Liminal Thinking. Dave Gray

for you to notice everything or remember everything you saw. If you’re looking for oranges, for example, you will tend to notice things that are small, round, and orange. If you are on a tight budget, however, you will probably pay closer attention to the things that are on sale. Psychologists call this the priming effect.

      Zimmermann estimates that your conscious attention has a capacity of about 40 bits per second. That’s a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can perceive: 40 bits out of a potential 11 million. That’s 10,999,960 bits of information that you sense but don’t notice, every second.²

      Think of your attention as a very thin sliver of your overall experience, like a needle on a record player. It’s only able to take in a tiny fraction of what you are experiencing in any given moment.

      With that in mind, let’s draw your attention as a thin line that rests on the platform of your experience, a line that, at least to some degree, you can control and direct.

      

      Based on those things that you notice, you will form theories and make judgments.

      For example, you probably have a theory that when you walk into a grocery store you will be able to buy juice. You can probably walk into a store and find juice pretty quickly. This theory is based on your previous experiences shopping in grocery stores.³

      From your theories, you make judgments. For example, if you see something that looks like a grocery store, and you believe all grocery stores have juice, then you suppose—make a judgment—that you will be able to walk in and buy juice.

      Of course, you might be wrong! Perhaps this one grocery store doesn’t stock juice, or it is sold out.

      These are the third and fourth parts of the Pyramid of Belief: theories and judgments. You will only make theories and judgments about things that you have paid attention to or that you have noticed.

      So let’s draw theories and judgments as two more platforms that rest on that needle of attention.

      Your experience can be extended, of course, by things teachers tell you, things that you read or see on TV, things that your friends say, what your doctor says, and so on. But each of those sources is also making judgments, based on their own Belief Pyramids. So you will also need to make theories and judgments about which sources you trust and which you don’t.

      Even if you trust your doctor, for example, you may still want to get a second opinion on issues that are very important to you.

      These four things—your experiences, attention, theories, and judgments—form a foundation that reduces the unknowable to a kind of map or model that is simple enough to understand and use in daily life.

      In essence, as people, we simplify reality to reduce its infinite complexity, in order to make it easier to understand.

      This is important, and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s essential. We all need this simplified reality in order to function. If you experienced everything as if it were completely new, you would be like a baby, helpless, paralyzed by complexity, and unable to do anything.