BY LEONORA OPPENHEIM
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Leonora Oppenheim is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, performance, walking, and photography. Using her own body as a research tool, she explores how we humans connect and disconnect from ourselves in the landscape. She is a lecturer in design at Bath Spa University, teaches The Feldenkrais Method and Compassionate Self Healing.
BY LEONORA OPPENHEIM
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Leonora Oppenheim is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, performance, walking, and photography. Using her own body as a research tool, she explores how we humans connect and disconnect from ourselves in the landscape. She is a lecturer in design at Bath Spa University, teaches The Feldenkrais Method and Compassionate Self Healing.
BY LEONORA OPPENHEIM
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Leonora Oppenheim is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, performance, walking, and photography. Using her own body as a research tool, she explores how we humans connect and disconnect from ourselves in the landscape. She is a lecturer in design at Bath Spa University, teaches The Feldenkrais Method and Compassionate Self Healing.
BY LEONORA OPPENHEIM
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Why do we outsource our authority to AI when our body has the answers?
Do you know what you’re watching?
The kid is super cute, all rosy cheeks, curls, and dimples. She’s sweet and energised, singing along to a traditional song. “You are my SUNshine, only SUNshiiiiiiiiiiiiine. You make me happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy when skies are greeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.”
She’s really giving the lyrics some oomph. And she’s funny with how she puts extra emphasis on the sounds she enjoys, like sunshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeeee, a mini American Liam Gallagher, if you will.
This is just a few seconds of seemingly inconsequential joy appearing on my Instagram feed. The adults off screen, who are presumably filming, are laughing along lovingly in adoration of the child’s expression.
But something in my belly throws up a question mark. Hold on, do I feel it in my belly? Or is it the slight constriction in my chest?
Nevertheless, the question mark floats to the forefront of my attention as I scroll onwards. What was I watching? Was that a real child? I pause. I scroll back. The toddler starts the song again. I smile again, but I’m uneasy. I click to open the comments and it unravels immediately.
You all know it's AI, right?
“Yall know it’s AI right?”, “She has Shirley Temple’s spirit”, “There are kids that exist that are this beautiful, I wish this wasn’t AI.”, “I saw the original baby singing this weeks ago (eyeroll emoji).” And on, and on, the comments tumble in a downward spiral alternating between “She’s adorable!” and “Don’t be an idiot, this is fake, stop believing AI”.
The question mark rising inside me like a helium balloon takes on new dimensions. Why did I think this was an actual child? How can I tell? What didn’t I see? I start the video again, whilst a background part of my brain registers the more I watch this video the more my algorithm is influenced to bring up AI generated singing babies.
No matter, I want to check the details. On review this is what stands out: the car is pristine, the child’s outfit is spotless and uncreased, the cheeks are so rosy it looks like blusher on her young skin, her eyes sparkle like an animation. I check other more obvious areas. Does she have the right number of fingers or has the technology ironed out that particular glitch?
What really gives it away? In the end, I decide everything I’ve listed above is viable. I suppose a child could be this pretty, this perfectly dressed, this charming, and this could be a brand new car. But, in the end, I know it’s AI because of the colour and the image resolution. These are very subtle qualities that are difficult to describe.
Do I even have the language for this type of airbrushed imagery with the strangely even light source and perfectly contoured features, with no discernible texture, that makes me feel a little queasy. I’ve entered the uncanny valley of perception where everything seems so perfect that it must, in fact, be artificial.
(here’s a helpful explainer of the uncanny valley in an essay by Jason Frowley PhD)
This is the age of discernment
But hold on, what just happened? If you scan back a few paragraphs, you’ll see I wrote that I felt something in my belly (or was it my chest?) and so I stopped scrolling to the next video. Because my body already knew. Everything I did after that was visual analysis.
We have an inbuilt system of discernment in our bodies. How do you know when you’re hungry, thirsty, tired? Your body tells you. Your senses tell you. This is the baseline signalling system that most humans are tuned into. But there are many other layers of information, in what’s
referred to as the ‘subtle body’, that most of us override every day.
Rather than go into the ethics of cute singing AI generated children on the internet, what I want to focus on is the knowing that we have inside. And the ways in which we are culturally conditioned to ignore our own sensory intelligence. We’re currently witnessing a mass outsourcing of our inner authority to AI platforms.
We’re hearing stories of the ways in which people are using Chat GPT (other LLMs are available) to plan their work day, their personal schedules, their diets, their exercise regime, even using it as a therapist. As a lecturer at a university, I can write a whole other essay about the ways in which my students are outsourcing their thinking and writing to AI.
I’m not interested in blaming AI for the ills of the world - the astronomical environmental impact being the major caveat - Andrea Jones-Rooy writes about this here.
I’m generally a believer that technology, like all new media, is a neutral resource that can been used for good and bad. However, it’s becoming clear that people en masse are deferring their own expertise and lived experience to a machine that is essentially scraping the internet for solutions.
We’re using AI to control our bodies without listening to our actual bodies. What we really need, in this age of information overflow, is training in discernment and a clearer understanding of personal capacity, giving us greater resilience against burnout.
Swimming in a post-truth soup
It’s time to tune in to our own sensory intelligence systems. Why? Because we’re living in a time of not knowing what’s true. We have a constant melding of the real and the artificial that we’re bombarded with everyday. This is compounded by the confabulations that are flooding our timelines from politicians, newsreaders, and cultural commentators.
Fantastical stories and images appear everywhere, in every category of life, everything seems to be blending together into the daily question of... ‘What am I looking at now?” This means we’re living in an age where tuning into ourselves and our inner authority is the most empowering act.
Timothy Morton, the literary scholar and author of Hyperobjects, has started a series on his Substack about his experiences of precognition. He writes about the way our brains are “smeared out into the future”. Truth, fiction, lies, propaganda - it’s all smeared together and I would argue that one of the only places where we can find the truth of our lived reality is in our own bodies.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where cultural media was understood to have categories of real and not real. We would sit in a movie theatre and enjoy the story (clear delineation - this is not real). We would watch the news (clear delineation - this is
real). We would look at a photograph and believe it documented something in the physical world. We would look at a painting and, whether it was figurative or abstract, understand that it represented the vision of the artist, something from their imagination.
Today, I am frankly unclear.
As a caveat, it’s important to say the above paragraph is framed in naive terms. I know news reporting has a bias, that photography is an interpretive medium, and the camera is not the arbiter of truth (airbrushing and editing has been around well before Photoshop was invented). However, with all that said, we’re definitely living in new territory where my brain is now hyper-alert to everything I’m consuming.
It feels like I’ve had an interpretation software upgrade, against my will. In this mushy, melded, smeary, boundaryless soup of audacious invention, outright lies, and content production, my new filter is constantly asking, “Is this real?”
So how can tuning into the physical self and our sensory intelligence help us understand what’s going on?
Moving from observed reality to felt reality
As an artist, trained first as an art historian, then as a designer, I’ve been educated in interpreting visual language. I know how to read an image. I am sensitive to symbolism, semiotics, and visual analogies. I understand painting techniques, photography styles, film genres. But this is all cognitive training. Like being a visual polyglot. Useful in this day and age, but mostly brain work. More recently, I’ve trained in movement and somatics - spending the
last ten years working on my instinct and intuition muscles. What I’ve learned about physical awareness and sensory intelligence is that it works faster than the brain. The body knows before the brains knows.
The body is precognitive, and I believe our bodies are better equipped to help us navigate contemporary confusion than our minds.
This is why I used the example of scrolling through Instagram at the top of this essay. A funny feeling (highly technical term) went through my body as I watched the video of the cute child singing “You are my sunshine”, but I was already onto the next piece of content before my brain caught up with my queasiness.
One might argue, well so what? Spend less time on Instagram, you fool. And while this is a fair riposte, I want you to extrapolate this example a little further. In the depths of wading through AI slop and post-truth soup, humans are experiencing record levels of anxiety, stress, and burn out.
As Brie-Anna Willey writes here, “It’s a systems design problem for the human nervous system.”
The body of the planet and the human body are simultaneously under severe pressure. This is not a coincidence. Things are heating up. AI is soaking up enormous amounts of resources and enormous amounts of our attention. We’re running dry. As the planet sends out signals of climate weirding, our bodies are sending out signals of serious overwhelm.
What is real? Is this even a useful question any more?
A friend of mine recently recounted a story about a child watching a video (of what she did not relate). The parent looked over their shoulder at the screen and asked, “Is that AI? How can you tell if it’s real or not?” And the child responded, “Why does it matter?”
When I heard this, something cognitively fell out of me and clanged on the floor. Perhaps it was my jaw. Cue existential meltdown. Are we at the stage now, where we don’t mind anymore whether we understand what we’re watching? Obviously a small child watching a screen isn’t equipped yet to think about the repercussions of their statement, “Why does it matter?”
The reason I do think it matters, in this post-truth age, is not necessarily because I’m on an objective moral quest for THE TRUTH. The older I get the more I believe that truth is mostly subjective, or at least time-sensitive. (See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on The Danger of the Single Story.)
No, why I think it really matters is because our nervous systems are completely dysregulated and many many people cannot ground themselves in their own reality. I see it as a kind of inescapable loop of behaviour. As reality begins to distort and dissolve through our screens, where we’re spending so much of our time, we lose our bearings, we feel disoriented. Where is the anchor? Why do I feel this rising panic? Why is my breath so shallow? How can I distract myself?
Oh I know, I’ll go back to the screen.
I do this, you do this, we all do this.
I’m not interested in purity flexing. One finger pointing at you, four fingers ummm... I mean... three fingers are pointing back at me! (you get pop reference points for knowing this funny Brad Pitt scene in Bullet Train.)
While I acknowledge my own poor digital hygiene (what a 21st Century term), I have to point out that I’ve gathered the tools to balance out the disorienting impacts of the entertainment escapism industrial complex.I know how to ground myself and regulate my nervous system. This has been the majority of my work over the last ten years. And I want to let you know, it is possible to understand what’s true for you, to develop an unshakable self trust, and to find safety and calm within yourself.
Sensing our own thinking
My job as a somatic practitioner is to help people learn how to feel safe in their bodies. I want people to understand that by ignoring themselves in profound ways they are overlooking the knowledge they already have in favour of enormous amounts of information they don’t need.
As we constantly outsource our inner authority, how can we trust our feelings? How do we know what our feelings signify, if we don’t understand them for ourselves.
It has been written recently that we’re losing the capacity for metacognition. This is the ability to connect a variety of data points and synthesise an understanding, from the ways in which these points relate, to interpret our own thinking. As neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains succinctly here.
While some are concerned about an atrophying of the human brain, I’m much more concerned with the loss of embodied knowledge and sensory intelligence. It’s stopping us from being able to care, at a deep level, for ourselves.
We can access, diagnose, and remedy our emotional state through the body. Let’s call it the original AI. Sensing ourselves, with a combination of interoception and intuition, is a way of accessing all the answers that are relevant to your current condition.
If we cannot read ourselves through our sensory intelligence, then how do we know when we’re exhausted, or burning out? Do you know what the physical signal is in your body for overwhelm? Do you know when you need to put down the phone, without an app that blocks you at an arbitrary time limit?
We’re trained to ignore physical sensations, the heart rate, the sensorial signals. The tightening, the expanding, the softening, the tensing, the inflammation, the congestion. The flight, the fight, the freeze. Push harder, go longer, hustle more!
The body is not a vehicle for your brain, it is not a subsidiary carcass. The body is the whole, the brain operates throughout your physical form, constantly communicating what you need to know. “You feel feelings in real time,” as the comedian Kanan Gill observed in a funny stand-up bit, about the all-too-human habit of analysing what we already know to be true.
The question is, can you recognise your own feelings? Are you sensing your own thinking?
If you’re wondering at the end of this essay, yeah but how? Then please get in touch.
As a starting point, you can listen to my Somatic Audio Service, one of these Friday podcasts, which are 20 min lessons on sensing the body for greater ease in movement and calming the nervous system. The next essay will be about the nervous system and how it controls so much of what we feel and experience in our everyday lives. I’ll leave you with another short essay from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, this one is about how reading regulates the nervous system.
On the imagery in this essay
Disclaimer: I did not use AI to help me write this essay, as you can probably tell by its inefficient lengthiness, but AI was definitely used in the creation of these illustrations. These images were generated and regenerated (again and again) through Midjourney by Sum-Sum Tse-Cappi, my wonderful graphics-whizz colleague at Bath Spa University. As a starting point she used an original digital photo of me wearing a VR headset. I feel these images are emblematic of the ways in which we are living disembodied lives in between realities.
Right now, our systems are glitching.
Leonora Oppenheim is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, performance, walking, and photography. Using her own body as a research tool, she explores how we humans connect and disconnect from ourselves in the landscape. She is a lecturer in design at Bath Spa University, teaches The Feldenkrais Method and Compassionate Self Healing.