For generations, we’ve been taught a simple story about how our minds work. Everything happens inside the brain, we’re told. Thoughts originate there, awareness is produced there, and intuition is just random noise we can safely ignore. This narrative has become so deeply embedded in our understanding of ourselves that we rarely question it. But what if this fundamental belief about human consciousness is not just incomplete, but actively making our lives more difficult than they need to be?
The Assumption We Never Questioned
The standard model of consciousness that most of us carry around is deceptively straightforward. Your brain, sitting inside your skull, generates all your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It’s a self-contained biological computer, processing inputs from your senses and producing outputs in the form of decisions and actions. This view seems so obvious, so scientifically sound, that challenging it feels almost absurd.
Yet here’s something that might surprise you: neuroscience has never actually proven that thinking or consciousness is created by the brain. Read that again, because it’s important. Despite decades of sophisticated brain imaging, neural mapping, and countless studies, science has not established that the brain produces consciousness. What neuroscience can demonstrate is correlation. Researchers can show that certain brain regions light up when you think particular thoughts, that specific areas activate when you experience certain emotions, that measurable patterns emerge when you engage in various mental activities.
But correlation is not the same as origin. This distinction matters more than you might think.
The Radio Analogy
Consider a radio playing music. When the radio is on, various components light up and activate. Electrical signals flow through circuits. Speakers vibrate. If you were to study the radio with sophisticated equipment, you could map exactly which parts activate when different songs play. You could identify patterns and correlations. You might even predict what kind of music is playing based solely on observing the radio’s internal activity.
But does that mean the music is created inside the radio? Of course not. The radio is receiving a signal, translating it, and making it audible. It’s an interface between the broadcast and the listener, not the source of the music itself. Destroy the radio, and the signal continues broadcasting. The music doesn’t originate in the device; the device simply makes it accessible.
This analogy illuminates something crucial about the assumption we’ve been carrying about our brains. Just because neural activity correlates with conscious experience doesn’t necessarily mean the brain is generating that experience from scratch. It could just as easily be receiving, filtering, and translating something that exists independently.
Living as a Closed System
When you believe your brain is doing everything on its own, operating as an isolated biological machine, you begin to live like a closed system. This belief has profound practical consequences that show up in daily life in ways we rarely connect back to this fundamental assumption.
You stop trusting information that doesn’t arrive as a clear, logical thought. That subtle feeling about a person or situation gets dismissed as irrational. The quiet sense that you should take a different route home, call a friend, or reconsider a decision gets overridden by what seems more reasonable, more explainable, more like something your brain consciously produced.
You second guess intuition constantly. When information arrives not through obvious logical chains of reasoning but through sudden knowing, through gut feelings, through what some call sixth sense, the closed system model tells you to be suspicious. If your brain didn’t consciously work it out step by step, it must not be reliable. So you hesitate, you doubt, you talk yourself out of acting on information that doesn’t fit the approved model of how knowing is supposed to work.
You override timing in favor of effort. The closed system model suggests that success is about making your brain work harder, think more, analyze better. So when something doesn’t feel right timing-wise, when the moment doesn’t seem optimal, you push through anyway. You’ve been taught that persistence and force of will should overcome any obstacle. The idea that there might be an optimal timing for things, a flow that exists outside your individual effort, seems mystical and unreliable.
You try harder when you should stop and listen. The default response to challenges becomes: think more, work harder, analyze deeper. The possibility that you might be missing crucial information because you’re not in the right state to receive it doesn’t register as a viable option. Stopping, quieting the mental chatter, and simply being receptive feels like giving up rather than tuning in.
A Moment of Clarity
Sometimes reality breaks through our models in ways that can’t be explained away. In 2015, while driving down the road feeling frustrated, a question emerged with particular intensity: “How come sometimes I can access information I shouldn’t even know, but not always?”
It wasn’t a new question. Anyone who has experienced genuine intuition, who has known things they had no logical way of knowing, has probably wondered the same thing. Why is this capacity so inconsistent? Why does it work sometimes but not others?
What happened next was one of those moments that shifts your entire understanding. In front, there appeared what looked like a beam of light filled with information. This wasn’t a hallucination or imagination in the ordinary sense. It was more like a sudden shift in perception that made visible something that had always been there. And with it came immediate understanding.
The information wasn’t absent during the times it seemed inaccessible. The broadcast was constant. What varied was the tuning. Like a radio that sometimes gets clear reception and sometimes doesn’t depending on interference, positioning, and whether it’s even turned on, the ability to access information depended not on whether the information existed but on whether the receiver was properly tuned.
The signal is always broadcasting. You don’t create it through mental effort. You don’t control it through force of will. You tune into it by achieving the right state of receptivity.
When Connection Happens
Throughout life, most people have experienced moments of knowing things they couldn’t possibly have known through normal channels. Information arrives that proves exactly right, guidance emerges that makes no logical sense in the moment but turns out to be precisely what was needed, insights appear that change the course of events in significant ways.
During those moments, something shifts. It’s as if becoming like water, with nothing between the self and the information needed. Everything flows. There’s no second-guessing, no internal debate about whether to trust what’s being perceived. The information simply arrives, and there’s complete trust in acting on it.
This state of being tuned in feels qualitatively different from ordinary thinking. When you’re connected to what some call the field, intuition, awareness, or any number of other terms attempting to describe something that transcends easy categorization, information doesn’t feel like thinking. It feels like knowing. There’s a certainty to it that doesn’t come from having reasoned your way to a conclusion. It’s more fundamental than that.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself. The time you took an unexpected route and later discovered you’d avoided a serious accident. The person who came to mind moments before they called with important news. The opportunity you pursued despite it making no logical sense on paper, that turned out to be exactly right. The warning feeling about a situation that you heeded, only to find out later what would have happened if you hadn’t.
These aren’t random coincidences or lucky guesses. They’re examples of tuning into information that exists beyond the narrow band of conscious, logical thought.
The Brain as Interface
Interestingly, scientific research increasingly supports viewing the brain as an interface rather than a generator of consciousness. Studies of brain function reveal patterns more consistent with reception, filtering, and translation than with creation from nothing.
Consider how the brain responds to external stimuli. It doesn’t generate sensory experience out of thin air; it processes incoming information from the environment. Visual perception, for instance, involves the brain interpreting electromagnetic waves, not creating the visual experience independently of those waves. The brain serves as a translator between external reality and conscious experience.
Why should consciousness itself be any different? Perhaps awareness, thought, and intuition also exist in some form independent of individual brains, with the brain serving to tune into, filter, and translate this information into personal experience. This model actually fits the evidence at least as well as the standard model, possibly better.
What Changes When You Know This
Once you understand that the brain might be an interface rather than a generator, many previously confusing aspects of life begin making sense. The frustration of forcing decisions dissolves when you realize you might simply be out of tune with the information you need. The decision isn’t hard because you’re not smart enough or don’t have enough data; it’s hard because you’re not in the right state to receive clarity.
Timing suddenly matters more than raw effort. If information and opportunity exist in a field you tune into rather than create through willpower, then being in the right place at the right time, in the right state of receptivity, becomes more important than grinding harder. This doesn’t mean effort is irrelevant, but it reframes what kind of effort matters most.
The quiet nudge, the subtle knowing, the gentle pull in a particular direction gains credibility. These aren’t random neural firings to be ignored in favor of more rational analysis. They’re potentially signals from a broader field of information that your brain-as-interface is picking up and translating into felt sense.
Ignoring these signals feels off because you’re literally ignoring valid information. The discomfort you feel when you override intuition isn’t irrational anxiety; it’s the recognition that you’re acting against information you’ve actually received, even if you can’t articulate the logical chain that would justify it.
More Than Just Science
The implications of this shift in understanding extend far beyond academic debates about neuroscience. At stake is something more fundamental about how we relate to ourselves, each other, and reality itself.
The lie, if we can call it that, wasn’t just about presenting one scientific theory over another. It was about convincing people that they’re fundamentally separate and on their own. If consciousness is produced entirely by individual brains, then each person is an isolated island of awareness, fundamentally disconnected from others and from any larger reality.
This worldview of separation has consequences. It makes life harder because it cuts you off from resources that are actually available. It makes you struggle in isolation when you could be drawing on something larger. It makes you trust only the narrow band of information that arrives through obvious logical thought, ignoring the much wider spectrum available through intuition, timing, and connection.
When you believe you’re separate and that everything depends on what your individual brain can figure out through conscious analysis, you carry an enormous burden. Every decision, every challenge, every uncertainty falls entirely on your shoulders. There’s no larger intelligence to tap into, no field of information to access, no flow to align with. Just you and your brain, trying to figure everything out alone.
The Freedom of Truth
There’s a reason truth is associated with freedom across cultures and wisdom traditions. Truth literally sets you free, but not in some abstract metaphorical sense. When you understand that you’re not actually isolated, that consciousness might be something you participate in rather than something your brain creates in isolation, you’re freed from the prison of separation.
You can start trusting information that arrives through channels other than verbal, logical thought. You can honor timing, recognizing that sometimes waiting for the right moment matters more than forcing action now. You can develop your capacity to tune in, to become receptive, to quiet the mental noise that interferes with signal reception.
You can stop shouldering the entire burden of figuring everything out through conscious analysis alone. This doesn’t mean abandoning rationality or critical thinking. It means recognizing these as tools within a larger toolkit, not the only valid ways of knowing.
Living Differently
What does it actually look like to live with this different understanding? It starts with paying attention to the full spectrum of how information arrives. Notice the quiet knowings, the subtle pulls, the timing that feels right or wrong regardless of what logic says. Don’t automatically dismiss these as irrational or unreliable.
Practice states of receptivity. This might look like meditation, time in nature, creative flow states, or simply moments of genuine stillness. These aren’t escapes from real life; they’re opportunities to clear the interference and improve your tuning.
Trust timing more. When something consistently doesn’t flow despite your best efforts, consider that the timing might not be right rather than assuming you just need to try harder. When something opens up easily, pay attention to that too.
Experiment with following intuition on small things where the stakes are low. Notice what happens. Build a personal database of experiences that either confirm or contradict the interface model. Don’t take anyone’s word for it; test it in your own life.
The fundamental shift is from seeing yourself as isolated and separate to recognizing yourself as connected and participatory. Your consciousness isn’t trapped in your skull; it’s interfacing with something larger. You’re not on your own, figuring everything out from scratch. You’re part of an interconnected reality, with access to information and intelligence beyond what your individual brain generates.
This isn’t mysticism opposing science. It’s a fuller understanding of what science has actually shown and hasn’t shown, combined with honest attention to the full range of human experience. The brain-as-interface model honors both empirical research and the lived reality of intuition, timing, and connection that billions of people experience but have been taught to dismiss.
The truth that sets you free is simply this: you’re not as alone or as limited as you’ve been led to believe. The struggle can ease when you stop fighting against your own deeper knowing and start trusting the full spectrum of intelligence available to you. Life becomes less about forcing and more about flowing, less about isolation and more about connection, less about the grinding effort of figuring everything out alone and more about tuning into what’s already there.
Atlas's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to Atlas's Substack at atlasrelics95.substack.com/subscribe
