Angus Fletcher argues human 'primal intelligence' outwits AI in war games and beyond

Angus Fletcher, a professor at The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative, argues in his new book that human beings possess a form of "primal intelligence"—a non‑logical, story‑based cognition that allows people to outthink artificial intelligence in many real‑world situations, including simulated warfare.

In Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know (Headline, £22, 304pp), Fletcher contends that modern definitions of intelligence overemphasize computational logic and that teaching people to "think like computers" trains them for tasks machines can already perform better. Instead, he says, human cleverness rests on four interlocking capacities—intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense—that AI systems lack.

Fletcher uses several examples to illustrate the gap he sees between machine and human reasoning. He describes a visit to a Pentagon testing site where a computer programmed with the strategies of history’s great generals and capable of making vast numbers of calculations per second repeatedly lost war‑game scenarios to human teams from the U.S. Army. According to Fletcher, the machine’s memorized tactics were logically exhaustive but predictable; human players prevailed by exercising initiative and unpredictable judgment.

The author links that unpredictability to what he calls "story‑thinking": the human tendency to weave events into narratives that incorporate motives, emotional stakes and plausible surprises. He argues that common sense is central to the skill set, noting that AI systems such as large language models can produce accurate calculations yet also generate falsehoods because they lack an internal mechanism to know "when they don’t know something." Fletcher writes that such systems "fabricate guilelessly, filling the gap in their knowledge by extrapolating from past trends," producing so‑called hallucinations.

Fletcher draws on a mix of literary, historical and technological examples to show how narrative thinking can produce insights machines miss. He cites the 19th‑century theorist Carl von Clausewitz to underscore the limits of purely logical plans, and he points to Shakespeare as an exemplar of narrative intelligence, suggesting that reading complex literature can help cultivate the four strands of primal intelligence. In the book, Fletcher lists figures he believes developed such capacities—Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, Maya Angelou and Vincent van Gogh—and presents exercises intended to train readers to strengthen their own story thinking.

The argument is both descriptive and prescriptive. Fletcher frames the book as corrective to educational approaches that prioritize algorithmic reasoning over imaginative and emotional faculties, and he sets out practical steps readers can take to develop intuition and common sense. He writes as a scholar of "story science," drawing on his affiliation with Project Narrative and positioning narrative cognition not as mere ornament but as a core element of practical intelligence.

Primal Intelligence situates itself within ongoing debates about the limits of artificial intelligence and the kinds of tasks for which human judgment remains essential. Fletcher’s account does not deny the power of computational tools for tasks grounded in mathematics and logic, but it asserts that in situations requiring initiative, moral appraisal, or imaginative projection, humans retain a distinct advantage. The book is published by Headline and is available in the United Kingdom at the listed price and page count.