Manoush Zomorodi

As AI removes more friction from how we work, learn, and create, a more consequential question is emerging: What conditions help human beings think, decide, create, and adapt at their best?

We have spent decades designing work for speed, convenience, and cognitive output, while leaving our mental and physical health behind.

Award-winning journalist Manoush Zomorodi has spent more than a decade investigating the unintended consequences of technology by turning her audiences into participants. Through large-scale public experiments including Bored and Brilliant, The Privacy Paradox, and Body Electric, tens of thousands of people have tested how technology affects attention, creativity, behavior, and physical health.

Her latest project, Body Electric, grew from a collaboration with Columbia University Medical School involving more than 20,000 participants, produced peer-reviewed research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, and became a book.

What Manoush discovered challenges a basic assumption about human performance: Our best thinking doesn’t just happen from the neck up.

Movement, recovery, physical state, attention, and human connection shape the abilities organizations and institutions increasingly value most—judgment, creativity, adaptability, focus, resilience, and connection. When those biological systems are chronically overloaded, the consequences show up not only in health and burnout, but in how well we learn, collaborate, make decisions, and generate new ideas.

Now, as AI promises to remove even more physical and cognitive friction from our days, Manoush introduces Full Body Intelligence: a framework for understanding what human beings need in order to perform at their best—and how to use technology without weakening the capacities we most want to strengthen.

Drawing on science, journalism, storytelling, and live audience participation, Manoush explores what we should automate, what human capacities are worth protecting, and how workplaces, schools, and institutions can create better conditions for human intelligence to flourish.