I learned a startling fact 30 years ago when I was reading The User Illusion, by Tor Norretranders, that consciousness is limited to processing about 20 bits/second (here’s my summary from that 1995 read). And yet we perceive about 12 million bits/second from our senses (10 million from our vision alone). How could we possibly be conscious of what’s going on around us? His answer: “symbols are the Trojan horses by which we smuggle bits into our consciousness.”

In other words, our conscious brain relies on an unconscious brain / nervous system / body that filters through the deluge of sensory input based on previous experience to look for what is “relevant” to our current conscious thinking, then condenses what remains into abstractions (aka symbols) that are simple enough that our conscious brain can process them despite its pitifully limited capacity. Our so-called thinking depends on what Bruno Latour would call “black boxes” of abstraction.

Most of what is called “thinking” these days is improving the processing of the conscious brain. This is what people (mostly men) like Shane Parrish and his Great Mental Models or Ryan Holiday and his Daily Stoic writings or Ray Dalio and his Principles would have you believe – your conscious “rational” mind is the greatest achievement of humanity, and you should strive to be living in a conscious rational way as much of the time as possible. And there is value in that approach!

But it’s also tremendously limited, because it treats these cognitive “black box” abstractions and symbols as reality. It’s like choosing an 8-bit image over the original awe-inspiring landscape vista. Yes, the abstraction is simplified and easier to consume, but it loses the fidelity and detail of its origin. Life is more complex than any abstraction. The map is not the territory.

I have spent most of my life living in my head, living in the realm of the conscious brain and simplified abstractions. This whole blog is an external representation of my cognitive processing – I take in complex ideas, extract key points I want to remember, record the summaries, and never return to the original experience. The blog was literally started as a place for me to write book reviews, and while I often reference the summaries, I almost never re-read the books. Being an excellent conscious processor is my superpower – it enables me to be a good writer, a good teacher, and an unrepentant generalist.

And yet, I am starting to see the limitations of this approach even though it has worked so well for me (“what got you here won’t get you there”). Consciousness is working in the realm of limited symbols. It denies the full reality of what the body experiences on a moment to moment basis. By accepting the black box abstractions as reality, I cut myself off from the vitality of life, because each layer of filtering and simplification creates more separation from the original experience.

One of the reasons I’ve been actively involved in sports throughout my life is that it gets me out of my head. When I’m zooming down a mountain on skis (or on a bike or trail running), I don’t have time for slow conscious processing; I have to just let go of the conscious brain and fully immerse myself in the experience. The same applies in competitive sports like volleyball or ultimate frisbee – I have to just trust my body and react because there’s no time to think. And I treasure that experience – the voices in my brain disappear and there’s a blessed silence as I am just present in the moment. This flow state is critical to high-end performance, as documented in Steven Kotler’s book The Rise of Superman about extreme sports athletes: “It’s an efficiency exchange. We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.”

This is also what the practice of meditation is designed to do. As we pay more attention to the details of the present moment, from the feeling of the breath going in and out of our body and the pressure of our bodies on our seat or our feet on the floor, the experience overflows the bandwidth of the conscious mind. It can’t keep up with the flood of unattenuated unsimplified sensory inputs, so our conscious brain short circuits, and we are put into a more primeval state of awareness. One might say we return to the awareness of the baby, where everything is delightfully novel as we experience the miracle of existence anew each moment.

If meditation isn’t your thing, nature can also serve this purpose, as being fully present in nature inspires awe as the sensory experience overwhelms our conscious brain. Transformational rituals often involve time alone in nature, from Jesus’s 40 days in the desert to coming of age rituals in hunter-gatherer tribes. Forest bathing is a present day equivalent. This also explains why I’ve always enjoyed sports in nature such as hiking or trail running or skiing – the combination of being in my body in a nature setting works wonders for turning off my conscious mind.

We can’t fully connect with other people when we only are processing 30 bits/second. We lose our sense of belonging in community, because that is a full nervous system sensory experience that can’t be simplified or abstracted without losing the experience: a like from a Facebook “friend” does not fulfill us the same way that experiencing a friend’s approval in real life feels. Only somebody who lives in the conscious brain of simplified abstractions would even consider them potentially equivalent.

By opening up our whole unconscious nervous system, we experience others in a fuller and deeper way where we might pick up signals that would be lost in the filtering and compression that goes to the conscious brain (I suspect this transition from conscious to unconscious processing is what explains the religious experience of speaking in tongues). This deep interpersonal connection is what Thomas Hübl demonstrated in the coaching of my trauma class. He described safety as feeling you feeling me – when my nervous system feels another person being fully present and connecting back, then I can relax.

I suspect that many present-day neuroses are artifacts of living in our conscious brain. We are animals designed to live in the full experience of the world, and we have lost that connection in our drive towards efficiency and abstraction and conscious control. Peter Breggin’s book, Toxic Psychiatry, made a deep impression on me as a college student, as he made the case that many psychiatric interventions essentially worked by disabling the conscious mind because psychoses were artifacts of the complexity of consciousness. At the time, I was horrified as I considered my conscious mind to be of utmost value, and I resolved to never go on any psychiatric medication. But now I wonder if there might be value in turning off the conscious brain to experience the world more fully as it is (I know many people who have had transformational experiences on psychedelic journeys in controlled settings).

Over the past year, I’ve been letting go more of the imperatives of the conscious brain (trained by capitalism and colonialism) to constantly maximize and optimize. I used to feel that I had to be reading during every moment of downtime, and listening to a podcast every moment while walking or driving, so I could learn more and efficiently use my time. Now I’m more likely to just enjoy the quiet and experience the world around me. Put down my phone and share a moment with my kids. It’s not efficient or productive in a measurable sense (silly capitalism), but it does create more joy and connection.

And it creates more insight! We have far more processing power in our unconscious brain than the 30 bits/second of the conscious brain. So when we can learn to harness that unconscious processing power by training our intuition as David Bessis describes in his book Mathematica, we can accomplish tasks far beyond what our conscious brain can handle. A friend shared that he keeps little puzzles on his desk so he can distract his conscious brain to let his unconscious brain work on the bigger questions he is facing.

I spent most of my life trying to optimize my conscious brain with more information and more abstractions, and it’s been interesting to realize that I also made myself miserable in that quest. And yet, my body knew what it needed: I’ve always spent many hours a week in an activity that involved human connection and unconscious body-based experience, from team sports like volleyball and ultimate frisbee, to singing in choruses for 20 years, to joining a ski house where we spent weekend days skiing together and the nights partying. My abstractions brought me conventional success, my hobbies brought me joy.

And yet the experience of joy is always available if I allow myself to have it. Every moment is a miracle if I fully experience it, especially with kids. But it requires me to turn off my conscious brain, and sink into the connected awareness of the unconscious nervous system. I learned to practice that more throughout 2025, thanks to my meditation coach and to letting go of work being my identity by taking a couple months off for parental leave and trying to actually relax.

Derek Sivers shares a great story on learning to relax, where he was biking a regular 15 mile route, and working as hard as he could to get a good workout (“really full-on, 100 percent, head-down, red-faced sprinting”). Until one day, he decided to take it easy and enjoy himself, appreciate the experience, and just chill: “And ahhh… what a nice ride. I was relaxed and smiling and looking around. I was barely giving it any effort.” When he got to the end, he was shocked to find that the relaxed ride was only 4% slower than the all-out effort ride. He realized “half of my effort wasn’t effort at all, but just unnecessary stress that made me feel like I was doing my best”. So much of what our conscious brain does is fool us into thinking that it’s necessary for optimum performance. But it isn’t. It’s just unnecessary stress to make us feel like we’re doing our best.

So try something to turn off your conscious brain for a few minutes. Go for a walk in nature. Take a few deep breaths and actually notice the breath flowing into and out of your body. Connect with a friend in real life. Play a sport with others. Notice the joy and calm that arises when you let go of the need for efficiency and productivity, and let yourself just be.