October 10, 2005

The Bandwidth of Consciousness

How much information do you think you can process into your consciousness every second? If I were asked the same question, I'd start to think about the fullness of sound (vs. the bit-rate of mp3s), the rich visual landscape I constantly survey (vs. the bit-rate of avi's), and so on, and I would have thought it was multiple megabytes, if not gigabytes, per second.

Yet, according to this reading, our capacity for processing information is only about 10-50 bits per second. That seems unbelievably low to me, considering all the sensory information we have access to. So how could it be true?

Well, the central idea is that we only really focus on one thing at a time, but our brains are so good at switching from thought to thought and input to input that we are able to scan through many different senses at once.

Another way we can get around this is that a lot of information gets processed subconsciously. Once we are so good at a certain task that it becomes automatic, like driving, we are able to subsume a great deal of sensory information subconsciously and not really process it, which frees the mind up for other tasks.

I know my own mind has a sort of "buffer" of information that it holds. When I am engrossed in a basketball game on TV, I have found myself literally unable to hear comments spoken to me. Not that tuning people out is anything extraordinary. The interesting thing about that is, as soon as the play is over (anywhere from a 2 or 3 to more than 10 seconds later), I then become conscious of the fact that someone did say something to me, but I truly had no recollection of actually hearing them speak. I need to ask the person to repeat their comment. I think it's amazing that I can know that someone said something to me but have 0 recollection of the actual act of them speaking to me.

Posted October 10, 2005 12:41 PM. Categories: Readings , Week 5 | Permalink