Your Body Knew Before You Did

Nobody teaches you to ride a bike by explaining it. You can be told about balance, about the relationship between speed and stability, about how to lean into a turn. You can nod along and understand every sentence. And then you get on the bike and fall off anyway.

At some point, something shifts. Not in your head. In your body. The bike stops being a problem you are solving and becomes something you simply do. And here is the strange part: once you can do it, you cannot fully explain how. Ask a skilled cyclist to describe in words what they do to stay upright, and they will hesitate. The knowledge is real. It is just not the kind of knowledge that fits into sentences.

This is not a trivial observation. It points to something deep about the nature of knowledge itself, something that Western philosophy spent a very long time ignoring.

It's like riding a bicycle ...

Two kinds of knowing

The philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, drew a distinction in 1949 that remains one of the most useful in epistemology. He separated what he called "knowing that" from "knowing how". Knowing that it rains in London. Knowing how to swim. The first kind is propositional. It can be stated, written down, transmitted in language. The second kind is procedural. It lives in the doing.

Ryle's point was that these are genuinely different categories of knowledge, not just different stages of the same thing. A person can have enormous amounts of propositional knowledge about a skill and be unable to perform it. A person can perform a skill with extraordinary fluency and be unable to articulate what they know. The knowledge is real in both cases. It is simply organised differently.

The philosopher, Michael Polanyi, deepened this with his concept of tacit knowledge. "We know more than we can tell," he wrote, and he meant it literally. A doctor who can diagnose a patient by walking into the room, before reviewing a single test result, is drawing on something that resists translation into explicit rules. A master craftsperson who can feel when the clay is right, when the joint is true, when the timber will hold, is not applying a formula. They are accessing a form of understanding that has been absorbed into the body and the practised hand.

The body is not a vehicle for the mind. It is a site of knowing in its own right.

What happens in the body

There is a neurological story here, and it matters. When you first learn a skill, the prefrontal cortex is heavily involved. You are consciously monitoring each step, allocating attention, checking and correcting. It is effortful and slow. Over time, as the skill becomes practised, it migrates. The basal ganglia take over. The cerebellum. The motor cortex. Processing moves from the deliberate to the automatic, from the verbal to the non-verbal, from the foreground to somewhere that does not quite have a name in ordinary language.

This is not the knowledge becoming less. It is the knowledge becoming more deeply integrated. The expert tennis player does not consciously calculate the trajectory of the ball. They move before the calculation would be complete. The jazz musician does not think about chord voicings mid-improvisation. Something else is happening, something faster and more integrated than conscious reasoning.

Neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, spent decades showing that the body is not separate from cognition, but constitutive of it. Emotion and feeling are not disruptions to rational thought. They are part of the substrate on which thinking runs. Cut someone off from their bodily signals and their decision-making deteriorates, even if their verbal reasoning remains intact. The Cartesian picture of a mind floating free of flesh was never accurate. It was always a convenient fiction.

Where expertise becomes instinct

The psychologist, Gary Klein, spent years studying expert decision-making in high-stakes environments: fire commanders, military officers, intensive care nurses. He expected to find people running through pros and cons, evaluating options. What he found was something different. Experts, under pressure, do not compare options. They pattern-match. A fire commander walks into a burning building and knows, without being able to say why, that something is wrong. They order an evacuation. The floor collapses where the crew had been standing.

Klein called this recognition-primed decision-making. The expert has accumulated so many thousands of hours of experience that situations present themselves pre-interpreted. They do not see raw data and then reason toward a conclusion. They see meaning directly. The situation speaks to them.

This is very close to what we ordinarily call instinct. Not the instinct of the infant, which is biological and unlearned. But a cultivated instinct: experience so thoroughly absorbed that it no longer requires conscious mediation.

At a certain depth of expertise, the distinction between knowing and perceiving begins to dissolve.

The chess grandmaster does not calculate every possible move. They look at the board and feel which configurations are alive and which are dead. The sommelier does not run a chemical analysis. They taste and know. The experienced midwife does not consult a checklist. She reads the room, the breathing, the quality of silence, and acts.

The epistemological question

So is embodied knowledge epistemologically different from propositional knowledge? I think the answer is yes, and I think the implications are larger than they first appear.

Propositional knowledge is third-person knowledge. It can in principle be stated, shared, verified, challenged. It is the kind of knowledge that fits into peer-reviewed papers and examination answers. It is enormously powerful. It is also incomplete.

Embodied knowledge is first-person knowledge. It cannot be fully transferred by description. It requires participation. It is acquired through the body, through repetition, through being in the world in a particular way over time. And it carries a kind of certainty that propositional knowledge sometimes lacks, not because it is more accurate, but because it is more direct. You do not believe you can ride a bike. You simply ride it.

The philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the body is our primary mode of being in the world. Before we theorise about experience, before we form beliefs and propositions, we are already oriented, already skilled, already capable of navigating space and time through habits laid down in flesh. Propositional knowledge, on his view, is a secondary construction built on top of this deeper bodily engagement. We abstract from lived experience. We do not begin with abstraction.

Why this matters beyond philosophy

This is not merely an academic question. How we answer it shapes what we treat as legitimate knowledge in medicine, in education, in the study of anomalous experience.

A healthcare system that only trusts what can be written in a protocol will systematically undervalue the diagnostic wisdom of the experienced clinician. An education system that only tests propositional recall will systematically undervalue the student who knows how to think but cannot reproduce the right formula under pressure. A scientific framework that only credits third-person verifiable evidence will systematically ignore the first-person knowing that practitioners in many traditions report.

When I give a reading, I am not applying rules I could write down. I am doing something that feels much closer to what Klein's fire commanders do, or what Polanyi's experts do. I am drawing on a form of knowledge that is real, that has been cultivated deliberately over decades, and that does not translate neatly into propositional form. The fact that it resists that translation does not make it less than knowledge. It may make it a different kind.

The question worth asking

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm.

Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows. The cultivated practitioner knows. The expert whose knowledge has become invisible, even to herself, knows.

The question is not whether embodied knowledge is real. The question is why we keep pretending it isn't, and what it costs us when we do.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and a shamanic practitioner. She writes about consciousness, knowledge, and the edges of what we permit ourselves to take seriously. Reach her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.