As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking.

Having explored books on topics covering neuroscience, consciousness, free will and logic this past year, I’ve come to appreciate more than ever how much a bunch of smart people have been thinking far more deeply about thought than I’d ever dared.

Ironically, the more I learn from them the more it seems there’s ever more that remains unknown to me. At least it feels that way. Apparently, even a little knowledge can be a humbling thing.

As luck would have it, a few months back I came across an ingenious statement that directly addresses this circular paradox.

Attributed to the renown physicist, Dr. Emerson M. Pugh (by his son, Emerson W. Pugh – a distinguished scientist and research engineer in his own right), the elder Pugh was a professor of physics from 1921 to 1965 at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where documents relating to his work on the WWII Manhattan Project remain archived.

As for Pugh’s statement, its self-referential simplicity is sheer elegance:

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

– Emerson M. Pugh /1938

If nothing else, Pugh’s insight helps to ease me off the hook.

Being dazzled by knowledge to the point of more fully appreciating one’s ignorance is less about the constraints of understanding and more about the human condition in which we’re all trapped.

I am not suggesting that understanding the human brain – and, by extension, how our minds work – isn’t worth striving to more fully expand. It simply means that our ability to grasp the fullness of objective reality becomes increasingly diminished the more we glimpse the vastness of how much we cannot perceive – and therefore cannot know.

Nonetheless, although time spent thinking about thought can leave one feeling increasingly daunted, the associated sense of humility leaves me convinced that it is time well spent.