“A book that will change the very way we think.” - Daniel Pink (futurist, author of Drive)
"This book is a kind of manifesto on the nature of human thought." - Jaeseung Jeong (Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, KAIST)

Angus Fletcher, a cognitive scientist who has worked with America's elite special forces for many years,
Unlock the secrets of unique intelligence that surpasses AI!

We live in the most information-rich era in human history.
Find the information you want instantly with your smartphone, and use AI to analyze vast amounts of data to make the most rational choice.
But the more answers there are, the more blurred the direction becomes, and the more sophisticated the analysis, the more difficult the decision becomes.
The first to spot this contradiction were the US Army Special Forces.
Although the recruits had high IQs and excellent analytical skills, they hesitated and were easily swayed in their judgment when faced with real-world situations with many variables.
“They are good at solving math problems, but they can’t solve life problems,” one commander said.
As knowledge-centered education becomes more and more prevalent, it becomes increasingly apparent that it cannot overcome uncertainty and confusion.

Accordingly, cognitive scientist Professor Angus Fletcher, together with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, is developing training to restore 'Primal Intelligence', the original decision-making ability that humans have used since primitive times.
As a result, special forces soldiers demonstrated more agile and effective judgment in time-pressured, chaotic, and crisis situations.
The study has since demonstrated superior outcomes across innovation, resilience, decision-making, communication, and leadership in surgeons, fighter pilots, NASA astronauts, business leaders, teachers, and children.
For his contributions, Professor Angus Fletcher was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 2023 by the U.S. Army, with the distinction of “groundbreaking.”

Based on this empirical research, "Innate Intelligence" reveals for the first time how to awaken four essential human abilities in the AI ​​era: intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.
Now, reactivate the inherent intelligence that lies dormant within you.
Direction is more important than the answer.
Native intelligence will be your compass to navigate an uncertain world.

Our brains have non-random, illogical intelligence.
This intelligence evolved millions of years before the data-dependent circuitry of AI, giving our primitive ancestors the ability to survive in an unknown world.
At first, this ability was simply accepted as a way of life.
But as our ancestors reflected on themselves, they immediately began to use this intelligence to explore their own intelligence, and as a result, they discovered that intelligence has four distinct abilities: intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.

- Intuition recognizes the hidden rules of the world.
- Imagination imagines a future that does not exist.
- Emotions determine the path an individual will take in his or her development.
- Common sense allows us to make wise decisions in uncertainty.

These four unique abilities enable humans to act wisely even with little information.
Of course, this doesn't mean that humans always act wisely.
But the very fact that AI can "act intelligently" is what allows it to thrive even in situations where it fails. AI can reason logically and generate random ideas.
However, common sense and imagination are not mechanically generated, so when data is insufficient or scarce, they perform worse than the human brain.
So computer thinking fails in innovation, leadership, and most aspects of daily life.
These realistic limitations of logic show why today's education system is failing.
This is because they only train students to think like computers and do things that computers are good at, but they fail to cultivate the innate wisdom of humans that AI cannot imitate.
Ultimately, future generations could become second-rate algorithms with less practical intelligence than even primitive humans.
--- From "Prologue_Lost Nature, Awaken the Dormant Abilities of the Brain"


Spy hunters gave me this advice:
“If you can’t see the exception, treat ‘everything’ as an exception.”
“Treat everything as an exception?” I asked, just to be sure.
"you're right.
“Just like how I saw the world when I was young.”
I couldn't remember how I saw the world when I was young.
But I knew how my children saw the world.
I once took my six-month-old daughter out to the backyard for a picnic.
I prepared a sandwich and lemonade for myself, and also packed a jar of carrot puree and a plastic spoon for my daughter.
He opened the bottle and offered his daughter a spoonful.
The daughter was slurping down a carrot when she dropped her spoon on the grass.
“It’s okay!” I said cheerfully, taking a clean spoon out of the container.
“Dad prepared something else!”

The daughter looked at the new spoon in the carrot jar suspiciously.
Even though I held out the spoon, he didn't put anything in his mouth.
He just held the handle tightly in his chubby fist and looked at it carefully.
Then suddenly she burst into tears and whined.
I looked at my daughter in confusion.
Then slowly I realized.
My daughter was upset that I gave her a new spoon.
The old spoon was good.
And he thought I had tricked him and taken his spoon away.
To prove my innocence, I held up an old spoon and a new spoon side by side and showed that they were interchangeable.
But the proof failed.
It wasn't the same spoon for my daughter.
My daughter continued to whine until she got her spoon back.

At that moment, I thought my daughter was foolish.
But as I realized through the special forces agents, I was the fool.
I had forgotten the truth of life that even my daughter knows.
There is nothing in this world that is the same.
Every picnic, every person is unique.
Even mass-produced plastic products made in factories can have different meanings in certain situations.
How did my daughter know this? Did she learn it? Did she suddenly wake up one day, lying in her cradle? No.
My daughter learned through the power of her unconscious brain, her deep biological instincts.
It was tacit knowledge that was acquired naturally.
It was not a deliberate decision, but an instinctive act of thinking that everything I saw was special.
As time goes by, we lose this default setting.
As we age, we structure our routines around patterns and principles, prioritizing efficiency over discovery.
Ultimately, our brains have a default setting to 'assume we've seen it before'.
This means replacing slow exploration with quick judgment, the opposite of what we were born with.
--- From "Chapter 1 [Intuition] The Eye that Captures Exceptions"

At the request of the Army Special Forces, I developed an alternative to emotional intelligence.
This method, which is more biological than logical, is based on brain connections that link emotions and stories.
Because of that connection, when the narratives of movies and novels touch our emotions, we experience a variety of emotions that are difficult to express in words, such as joy or sadness.
For a long time I had this question.
Why are emotions and stories so intertwined in our minds? Then, I met a special agent named Lucy Gray.
He was working as a singleton.
Singleton is sent into enemy territory alone, without a team or support personnel.
Because they perform their duties alone, singletons must be thorough in their self-evaluation.
You need to know when your plan is successful and when you need to change it.
Confidence should not be too much or too little.
You must evaluate yourself fairly and clearly and accurately assess your abilities each time.
Otherwise, the operation may fail and you may lose your life.

“How do you do that?” asked Gray.
Since he is such a systematic person, I assumed he would check everything about himself, from his task completion rate to his heart rate.
“I do it all by feeling,” Gray replied immediately.
“You mean a feeling?”
“Yes, I feel that way.”
Gray's self-evaluation was emotional.
If things felt smooth, I continued, and if something felt wrong, I adjusted.
To Gray, emotions were like a mysterious sense that gave him a deeper understanding of reality.
But in studying Gray and other singletons, I found a biological explanation for their seemingly supernatural ability to self-evaluate.
Emotions tracked the narrative of their mental lives, signaling that they needed to change direction when the narrative strayed from its most effective form.
--- From "Chapter 3 [Emotions] A Compass That Never Loses Direction"

Like Van Gogh, Steve Jobs encountered Shakespeare outside the classroom.
I didn't read Shakespeare for a test, I read it out of pure curiosity.
So rather than feeling a sense of kinship with King Lear, I ended up having the eyes of a child.
The result of Jobs's gaze was what his Apple colleagues called a "reality distortion field."
Within that distortion field, Jobs put aside the old rules of life and pushed for exceptions.
Until that becomes the new rule.
There are countless examples of Jobs creating new rules.
There's also a story told by engineers in Cupertino.
In 2005, Jobs collaborated with Motorola to launch the Rocker.
The Rocker was a stick-shaped phone that could download 100 songs from iTunes.
But the rocker failed miserably.
It sold very little and underperformed expectations.

It was just an old-fashioned cell phone that played a limited music list with crappy earphones.
Looking at sales performance alone, this project should have been abandoned.
But Jobs did the opposite.
The focus was on the originality of the rocker.
While competitors scoffed at the idea of ​​a jukebox phone, Jobs pushed Apple forward, eventually creating the iPhone.
Isaacson saw Jobs as a tweaker because Jobs recognized the exceptional potential of certain devices.
He found in those devices a peculiarity similar to that seen in King Lear.
Just as Shakespeare pushed King Lear's individuality to its limit, Jobs rejected common compromises and made each device more unique, maximizing exceptionality.
--- From "Chapter 5 [Innovation] The Courage to Welcome the Unfamiliar"

You were a leader from birth.
I know this fact.
Because you know who you were in the beginning, hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Your tribe consisted of only about fifteen people, most of them children.
At thirty, you became the oldest elder.
When famine struck, you were tasked with leading your tribe through the winter cold to new hunting grounds.
You are now a descendant of countless generations who have passed this test.
So you too can pass this test.
But because he still doesn't know his own nature, he keeps failing.
All your life you have been taught that you need education.
The word 'education' comes from the Latin word meaning 'to lead'.
That means you are the person you should follow.
Education is a modern way.
Never in history have humans spent so much time in classrooms trying to pass school exams rather than survival tests.
School teaches you that your mind is full of irrational things.
Irrational thinking takes many forms, including emotions, prejudices, and ignorance of facts.
Since humans are born irrational, there is a limit to how much schools can do to correct you.
Yet, out of fear and shame, you comply with the correction, hoping that it will make you a better person.
But the more you want to be corrected, the deeper your distrust of your own nature becomes.
We give up our ability to evaluate ourselves and rely on institutional evaluations, losing our inner direction.

As you approach graduation, you hear that the highest purpose in human life is to become a leader.
These words resonate deep within your soul.
So you imagine yourself leading a team.
Maybe it's a company or a country.
But when it comes time to take the lead, you hesitate.
Because they are so ingrained in the habits of followers, it is awkward for them to lead as leaders.
If you are conscious of others and doubt yourself, those around you will notice it and will not trust your abilities.
You keep giving empty commands, but most of them are ignored.
Finally, you step back and are glad to be free from the constant torment of self-doubt.
And it's a relief to see the person who took your place shaken just as much.

--- From "Chapter 10 [Leadership] The Power to Believe in the Future"