow translates to a diminished humanity.