Artificial or natural intelligence, you choose

Jefferson Breland

(6/2025) I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover that I did not invent the phrase, "Natural Intelligence." I really thought I was onto something.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my dining room table musing about the world, the meaning of life, and what to have for breakfast.

In one of my online newspapers, I saw a headline about Artificial Intelligence (AI). I thought, "If there is AI, there must be "Natural Intelligence."

It occurred to me this natural intelligence is the very same thing I have been rambling about in the pages of this newspaper and in my treatment room with my patients for years. Our bodies are wise and our symptoms are our teachers. Our bodies provide real-time feedback on the state of our being using our natural intelligence.

This is the same natural intelligence that has allowed the human race to survive for approximately 300,000 years. (Google’s AI gave me this statistic)

I am admittedly a person of old fashioned tastes.

I wear wrist watches without batteries that just tell the time. I have and sometimes use a typewriter from the 1940’s. I have film cameras and prefer black and white film. I have a collection of fountain pens I use. I shave with a single-edged safety razor. I also use a shaving brush and shaving soap. I read books, actual books made of paper. I practice one of the world’s oldest continually practiced forms of medicine.

It is, therefore, not a stretch to guess I have a few reservations of this newfangled technology named of AI.

Curiously, AI is not newfangled. According to Brittanica.com, the fundamental idea of a machine that could search, learn, analyze text and images, solve problems, make choices in a manner similar to the human brain was first described in 1935 by the British mathematician and logician, Alan Turing.

Turing’s ideas were expanded during the 1940s and were the foundation of modern computers and computer science as well as being instrumental in WWII code breaking efforts.

The specific term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by a couple of nerds according to Wikipedia.

What’s newfangled is its prevalence. AI is here. It’s everywhere. There is no getting around it. AI is with us for at least the next few weeks.

In healthcare, AI is being used for a wide variety of purposes. According to the AI-generated Google search, these include - diagnostic assistance, drug research, personalized treatment plans, chatbots and virtual health assistants, robot-assisted surgery, medical education, clinical trials, and NLP (Natural Language Processing) which allows computers to process huge amounts of data and create reports.

In some of these instances, there is clear evidence that the analytical capabilities of AI surpass human abilities.

In the journal, Bioengineering, an article entitled, "How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping Medical Imaging Technology: A Survey of Innovations and Applications," discusses one such example.

It states, "One of the key advantages of AI in medical imaging is its ability to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of disease diagnosis. Through this process, AI can assist healthcare professionals in detecting abnormalities, identifying specific structures, and predicting disease outcomes."

There is no doubt that the massive computing power of AI provides a huge benefit in our fast-paced medical system.

And, the AI is only as good as the data it analyzes.

AI is also subject to the laws of "The Butterfly Effect." This theory states that a small change in the data can lead to catastrophic shifts in the outcome of a computation. This was first observed by a research meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Edward Lorenz in 1961.

Lorenz ran mathematical computer simulations of weather. He discovered subtle changes in the initial data of his simulations would lead to dramatic differences in weather predictions over time. The longer the program ran, the bigger the differences. This is still the case in weather reports. There are so many variables, it is impossible to make completely accurate predictions.

So, AI is not foolproof. The Google "AI Overview" even makes a disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes."

It seems all technology, however advanced, shares with its human creators and counterparts the humbling ability to get stuff wrong.

We "Ooh and aah," about the latest technologies forgetting that we created and accomplished amazing things with only pencil and paper and our human natural intelligence.

Einstein used his Natural Intelligence, his imagination to create the Theory of Relativity. He did the calculations for it using only pencil and paper, mathematical tables, and a slide rule.

Now you may say, "I’m no Einstein," and you would be correct. There was and will only ever be one Albert Einstein who created the Theory of Relativity in the history of the Universe.

The same can be said of you. You are the only you that ever was, is, or will be in the history of the Universe.

And both, you and Einstein, share the same Natural Intelligence of the human body. We share the same natural intelligence that has allowed the human race to survive hundreds of millennia.

This intelligence is the wisdom stored in our DNA passed down through the generations. Remember DNA is only a probability. For the most part, it is not an inevitability. The DNA we have inherited has both the potential for disease or health. Generally speaking, our DNA will express itself based on how we live our life.

This wisdom is waiting for us to use it to stay healthy so that we can live to pass on this wisdom through our children and our children’s children. This wisdom is expressed by what our bodies feel. It is expressed in our symptoms both comfortable and not comfortable.

We rarely think of feeling good as a symptom. It is an indication that we are doing something which helps our body, mind, and spirit.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a symptom as: "a physical or mental feature which is regarded as indicating a condition of disease, particularly such a feature that is apparent to the patient."

Why does it only have to be a "condition of a disease?" It is simply an indication of the state of our being. It is also how we know we are doing well, are happy.

Sadly, in our modern times we often define our health by lack of or degree of disease or pain. We quantify our health by diagnoses or the number of medications we are on. What if we defined health by the quality of our life, not by the lack of quality?

The more we can learn to trust our symptoms, our body’s wisdom, the less we will have to rely on someone else or a technology to tell us what our bodies already know.

Great, this is all well and good. How do we achieve this?

We do it by reconnecting to our Natural Intelligence.

Intelligence has a bad rap. We think it has to do with being "smart." At some point in human history someone defined that intelligence had to do something with standardized knowledge and taking tests. I disagree.

Intelligence simply refers to our ability to understand. We all understand things slightly differently in our own unique way.

The OED defines natural as "Existing in, determined by, conforming to, or based on nature… existing or present by nature; inherent in the very constitution of a person or thing; innate; not acquired or assumed."

I love this. Combine the definitions of natural and intelligence and it simply means understanding that which is already present in us. It is already here.

There is no studying. No testing.

Natural intelligence is simply waking up and paying attention to what we experience in our bodies.

The body never lies. Our body always tell the truth whether we like it or not. What we do with this truth is entirely up to us. 

Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.

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