Written by Michael Kiser and illustrated by Kyle Fletcher

Humans process an incredible amount of information. According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, as good a doctor to cite as any other, we process “400 Billion bits of information a second. But, we are only aware of 2,000 of those.” Instead of focusing on the abstractness of that number, I’d like to consider the disparity. It’s like our brains are burdened with so much bloatware that they can’t even run malware. OUR BRAINS DON’T BELONG TO US.

Seriously, if you had a robot that performed 400 billion acts a day, but when you asked “how was your day, robot?” he was only able to recall 2,000 of those acts, you’d drive a steak through its evil, possessed little heart. That thing is either on auto-pilot or it’s being controlled remotely by the devil himself. This is straight up possession.

So what does it mean to be unaware of 399,999,998,000 bits of data every second that you’re alive? It means that you’re not taking in this information in a way that engages anything except the most basic areas of your brain. Consider how much information you read, view on TV, or simply process while sitting on the train staring out the window. An entire city goes by, you saw almost every aspect of it, and can’t remember a damn thing — you’re a zombie.

So if we’re already somnambulists in an abstract world of information puree so smooth we don’t even have to chew, it’s no surprise that we continue to push even further toward virtual classrooms, online news and media, and even human relationships that exists only through social networking. In a recent study, social networking “presence” actually produced really human emotions that were sometimes even stronger than when we see that same person in real life. Gross. 

There’s only one way to learn and process information more deliberately. We have to use our physical senses. 

Recently, Kyle, the designer of what you’re reading now, wanted to learn the game of Blackjack. He had options. He could putter around online in a gaming room and learn through trial and error from some avatars. He could read a Wikipedia entry about the game’s history and rules. But he chose to ask a friend (weird!) who has played Blackjack for some time. 

This experience was odd in a number of ways. First, Kyle had to be fairly patient. Far more patient than he typically has to be with high speed internet at work. This friend took a while to load — lots of card shuffling, mixing a gin and tonic, pulling up a chair that screeched across the floor. At least it was faster than loading Flash. 

Second, Kyle wasn’t in complete control of the learning style here. He couldn’t click through a bunch of Google search links, skim a couple videos, etc. He had to wait for this relative genius to spin a couple yarns, get through a preamble, and take a few more sips of his summertime basement beverage.

But while Kyle pays attention intently to the sights, sounds, smells and kinesthetics of this style of learning, something great begins to happen. His education becomes encoded in a story. This story has a plot, characters, setting, all the rich stuff. And it turns out that stories have a magical way of helping us remember details. These details might never show up in a Blackjack manual (his friend wore a pretty cool fedora), but they are forever imprinted in Kyle’s brain.

This extra data provides hooks in the story of how to play Blackjack, similar to the way that Homer’s Odyssey starts each chapter with “a rosy fingered dawn.” Stories, like pop songs that are highly memorable, have hooks that give the listener a subtle marker in their learning process. Ever remember what side of the page a sentence in a book was on? You didn’t pick that up from the story — you got it through your spatial and visual lmemory. A book on tape gives you none of that.

The point here isn’t that Kyle learned Blackjack any faster, or better, than he would have from another source. It’s that he cared about it afterwards. He had a story to tell that felt meaningful to him. Every try to remember where you saw an article on the web but can’t? Yeah, that’ll never happen in this case. Kyle has a full cast and crew in his memory banks on this one because it mattered.

So while that process might have slowed things down, or even misguided him in the ways of Blackjack playing, he at least was aware of a few more bits of information drilling into his brain every second of the way. And for that, he learned a lot more than just a simple card game. He learned a way of life — and maybe how to mix a good gin and tonic (hint, go heavy on the gin).