As an ultra-distance, world record holding cyclist, I am sometimes asked to talk about my experiences. Not from the perspective of a sports person ‘telling business people’ how to achieve high performance, but as a business person who took on a sporting challenge and showed athletes how to do it. It is a unique perspective. But I find myself struggling to get across the experience. For example, the awful sensation of waking up realising I fell asleep on the bike whilst pedalling and narrowly avoiding killing myself. Or, driven by the desire to win the race, realising I have made a terrible decision in an encounter with a bear. Or, in contrast, the intense, whole body sensation of emerging into a stunning sunrise above the clouds having ridden through the night embracing the new day. These experiences feel beyond description. But is that the case? And if it is? What am I missing in what others have experienced that I simply cannot understand fully?
To answer this question I explore three domains:
- Risk sports
- Emotional trauma
- Challenging leadership decisions
Let’s begin with getting to grips with what the question is really asking.
Mary’s Room
A seminal thought experiment known as "Mary’s Room" or the "Knowledge Argument," proposed by Frank Jackson illustrates the problem of understanding the limits of knowledge alone. Mary is a brilliant scientist who has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room. She has never seen color. However, she possesses access to every physical fact about the color red: she knows the specific wavelength of light, the exact photochemical reaction it triggers in the retina, the neural pathways through the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the excitation patterns in the visual cortex.1
The central question poses: When Mary exits the room and sees a ripe red tomato for the first time, does she learn something new? The overwhelming consensus in modern philosophy of mind and neuroscience is ‘yes’. She learns the ‘qualia’ of redness, i.e. the subjective, phenomenal experience of the color, which is distinct from the physical description of the mechanism. This highlights the hard limit of information transfer.
In professional contexts, we frequently commit the error of assuming that "physical facts" (data, case studies, theoretical frameworks) can substitute for "qualia" (the lived reality of execution). A leader reading about a layoff knows the "wavelength" of the event—the legal requirements, the script, the financial rationale. But until they sit across from the employee, they do not know the experience of the visceral tightening of the gut, the micro-expressions of betrayal, the palpable shift in the room's atmosphere. This gap is not a failure of imagination, but a structural feature of human cognition. We confuse the map (propositional knowledge) with the territory (experiential knowledge).
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED)
Compounding the gap between reading and doing is a cognitive bias known as the "Illusion of Explanatory Depth". Research by Rozenblit and Keil (2002) demonstrates that individuals consistently overestimate their understanding of complex phenomena. When asked to rate their understanding of how a bicycle works, participants rate their knowledge highly. However, when asked to draw the mechanism or explain the causal chain of gears and pedals, their confidence collapses as they realise their knowledge is skeletal and superficial.
This illusion is particularly potent in the age of digital information. Studies indicate that the mere act of searching for information online inflates an individual's sense of internal knowledge. People mistake the accessibility of data for the acquisition of wisdom. They possess the vocabulary (the semantic labels) but lack the causal, mechanistic, and somatic understanding that only emerges through interaction with the physical world.
Why Mary learns something new
When one reads a case study, the brain primarily engages the semantic memory system. This involves the storage of facts, concepts, and meanings, largely independent of the context in which they were acquired. This process relies heavily on the neocortex for storage and the hippocampus for declarative consolidation. It is abstract, symbolic, and "cold." This is propositional knowledge.
Lived experience recruits episodic and somatic memory systems. This is not just a recording of "what happened," but a storage of "how it felt," encoded through the amygdala (emotional tag), the insula (interoceptive state), and the somatosensory cortex (body state). This is experiential knowledge.
Risk sports
When a person reads about a rock climber scaling a cliff, or watches a video of the feat, the brain is not passive. It engages the Mirror Neuron System (MNS). Located primarily in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobule, these neurons fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe the same action.
This mechanism allows for "Embodied Simulation." The reader/observer simulates the action of climbing, reaching for a hold, stabilising the core, creating a faint neural echo of the event. This simulation provides a form of understanding that is superior to purely abstract data processing; it allows the reader to "grasp" the concept of climbing. The MNS is the biological basis for empathy and social learning, allowing us to intuit the goals and intentions of others by mapping their movements onto our own motor templates.
However, this simulation is neurologically inhibited and incomplete. While the premotor cortex plans the movements, the spinal cord is actively inhibited to prevent actual movement. Consequently, the simulation lacks the intense feedback loops that define the actual experience. It is a "closed loop" within the brain, devoid of the chaotic, high-fidelity data streaming from the peripheral nervous system during actual exertion.
The reader simulates the idea of the movement, but not the effort or the consequence.
For the climber on the wall, the neural reality is radically different. The experience is not a top-down simulation but a bottom-up sensory flood that fundamentally alters the brain's processing state. The climber relies on proprioception, the sense of body position in space. This is not merely "knowing" where the hand is; it is a rapid firing of muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs providing continuous, millisecond-level feedback to the cerebellum and somatosensory cortex.
Reading about a grip does not rewire the motor cortex; physically executing it under load does. The physical error signals generated when a grip fails or a muscle trembles, data points that are simply absent in the reader's experience.
The most significant gap between ‘reading’ and ‘doing’ in risk sports is interoception. This is the brain's perception of the body's internal state (heartbeat, breath, gut tension, temperature). In high-risk situations, the amygdala triggers the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. This results in a massive release of cortisol and catecholamines (adrenaline/noradrenaline). This is not a metaphor; it is a chemical bath that alters neural firing rates.
Studies on rock climbers show significant cortisol spikes during ascents that are absent in controls or during low-stakes practice. This hormonal shift alters neural processing speed, induces tunnel vision, and distorts time perception, qualia that the reader, sitting in a homeostatic state of safety, cannot access.
The climber must manage a heart rate that can spike to 160-180 bpm purely from psychological stress, distinct from metabolic demand. A study by Giles et al. (2020) found that experienced climbers show a "blunted" psychophysiological response compared to novices. They had lower peak cortisol concentrations and lower cognitive anxiety despite moving faster. This indicates that "knowing what it feels like" is a specific physiological adaptation. The novice might know (propositionally) to stay calm, but their biology betrays them. The expert is calm.
The state of flow, often described in risk sports, represents a specific neurobiological state characterised by "transient hypofrontality." This is a downregulation of the prefrontal cortex—the analytical, chattering, self-conscious part of the brain. The reader, in attempting to understand flow, engages their prefrontal cortex more to process the text and construct the mental image. Thus, the act of reading about flow is neurologically antithetical to the state of flow. The reader is analysing (hyperfrontal); the doer is being (hypofrontal). In flow, the brain releases a potent cocktail of neurochemicals: dopamine (reward/focus), norepinephrine (energy), endorphins (pain suppression), anandamide (lateral thinking), and serotonin (afterglow). Text cannot induce this specific neurochemical cascade.
Traumatic experiences
When we read a memoir about grief or a clinical paper on PTSD, or a victim of physical or sexual abuse, we utilise Broca’s Area (speech production) and Wernicke’s Area (language comprehension). We construct a linear narrative: Event A happened, causing Emotion B. We use "Cognitive Empathy", the ability to intellectually understand another's mental state (Theory of Mind). This process is "propositional." We parse the sentence "I was terrified" and map it to our semantic concept of terror. However, unless we have lived a similar experience, this mapping is symbolic. We are accessing a dictionary definition of terror, not the neural address of terror itself.
Trauma is not merely a "bad memory"; it is a distinct encoding failure. Seminal research by Bessel van der Kolk and colleagues (e.g., Rauch et al., 1996) utilised Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans to observe the brains of trauma survivors as they relived their experiences. The study produced a startling finding: when the subjects entered the flashback, the left inferior frontal cortex (Broca’s area), the region responsible for translating personal experience into language, significantly deactivated. The brain literally "loses its voice." Trauma is experienced as a non-verbal, visual, and somatic reality. It is "pre-linguistic." Because the experience itself shuts down the language centers, any subsequent written description is already a translation of a translation. The reader is engaging their language centers (Broca/Wernicke) to understand an event that specifically involved the shutdown of those centers. This creates an insurmountable ontological gap.
The reader is processing a story; the survivor is processing a sensory flashback.
During extreme trauma, the amygdala (threat detection) becomes hyperactive, while the hippocampus is suppressed by the flood of stress hormones (cortisol). As a consequence the experience is not encoded as a "story" (explicit memory) but as fragmented sensory imprints—a smell, a sound, a physical sensation (implicit memory).
The reader accesses the trauma through the reconstructed narrative (hippocampal function). They cannot access the raw, fragmented, timeless sensory shards that constitute the actual experience of PTSD. The reader perceives the event in "past tense"; the survivor relives it in "present tense" because the hippocampal timestamp failed.
Memory as a physical experience
The body retains the experience in ways the conscious mind may not. Trauma is often stored as chronic changes in the autonomic nervous system—a perpetually racing heart, a tightened gut, shallow breathing. This is the "Clinical Body Memory".
Elaine Scarry (1985) describes physical pain and trauma as "language destroying." The lived experience of profound grief or fear is an assault on the self-structure. Reading about it allows for a "safe" distance where the self remains intact. Living it often involves a temporary dissolution of the self-narrative.
A reader can learn the definition of "dissociation," but they cannot simulate the physiological shutdown (dorsal vagal collapse) where the body feels numb and the world feels unreal. The reader processes the concept of pain; the experiencer processes the nociception and affective distress of pain.
While "Perspective Taking" (imagining oneself in another's shoes) can activate some shared neural circuits, it often leads to "Empathic Distress" rather than true understanding if the observer cannot regulate their own arousal. However, the observer retains the ability to "step out" of the simulation. The trauma survivor is trapped in the loop.
What about leadership
In business education and "armchair" management, leadership challenges are often presented as intellectual puzzles. A "plant closure" is a logistical problem involving severance calculations, legal compliance (WARN Act), stakeholder communication plans, and supply chain rationalisation. This is the "Propositional" view of leadership. It relies on "cold" cognition—executive functions in the prefrontal cortex that manipulate abstract variables. Leaders who only "read" about these situations often suffer from the Illusion of Explanatory Depth; they believe they know how to fire 500 people because they understand the rationale for doing so. They mistake the logic of the decision for the reality of the execution.
When a leader actually executes a layoff, the "hot" cognition systems take over. The experience shifts from an intellectual puzzle to a bio-social crisis. Research indicates that the act of laying off employees or even the anticipation of it,elicits significant physiological stress responses in managers. A study assessing real-time physiological reactions found that the threat of layoffs and the act of delivering bad news causes significant spikes in Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Heart Rate in the deliverer. The manager is not just "stressed"; they are in a fight-or-flight state. Their body is reacting to the social threat of inflicting pain on tribe members, a deeply evolutionary violation. The "armchair expert" reading the case study remains at a resting heart rate, creating a fundamental disconnect in understanding the cost of the decision.
Emotional labour
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term Emotional Labor to describe the work of managing one's feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. Leaders during a crisis must often engage in "Surface Acting" (faking calm or confidence) or "Deep Acting" (attempting to actually change their internal state). This dissonance between felt emotion (anxiety, guilt) and displayed emotion (resolve) is metabolically expensive. It leads to Emotional Exhaustion and burnout. The reader of a leadership biography reads about the "stoic leader" but does not feel the crushing fatigue that comes from hours of suppressing the amygdala's panic signals while maintaining a smile.
Moral Injury in the C-Suite
Perhaps the most profound gap is the experience of moral injury. Originally studied in the military, this concept is now applied to business leaders who must make decisions that transgress their own deeply held moral beliefs (e.g., firing loyal employees to satisfy shareholder value).
Moral injury is not "burnout." It is a wound to the conscience that results in feelings of guilt, shame, and a loss of trust in oneself and one's organisation. It is a "soul wound". While military moral injury is often acute (a specific event), corporate moral injury can be "chronic", a slow accumulation of small betrayals of self that fundamentally alters the leader's identity. A case study can describe the "ethical dilemma," but it cannot replicate the lingering shame that keeps a leader awake at 3 AM.
Executive Isolation
The "lived experience" of leadership often involves a profound sense of isolation that cannot be conveyed in a case study. The leader bears the weight of the decision alone, a state that correlates with distinct psychological burdens different from general workplace stress. The "loneliness of command" is not a poetic metaphor but a social reality where the leader is separated from the social support systems (peers, friends) that normally buffer stress. Because a leader cannot "know" the experience of every employee, and a novice leader cannot "know" the burden of command until they feel it, the gap must be managed.
The Solution is ‘humble inquiry’. Edgar Schein’s concept of Humble Inquiry becomes the essential tool to bridge this gap. It is defined as "the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer." It requires "Here-and-now humility", an admission that the leader’s propositional knowledge is incomplete without the other person’s experiential data. It shifts the leader from a stance of "knowing" (which is often an illusion) to a stance of "learning".
Can we ever really know?
No.
This is the qualia barrier. We cannot override the biological fact that doing changes the brain in ways reading does not (synaptic plasticity, hormonal baselines, somatic markers).
But that’s not to say we can’t get closer to really knowing. Through high-fidelity simulations (e.g., flight simulators, role-playing with actors) and "deep acting" (method acting), we can approximate the physiological state, triggering some of the same neural cascades. Research shows that deep engagement in simulation can trigger "somatic markers" that guide future decision-making, bridging the gap partially.
The most professional response to this gap is ‘Intellectual Humility’, the metacognitive ability to recognise the limits of one's knowledge. It is the realisation that "I do not know what I do not know." It correlates with better learning, less dogmatism, and more thorough decision-making.
So what of all this?
You can never fully know what it feels like without doing it. The gap is not merely one of intensity, but of kind. Reading is a disembodied, semantic, and linear process. Living is an embodied, chemical, and chaotic process mediated by the whole organism.
Beware the Armchair expert. Acknowledge the "Illusion of Explanatory Depth." Credentials in theory do not equate to competence in crisis. The map is not the territory.
Value Somatic Data. In high-stakes fields, train to recognise interoceptive signals (gut feelings, heart rate) as valid data points, not just noise. The body is processing information faster than the cognitive mind.
To bridge the gap, use high-fidelity simulation that induces physiological arousal (e.g., stress inoculation training) rather than passive learning.
When leading those with experiences you lack, adopt the stance of the humble inquirer. Do not assume your map matches their territory. Ask about the reality of their experience, not just the wavelength.
In the end, Mary must leave the room. The redness of the apple cannot be calculated; it must be endured.
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