Daphne Garrido
Independent Researcher
Preprint · Version 1.0 · September 2026 - Available on Zenodo
Status: Not peer reviewed. Narrative critical review and mechanistic synthesis.
Series: The Human Embodied Intelligence Research Program · Preprint 2
Mechanisms of Full Body Intelligence.pdf
Full-body intelligence has been proposed as an organism-level construct in which adaptive cognition and self-regulation depend partly on closed-loop interactions among neural, visceral, autonomic, sensorimotor, neuroendocrine, and environmental processes.
The present paper reviews four mechanistic literatures most relevant to that proposal:
The goal is not to claim that these literatures already establish a unified faculty of full-body intelligence. Rather, it is to determine what each mechanism can legitimately contribute to a testable integrative framework, what remains theoretical or methodologically unsettled, and which stronger interpretations should be rejected or deferred.
Interoception provides established pathways by which internal physiological signals are sensed and integrated, but its measurement is multidimensional and single-task indices are insufficient. Predictive processing, active inference, EPIC, and allostasis provide formal accounts of how internal and external signals may be integrated for regulation, while remaining theoretical frameworks whose latent quantities require careful operationalization.
Neurovisceral integration and slow-paced cardiorespiratory resonance provide measurable examples of brain-body coupling, but heart-rate variability and physiological coherence are context-sensitive physiological phenomena rather than general intelligence scores.
Grounded-cognition research supports modality-specific and multimodal recruitment during conceptual processing, whereas strong claims that primary motor cortex is obligatorily necessary for language comprehension are not currently justified.