When I see things like this, a paragraph from a New Yorker story on how the brain works, I can’t help but think of Taoism:

We assimilate information unconsciously all the time; at any given
moment, we process thousands of stimuli, of which we pay attention to
only a few. As you read this sentence, you may not be aware of the
birds singing in the back yard, but your brain has analyzed the sound
and concluded that it poses no threat to you. In the past several
decades, scientists have uncovered particularly dramatic examples of
unconscious processing. In the early seventies, researchers at M.I.T.
studied four patients who had experienced trauma to an area of the
brain involved in vision and had been found to have a condition that
was later called “blindsight.” These patients’ eyes functioned
normally, but they did not perceive much of what was in their field of
vision. When the researchers flashed a light at the patients and asked
them to describe what they saw, the patients reported that they had
seen nothing. Yet the researchers noticed that their eyes often located
the source of the light. In a second experiment, a blindsight patient
was shown pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, and
fear. The patient said that he could not see the faces, yet he was
frequently able to correctly identify the emotions…

 Our brains can take in and process information unconsciously.  This could lead to the conclusion that our conscious knowledge or understanding is not all that we "know".  Indeed, in order to open ourselves fully to our perception and interaction with the world around us, we must accept our unconscious, find a way of attuning ourselves to it without recourse to our consciousness.  Maybe this is what the Tao Te Ching means when it says: "give up learning and troubles end."  Or, give up exclusive reliance on conscious rationality and you will expand your knowledge.  We can see without seeing.  (OK, that is not all that that line can mean, but the new neurology gives that line a new dimension…

     And you just have to love the name the neurologists gave to this unconscious capacity: Blindsight.  Sounds like a character out of Chuang Tzu!