Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

The remark condenses a central McLuhan theme: human conduct is shaped less by explicit, articulated ideas than by the largely unexamined environments we inhabit—especially media environments. People live through complex sensory, social, and technological conditions that they cannot fully conceptualize, yet those conditions still “program” habits, attention, and expectations. In McLuhan’s terms, the medium’s form works on us pre-consciously, reorganizing perception and social relations before we can “understand” it in a rational, propositional way. The quote thus cautions against overvaluing intellectual comprehension and invites attention to lived experience—patterns of use, feeling, and behavior—as the real driver of cultural change.